Internationalist Communist Tendency's blog

The “synchronised stagnation” of the global economy since 2008 shows the capitalist class everywhere has no solution to economic crisis. Hence ever more strident nationalism has been adopted across the globe. It even engulfs its two greatest powers, now locked in a trade war. This nationalism is their “alternative”. For them the problem is not capitalism but one form of it – globalisation. The fact is that the continued existence of the system in any form means more misery for most.

Deliveroo was founded in 2013 by Will Shu, an investment banker, and Greg Orlowski, a software developer. It was a simple idea whereby customers place food orders through an app or on the website, and couriers, with the app on their mobile phones, deliver the food from the restaurant to the customer. However, like any technology (no matter how life changing) utilised under capitalism, in practice Deliveroo means exploitation for the workers on whose labour the success of the company depends.

For those not fortunate to have been born with a silver spoon in their mouth and happy with the status quo, who want to see change, the task of finding a political home is no mean feat. For many the answer is obvious enough. It may be a simple ”Leave the EU” or “Get the Tories out”. But for many workers, Corbyn and his Labour Party represent the way out.

As the Brexit pantomime plays on, a General Election is now thrust upon us. Like all capitalist elections it will be a sham. About a third of the electorate (mostly working class) already have no illusions that a vote will do anything for them. In the UK the sham does not mean that ballot boxes will be stuffed with fake votes. Our rulers don’t need to do that. They have worked out how to get a result acceptable to the system without it.

In spring 2019, a crisis on an unprecedented scale was sparked in French hospitals. The emergency services went on strike in massive numbers. Barely three months from its beginnings on 18 March, in the Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris, it had spread to around a hundred establishments all across France by July. The movement will not stop spreading as long as the situation remains untenable. In September, the number of emergency services on strike was 239, or more than half of all services. This mobilisation has not died down and even rose to 267 services on strike in mid-October.

Statement of the Internationalist Communist Tendency

North or South, anyone who’s ever worked as a courier or care/support worker, or grew up in a working class nuclear family household, will have serious déjà vu watching the new Ken Loach film.

Today (‎9/11/19) marks the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (which did not quite make its own thirtieth anniversary). It will be accompanied by the usual capitalist paeans to the wonders of democracy and the capitalist way of doing things. The following article from Communist Review 8 (later Internationalist Communist) appeared in January 1990 but has never been reproduced digitally before. It was our deeper reflection not only on the collapse of the USSR’s empire in the East but the burgeoning crisis of world capitalism as a whole

It is now 11 years since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. The crisis in the real economy, instead of fading from memory, has become a fixture.

Explanations of the cause of WW1 and its ending are always carefully avoided every year as regularly as the commemoration itself.

The translation of the Theses on Precarity and the ‘Gig Economy’ that follows, appeared in Mutiny/Mutinerie, the bilingual agitation sheet of our comrades in Klasbatalo, the Canadian affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency. Here we just want to make a few observations to add to Klasbatalo’s correct summary of the situation of the workforce in this sector, as a contribution to further analysis and discussion.

How to make sense of these mushrooming mass protests-cum-rebellions which have no clear class character, owe their lightening speed of organisation largely to the rallying capacity of social media, which have few distinct or established leaders and whose often contradictory demands are constantly changing and are now emulating each other?

The authors of this text are three young people who have been, at various times and various degrees, supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party under his leadership, and, having broken completely with the capital-L Labour movement, wish to share our critique thereof, in the hopes that some of our comrades and friends will follow us. Our position is formed in part on the basis of our reflection on the Labour Party’s role as reconciler of the working class and capital, and in part on our reflections on our own experiences in the Corbyn movement.

The document which follows comes from a speech at a public meeting held by the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) on 16 October 1979, two days after the death of Onorato Damen. Neither we nor our Italian comrades have ever made a fetish of Damen, despite his stature as a revolutionary, and the enormous contribution he made to the foundation of what today is our Internationalist Communist Tendency. However, we could not let the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of his death go unmarked.

The real division we face is not Leave versus Remain, or No-Deal versus soft Brexit, but between those who have an interest in creating a fundamentally different kind of society and those who do not.

It was obvious from the beginning of the war against Bashar el Assad (2011) that Turkey intended to invade north-east Syria alongside its border (an area of some 30 kilometres deep and 420 long). Turkey only participated in the war against Isis/Daesh after a long delay, and never with much conviction.

Rosa Luxemburg argued before World War One that in the epoch of imperialism national liberation stands opposed to working class liberation. The recent death of Zimbabwe’s national liberation hero, Robert Mugabe, the conditions of the Zimbabwe working class, and the hellish state of the country as a whole, is yet another wretched demonstration of how true this is.

Seventy years ago, on 1 October 1949, the People's Republic of China was proclaimed by Mao. Here we reproduce an article which originally appeared in Communist Review 8 (January 1990), published by the ICT (or IBRP as it was then) in the aftermath of the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests.

The Trumps, the Bolsonaros, the Putins and the Xi Jinpings offer us capitalist barbarism and only the self-activity of the whole working class – the basis of working class democracy – can save humanity.

Climate change is not the only threat to humanity. A stagnant capitalist economy that survives on an increasing mountain of debt is intensifying imperialist rivalries. The slow death agony of the system is now manifest in so many ways. The post World War Two order that was imposed by the US in 1945 has been breaking down since the dollar ceased to be the world’s gold standard in 1971. Today the increasing rivalry between China and the US stretches from South America via the Middle East to the South China Sea.