Internationalist Communist Tendency's blog

Do not be misled by this almost "harmless" American bombardment, of which the Russians and thus Assad himself were fully prepared in advance. This show of strength is to justify, not only the continuation of the war, but its future extension. For the moment they have avoided the conditions for direct confrontation. However, there will always be time and opportunity to trigger them, regardless of whether the premises are true or false.

UBI is gaining traction amongst the capitalist class because it presents a last-ditch ploy to maintain ‘social peace’ and undermine a collective working class fight back in the economic turbulence to come. Not so much a “utopia for realists” as a dystopian reformist panacea in the face of declining ‘economic growth’, wages, services and general quality of life.

There are two ways to read Inventing the Future. One is a fairly innocent critique of the “post-68 left”, and an outline of how to build a desirable post-capitalist future through a flawed Gramscian framework. The other is a critique of working class self-activity, and a call for a benevolent class of technocrats who can gradually reform capitalism for the masses.

Those who see the need to eliminate anti-Semitism should involve themselves in the struggle for a classless and nationless world. The current media circus about Parliamentary factions is totally removed from the necessary struggle to root out anti-Semitism through the struggle to destroy capitalism.

Exactly a week after Putin’s “landslide” victory in the Russian Presidential election (March 18) a terrible fire broke out in the “Winter Cherry” shopping and entertainment centre of the Siberian city of Kemerovo. It killed more than 80 people, at least 40 of whom are children. Some are still missing. Appalling though Kemerovo was, it was not an isolated incident.

On Sunday March 25 the CWO held a meeting in Newcastle focussing on the recent educational strikes across the world. It was attended by students, academics and other university workers (some in the CWO, some not) who had participated in the recent pickets of Newcastle, York and Durham universities. A CWO comrade gave the following introduction.

Given the current programmatic poverty of the bourgeoisie, not voting is a duty. However, today, that isn’t enough.

The Irish-UK stand-off is not the only dispute over borders following Brexit.

The ruling class in Britain is mired in problems of its own making. Ditching its own long-embedded choices, it stumbles towards Brexit and is abandoning half a century of its preferred strategy. [1] Predictably, an exceptionally intractable problem has developed about the national border in Ireland. The political factions that arranged and delivered the Brexit decision blithely ignored the fact that the border would become the frontier between the Irish Republic, a member of the EU (European Union), and the post-Brexit non-EU United Kingdom.

To mark the anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg's birth 147 years ago (5 March) we offer this translation of Onorato Damen's introduction to the Italian translation to her famous work on the Russian Revolution.

The following article is intended to be part of a longer document or pamphlet of the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) and has been drafted by the CWO for further discussion in the ICT. It should thus be read in the context of earlier documents which we have already published on the party and class issue which put the issue in its wider context.

West Virginia teachers who had taken the initiative to force their union into a strike demanding that the state pay their health insurance found out via a robocall last week that "their" union had accepted a promise of a 5% pay offer (which they did not demand) but with no settlement of their grievance.

A response to the comments and criticisms of our article “Autonomism – Cutting the Ground from under Marxism”.

The dilemma for the US – and the threat for the world – is that over time China will catch up with the US militarily as well as economically. It’s a long way off. However at some point the US will arrive at the same dilemma which faced the German General Staff in 1914. Their calculation was that by 1916 they would lose what military advantages they had over their imperialist rivals so were facing a pivotal decision and thus gave the green light for support to Austria and Armageddon followed. The current USA-China rivalry will be the axis around which any conflict will take place.

In the early afternoon of Tuesday, January 30, the police charged and drove a group of workers away from the gates of GDN Logistics of San Cipriano Po (Pavia). They were demonstrating in front of the company's gates to ask for an end to dismissals and suspensions (therefore for reinstatement) carried out by the company against some of their colleagues for the simple fact they were "registered with Sicobas". The strike began in the early morning, and the police charge took place after more than 10 hours of blockade in which protesting workers prevented the entry of trucks to the warehouse units.

During the preparation for the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU) we made it entirely clear (in Revolutionary Perspectives 08) that the debate was one that class-conscious workers should not have been drawn into – on either side. Participating in the exercise could only line workers up behind one or other faction of the ruling class. The stories peddled by both sides – that somehow workers would benefit from the British state either maintaining or ditching their relationship with EU institutions – were full of lies and imagined, but non-existent, benefits.

The collapse of Carillion is another symptom of capitalism’s general crisis of profitability. We are told the PFI and debacle of Carillion are not the way capitalism is supposed to work. Unfortunately this is the way capitalism is supposed to work, and the way it worked under state control also. The system is supposed to transfer wealth created by the working class to those who own capital and this is precisely what has been happening with Carillion, with PFI in general and with privatisation.

As 2018 opens economic optimism is breaking out amongst the capitalist class. Leaving aside the vainglorious boasts of the current President of the United States that unemployment in the US has reached lows only last seen in the post-war boom, or that the New York stock market is now at all time record highs, more serious economic commentators are arguing that after a decade of misery (at least for 99% of the planet) the signs of recovery from the 2007-8 banking collapse are now behind us. If this sounds familiar it is because we have heard the same tale so many times.

An enormous number of currencies already exist across the world (dollars, roubles, euros, yen, yuan, etc.) – most of them tightly held in the wallets of bourgeois minorities dazzled by the illusion of its self-valorisation – wherever the crisis of the production and sale of commodities rages.

On Thursday, 28th December 2017, in Mashhad the second most populous city in Iran, thousands of protesters gathered outside the city hall and chanted “Death to Rouhani”, the country’s President. Some reports have suggested that it may have been initiated by the conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi, Rouhani's defeated rival in the May 2017 Presidential election. Later on, some others, including the senior officer of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, implicitly accused ex-President Ahmadinejad's circle being behind the recent protests. However it may have started, it quickly broke out of its intended framework and control and, in less than a week, spread to over 40 cities.