Internationalist Communist Tendency's blog

Many working class people do not believe that their class has the potential to change the world. Indeed many of us do not even recognise the idea of class, let alone see themselves as part of the class of “women and men of no property”. This is not surprising. The ruling capitalist class have powerful tools to confuse and distract the working class.

A decade on since the financial crash world capitalism’s basic problem of low profitability remains. The only way the capitalists can revive ‘growth’ is by starting a new cycle of accumulation and this can only be done if a mass of existing capital is devalued.

Despite only getting 17% of the votes compared to about 30% for their coalition partners in the Five Star Movement, Matteo Salvini leader of La Lega (The League) has seized the opportunity as deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior to become the most dominant force in the new coalition of “populist parties”. The successive speeches about registering Roma (reminiscent of what happened to Italian Jews in 1938 as preparation for their annihilation in the Holocaust) may have caused outrage, but behind it has come the racist attacks in the street.

As we have seen in Syria and elsewhere modern imperialist war is total war with no holds barred. There is no Geneva Convention, or set of humanitarian concerns, that can act as a check on the bestial appetites of the contending parties. The situation in Yemen remains unbelievably dire.

In Naples, in early June, a Malian man was shot by three youths in a drive by shooting. As they fired they chanted “Salvini, Salvini”. Matteo Salvini leader of the League (formerly the Northern League) only got 17% of the vote in Italy’s election but in the new “government of change” in coalition with the Five Star Movement has become Minister of the Interior. This is an ideal role for him to play his racist card.

Intransigence is an online journal which is a joint undertaking between a few groups (Workers' Offensive, Gulf Coast Communist Fraction, Internationalist Workers Group, and Klasbatalo Collective) and individuals in North America. It is subtitled “Publication of the Internationalists in North America”. Its self-proclaimed goal is “to aid in the regrouping effort that is currently underway, serving as both a medium for internal discussion and a means of publicizing these views.”

The latest ministerial resignations of David Davies, Minister for Brexit, and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson only underline the complete confusion at the heart of the government and the British ruling class in general. We have catalogued both this comedy of errors and what is causing it in previous articles on the Brexit decision.

We welcome the formation in Spain of a new nucleus of the future world party of the proletariat, one of the many fruits of the work of the Nuevo Curso blog collective from which they have sprung. We see them as a new, young and vital expression of the development of a movement based on the historic acquisitions of the class and look forward to working and exchanging with them as they develop. We reproduce here the translation of their initial founding announcement, as well as the introduction to it by Nuevo Curso. -Internationalist Communist Tendency

We have translated the following article on the Mexican election from the Spanish blog Nuevo Curso. We share its estimate that the new government will be as anti-working class as all previous Mexican governments despite the rhetoric of the new President, López Obrador. We also agree that his appeal to the Mexican ruling class lies in his aim to eradicate graft and end the impunity of the corrupt in the system.

They no longer hit the headlines but the Palestinian “Great Return Marches” along the Gaza border with Israel continue. Since March 22 the world has been witnessing yet more horrific scenes in the long conflict between the Israeli state and the dispossessed Palestinians on whose land that state was built. By June 2 the continual shooting of Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza by an Israeli Defence Force (IDF), safely bunkered inside its own border, had produced 124 dead and at least 13,000 wounded. In all that time only one Israeli soldier has been injured.

The following article was originally published as draft for discussion by the CWO in Revolutionary Perspectives 11. After further discussions and revisions the version published here has now been adopted by the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) as a whole. As originally stated it is intended to be part of a longer document or pamphlet of the ICT.

Has “globalisation”, the freedom for capital and goods to move from one end of the planet to the other, with no barriers to limit trade and its miraculous effects, come to an end? Looking at what has happened recently, it seems that an ideology, and, even more so, one of capital’s ways of being has reached the end. It seems like the bourgeoisie, or at least a part of it, has taken a suit from its wardrobe which it has not worn for a long time, one which was needed for a tougher climate and the storms that come with it.

Not only is “human nature” not unchangeable, it is also not the default nature of human beings to be greedy and selfish. We can now see that fundamental to human nature, more fundamental than the debaucheries thrown up by capitalism in its imperialist phase, is in fact, the tendency towards communism.

The rulers of all the major capitalist states have no solution to a world economic crisis which in various forms has now dragged on for decades. In the last few years chronic insoluble economic crisis has increasingly translated into political crisis. This has produced not just changes in government but questions about the institutions of these supposedly democratic regimes.

It should be common sense that workers can only use their collective strength if united in some body which includes them all. But that assumes that the unions today are representative of the workers. Under modern capitalist conditions the union exists to mediate wage labour on behalf of the state. The unions’ existence as permanent bodies means they have to comply with the rules of the capitalist game. They have become another layer of management within the system.

Capitalist class rule sits atop a mountain of corpses. Syria continues to be a battleground for imperialist interests scrambling to gain a foothold in the region, as well as a potential site for the start of a Third World War. In response to this deepening crisis, June will see a series of meetings to launch a revolutionary alternative to the bosses’ war drive. The meetings will mark the re-emergence of a platform for struggle under the slogan of “No War But The Class War” (NWBCW).

The following article is, like several we have already translated, from the left communist blog, Nuevo Curso. The background is that after 5 years of austerity the government of President Maurizio Macri has fallen foul of the global economic crisis and its latest fallout. A year ago he was hailed as the saviour of Argentina when, despite Argentina’s multiple defaults in the last century he launched a 100 year bond offering an interest rate of over 7%.

In the late 19th century, the Congo was ripped open for its large rubber resources to satisfy capitalism’s new found demand for tires, leading to the death of millions of Africans. The horrors of the Congo are well known. Pictures of mutilation and death appear frequently in the lectures of academics who demand the need to create a more humanitarian capitalism. Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ appears on many school syllabuses. But despite literary suggestions of a problem found within the human heart, the truth is the problem was to be found in a new epoch of history that continues to this day: the epoch of imperialist capitalism.

After years of falling wages and worsening working conditions are we now seeing a new shape to the working class?

Day and night, as the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran approaches, its leaders arrogantly harp on about their imperialist achievements and shout about the "Islamic-Iranian model of progress" and "Islamic Civilisation" ... At the same time, while the multi-coloured opposition to this regime pursues its reformist and nationalist goals, by bargaining and begging for their share, the working class is entering the scene.