Internationalist Communist Tendency's blog

As 2018 draws to a close, a twofold picture emerges. On one side, the accelerating capitalist crisis. Escalating global turmoil and imperialist manoeuvres bring untold misery to Yemen, Syria and the Ukraine. The ruling class, struggling to find a solution to the economic crisis, causes political chaos and confusion in Britain and the United States. On the other side – new mass struggles of the working class in Iran, Iraq, China, Nicaragua, Jordan and France. This happened before.

The article which follows is a translation of a contribution from a close sympathiser of the ICT in France.

We are publishing this translation from Russian of the Internationalist Communists of Krasnoyarsk. We should warn readers that the latter is machine translated and we have not been able to verify its accuracy. The article has since been overtaken by events (e.g. at time of writing this 4 people have now died) and the opinions are those of the Russian comrades.

Increasing militarism and hostility to migrants are interconnected aspects of the crisis of capitalism.

The struggle can hardly prosper if it becomes isolated in Iran. The Iranian workers’ need for a useful political organization, to develop consciousness and guide struggles, is what we all need. Not in the future but now.

The leaflet below was given out by the Italian affiliate of the ICT, Il Partito Comunista Internazionalista, in the anti-racist demonstration in Rome on 10 November.

Whilst all bourgeois eyes are fixed on the G20 summit in Buenos Aires or the Ukraine-Russia conflict in the Sea of Azov the class war goes on around the planet. We have already published on the strikes currently convulsing Iran more than once and now we have received the following report and comment on a revival of strikes in Russia from a sympathiser there.

Today the slogan of Bread, Jobs, Freedom, Soviet Organisation is to everyone's surprise, if not disbelief, resonating everywhere. The support of other workers, teachers, office workers has ignited hope in the hearts of millions of workers and toilers. Against the regime’s drumbeat for imperialist war, our slogan is “no war but class war”. As the class struggle intensifies, the balance of power in Iran is being questioned for the first time since 1979.

The figures set out in the latest UN report on UK pauperisation, shocking enough in their own right, form the latest link in a chain of extremes which is the reality of global inequality, a tendency which has rocketed since the 2008 financial crash.

Reflections on the CWO/ICT Public Meeting in London (November 17 2018).

This time, it is the workers of the Haft Tapeh that after several years of strikes, struggle and enduring all the hardships, arrests and beatings of their representatives, have stepped up their struggle and reorganised themselves.

9 November is an auspicious date in the German historical calendar. 80 years ago this was the anniversary of Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) when synagogues were burned and 10,000 Jewish males were marched to concentration camps. It was the first step on the road to the genocide of millions. 28 years ago it was the day that the GDR authorities announced the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. However, a century ago it was also the date when the Kaiser announced his abdication in the face of a workers’ revolution which had begun with mutinies in Kiel before spreading across Germany.

The Polish nationalism of today is a direct continuation and consequence of the nationalism which crushed the workers’ movement in years 1918-23.

The 100th anniversary of the Armistice, which we are told put a stop to the first world war, happens to coincide with remembrance Sunday, or Poppy Day. So we’re in for a treat. On top of poppy-wearing – now almost de rigueur – and two minute silences in the most improbable places, there are some smashing events in store. While local volunteers polish up war memorials, craft red poppy memorabilia, there are all sorts of state-sponsored celebrations, to mark the 11th hour of the eleventh day, in November 1918 when “the guns fell silent”.

Capitalism is killing the planet. The answer should be staring every environmentalist in the face: get rid of capitalism!

With this translation we begin the second volume of our series of translations from the review Kommunist, using the French version published by the Collectif d’édition smolny (www.collectif-smolny.org). As many will know the review Kommunist was the brainchild of the “proletarian communists”, or “left communists” as Lenin dubbed them, inside the Bolshevik Party in the spring of 1918. The original issue around which they were formed was opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) but as readers of our earlier translations will know they also highlighted their disquiet with certain developments inside Russia.

For the past few years, but particularly in the aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential election, the theme of identity politics has dominated political discourse on both the left and the right. Countless books, articles, blogs and comments have been written on the subject, but we ourselves have dealt with it only in passing.

The government is currently carrying out a review of legal aid following a series of cuts that have been implemented over the last few years. There is a growing view that the cuts have gone too far and could be a false economy as well as undermining faith in the legal system. Whilst it is unlikely that the government will put any significant amount of cash back into the system, it will probably at least pay lip service to the importance of legal aid. This article considers some of the issues at stake.

Under the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Saudi’s policy has become more aggressive both against Iranian influence and Turkey’s and it is in this context that the fate of Jamal Khashoggi should be understood.

“We will chase them out!” Alexander Gauland bawled straight after the entry of the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) to the Bundestag. It should be clear, at least after the racist riots in Chemnitz and Köthen, that this was no empty threat. The AfD’s rise has lent wings to the entire extreme right and is increasingly being translated into racially-motivated violence on the street.