Internationalist Communist Tendency's blog

We have received the tragic news that Mateusz (also known online as Gepetto, Antoni Lulek and Feliks Domański) has succumbed to his depression. He was only in his mid-twenties.

A comment on recent events from a CWO sympathiser.

Fisher's book on Capitalist Realism remains a popular reference point for many would be anti-capitalists in the UK. As such, we have decided to translate this new review from our comrades in Italy, where the book has only recently been published. See also our reviews of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work and Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by authors from a similar milieu.

By any rational measure you might assume that a dominant sentient species when faced with global threats would pull together, pool resources and information and search for a mutual solution to the problem. But the coronavirus pandemic has confirmed what the climate change crisis already told us: that capitalism, even in its “globalised” form, is fundamentally unsuited to producing a coordinated response to tackle anything.

The following leaflet was given out in various cities across Italy on 6 June on the occasion of demonstrations by the various rank and file (Cobas) unions against the imposed return to work whilst the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage.

Flyer distributed by comrades and sympathisers at protests over the murder of George Floyd.

29 May marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Equal Pay Act 1970, precipitated by the Ford sewing machinists’ strike in 1968 which started in Dagenham.

The ICT considers itself to be one core of the future international party of the working class. But the word “party” often triggers an allergic reaction, even amongst elements otherwise sympathetic to our politics – after all, there is already no shortage of parties both of the left and the right which attempt to rule the capitalist state, be it through electoral or military means. As we often repeat, our vision has nothing in common with these rackets. The party we seek to build is not a government in waiting but a guide in the struggle for a new world.

For many people, lockdown has exacerbated an already deadly domestic situation, or, as one sufferer put it, it’s a pandemic on top of an epidemic.

According to Tom Harris in The Daily Telegraph on 17 March, “we are all socialists now”.

Contradictions at the heart of the capitalist mode of production affect human relations at the level of the superstructure. The ideological, cultural, linguistic, and organisational forms prevalent in contemporary society are not independent of the social and economic structure of our society, and are bequeathed to us from previous modes of production. Sexuality, like other spheres of human activity, is not exempt from this.

Mainstream news sources, for the last decade, have been reporting on the increased frequency of the “hallway healthcare” phenomena in Ontario hospitals. Over this time the problem has grown into a norm, rather than an alarming exception.

As the 75th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe approaches and the British ruling class is trying to use the occasion to stoke patriotic fervour, when we are once again being told we must suffer in the ‘national interest’ due to the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis, it’s a timely reminder that even in the most extreme of circumstances, the brutal imperialist slaughter of World War II, the Communist Left stood for the principle ‘no war between nations, no peace between classes’.

A much expanded update to the article we previously published here: leftcom.org

The myth that we’re all in this together is already wearing thin. COVID-19 has come after ten years of grinding austerity characterised by the gig economy, poverty wages, benefit cuts, attacks on the NHS, and a desperate housing crisis. While the richest 1% have got richer, we’ve had a growth in food banks, child poverty, unaffordable housing and poor health. In fact UK poverty numbers were at their highest level for 18 years even before the coronavirus. Unequal societies are prone to outbreaks of mass disease, and our society gets more unequal with every passing day. Lockdown has shown that this is a public health crisis defined by inequality, and the working class is suffering most.

For the working class the cost of a roof over our heads is a major expenditure, one that can push households further into debt and ultimately onto the streets. This report from our ICT affiliate in Canada shows how the coronavirus lockdown is exacerbating the housing problem for the working class.

Today (02/05/20) is the fifteenth anniversary of the death of our unforgettable comrade Mauro Stefanini. We are not great fans of formal rituals or commemorations (neither was he) but by way of acknowledging our debt to him we publish this short introduction to the volume of his work our comrades of the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) published five years ago under the title Le radici spezzate – Il percorso ideologico della controrivoluzione in Italia (Broken Roots – The Course of the Counter-Revolution in Italy).

The realities of life under Covid-19 lockdown, whatever the specifics, are strange. Over the last two months or so, many of us will have seen empty shelves in supermarkets where once-familiar products like flour, eggs, soap and toilet roll are seemingly in short supply. Is this because there are not enough of these products being produced? Have the supply lines broken down, so that existing products aren’t reaching the shelves? Are customers buying these things in a panic, leading to temporary shortages? Are speculators buying them, to sell at a profit later?

The world proletariat has in the past celebrated May Day in some dramatic situations: from the imperialist world wars which forced workers to kill, die and produce for their class enemy — their own capitalist class — to the many occasions when the ruling class has unleashed its repressive machine to crush those struggles aimed at making exploitation less onerous, and the chains of the bosses’ oppression a little less heavy.

We have received this letter from the Haringey Solidarity Group and republish it here as it presents a working class perspective on the current PPE scandal, against the bosses' propaganda.
Regarding the call for "fair wages" in the final paragraph however, we must repeat that our emancipation as a class can only be achieved through the abolition of the wages system, not redistribution.