Internationalist Communist Tendency's blog

Workers in the meatpacking industry have a long history of militancy. Many first generation US citizens shaped the famous battles of the Chicago stockyards. Today's precarious migrant workers, often with no legal status, face an even bigger challenge.

Twenty years ago, from 24 March to 10 June 1999, United States and other NATO airplanes conducted bombing raids over what was left of Yugoslavia. Ever since the late 1980s, as capitalism’s world economic crisis sharpened and the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia went down with the USSR, rival war lords had been whipping up ethnic and religious divisions in order to carve out new state territories for themselves.

The dire situation really does pose the question of what sort of society we should and could be living in the 21st century.

Internationalist communists oppose every war that the capitalist class and their governments create to defend their own selfish interests. This position is nothing new but is the legacy from previous generations who saw that "War or Revolution" is a choice that has to be made clearly and consistently.

The Brexit pantomime threatens to fracture the traditional political set-up of the British ruling class. Meanwhile the whole issue is diverting attention from the dire situation experienced by the working class. Theresa May has announced that austerity is over but the massive spending cuts that have been implemented over the last decade are not going to be reversed.

We know that the bourgeois state can provide us no genuine or lasting protections and we know that women will never be safe for as long as class society and the social construct of gender exists.

Two articles on the recent developments in the US and UK automotive industry.

A century ago, from 2nd — 6th March 1919, 52 delegates, more than 40 from various political organisations outside Russia, met in Moscow.

Since the 2008 economic crisis, the ballooning global debt has increased from $20 trillion to over $240 trillion. With this exponential growth of indebtedness and an unresolvable crisis of accumulation, capitalism is losing its grip. The effects of this crisis are felt no more clearly than within the maquiladora sweatshops on the northern border of Mexico. Here sub-assemblies are pieced together for the struggling US automobile industry north of the Rio Grande.

A spectre haunts the world today. It is the spectre of “socialism”. Commentators of left and right, of reactionary or reformist inclination, agree that “after three decades in the wilderness, socialism is back.”

War or no war, one thing is certain, and that is the bourgeoisie — Chavista or oppositionist — cannot take society anywhere. There is no viable solution based on the nation and certainly not a capitalist one.

Recent political events in Venezuela have once again brought to the fore its devastating economic situation. The struggle for power between Maduro and Guaidò, or between a fraudulently re-elected president and an opposition candidate who has proclaimed himself president, besides giving Venezuela a grotesque image, hides the real scenario of an economic and political human tragedy.

The article below has been provided by a CWO sympathiser. It gives a brief sketch of a continuing struggle where we again see workers organising themselves against their bosses and against the bosses' props, the Labor Unions. At this point the outcome of the struggle is not yet determined but even now it is clear that the struggle is part of our class's resistance against the capitalists' crisis-driven onslaught.

It is because the AWL appears to attract a number of genuine young militants who are seeking change that we have decided to examine here their politics and activity.

Neither Maduro nor Guaidó have anything to offer the working-class in the face of this turmoil.

We present an article from the Internationalist Communists Oceania (internationalist-communists-oceania.netlify.com), a new Left Communist regroupment effort in the Oceania region.

Two pieces of news from Mexico currently appear in the press around the world: a new historical record in the number of homicides and the explosion of a Pemex pipeline in Tlahuelilpan, which has left almost a hundred corpses already. Everything in Mexico leads us to despair. But there is something important going on that the international media is not broadcasting.

The world economy is in poor shape and the American economy is in even worse condition. The 2008 crisis has not been resolved and many analysts fear a new financial explosion. Capital continues to stay clear of investment in production and is trying to recover without running up more debts. Company returns are low, profit rates are decreasing. Capital is moving more and more into speculation. It is the same old situation, except that the rescue costs of the previous crisis cannot be repeated in the next crisis. The sound of war can be heard in the distance, accompanied by the rising threat of a new, catastrophic barbarism.

A growing gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is in itself only a symptom of the disease. The real problem is that capitalism in crisis has nothing left to offer but increasing misery for the mass of the population. And 2019 will be no different.

At the time of writing – early January 2019 – it is difficult to say whether the movement of the gilets jaunes has entered a phase of reflux before it dies down or if it is going through a pause after more than a month of intense activity and severe clashes with the state.