Internationalist Communist Tendency's blog

It was obvious from the beginning of the war against Bashar el Assad (2011) that Turkey intended to invade north-east Syria alongside its border (an area of some 30 kilometres deep and 420 long). Turkey only participated in the war against Isis/Daesh after a long delay, and never with much conviction.

Rosa Luxemburg argued before World War One that in the epoch of imperialism national liberation stands opposed to working class liberation. The recent death of Zimbabwe’s national liberation hero, Robert Mugabe, the conditions of the Zimbabwe working class, and the hellish state of the country as a whole, is yet another wretched demonstration of how true this is.

Seventy years ago, on 1 October 1949, the People's Republic of China was proclaimed by Mao. Here we reproduce an article which originally appeared in Communist Review 8 (January 1990), published by the ICT (or IBRP as it was then) in the aftermath of the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests.

The Trumps, the Bolsonaros, the Putins and the Xi Jinpings offer us capitalist barbarism and only the self-activity of the whole working class – the basis of working class democracy – can save humanity.

Climate change is not the only threat to humanity. A stagnant capitalist economy that survives on an increasing mountain of debt is intensifying imperialist rivalries. The slow death agony of the system is now manifest in so many ways. The post World War Two order that was imposed by the US in 1945 has been breaking down since the dollar ceased to be the world’s gold standard in 1971. Today the increasing rivalry between China and the US stretches from South America via the Middle East to the South China Sea.

We have been asked from several quarters to give our views on the new group, Emancipación. As a context for our reflections we start with a brief summary of our guidelines for debating, orienting and regrouping the world’s revolutionary forces.

Only in a communist world without states and borders will human beings be able to really tackle the damage that has been done to their natural surroundings.

By abstaining from bourgeois electoral politics and building our own revolutionary organizations we are best placed to build our own political forces up to take advantage of the political crisis of bourgeois rule that manifests itself in disaffection from the ruling parties. For workers, elections are an exercise of ritual humiliation perpetrated upon them by those who exploit them.

On re-reading this piece, what is striking about the picture of the working class in capitalism's self-styled service economy in 2006 is how much it resembles the situation today. After decades of capitalist restructuring in the face of problems stemming from the declining rate of profit (problems by no means confined to the economy of the UK) there are now recognisable constants in the socio-economic profile of the 'restructured' working class.

The role of China in the imperialist pecking order has been covered many times on our website (leftcom.org). Here we deal with China’s evolution from a largely agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse which has also created the world’s largest working class – and what comes with that is, of course, simmering class conflict.

The article which follows was written at the beginning of the month when the continuing deforestation of the Amazon led to the yet more murders of the indigenous population. Since then the crisis has deepened as the dry season burning of the Amazon to clear the way for farming has reached new heights.

Today, as the global economy flounders from crisis to crisis, Marx’s analysis of capitalism is the essential basis for a correct understanding of what is going on. Moseley’s book reaffirms key elements of this analysis. The previous obsession with the transformation problem has resulted in the undermining of these key aspects of Marx’s critique, actually making an understanding of twenty first century capitalism harder. Moseley’s book, though long winded and somewhat repetitive, serves a very useful purpose in exposing this undermining and its implications. For this reason alone it is worth reading.

The next few months will see the party political machines in full swing trying to draw us into the quagmire of democratic debate and that great privilege – a vote at the polling station. Neither of those arenas offer anything for the working class.

It did not take the fatal consequences of recent record temperatures in Western Europe, or the recent wildfires in California, monsoon floods in Nepal, India and Bangladesh or the Mozambique cyclones, to tell us that something has radically shifted in the world’s climate. The existential threat of human-created climate change to life on the planet has been understood for decades. NASA, among others, first sounded the alarm about global carbon emissions in 1988 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed the same year.

This edition of Revolutionary Perspectives goes to press at the same time as our English translation of Onorato Damen’s book Gramsci between Marxism and Idealism published after his death in 1979 (see leftcom.org or footnote 8 for how to purchase). By way of a taster we present an obituary which we translated from Prometeo.

Part four of this article was written before the biggest financial crash was followed by the biggest banking bail-out in capitalism's history, yet it is interesting to see that essentially the same economic profile presents itself today.

The Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) and Klasbatalo are pleased to announce that from this point on Klasbatalo has become the Canadian affiliate of the ICT.

In 2010 the announcement by the Coalition government that university tuition fees would be tripled sparked a wave of student protest. Remaining largely within the confines of the campus, the movement exhausted itself and failed to spread to other sectors. Nine years later, what’s left?

The rising tensions in the Persian Gulf in the past weeks can be easily attributed to a sharp crisis of overproduction in the international oil market, ongoing since 2014. One relevant theater for understanding recent developments therefore lies in the largely under-reported and often overlooked Libyan Civil War, and in particular in its wide-ranging implications for OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries).

Part three of this series was published in 2005, two years or so before the great financial crash when the economic pundits were lauding the move away from manufacture to 'business and financial services'.