Internationalist Communist Tendency's blog

We live, and have been living, in an epoch of capitalist decadence. Notwithstanding longer life expectancy, technological advance, and the claims of its defenders, the capitalist system is incapable of addressing existential questions such as the destruction of the environment via man-made climate change. After all, to do so would get in the way of making profits. Short-term expediency portends long term disaster.

Such a world will be organised according to the original motto of Karl Marx “from each according to their ability; to each according to their need.” This has nothing to do with the nightmare of state capitalism that emerged in the USSR.

The publicity surrounding John McCain’s recent funeral was excessive to say the least, with wall-to-wall coverage in the United States and Britain, as well as other countries around the world. We were relentlessly informed in a slew of whitewashed obituaries, cringe-worthy plaudits and declarations of love from the bourgeoisie on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a week, in newspapers, online and on television, what a heroic champion of freedom, democracy, civil rights and free speech this man was; as well as being above all a great patriot.

You would have to be well over 80 to directly remember anything about the 1930s. The nearest thing to real experience of that time, for those in the succeeding generation, was listening to our parents who preferred to forget about them.

Prison labour is a billion-dollar industry, and the corporate beneficiaries of this slave labour include some of the largest corporations and most widely known brands. There are literally hundreds of corporations and firms that exploit prison labour.

The casual observer might think that Trotskyism has been quite consistent in its views on the Syrian war but in fact there are almost as many positions on the war as there are Trotskyist groups. And this is no accident. Before we look at the stance that various Trotskyist groups have taken on the Syrian war it is useful to provide a brief overview of Trotsky and Trotskyism.

The post-war boom melted away decades ago. It produced a mass consumer society unheard of in history. This society was based on the colossal destruction and devaluation of capital in the Second World War.

A brief reminder. In January 2015 Paul Mason proclaimed on his Twitter account: "come to Athens – the revolution is happening". It is 2018 now, and three years later it is Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, who is ecstatic: "You did it! Congratulations to Greece and its people on ending the programme of financial assistance." What happened?

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.