International Communist Current Public Forum
The Trump election and the crumbling of capitalist world order
“In the face of this decline, and also of growing class, racial, religious and ethnic divisions, Trump wants to unite the capitalist nation behind its ruling class in the name of a new Americanism. The United States, according to Trump, has become the main victim of the rest of the world. He claims that, while the US has been exhausting itself and its resources maintaining world order, all the rest have been profiting from this order at the expense of “God’s own country”. The Trumpistas are thinking here not only of the Europeans or the East Asians who have been flooding the American market with their products. One of the main “exploiters” of the United States, according to Trump, is Mexico, which he accuses of exporting its surplus population into the American social welfare system, while at the same time developing its own industry to such an extent that its automobile production is overtaking that of its northern neighbour.
This amounts to a new and virulent form of nationalism, reminiscent of “underdog” German nationalism after World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. The orientation of this form of nationalism is no longer to justify the imposing of a world order by America. Its orientation is to itself put in question the existing world order”
Date: Saturday 15 April 2017, 2pm-6pm
Place: Lucas Arms, 245A Grays Inn Rd, Kings Cross, London WC1X 8QY
The ICC will begin the meeting with a presentation based on two recent articles: a more general one on the question of populism http://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201608/14086/question-populism, and the article analysing the Trump election which we quote from above: http://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201702/14255/trump-election-and-crumbling-capitalist-world-order
After that – plenty to discuss. All welcome.
Obviously we will be
Obviously we will be discussing the situation created by the US attack on the Assad regime base. Jaycee and myself attended a London AF meeting a couple of weeks ago, on Trump et al, and we invited all the participants to come to our meeting. I hope others who post on this forum will also think about coming. Revolutionaries are faced with weighty and difficult questions.
In addition (and despite my
In addition (and despite my criticism of the ICC as an organisation) I thought this article by Henk written before the recent attack on the Syrian air base, and in a style unrestrained by the usual left communist straight-jacket, was a pretty good summary of the situation in the USA post the Trump election:
http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201704/14285/election-donald-trump-and-degradation-capitalist-political-apparatus
Might have been tempted to go to this meeting but I'm otherwise engaged.
The meeting had quality if
The meeting had quality if not quantity. To a large extent it was a debate between the ICC and the CWO, but as these are rare enough, this was positive in itself. The main points of contention were on the underlying nature of populism, and the origins and role of revolutionary minorities. We aim to publish an account, though it could take a bit of time.
It was an interesting
It was an interesting meeting. Of course a discussion of populism, as it manifests itself today, necessarily touches upon democratism, anti/alterglobalisation, the figure of the 'citizen' - for more than a decade, the Left and quite a few self-proclaimed anarchists have helped reinforce myths about one, or more, of these.
It looks like French group Théorie Communiste have also been thinking about these things. Here's an analysis of left and right populism (Mélenchon and Le Pen) with Bernard Lyon of Théorie Communiste:
http://sortirducapitalisme.fr/207-analyse-critique-du-populisme