Mass cremations of Covid victims in India

The terrifying upsurge of the pandemic in Brazil and India is above all an expression of the decay of the world capitalist order and the irresponsibility of the whole ruling class.

Labour’s election losses help us understand what’s going on in the ruling class, but they are not a defeat for the working class, because the Labour Party has long been a party of capital.

 

In the first part of this series we sketched out the first steps of the workers’ movement in dealing with the aftermath of a 350 years history of the enslavement. In this part we will examine how the socialist parties at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century took up the political defence of black workers. Although African Americans were only one of the many “nationalities”, they were subjected to a special regime, where the culture of slavery persisted. Therefore the struggle for the abolition of the system of two classes of workers, the division between white and black workers, was an important point.

Aftermath of ethnic clashes in Lod

This is the first time that military conflict between Israel and Hamas has been accompanied by ethnic clashes and pogroms inside Israel, marking the acceleration of capitalism's decomposition. 

Poster of May 68 against state repression

In recent months there have been criticisms and misinterpretations of our positions regarding the state measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Some have even concluded that the ICC in fact supports these measures. The ICC supports any proletarian struggle against the attacks by the state, but it doesn’t support demands to put an end to the anti-Covid state measures. Such demands have no other perspective than reinforcing illusions in bourgeois rule, whether democratic or openly despotic and only raise obstructions against the development of the class consciousness and the combativity.

In the first part of the reply to this reader's letter, we responded to the criticisms made by comrade D. to the "Report on the Question of the Historical Course", adopted at the 23rd ICC Congress and published in International Review 164. In this second part, we would like to deal with another question raised by the comrade in his letter: that of the possible prospect of a generalised nuclear war.

Our previous issue of the International Review was entirely dedicated to the significance and implications of the outbreak of Corona Virus. We highlighted the historical relevance of this event, the most important since the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989. The present issue of the Review continues our intervention on the pandemic from different angles and it includes some other articles.

Turkish military incursion into northern Syria, October 2019

Turkey’s ambitions to assert itself as a regional power in the Middle East is a clear illustration of the growing tendency towards every man for himself at the imperialist level; and it is above all the working class of Turkey and beyond which is paying the price in increased exploitation and bloody wars. 

Unlike the current Black Lives Matter protests, which channel anger against racism into the mire of bourgeois politics, the strike of February 1941 in occupied Holland shows that the working class can fight on its own ground against the persecution of minorities. 

The article below was recently published by the ICC's French section. If the details of violence among young people relate to that country, they are not a French specificity, as is clear from many recent examples in the UK.

Food bank queues, Glasgow

From health to housing, education to income, the working class has been hardest hit over the past 12 plague months. The economic crisis and social deprivations, accelerated by Covid-19, have roots deep in the decadence and decomposition of capitalism. However sections of the proletariat in GB, under the most difficult conditions, have nonetheless attempted a defence of basic class interests.

In December last year the ICC wrote to the Internationalist Communist Tendency, asking them to publish a letter of correction of serious falsifications made about our organisation that appeared on the ICT website in an article entitled ‘On the forty-fifth anniversary of the Founding of the CWO’. The ICC does not request such rectifications from the bourgeois camp. We expect lies coming from this direction and simply denounce any such defamations as the trademark of the enemy class. 

We republish here a letter we addressed to the IBRP in December 2004 following the appearance on its website of a declaration emanating from a mysterious “Circle of Internationalist Communists”, containing extremely grave accusations against the ICC. Despite the protests of our organisation, which it did not take into account, the IBRP did not make any attempt to verify the reality of this group or the content of the accusations in question.

Bristol "Kill the Bill" protests: the left spreads democratic illusions

The UK government is without doubt sharpening its tools of repression. But workers need to fight against state violence and repression as part of their own class struggle, not as part of a popular front for “democratic rights”.

The massive protests by farmers in India against the laws of the Modi government of the past winter were the largest protests in the history of India since its independence in 1947 and gained wide support from all over the world. But unlike many bourgeois organisations want us to believe, the farmers and the agrarian wage labourers were not united behind the demands of the farmers’ unions. The movement was spearheaded by the class of richer farmers-cum-commission agents, and its objectives were above all shaped by the interests of this group.

The Communards destroy a symbol of France's "colonial glory"

The 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune - above all in France - has seen a concerted campaign by the bourgeoisie to distort the real meaning of this seminal event in working class history.

 

In the article below we show how, faced with “an accelerated deterioration and precariousness of living conditions”, students in France demonstrated on 21 January 2021, when “hundreds of students took to the streets across France to express their anger and frustration”.

After a year in which the African continent seemed to escape the worst of the pandemic, the diagnosis for 2021 is less rosy....

Marc Chirik passed away 30 years ago, in December 1990. In tribute to the precious contributions of our comrade, of this great revolutionary in the line of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, we are republishing the two articles from International Review 65 and 66 that were written just after his death. These two articles go over the broad lines of his life and summarise what he brought to the proletarian cause and the defence of marxism.

 

We are publishing here a three-part series on the question of education that first appeared in the pages of World Revolution in 2001 (numbers 243-245). While it starts with references to the UK general election of 2001, what the series says is still relevant today.