The movement against pension reform in France was from start to finish under the control of the unions. They called the strike, they chose and organised the days of action, they led the rare general assemblies. And it was the unions who led the movement to defeat. And for two years the unions worked together with the government ... to prepare and manage to pass this reform!

In the December 2019 general election, the Labour Party got its lowest number of seats in the House of Commons since 1935. The British bourgeoisie has historically been one of the most experienced and effective in deploying its political apparatus, with Labour playing a key part, whether in opposition or government. The diminished position of the Labour Party echoes the situation in other European countries.

Sudan is a country that has been ruined by over 40 years of “civil” wars in which the big imperialist powers have been involved from the start. The various armed conflicts have left over two million dead in South Sudan and Darfur, and led to a general impoverishment which has given rise to numerous hunger revolts against the military and Islamist regimes which have succeeded each other since “independence”.

An underlying problem with anarchism is its lack of a class analysis - a kind of original sin of anarchism, which has always tended to express the standpoint of the petty bourgeoisie or other intermediate strata rather than that of the working class. Extinction Rebellion – like the trade unions or the Labour party – is a bourgeois organisation, linked directly to the capitalist state, and thus incapable of being “transformed” into something that serves the class struggle. Its function – like the New Green Deal or the Youth for Climate campaign - is to recuperate genuine concerns about the future of the planet and to steer them away from questioning capitalism.

What was the significance of the recent strike movement in France, principally involving railway workers, health workers and other parts of the public sector? This was a movement which was undoubtedly a response to a direct attack on workers’ living conditions – the so-called “Pension Reforms” demanded by the Macron government. It was centred on the workplaces where the working class is most obviously a living social force, but at the same time, there was a very strong push towards solidarity between the different sectors.

Saturday 7 March 2020 2.30-5.30pm May Day Rooms 88 Fleet Street London EC4Y 1DH

The election of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, with a large majority, which meant the end of the parliamentary logjam and brought the UK’s formal departure from the EU on 31 January, would appear to mark a decisive break from the political crisis that has engulfed the British ruling class over the past few years. In fact, ‘Global’ Britain has plenty of political problems ahead.

The emergence of a new virus and the reaction of the bourgeoisie shows how the development of the productive forces has come up against the death and destruction caused by capitalism.

 

Taken from the "extreme" end of the spectrum of possible US responses to continuing Iranian aggression, the hit against Iran/Solemeini was directed by Trump in true Mafia style. The President, who was calm and lucid throughout the whole episode, clearly laid his cards on the table, was open about those up his sleeve, and the Iranians, understandably, folded. There was no interest in a missile exchange, no interest from Iran in suffering further, greater losses and no interest whatsoever from Trump in getting engaged in a wider war.

Last spring, the ICC held its 23rd International Congress. This article proposes to give an account of its work.

The report on the question of the historic course from the 23rd ICC Congress, which we are publishing here, confirms a significant change of analysis in relation to the one elaborated in a basic ICC text from 1978 entitled “The historic course” (International Review 18).

According to the materialist conception of history developed by Marx, the contradictions of the capitalist system lead to a historic alternative: socialism or barbarism; either a struggle leading to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat or the mutual ruin of these contending classes and society itself.

The proletariat will only be able to free humanity from the increasingly suffocating chains of world capitalism if its struggle is inspired and fertilised by the critical historical continuity of its communist organisations, that thread that runs from the Communist League in 1848 to the current organisations that identify with the tradition of the communist left. Deprived of this compass, the workers’ reaction against the barbarity and misery imposed by capitalism will be condemned to blind, desperate actions, which may lead to a definitive chain of defeats....

After years of weakness, the social movement against pension reform shows a re-awakening of the combativity of the proletariat in France. Despite all its difficulties the working class has begun to raise its head.

Militants of the GCF, Paris 1945: left to right, Chirik, Bricanier, Mousso and Evrard

 

 

This article, continuing our long-running series on the communist goals of the workers' movement, looks at the contribution of Marc Chirik, a comrade of the Italian Fraction , the Gauche Communiste de France and the ICC, to the debate on the post-revolutionary state and the problems of the period of transition from capitalism to communism

The USA's assassination of the Iranian military leader Qaseem Soleimani threatens to bring an escalation of military conflicts in the Middle East. But the spread of war and destruction is not the  product of US imperialism, alone, and it won't be halted by getting rid of Donald Trump or the Republican Party. It is an expression of the advancing decay of the world capitalist system, which has no alternative to offer humanity. And as the missile strike that brought down the Ukrainian airliner in Tehran graphically illustrates, the first victims of capitalist war are precisely the civilian populations of the world.

greatest lie in history: Stalinism equals communism

Thirty years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall demonstrated the bankruptcy of the reviled Stalinist regimes. This event was the real symbol of the implosion of the Eastern Bloc. Its thirtieth anniversary has been the chance for the bourgeoisie to use the same lies today as yesterday. The working class has to permanently reject and fight back against this ideological assault.

 

The continent of Australia is a harbinger and a microcosm - a particularly significant microcosm being as large as the whole of Europe or the United States - of the Earth being turned into a desert through the rapacious and unquenchable thirst of capitalism for profit. Everything about man-made climate change, global warming and capitalism's absolute inability to even begin to deal with this mortal threat to humanity, as well as the phoney solutions proposed by the likes of the Greens, is here in "Oz" today.

According to Emmanuel Macron and his ministers, the December 5 strike is "a mobilisation against the end of special regimes", against "equality and social justice". It couldn't be clearer: railworkers and other sectors of workers that have a "special regime" are irresponsibly egotistic and use it to maintain their so-called "privileges". LIES! The government is trying to put us one against the other in order to divide us and render us unable to fight effectively.

Local militias, supported by regional and international imperialist powers, have turned Libya into a chaotic war zone and a veritable slave market for refugees