"The International Communist Party", no.63, April-May 2025

"The International Communist Party", no.63, April-May 2025
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International Communist Party
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The International Communist Party
Issue 63
April-May 2025
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Last update May 4, 2025
WHAT DISTINGUISHES OUR PARTY – The line running from
Marx to Lenin to the foundation of the Third International and the
birth of the Communist Party of Italy in Leghorn (Livorno)1921, and
from there to the struggle of the Italian Communist Left against the
degeneration in Moscow and to the rejection of popular fronts and
coalition of resistance groups
– The tough work of restoring the revolutionary doctrine and the
party organ, in contact with the working class, outside the realm of
personal politics and electoralist manoevrings
Contents:
-   1. - Wall St.’s
Trade War
is Nothing New
-   2. -
May Day 2025
Leaflet
-   3. -
Attacks on Migrants in the U.S.
Are Also Meant to Repress The Working Class
-   4. - The Carcass of
Collective Bargaining
-   5. - Toward the
General Strike, Towards the Class Union
-   6. -
Artificial Intelligence
-   7. -
Temporary Civilisation
Forever Chemicals
-   8. -
The Iron Hand of Georgian Sovereignty
- For the Class Union
-   9. - Starbucks
Workers Strikes in Chile
-  10. -
Greece: Workers Take to the Streets
Against the Massacres of Capital and for Generalized Wage Increases
-  11. -
Strikes in Argentina
-  12. -
Brussels Strike
-  13. -
Iranian Worker Struggles
-  14. - Current
Trade Union Struggles in Turkey
- The Imperialist War
-  15. -
Capitalism Needs War
. Only the Revolutionary Struggle of the Working Class can Oppose it
-  16. -
Proletarian Defeatism in Gaza
- Life of The Party
-  17. -
Interventions in the Unions and on the Streets
-  18. - Our Mourning:
Raimondo
- General Meeting
-  19. - General Party Meeting 25-26 January 2025
[
RG151
]
-  20. -
The Imperialist War in the Middle East
: Today’s Vanquished - Tomorrow’s Winners
-  21. - The Grueling
Massacre in Ukraine
-  22. - Origins of the
Communist Party of China
-  23. -
Class Struggles in Latin America
-  24. - The Independence of the
Sahel States
on Trial
Wall St’s Trade War is Nothing New
Finance, Currency, and Trade in the Conflict Between Dueling Imperialisms
On April 2, 2025 the Trump Administration announced
its “Liberation Day” tariff scheme. The plan introduced a flat rate 10%
tariff on foreign imports and higher retaliatory tariff on a selection
of countries, especially China. In the days following the announcement,
Wall Street’s excitatory Trump bubble burst, with the U.S. stock markets
indexes all crashing 15-20% year to date. Within two days S & P 500
companies logged a $5-trillion loss, exceeding a two-day loss of $3.3
trillion in March 2020. As Trump announced “it’s a great time to buy!”
and blamed the situation on “a little problem” in the bonds market where
some got “a little out of line”, the ruling class’s Commander in Chief
called for his fellow suits on Wall St. to rally and fall back in line
on the march towards future super profits derived from a coordinated
assault, squeezing out the competition while using manipulative market
strategies & trade maneuvers backed by militaristic brigandry to
maintain global financial dominance. As the liberals scream about the
harm done to the “economy”, they only worry about losing their share in
the loot! For the middle classes and the various parasitic appendages
dependent upon the super profits of US imperialism, they see only
madness as they are expropriated by the big bourgeoisie and cut out of
the fascistic corporatist body like a cancer. Regardless, as more and
more are forced to join the ranks of the proletariat kicking and
screaming, they give sparks to the future re-energizing of the live wire
of the class struggle.
Behind the tariff and the resulting stock market
chaos is a larger strategy to apply economic pressure to force foreign
countries into coming to the table around a future “multilateral”
currency accord aimed at restructuring the international monetary order
and alliance system by more directly subordinating countries within the
U.S. orbit to its financial interest and militarist domination. The plan
called the “Mar-a-Lago Accord”, aims at securing the domination of U.S.
finance capital and reviving U.S. industrial manufacturing by
devaluating the dollar while re-establishing a new crypto currency or
new gold standard, tying U.S. security guarantees directly to the
holding of long term U.S. debts under a more direct centralized control
of the U.S. Treasury Department. Behind the plans of the so-called
Mar-a-Lago-Accord is a long standing playbook of US finance capital and
how it has marshalled its forces to dominate and subordinate the various
sub-imperialisms within the capitalist world. The “trade war” and
its tariffs are merely one tool in the larger arsenal of the
United States bourgeois and its dominant financial cartel who attempt to
retain their global dominance and contain the emerging rival imperialism
of China. As the capitalist system across the world faces increasing
stagnation, lack of an ability to grow as a result of enlarging debts
with GDP’s not keeping pace, we can clearly see in these maneuvers the
desperate ploys of a decaying and petrifying capitalist world order in
it’s imperialist stage, whose rotten corpse will prove to be fertile
grounds for the communist revolution that is inevitably to come.
The End of Bretton Woods and the Gold Standard
With the desolation of all the rival world imperialisms and the mass
slaughter of the European and Japanese proletariat at the end of the
second world war, U.S. financial capital and its industrial monopolies
exported their vast surplus into rebuilding Europe. With the
establishment of the Bretton Woods system and the creation of the
International Monetary Fund, the U.S. bourgeoisie consolidated its
financial domination of the world. Through Bretton Woods, the
associated countries’ currencies were directly tethered to the U.S.
dollar which was guaranteed by direct convertibility at a fixed rate of
gold bullion set by the United States Treasury who at the time
controlled two thirds of the world’s gold supply. With the U.S. as the
sole industrial power and the prevailing “workshop of the world” it
entered into a period of enforcing its free trade policies to obtain
open markets to serve as outlets to profitably unload its exploding
industrial surplus.
After the war most of the Western European and
Japanese industrial monopolies’ capital were able to quickly recover.
Benefited by the desolation of their respective proletarian defense
organizations they quickly recovered themselves and by the 1950’s their
growth surpassed pre-war levels. As the European industries and their
associated imperialism began to revive, throughout the 1950s
Washington’s sustained increased deficit spending to finance loans, aid,
and troops for allied regimes, printing vast amounts of monies to
finance it’s imperial domination eventually leading to a glut of dollars
in circulation. For decades the U.S. kept the price of gold pegged at
$35 an ounce; however, as the deficit spending increased, and trade grew
among the other states including the development of foreign currency
markets, the bourgeoisie began to recognize the dollar as overpriced.
Hungry to regain their former imperial independence, the Japanese and
Europeans began bucking out from under the U.S. finance by pulling their
gold from the Treasury reserves. As German and Japanese industry rose to
contest U.S. export supremacy by the late 1960’s the United States was
no longer the totally dominant economic power it had been in the
previous two decades. When the U.S. economy turned over for the
first time in the post-war era from running an export surplus to a trade
deficit, fears began to pulsate throughout the ranks of the U.S.
industrial monopolists as they realized their status was in jeopardy. It
wouldn’t be long until the slogans of “free trade” were forgotten in
pursuit of protectionism to subordinate the developing German and
Japanese imperialism.
To reverse the competitiveness of U.S. industries,
moves to introduce protectionism began in 1962 with limits imposed on
imports of cotton textiles from Japan. As part of the ‘Southern
strategy’ in the 1968 presidential election campaign, Nixon promised
further limits on imports of textiles that competed with domestically
produced goods in the South. The Nixon administration focused heavily on
export promotion as a vehicle for industrial growth and job creation.
The idea that a lower foreign exchange value of the dollar could bolster
domestic industries was widely discussed. In 1969, the United States
negotiated export restraints with European countries to limit their
exports of iron and steel products. Congress was soon overrun with
proposals to limit imports even further. In fear of importing U.S.
inflation, Germany “voluntarily” agreed to unhitch from the dollar and
appreciate its currency in 1969; however, Japan refused. In 1970,
congress imposed quotas on imported clothing and footwear from Japan.
Amid this one sided trade war, the United States additionally focused on
Japan and West Germany as countries whose currencies should be revalued.
Not only did the United States have growing trade deficits with both
countries, but Japanese exports threatened powerful domestic
industries in textiles and electronics and the Germans iron and steel. A
revaluation of the currency due to the manner in which trade was
conducted in dollars would devastate the competitiveness of the two
export economies. A dollar devaluation would also help with the growing
government deficit as U.S. Treasury Debt is paid back in the USD.
Amid this discussion in the U.S., mounting criticism
of the old imperialism against the “unfair” U.S. monetary and trade
policy grew, amid fears of a U.S. default on its debts. More and more
began to turn in their dollars for gold, only deepening the concerns
about the treasuries ability to pay back all reserve dollars. By 1970
the U.S. held under 16% of international reserves. The first six months
of 1971, assets for $22 billion fled the U.S. In May 1971, a study
completed by the Treasury Department concluded that a foreign exchange
crisis was inevitable as the dollar was overvalued by 10% to 15%. The
Treasury stated that the U.S. should ‘take advantage of the present
crisis to achieve (i) a lasting improvement in the balance-of-payments
position of the United States, (ii) a more equitable sharing of the
responsibilities for world security and economic progress, and (iii) a
basic reform of the international monetary system’. The memo put forward
‘the following measures as negotiating leverage: (i) suspension of gold
convertibility; (ii) imposition of trade restrictions; (iii) diplomatic
and financial intervention to frustrate foreign activities which
interfere with the attainment of our objectives; and (iv) reduction of
the US military presence in Europe and Japan. It is from this exact same
play book that U.S. imperialism would take notes in 1985 and again today
in 2025.
We are reminded of what we said in issues 19-21 of “Il
Programma Comunista” of 1971, we described the monetary crisis that had erupted at the time: “In the whirlwind of currency and faltering bourgeois idols, the collapse of the capitalist system looms on the horizon.”
In August of 1971, France sent a warship into harbor
at New York, retrieving dollar reserves for gold. Days later Nixon
unilaterally imposed 90-day wage and price controls, and a 10% tariff on
all imports. Most significantly he officially ended the gold standard by
announcing the dollars would no longer be convertible into gold,
effectively ending the Bretton Woods system by effecting a U.S. default
on its debts by torpedoing the currency while making away with what the
rest of the world thought was it’s gold safely locked away in Fort Knox.
As a result, the U.S. dollar plummeted by a third
which additionally gave rise to enormous speculation against the dollar
with the Mark and Yen appreciating significantly. By January 1973
the stock market had the largest crash since the Great Depression with
the DOW Jones industrial Average losing 45% of its value, the London
Stock Exchange’s FT 30, which lost 73% of its value during the crash.
Although West Germany’s market was the fastest to recover, returning to
the original nominal level within eighteen months, it did not return to
the same real level until June 1985.
The United Kingdom did not return to the same market
level until May 1987, whilst the United States did not see the same
level in real terms until August 1993, over twenty years after the
1973‑74 crash began. Following the 1973‑75 recession, the United
States experienced a significant wave of corporate consolidation. The
post-1970s era saw a stronger concentration in services, retail, and
wholesale and particularly in the financial sector. A number of large
banks consolidated in 1974 following the crash, forming Shearson Hayden
Stone. This merger was part of a series that led to the creation of
Shearson Lehman Brothers, and its transformation into the world’s fourth
largest investment bank. Its collapse would later instigate the 2008
global financial crisis and the subsequent “Great Recession”.
Rise of the Petrodollar & Fortification of U.S. Finance
Against the Rising Corpse of the Old Imperialisms
By the spring of 1973
all the major currencies had been unfixed from the
dollar and the markets continued with high volatility. The economic
situation was exacerbated with the United States backing Israel in the
Yom Kippur War. The subsequent OPEC oil embargo in October led to a
massive inflationary spike across the world. European countries began to
run up large deficits to afford increased energy prices which ultimately
resulted in the collapse of their finance markets. The 1976 Pound
Sterling crisis led to the humiliation of Britain who went “cap in hand”
to the IMF for a loan after the failure of their currency which had
formerly been the world’s reserve currency until British imperialism had
nearly bankrupted itself in the course of the World Wars. The
instability of global finance after the ending of the Bretton-Woods
system would begin to calm as the crashing European industries and
currencies left the stronger U.S. finance and its industrial monopolies
the last standing amid the bloodbath of its own creation. It’s financial
domination and position as the world reserve currency further
consolidated through the initiation of the petrodollar recycling system
with OPEC and then enforced upon Europe though continued threats of
reneging on NATO “security guarantees” and implementing tariff and
currency manipulation policies, the U.S. using the fear of unleashing
the Russian bear on Europe, it’s Israeli attack dog in the Middle East
and the CCP under Mao on Japan to coerce submission of its protectorate
“allies”.
The system was established in 1973 when Nixon sent
Kissinger to negotiate a deal with the Saudis’ to end the oil embargo.
Amid the U.S. menacing invasion and the Saudi threats of a salt the
earth strategy to burn its own oil fields amid the ongoing Yom Kippur
War. The Saudis agreed with Kissinger instead to become a dependent
economic protectorate of U.S. imperialism to avoid the mutually assured
destruction of their state on the one side and global oil production on
the other. The deal guaranteed that the Saudis would only sell oil in
U.S. dollars and in return they would receive military equipment,
training and a “security guarantee” provided by the same United States
military who had just threatened invasion. Critically, the deal also
established that Saudi oil export surplus could only be reinvested in
U.S. denominated assets, U.S. treasury bonds.
With the U.S. as the biggest purchaser of oil it
created a “recycling” system whereby oil which was bought in
dollars would then have its surplus reinvested into American bond debt
purchases. The bonds bought with dollars would provide a stable interest
return to the oil producers, while giving to the U.S. the
lionshare of the actual surplus in the forms of dollars. The U.S.
government could then use those dollars to fund itself, often funneling
it right back into U.S. corporations hands through government contracts.
So long as the U.S. continued to pay it’s interest while maintaining its
protectionist racket “security guarantees” and successfully using its
military to terrorize the inferior imperialisms into submission, it
could continue to balloon it’s debts while delivering super-profits to
U.S. corporations, thus never really having any interest in actually
“paying off” it’s national debt, but every interest in defaulting
periodically when possible and necessary. As the backward Arab monarchy
fearing its own revolutions at home unable to stand up to U.S. military
might contented themselves with their new pensions under it’s imperial
umbrella, the deal was quickly followed by other OPEC countries,
although they did not all get the same security guarantees as the
mountain of corpses left by U.S. interventionism in the region has
demonstrated. As all countries in the world imported oil from OPEC, all
foreign banks now needed dollars to purchase them, this became a major
pillar in preserving the status of the U.S. as the global reserve
currency.
The. U.S. effort to devalue the dollar in 1971, also
forced countries to make a choice: either hold dollars (which could
decline in value),reinvest those dollars in U.S. assets, like bonds,
which offered a set interest rate return rate or attempt to establish a
currency alternative to the dollar and risk facing U.S. military
aggression. When Japan began considering a shift into gold or Deutsche
marks by late 1973 U.S. Treasury officials told Japan that failure to
support the dollar would be seen as hostile, potentially resulting in
trade retaliation or military friction. By 1978 Bundesbank in Germany
wanted to stop buying dollars and let the D-mark float higher,
considering potentially diversifying reserves away from dollars. The
U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and President Jimmy Carter sent a memo
that Germany must support the dollar or face major consequences for NATO
cooperation and U.S. German trade relations. U.S. officials warned of
political instability in NATO if economic coordination failed. The
Bundesbank resumed dollar purchases, despite domestic opposition. During
the Volcker Shock 1979‑82, the Fed raised interest rates to nearly 20%
to combat inflation. Treasury Secretary Donald Regan demanded that
European central banks hold onto their dollar and treasury reserves.
Europe was warned that failure to cooperate could lead to U.S.
disengagement from NATO commitments, trade restrictions or tariffs,
currency war dynamics.
The subsequent demand for dollars to pay for energy
and the stable demand for U.S. treasuries as a comparatively safe
haven investment, guaranteed by the U.S. military’s constant threats to
destabilize the world and thus the other countries currencies, led to a
situation whereby in the year 2000, 70% of all foreign exchange reserves
were held in dollars. Thus through forcing purchase of US bonds and
holding of dollar reserves the U.S. was able to ensure that the sun
didn’t set on the U.S. empire. With the threat of the rising industrial
monopolies transforming into their own contending finance capitals
supplanted by being forced into the petrodollar system, the return to an
upward value of the dollar was once again more beneficial for U.S.
finance capital.
Just as the new petroleum world order was taking
shape, the 1972 visit between Nixon and Mao foreshadowed Nixon pulling
out of Vietnam and abandoning the U.S. proxy state in South Vietnam in
favor of the new friend China against the old foe of Moscow, just as
they threatened to abandon the European bourgeoisie to the forces of
Soviet imperialism, the Japanese bourgeoisie with no military sat in
fear of Mao. Thus began the process of establishing trade relations
between the U.S. and China and by the late 1980’s U.S. corporations
would begin offshoring production to the cheap Chinese labor markets and
by 1988 Chinese exports to the U.S. totaled $40 billion. As U.S.
imperialism began to spread its tentacles into the belly of China, amid
the high inflation and rising interest rates from the Fed, an all out
attack was orchestrated against the American worker who for a century
had enjoyed consistently rising wages and standards of living always
historically large when compared to the rest of the world since colonial
times. As high wage factory jobs began to disappear in the 1980’s-1990’s
cheap imports from East Asia, encouraged by a strong dollar ensured
standards of living remained relatively stable. As the emerging tech
industries began to develop they would extract super profits from
Chinese proletarians as the children of U.S. workers were flocked into
colleges under the promise of obtaining high wage jobs at the costs of
accruing more private debts, only today to find these jobs too
disappearing, but before we investigate the so called “Mar-A-Lago”
accord we must understand the Plaza Accord.
The Plaza Accord & the Financial Entombment of Japanese Industry
From 1980 to 1985, the dollar had appreciated by
about 50% against the currencies of the next four biggest economies at
the time. The high dollar price brought in high yields for U.S. finance
but threatened its industrial monopolies who at the time were still
dependent on U.S. labor for its manufacturers. By the mid-1980’s German
industry continued to find difficulty in competing on international
markets, much of its shipbuilding, part of its steel and most of its
photographic production to cheaper competition in the United States,
& Japan. However, Japanese industry began to aggressively climb out
of its relative slump and moved into exports of higher production value
commodities. As high quality and cheap Japanese automobiles began
flooding international and domestic markets the U.S. industrial
monopolies once again felt threatened.
An alliance of manufacturers and farmers responded
with a concerted campaign requesting protection against foreign
competition. Major players included grain exporters, the U.S. automotive
industry, heavy American manufacturers like Caterpillar Inc., as well as
high-tech companies including IBM and Motorola and by 1985, Congress
began considering protectionist tariffs and import restrictions. Despite
Reagan’s “free trade” policies which would begin to see U.S.
manufacturing first really start to move abroad, after his
inauguration he implemented various quota agreements limiting and
restricting Japanese imports. The negative prospect of further trade
restrictions from congress moved the White House to begin efforts to
devalue the dollar relative to other currencies for the first time since
Nixon. Thus the Plaza Accord began to take shape when the U.S. twisted
the arm of France, West Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, to
appreciate their currencies in respect to the U.S. dollar. WIth little
choice given the strong position of U.S. imperialism the countries all
acquiesced to the demands. Subsequently, the dollar dropped by 50% in
relation to the Yen and 40% in relation to the Mark.
The maneuver ultimately culminated in the decimation
of Japanese industry which still has not recovered to this day. As the
Yen appreciated, Japanese exports dramatically fell irreversibly
damaging their industry which was booming off of exports to the West.
The Bank of Japan attempted to resolve the crisis by reducing interest
rates and injecting fiscal stimulus; however, the lower rates led to an
artificial real estate and financial bubble which burst by 1994 with
massive slew of bankruptcies, bank defaults and a real estate crash
which resulted in what is called the “lost decade”. Thus Nikkei 225, the
stock index of major Japanese companies peaked in 1994, three decades
after the crash it still has not returned to the same level. During the
same period of time, the US stock index returned 1,000%.
Thus with Japan cut down to size, the U.S. retained
its sole hegemonic status into the 2010’s with major production and
capital shifts to China only exploding in the early 2000’s relative to
previous decades. It is only by the mid 2010’s that the United States
began truly reappraising it’s “most preferred” trade status with China
in recognition it had developed into a rival contending imperialism
while capitalists willingly sacrificed the health of their... ignored
the health of their industrial monopolies while racking in massive
super-profits from the established world trade and financial order in
the previous decades. Thus, the U.S. has been trying for years to get
China to agree to another Plaza Accord and appreciate the Yuan; however,
time has shown that it is unlikely that China will voluntarily
appreciate their currency after the economic slaughter of Japan.
The Rise of Chinese Imperialism
Since the late 1970s the Chinese bourgeois developed itself while taking
a subordinate role under world imperialism, serving as its middle
man who could do the dirty work of disciplining and exploiting cheap
Chinese labor while global finance capital extracted super-profits. As
these manufactures continued to develop into larger industrial
monopolies Chinese finance began to develop itself and transform into an
export finance capital. As such, it had likewise needed an enlarging
military to unload its surpluses into and to defend and guarantee its
own debts that it sells to developing countries. As such China has only
recently emerged as a contending rival imperialism and the prevailing
trade war policies has nothing to do with returning jobs to the United
Stated or “getting a fair deal” to benefit the working class, but
everything to do with the rivalries of the two contending blocks of
financial capital who must carve up the world between themselves to
continue to accumulate or die.
China developed into the global center of low-cost
industrial production after it began to open its markets in the late
1970’s to the 1990’s, exploding in the 2000’s. International
corporations and financial institutions often through foreign direct
investment (FDI) gained access to cheap chinese labor markets where the
vast majority of the population was still trapped in the poverty of
agricultural peasant life. Initially, Transnational corporations
invested in Special Economic Zones, where Chinese workers toiled in
sweatshop conditions, often for less than 5% of the wages of U.S.
workers in similar industries. As corporations moved manufacturing to
China, the value generated by hyper-exploited labor was realized in the
imperialist cores by selling goods at much higher prices than they could
on domestic Chinese markets. This created super profits for the big
retailers and tech firms operating as commercial financiers while the
small bourgeois manufacturers in China received much smaller profit
shares at the lowest rates possible. Still both bourgeoisies benefited
from the hyper exploitation of the Chinese workers which likewise
enabled the undercutting of the leverage of western workers labor and
the flatlining of wages over the next half century. State-suppressed
labor organizing, with strikes and independent unions crushed by the
CCP, ensured reliable returns.
Even though foreigners were not allowed to directly
own majority shares of manufacturers or corporations in key industries,
the surplus was still funneled back into the hands of U.S. financial
capital in a number of ways. While the low end manufacturing and
assembly was done in China by subcontractors, U.S. companies like Apple,
Nike, and Walmart designed, marketed, and controlled the brand and
retail selling it in the United States and Europe, accruing the lion’s
share of the profits and forcing the numerous competing small
manufactures into deals where they would only receive the smallest cut
possible. Second, U.S. firms maintained monopoly control over the
intellectual property, patents, software, and branding. Chinese firms
that wanted access to markets or technology were often forced into joint
ventures, which transferred profits upward. U.S. firms licensed the
technology and captured royalties and licensing fees. The Chinese
state often enforced these contracts. With the yuan undervalued for much
of the period, profits repatriated to the U.S. were effectively
magnified. These super profits led to the explosion of U.S. corporations
such as Walmart and Apple which became the first company ever to surpass
$3 trillion in market value. Additionally, the Chinese state to
secure advantages for its exports also recycled its trade surpluses into
U.S. Treasury securities, effectively loaning its surplus back to the
U.S. government at low interest just as the OPEC countries and Europeans
had.
U.S. finance capital continues to reign supreme but
it has now recognized it is in an existential crisis and must quickly
implement similar Nixon era and Plaza Accord like policies or go the way
of English finance capital. As of 2020, 50-60% of Chinese manufactured
exports continued to be tied to U.S. brands such as Apple as
subcontractors; however, over the decades China has developed its own
cohort of billionaires out of its manufactures who have established
competing independent brands and electronic marketplaces such as TEMU
who rival U.S. corporations such as Amazon in their own rights. These
Chinese enterprises have begun to flood international markets with
increasingly high quality, high value, commodities at cheaper prices.
Within the last five years the number of such independent Chinese
companies’ share of the total exports has doubled, now at 28% of total
Chinese exports. Thus as the capital from Chinese manufacturing
and its real estate sector has accumulated it has slowly begun to
develop its own independent global enterprises, getting out from under
the monopoly of U.S. finance in which its manufactures had been
dependent on for access to foreign markets. Correspondingly it has begun
to develop its own finance capital which has begun to increasingly
export its surplus onto global markets competing with the dominant U.S.
bloc, forming the basis of the present inter-imperialist rivalry between
the two powers.
Over the last twenty years the Chinese finance sector
has become the largest in the world. In 1995 the Chinese government
passed the Commercial Banking Law which sanctioned independent banks and
established the Peoples Bank of China as a national reserve. The "Big
Four" state-owned commercial banks are the Bank of China, the China
Construction Bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and the
Agricultural Bank of China, all of which are among the top ten largest
banks in the world as of 2018. China’s financial sector is now the
largest in the world, with approximately $58 trillion in assets,
equating to about 300% of GDP by the end of 2023. Measured in total
assets, its size surpassed that of the US banking system in 2010, and
all euro area banks combined in the last quarter of 2016. Since 2017,
China has become the world’s largest official creditor, surpassing the
World Bank, IMF and 22-member Paris Club combined, although the vast
majority of its investments, 97% remain tied up within China itself, it
has started to export a growing amount of finance capital across the
world. The big four Chinese banks are publicly traded, however the
Chinese government retains majority shares and a single foreign investor
cannot hold more than 10% of the bank’s total equity with total foreign
ownership capped at 25%.
The entrance of Chinese export financial capital as a
major competitor to U.S. finance capital across the world is now
seriously threatening U.S. dominance. As Chinese industry has
increasingly moved into higher value products such as tech and
automobiles out competing the United States in foreign markets across
the world, and despite it’s large domestic finance industry that has
grown out of its industrial explosion, the one area where China remains
significantly behind is in regards to its competitiveness on the global
financial markets. China’s share of global equity markets remains 10-12%
whereas the United States retains 45-50%, pension, insurance asset
managers 3-4 trillion, where as through BlackRock, Vanguard, State
Street control in the U.S. control ~$20+ trillion in assets. Likewise,
the Chinese stock market cap is approximately 10-12% of the world’s
value whereas the United States is among 24% and 50%.
Between 2000 and 2010 Chinese finance capital’s
outward Foreign Direct Investment increased from $0.9 billion to $68.8
billion, growing from only $12 billion after a rapid post 2008 crisis
growth fueled by speculative investment in its real estate sector.
Chinese finance capital then underwent a period of significant
consolidation leading to a rapid increase in export finance capital and
by 2016 it peaked at $196.1 billion including large deals in the U.S.
and Europe. As of the second quarter of 2017 mainland Chinese banks’
cross-border claims amounted to $970 billion, ranking eighth overall
globally and exceeding those of traditional financial centres such as
Switzerland and Luxembourg, or countries hosting large international
banking groups such as Spain and Italy. As the Chinese finance industry
has rapidly expanded and begun pouring its surplus onto world markets
China has slowly transformed into a contending rival imperialism of the
United States. However, the rapid development of Chinese imperialism has
also led the world capitalist system ever increasing towards cataclysm
as the global overproduction crisis pushes the two blocks of financial
capital into imperialist war in a desperate attempt to continue profit
accumulation.
U.S. Finance and the Great Wall of Chinese Protectionism
U.S. finance capital has for years worked to break
down the walls of Chinese protectionism around its emerging financial
system. Historically, China has imposed restrictions on foreign equity
ownership, especially in sensitive sectors like banking,
telecommunications, media, and heavy industry. The U.S. government made
China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization contingent on
ending protectionism throughout its economy, including finance. This
required China to allow foreign banks to operate in China, permit joint
ventures in insurance, securities, and asset management. The objective
was to open the Chinese financial market to U.S. firms like JPMorgan,
Citi, and Goldman Sachs under the narrative of "global integration", but
with the motive of capital penetration. The U.S. China Strategic &
Economic Dialogues from 2006‑16 held annually under the Bush and Obama
administrations demanded greater foreign ownership rights in Chinese
banks and funds, exchange rate liberalization in regards to the Yuan to
the advantage of the USD. Presented as “dialogue”, but in material terms
a tool of imperialist economic diplomacy to discipline and integrate
China into global finance dominated by U.S. capital.
Until the late 2010s, foreign firms could generally
only own up to 49% of joint ventures in key industries. Full foreign
ownership was restricted to limited sectors like export manufacturing or
tech outsourcing zones. By the late 2010s, U.S. firms like BlackRock,
Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan began entering China’s insurance and asset
management sectors. Though still regulated, these openings were
victories for U.S. finance, as they hoped to siphon Chinese household
savings into Wall Street-linked products. By 2020 as a result of the
growing financial challenges, China agreed to treaties with the U.S.
which further opened up their finance markets. U.S. firms were allowed
100% ownership in areas like Asset management (e.g., BlackRock),
Securities firms (e.g., JPMorgan), Insurance (e.g., AIG, MetLife). Today
BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan have gained increasing access to
Chinese capital markets post-2018, managing billions in Chinese assets.
Today, China’s banks are still grappling with the
prolonged turmoil in the property sector. In a bid to stabilize wobbly
regional banks, Chinese provinces injected a record $31bn of capital
last year through special-purpose bonds. Several other signs
suggest the potential for a banking crisis in China. According to
Bloomberg “China’s first bank loan contraction in nearly two decades has
fanned fears the world’s No. 2 economy is careening toward a “balance
sheet recession” as Japan did decades ago. A plunge in new corporate
borrowing combined with households preferring to repay debt saw bank
loans shrink last month for the first time since July 2005. That
deepened China’s years-long battle with weak credit demand, as a
property slump spurs caution on buying homes and expanding investment.
Determination among consumers and businesses to pay down debt following
real estate collapse is seen as a hallmark of Japan’s stumble into
decades of deflation in the 1990s.”
Further evidence of Chinese desperation is seen with
the 16 January 2025, the People’s Bank of China and four other major
regulators in China jointly issued an opinion outlining 20 new policies
to further open up the financial sector creating designated pilot free
trade zones mostly completely open to U.S. finance in major cities and
provinces. Whilst there are still considerable uncertainties about the
details and implementation timeframe, the opinion accelerates China’s
protectionist walls around its finance sector getting battered down by
the still dominant position of U.S. finance capital.
The End of the Era of the Petro‑Dollar
By the mid 2010’s the dominant position of U.S.
finance capital and its industrial monopolies began to come under threat
for a number of reasons. The shift of the United States from the world’s
largest importer of oil to a net oil exporter weakened the economic ties
between it and the Saudis, combined with the rise of China as the
largest importer of Middle Eastern oil, the break of Russia, one of the
leading oil producing nations in the world with the international
finance system dominated by the U.S. jeopardized the hegemony of the
petrodollar system as new international finance systems began to be
constructed.
After the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and
subsequent U.S. sanctions, Russia began for the first time shifting away
from the sale of oil in dollars. Large oil contracts were denominated in
Yuan or Euros. Subsequently Russia began developing systems to bypass
Western-controlled financial networks. SPFS (System for Transfer of
Financial Messages): A domestic alternative to SWIFT, launched by the
Central Bank of Russia in 2014. MIR Card System: A domestic payment card
system to replace Visa and Mastercard, in case of sanctions. Russia
signed currency swap lines with key trading partners, China that same
year Ruble-yuan swap worth $24.5 billion, Turkey, India, and others
followed. These allowed energy and commodity trade to bypass the dollar.
Despite U.S. financial sanctions that were believed
would crush the Russian economy, the Russian’s chugged along by selling
oil to India and China, switching its reserves to Euro, Yuan and Gold,
reducing its holdings of U.S. Treasuries to near zero by 2020. By
April 2024 Russia announced that its trade with China had almost
completely moved away from using the U.S. dollar. The International
Monetary Fund found that in 125 economies, the median usage of renminbi
in cross-border payments with China increased from 0% in 2014 to 20% in
2021; for a quarter of these economies, renminbi (petroyuan) usage has
risen to 70%. In 2023, one-fifth of global oil trade was settled in
non-dollar currencies. And Saudi Arabia’s deepening energy ties with
China have led to long-term oil-trading contracts denominated in
renminbi. In 2022, the dollar’s share of global reserves fell ten times
faster than over the previous two decades, to 58%, from 73% in 2001.
Thus the movements began to signal a major challenge
to the passive dollar recycling system and a move to multi currency
maneuvering with Chinese finance imperialism leading the charge of the
rebellious sub-imperialisms peeling off of the U.S. orbit. The first
export of Saudi oil conducted in Yuan to China in 2018 ended the decades
long international agreements to only conduct the sale of oil in
dollars, as Iran soon disallowed all sales of oil in dollars. If more
countries were to conduct purchases of oil in other currencies it risks
dollar dominance over the long term. This reality, combined with the
meteoric rise of Chinese export finance capital by 2016 facilitated some
of the first skirmishes between Chinese finance and the U.S. for global
dominance.
The collapse of the petrodollar system combined with
the creation of a competitive U.S. oil monopoly directly under the
control of U.S. finance and not dependent on an Arab sub-imperialism has
significantly shifted the strategic position of U.S. finance capital as
it now positions to contain and snuff out the emerging imperialist bloc
centered around China through a complex set of maneuvers of divide and
conquer. Nonetheless the tools utilized by U.S. imperialism today are no
different from those it has employed over nearly a century of its
imperial hegemony.
The 2020 Financial Crisis and the First Trade War
With the progressive decline of the petrodollar
system which underwrote U.S. financial domination, the United States
would begin to implement its trade war strategies in 2018 in a repeat of
the same methods of the past. Enlarging debts which are critical for
imperialism and its profit accumulation face the wall of declining GDP.
Eventually more interest is taken on to keep selling debts which only
worsens the GDP problem, leading to inevitable default and potential
explosion of war. Thus, the U.S. and China both prepare for war as they
prepare for financial defaults.
The methods by which China and the United States were
forced to rescue themselves from the 2008 financial crisis, after the
collapse of the subprime mortgage markets and the investment banking
firm Lehman Brothers, would make another worldwide financial crisis
inevitable. After 2008 there was a large increase in global corporate
debt which rose from 84% of gross world product in 2009 to 92% in 2019.
By 2019, global debt was 50% higher than during the 2008 financial
crisis. This created a situation where any significant economic downturn
would make it so that companies with high levels of debt ran the risk of
default. The overaccumulation of capital led to bubbles in real estate,
tech, and corporate bonds with no profitable outlet. By 2017 global
growth was said to have peaked when the following year industrial output
experienced a sustained decline, leading the IMF to state that by 2019
the world economy was already going through a “synchronized slow down”
despite low interest rates, raising fears of a “debt bomb” whenever the
next economic crisis inevitably flared up. Thus all the signs of a major
economic crisis were already there.
In 2018 the first Trump administration would announce
its first round of tariffs and trade barriers on China. The tariffs
disproportionately targeted sectors aligned with the CCP’s Made in China
2025 industrial policy: semiconductors, robotics, aerospace, biotech,
etc. The goal was not fair trade but strategic suppression of Chinese
development in high-value production. Despite nationalist rhetoric, U.S.
imperialism used tariffs as leverage to force China to open its markets
to give greater access for U.S. finance to continue its extraction of
super profits and beat back the developing strength of Chinese finance.
It aimed at loosening restrictions on foreign ownership of banks and
insurance firms & strengthening IP enforcement to protect U.S.
monopolies. The tariffs helped create a manufactured crisis to justify
industrial subsidies such as Biden’s CHIPS Act, national security-based
export bans (on semiconductors, AI), and direct state intervention in
capital flows and supply chains. The tariffs hastened a slowdown in
global trade and manufacturing. Slower trade reduced industrial profits
and choked off demand for investment. Capital increasingly flowed into
speculative and fictitious forms (real estate, stocks, corporate bonds)
leading to asset bubbles and unstable financial structures.
The Repo market panic in September 2019 would be the
first tremor as the U.S. interbank lending system seized up, forcing the
Federal Reserve to inject hundreds of billions in liquidity months
before COVID. The pandemic did not cause the crisis in any fundamental
sense; rather, it served as a catalyst and smokescreen, allowing the
ruling class to shift blame, justify running up massive debts and
finance the further consolidation of the large corporate financial
monopolies, all while pacifying working-class mobilization through fear,
confusion, and emergency politics. The 2020 crash would be the worst
since the Great Depression with major indices dropping 20 to 30% in late
February and March. Following the crash, global stock markets plummeted,
demand collapsed, and millions of small businesses and workers were
devastated. Yet, almost immediately, the largest corporations bounced
back with some reaching record profits by the end of the same
year. This wasn’t a recovery driven by production, innovation, or rising
demand, it was a state-engineered transfer of wealth and power to
monopoly capital with the tech giants, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft,
Facebook (Meta) becoming even more dominant in every sector, Tens
of thousands of small and medium-sized retailers closed permanently with
Walmart, Target, Home Depot, and others expanded market share, Asset
managers like BlackRock and Vanguard expanded ownership stakes in
virtually every major firm.
The injection of hundreds of billions of dollars,
combined with Trump’s tariffs would work to crash the value of the
dollar in 2020 by 10-20% and ultimately setting the stage for the
current Chinese financial and housing crisis, just as was done against
Japan in 1985. As Nixon had waited for the crisis situation to develop
in the 1970’s to force their policies on their haughty European and
Japanese protectorates, the U.S. bourgeois would do the same even if
their hand may had been forced to apply some measures of capital
injection to prevent a run on the banks, COVID served as a
convenient cover for a dollar devaluation + tariff strategy. Within a
few days of the crash in March the Federal Reserve dropped interest
rates to zero while initiating a $700 billion quantitative easing. The
influx of cash led to a heating up economy and eventually a large-scale
inflation which likewise led to an uptick in workers’ leverage and thus
a proliferation of strikes. Stocks began to recover their prices and the
GDP for most major economies had either returned to or exceeded
pre-pandemic levels by April.
China’s lockdown policy also allowed more state
intervention in the organization of the supply chain to mitigate the
impacts of the financial crisis. By the second quarter of 2020, Chinese
factories were largely back online while U.S. and European industries
remained shuttered and higher demand for medical supplies ensured that
large profits continued to float into the country. Strict Chinese
lockdown rules allowed capital to redirect output to global markets
without overheating domestic demand and maintain increased labor
discipline under the guise of pandemic management, reducing labor
militancy and wage pressure in the short term.
By 2020, China’s GDP contracted by 6.8%
year-over-year, the first officially reported decline since 1976.
Industrial production fell by 13.5%, and retail sales dropped by 20.5%,
as lockdowns paralyzed the domestic economy. The state turned to its
default stimulus mechanism: infrastructure spending and construction. As
Western economies locked down, global demand for Chinese medical goods
surged. China’s trade surplus hit a record high, fueling a recovery in
industrial output. As capital fled the U.S. dollar and flooded into
China’s relatively stable financial system, the renminbi appreciated by
over 6% against the dollar by the end of 2020. The People’s Bank of
China intervened in FX markets, cutting reserve requirements and
indirectly purchasing dollars to stem the rise, utilizing the same
methods used by Japan in the 1970’s and 1980’s to combat their currency
appreciation. The massive credit expansion to developers post-2020
planted the seeds of the Evergrande crisis in 2021‑23, when the firm
defaulted on $300 billion in liabilities. As prices and sales collapsed
in 2021‑23, the effects rippled into banking, household wealth, and
local governments. The stimulus created overcapacity in housing,
infrastructure, and industrial capital, a classical feature of
capitalist crisis.
The collapse of Evergrande in 2021 triggered a
liquidity crisis, leading to defaults by over 50 developers and causing
a sharp decline in property sales. Newly built home sales fell by 6% in
2023, reverting to levels not seen since 2016. Home prices have plunged
about 30%, resulting in the destruction of approximately $18 trillion in
household wealth. Foreign direct investment into China has seen a
significant decline, with a 94% drop in the second quarter of 2023
compared to the same period in 2021. It’s unclear where indebted local
governments can obtain funding, beyond the relatively small amounts the
People’s Bank of China can funnel in via state banks. Chinese cities
have already racked up about $15 trillion in debt, much of it hidden in
housing, having borrowed heavily in recent years to cover the cost of
pandemic-related spending and infrastructure projects. This means that
China is increasingly desperate for foreign capital to stave off it’s
growing debt crisis which risks to collapse its’ finance and banking
industry. Thus we can understand that the current trade war policies are
intend to increase pressure on Chinese capital by damaging it’s
industrial profits, further exasperating the current crisis to force a
further opening up of Chinese finance to U.S. capitals penetration.
The Mar-A-Lago Accord and the Gold Rush
The Mar-A-Lago Accord is a proposed policy document
outlining the broader strategy for U.S. imperialism to follow over the
coming years created by Stephen Miran who is the current White House
chair of the Council of Economic Advisers & supported by Scott
Bessent the current Secretary of the Treasury. The plan in essence
builds from the previous tactics of U.S. imperialism implemented since
the end of Bretton Woods. It is a strategic move on the part of U.S.
capital to do to Chinese industry what it had done to German and
Japanese in the late 20th century; however, given the relative power of
the U.S. it will no longer be able to coerce these governments into
acquiescing to such a “voluntary agreement” without a fight as it had in
the previous century. Thus as it works to penetrate the Chinese finance
industry it is leveraging towards a nuclear option, which if not
executed properly risks devastating the U.S. bourgeois, it outlines a
desperate gambit to hold on to global economic hegemony which is to
unfold in stages broadly correspond to the opening moves of the current
administration, which takes periodic economic crashes as necessary
collateral damage.
The Mar-A-Lago Accord calls for a world wide devaluation of the dollar
via the appreciation of other world currencies, as occurred under Nixon
when he removed the U.S. off the Gold Standard and then again under the
1985 Plaza Accord, only this time it would involve the U.S. dollar
repinning itself to gold or cryptocurrency while also controlling which
countries would be allowed and not allowed to hold USD as reserves
thanks to the assistance of new electronic surveillance technologies.
The aim is simple, to further crash Chinese finance and industry which
is still dependent on U.S. exports and thirsty for equity to avoid a
cataclysmic banking crisis. By threatening to orchestrate a global
blockade on their goods by cutting China completely out of accessing
dollars, while preserving its status as the global medium of trade. For
the conquest of the increasingly indebted Chinese imperialism by
increasingly indebted U.S. imperialism they must once again essentially
default on their loans, while leveraging military might to force the
other world imperialism to go along with deepening financial
subordination as the U.S. financial conglomerates continue their
consolidation and gobbling up of the world.
Despite the movement toward de-dollarization in
Russia, the process has only actually made initial inroads in the rest
of the world and even within the bloc of Chinese imperialisms
dependents. The US still comprises about 50-60% of global foreign
reserves, no other currency currently is a viable replacement; however,
talks in the BRICS of an alternate currency has U.S. imperialism
scared. In recognition of the growing challenge to the dollar as
the world reserve currency as a result of the decline of the petrodollar
recycling system the plan seeks to retain the dominant role of the
dollar U.S. financial capital by leveraging U.S. military power to move
countries onto untradable 100 year bonds to essentially buy U.S.
military protection. To gain leverage and force other countries to
accept this arrangement, the plan calls for the rolling out of a period
of harsh tariffs combined with high interest rates to taper inflation.
Likewise, it also calls on the Treasury secretary to begin charging a
minimum 1% tax on interest payouts to foreign governments who hold
existing U.S. treasurers to be varied punitively based on the country’s
compliance with U.S. policies. This combined with threats of removal of
U.S. security forces across the world are to be leveraged to gain
agreement on currency revaluations and “voluntary” bond exchanges to the
100 year bonds alongside negotiations for a return to lower tariffs.
With the death of the petrodollar system, the U.S.
bourgeois’s look back to leveraging its gold assets to first devalue the
currency to its advantage and at a turn of a coin maintain its staying
power as a global reserve currency. A revaluation of the price of gold
by the U.S. Treasury Department which maintains it pegged to Bretton
Woods era levels, would help it undermine the developing turn to other
currency systems. BRICS nations taken as a whole officially hold 5,700
tonnes of gold reserves which is 16% of the globally mined gold reserves
and have drastically increased the gold reserves over the last few
years. Goldman Sachs has reported that China has apparently bought 10X
more gold than officially declared. Assuming the BRICS countries declare
a gold-backed digital currency, with lower transaction cost and exchange
issues it could generate billions of dollars of profits for the BRICS
bourgeoisie. To add to this China holds 80% of the world’s rare earth
minerals like Germanium, Gallium, Lithium etc and Russia is the
warehouse of commodities from metals to fossil fuel to agriculture.
However the balance of gold power is still skewed in favour of the G7
countries, which together hold 17,500 tonnes or 49% of the total global
reserves. The revaluation of American gold reserves to market levels
could also substantially increase the value of gold internationally
thereby closing the window of opportunity for BRICS countries to build
their gold reserves which they were able to do at suppressed prices
until recently.
Thus we are seeing a global scramble in the classic
imperialist style for direct control of raw minerals and gold as the
financial blocs hurriedly build their reserve hordes to ensure their
monetary systems dominance over global trade, amid an intensifying arms
race and active war between the sub-imperialisms of the two states
already breaking out all over the world. For U.S. finance they continue
to seek the full domination of the world under Trump, even if he claimed
just like Nixon to be executing his policies in the name of ending the
empire and averting world war. For the clever bourgeoisie who seek to
manipulate the various levers of the economy apply more and less
leverage here and there to get the desired outcome their economic system
continues to steam forward in one cataclysmic direction.
May Day 2025 Leaflet
The following leaflet was prepared for distribution at May Day
demonstrations throughout the world.
THE CAPITALIST ORDER PREPARES FOR WAR BETWEEN NATIONS
THE PROLETARIAT MUST PREPARE FOR WAR BETWEEN CLASSES !
Only revolutionary defeatism of the working class can stop imperialist war
Down with nationalism, long live working-class internationalism!
Ominous clouds are gathering over vast areas of the world,
while in others, the storm of war has already been raging for some time.
In the world, dominated by the laws of capital, 56 conflicts of varying
size and intensity are taking place, involving 90 countries: from
Ukraine to Palestine, from Congo to Yemen, from Myanmar to Sudan.
The world economy stagnates, overwhelmed by the overproduction of goods,
and any attempt to restore its momentum runs up against the
irreconcilable contradictions of this now anti-historic production
system.
The abandonment of free trade, which has characterized the past decades,
and the return to protectionism and economic nationalism, are further
proof that the regime of capital is outliving itself. On the one hand,
protectionism will further increase the exploitation of the proletariat,
and on the other it will intensify the struggle for the division of
markets.
The trade war between imperialisms is a preview of open war, as happened
in both world wars of the last century, the first of which was stopped
throughout Europe by the victory of the proletarian revolution of
October 1917 in Russia, a shining historical example of how the war
machine of capital can be broken.
The United States, the world’s leading economic and military power, is
reacting to the crisis with protectionism and threatening to deploy its
enormous war machine to contain its global rival, China. The People’s
Republic of China – the world’s second most powerful capitalist nation,
usurping the title of socialist, as the Stalinist USSR once did –
continues with ever greater difficulty, in a context of general economic
crisis, its industrial and military growth, keeping a low profile to
gain positions at a commercial and diplomatic level, while preparing for
confrontation also on the military level.
In an attempt to get out of the industrial recession, the European
imperialists rearm, under the pretext of responding to the Russian
threat, but their rearmament will be directed primarily against the
proletariat, who are called upon today to make sacrifices and tomorrow
to go to the front to defend the interests of their masters.
A united Europe – impossible under capitalism – will be torn apart by a
Third Imperialist World War, as occurred in the First and Second, with
the various nation states siding with either the American or Chinese
imperialists.
The worldwide arms race will require the mobilization of huge resources,
taking away from hospitals, schools, wages and pensions. In South Korea
the bourgeoisie are working to introduce a 64-hour work week, while some
countries are already considering reintroducing compulsory military
service; Poland intends to conscript the entire male population for
periods of military training.
The working class cannot fight decisively and uncompromisingly to defend
its living and working conditions without challenging the national
economy, which is nothing more than capitalism. This battle must be
fought not only in every country, but within the union movement, which
today is mostly dominated by unions subservient to national bourgeois
interests. Workers must struggle against the openly bourgeois or
opportunist leadership within the unions, who have historically been
complicit in the march of workers for the defense of their fatherland,
and will continue the same tradition when the mass graves of tomorrows
Third Imperialist War will be dug and filled with the corpses of the
proletariat. In the United States the president of the United Auto
Workers union – has hailed the protectionist tariffs that increase the
prices of goods as a victory for the working class. In Italy, the
secretary general of the Italian General Confederation of Labor led a
demonstration in favor of European rearmament, in other words, the
slaughter of proletarians.
A real struggle for significant wage increases, for better and safer
working conditions, for the reduction of working hours also becomes a
struggle against rearmament spending, the only true opposition to the
militarization of the economy and society – effectively preparing the
proletariat for the revolutionary struggle for communism with the
authentic Marxist tradition, represented by the international class
party as its instrument of emancipation.
The impersonal historical force and necessity of communism, a new form
of production that is already mature and pressing in the belly of the
capitalist monster, will once again present itself as the only true
possible alternative: either bourgeois war for the preservation of this
system of production or international communist revolution.
TODAY AS WAS TRUE YESTERDAY, WAR ON WAR !
THE ENEMY OF THE WORKING CLASS IS IN ITS OWN COUNTRY !
PROLETARIANS OF THE WORLD UNITE !
Attacks on
Migrants in the U.S. Are Also Meant to Repress the Working Class
In the context of the wave of persecution, detention, and
deportation of migrants carried out by the US government, a clear
pattern of selective political repression has begun to emerge against
labor leaders and activists who promote the release of detained
migrants, and even activists who have opposed the massacre of
Palestinians. Just as the media has reported on the suspension of visas,
detention, and deportation of foreign students who have expressed
solidarity with the Palestinians (e.g., Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa
Ozturk), the anti-migrant wave has also been used to arrest union
leaders, including Alfredo “Lelo” Juárez, a union leader for
agricultural workers who is currently imprisoned at the U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center in Tacoma. Also detained
in Tacoma is Lewelyn Dixon, a laboratory technician at the University of
Washington and member of the SEIU 925 union, who has a permanent
residence card and has been living in the United States for 50 years.
ICE is harassing and intimidating people without presenting warrants. In
doing so, it is joining forces with the Border Patrol and thus acting
jointly as part of the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state.
On March 27, the Washington State Labor Council, which represents all
Washington unions, organized a demonstration in front of the detention
center in Tacoma, demanding the release of Alfredo Juárez and Lewelyn
Dixon.
What is at stake is the maintenance and deepening of the
super-exploitation of agricultural workers, migrant or not, subjected to
long hours and job instability in temporary contracts. We will also find
the same situation among construction workers and workers in general.
This offensive of exploitation against the working class can only be
stopped through unity, grassroots organization, and mobilization against
the capitalist bosses and the government. Workers must build a
combative, class-based union movement that breaks with any
differentiation among its members based on race, nationality,
occupation, or any other artificial excuse used to divide the working
class. The working class is one and fights for the same demands
throughout the world. And this movement of struggle must ignore the
calls of Democrats, Republicans, and all the politicians who seek votes
to get into the bourgeois parliament. Only the resumption of the class
struggle of the workers, with revolutionary leadership, will lay the
foundations for the true emancipation from capitalist barbarism.
The Carcass of Collective Bargaining
In March 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order
that effectively revoked collective bargaining for a significant portion
of the federal workforce. Claiming “national security concerns” and
invoking a seldom-used provision of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978,
the order targeted agencies including the Departments of Defense, Justice,
State, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and the Environmental
Protection Agency. This action impacted approximately one million workers
or 67% of federal employees and 75% of unionized federal workers. This is
largest assault on the established unions since the breaking of the 1981
Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strike by the Reagan
Administration, which culminated in their decertification and opened a
period of mass membership declines across the unions from which they still
have not recovered. Thus, the recent decree by the Trump
administration abolishing the so-called “collective bargaining rights” for
most federal workers has been met with cries of outrage from the
boss-linked leadership within the unions and the legalist champions of the
capitalist state’s “fairness.” But the Marxist party knows collective
bargaining is but a weapon of the bourgeoisie, an instrument forged in the
counter-revolutionary furnace of class collaboration. The National Labor
Relations Board, like its counterparts in every capitalist country, exists
not to empower the proletariat but to domesticate it, to enshrine its
subjugation within the sterile confines of legality and procedure. The
“right to bargain” is the right to negotiate the terms of exploitation,
never its abolition.
The Trump decree does not represent a break with democracy, but its
fulfillment. For when capital no longer requires the mask of conciliation,
it discards it without ceremony. The illusion of neutrality is cast aside,
and the state reaffirms itself as the executive committee of the ruling
class. The mis-leaders of labor weep not because exploitation has deepened
which they accept but because their privileged role as mediators has been
threatened.
It is not for the communists to defend collective bargaining, nor the
unions which enforce it. It is for the party to expose their function, to
unmask the lie that the working class can secure dignity and peaceful
co-existence through negotiation with its enemy. The obliteration of
collective bargaining amid the massive cuts to the capitalist states
bureaucracy and the expropriation of the middle classes are all part of
the deepening crisis of capital which will one day obliterate the last
vestiges of the parasitic labor aristocracy and return the masses to the
grounds of the class struggle. The federal worker must not demand the
return of bargaining tables, but prepare for the return of the generalized
strike and the class union.
Toward the General Strike, Towards the Class Union
It seems that after a period of routing from the domination of
capital and the prevailing counter-revolutionary forces, the course of
global capitalism and the increased consolidation of the international
bourgeoisies – as well as their bloody confrontations – are continuing to
push the proletariat into a renewed combative urgency. All around the
globe, workers are calling for and wielding the mighty general strike.
From Argentina, Greece, Belgium, Morocco and beyond, the international
proletariat is beginning to remember how to move its muscles in response
to capital’s increasing pressure.
Throughout the history of the proletariat’s struggle, general strikes in
which workers organized through various unions collectively withhold their
labor-power in order to overwhelm the bourgeois repressive apparatus and
force concessions by paralyzing the reproductive cycle of capital in a
number of industries appear like great battles within the tapestry of
capitalist epoch that now hang in empty halls of the militant American
Labor movement.
One notable general strike for the 8 hour workday (still just a wish for
the number of American workers who must work two or more jobs or extended
overtime to pay living expenses and feed their families) is of course the
famous 1886 Chicago strike that brought out hundreds of thousands of
striking workers together in song and solidarity, only to be remembered
for its bloody end as the Haymarket Affair. This event cemented the first
of May as what is known as “International Workers’ Day.” Born out of a
bloody struggle for a reduction in the working day, it has served as a
unifying point for workers around the world to reflect on their class
history and celebrate the hard earned and necessary gains of the working
class as well as look forward towards the demands yet won.
That is why as we approach this May Day, 139 years after the Haymarket
Affair, we must recognize that conditions for the international
proletariat are still indeed poor, that the global workers’ movement is
still incredibly weak, and that at this very moment proletarians are being
slaughtered in the violent tremors that are mere previews for the great
imperialist wars to come.
The overproduction crises of imperialist capitalism can only worsen and
worsen, resolving to continuously consolidate into fascistic and
social-democratic ends that are but desperate measures for the
bourgeoisies to defend their home markets and their dwindling rates of
profit, subordinating the laboring masses through either open tyranny of
the bourgeois state or obscured through the treacherous veil of
“democracy.”
With the slow recovery of the class union movement, workers in the US are
still largely organized through the regime unions, who are completely
subordinate to the interests of capital, if organized at all(national
union density sitting under 10%), and because of this, American workers
are extremely limited in exercising broad actions across various
industries for their common demands and defending themselves against the
bourgeoisie.
This deficiency in class coordination is especially apparent with the
recent boycotts and “economic blackouts”, which leverage no force against
the bourgeoisie, do not forward any collective demands of the class, and
therefore cannot “win” anything in particular. It will not be “selective
consumerism” that will free the proletariat from capitalism but the
abolition of commodity production in general!
In order for workers to defend themselves from the ever increasing
exploitation of the bourgeoisie, the coordination of general strikes can
exert pressure where it hurts the capitalists the most: their profits.
An Idle Sword in the Stone
America has not seen a true general strike since the 50,000
worker Oakland General Strike of 1946, largely due to the creation of the
infamous Taft-Hartley Act enacted by the consolidated American
bourgeoisie coming out of the second great imperialist war in a necessary
effort to quell class tensions during the wave of strikes of 1945-1946.
Having codified the “appropriate” means to workers’ struggle within the
limits of their legal apparatus with the creation of the NLRB earlier in
the 30s, the bourgeoisie realized that solidarity strikes and wildcat
strikes were far too disruptive for labor peace and decidedly revoked the
“privilege” at their leisure.
A far cry from the general strikes of yesterday, American workers today
are now fighting to remove ridiculous anti-worker “No-strike Clauses” from
their contracts that continue to reduce the struggle for the rank-and-file
to mere business arrangements between the boss-linked, business union
leadership and the company exploiters. Being that all profit is the
expropriated surplus-value of the exploited worker, withholding
labor-power via a strike is the proletariat’s only actual coercive force
they can leverage against the capitalists, most other actions surmounting
to the equivalent of faith in the benevolence of the capitalists through
unfavorable legal means.
The strikes of today are now relegated to conditional responses to Unfair
Labor Practices(per NLRB rules) or in the periods between the old sacred
contract and the new sacred contract for often little real gains, with
many picket lines being hollow “protests” that aim to appeal to bourgeois
political representatives or the heartstrings of the bosses, rather than
militant strikes that really disrupt production and the circulation of
capital in meaningful ways.
These strikes are still very noble and useful in their own basic way, as
workers are still able to win small concessions like Cost of Living
Adjustments (COLAs) and at the very least damper the rapid diminishing of
wages compared to the vast majority of unorganized workers who suffer as
lone individuals in their shared class plight. The hard lessons from the
repression of the bourgeois politicians, as well as the collaboration and
outright sabotage from the misleaders of the regime unions, are
fundamental courses in the long curriculum within the “schools of class
struggle”, but even these basic legal defensive strikes that abide by the
bourgeoisie’s rules are in the process of being dismantled.
In July of 2023, the US Supreme Court made a decisive rule in the case of
Glacier Northwest, Inc. v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, that
unions can be held liable for “intentionally causing economic harm to
employers.” Against the mighty boss who holds their entire
livelihood in their hands, the proletariat, who must sell their
labor-power like piecemeal slavery well beyond the necessary means for
their reproduction to line the pockets of the slave master, mustn’t dare
turn the tables and in turn hurt the robber baron!
We see the continual attempts of fascistic incorporation of the trade
unions into the larger body of the bourgeois state, increasingly making
the necessary economic defense organizations for the workers into
appendages of the bourgeois political parties, suggesting to workers that
“your power to improve your conditions is found with the ballot!” for the
very same parties that the oppressive boss also votes for.
If workers are to have any hope in achieving better conditions, it can
only be backed by the genuine use of economic coercion, not by the
endorsements of this bourgeois politician over that one, only through
withholding that precious labor-power that all of bourgeois enterprise
rests dearly upon.
Who Can Wield It?
Following the “stand-up” strikes in 2028, Shawn Fain and the
United Auto Workers (UAW) are calling for all American unions to align
their contracts to expire simultaneously on May 1st 2028, International
Workers’ Day, alongside the expiration of the UAW contracts of the Big
Three carmakers that came out of these strikes. The exact nature of how
this supposed “general strike” is being organized, who is organizing it,
what are the demands, are all largely a mystery. So far some unions have
passed supportive resolutions towards this call such as the Chicago
Teachers Union (CTU) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the
American Postal Workers Union (APWU); however, the opportunist UAW
leadership has refused to commit any serious resources or union staff to
making it a reality.
The seemingly renewed combativity of the union leaders in working towards
the return of the general strike comes at a time when the bourgeoisie,
under Trump’s leadership, has begun sweeping attacks on unionized workers;
including removing “bargaining rights” from federal workers, including the
thousands of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers
organized through the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE),
with the stroke of a pen, claiming that they pose a “threat to national
security.”
The AFGE leadership has responded that they will hold mass “protests”
across the country to demand a stop to the “biggest attack on the labor
movement in history”, emphasizing again the erroneous need for “democracy”
to save the working class from “undemocratic” attacks. Having already long
revealed itself as a pitfall for the working class, democracy, as a
nebulous field of inter-class cooperation, is always and tirelessly at
work undermining the conquest of the proletariat. A portion of the
bourgeoisie are in fact ardent supporters of both unions and “union
democracy” if it means that the worker can negotiate insignificant
economic demands without forming a revolutionary class political
consciousness.
There are no legal means to defend these workers, what they need is the
collective action and support of a class union to gain what was so easily
taken from them and also to push for more.
In 2018, when teachers in West Virginia organized through the American
Federation of Teachers(AFT) and National Education Association(NEA) were
met with pathetic wage increases by way of the traditional “legal” method,
they defied the state law and their union bureaucrats and held a historic
strike, despite official leaderships condemnations, that amounted to
improvements of their conditions. The strike itself was a momentous
achievement, demonstrating that rank-and-file workers can indeed organize
mass strikes despite being against innumerable “legal” odds in the modern
era.
In a recent article by the Richmond Virginia Caucus of Rank-and-file
Educators (VCORE) titled “When Federal education funding stops, so does
our labor”, the call for a general strike of educators was made: “now more
than ever, we need the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers
(AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) to jointly call for a
general strike of K12 public education workers, whether unionized or not.”
Only a mass, all-industry strike can effectively forward the demands of
the teachers and the militant section of teachers understand this. This is
true for the broader range of interests for the working class wishing to
achieve specific demands that are unique to the class as a whole such as
wages, hours, and conditions. Without class unionism, workers are not only
divided by craft, industry, and geographical region, they also hold little
power against their common oppressors, fighting every uphill battle
against the bourgeoisie as a mere fraction against a powerful whole.
Especially important is the elevation of the national worker struggle to
the realm of international solidarity of all workers, rejecting the
defense of “one’s own national economy” over another’s; However, the
so-called “most progressive” of the business unions, like the United Auto
Workers under the leadership of Shawn Fain, openly supports Trump’s
protectionist tariffs as “good for American labor.” Going on to defend not
only the tragedy that was the mass slaughter of proletariats in the second
imperialist World War which he openly celebrates the history of UAW role
in building the “anti-fascist” bombers for, but also the exploitation of
labor-power from the workers at home used to fuel the war economy,
suggesting that a tragedy such as an imperialist world war is actually an
economic boon for the American proletariat:
“People forget about the arsenal of democracy and how excess capacity in
this country was used to support the war effort and delivered a victory in
World War II for America.” (Shawn Fain on CNN. April 3. 2025)
Similarly,
the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who have asked the
bourgeoisie to enact tariffs on Mexican beer imports to protect American
beer industries, also ask “would you trust China with aircraft repairs?
United Airlines does”, harkening back to the IBT’s long history of
conservative and McCarthyist nationalism, playing into the
“anti-communist” tropes of the American bourgeoisie against their Chinese
imperialist rivals and pitting exploited workers of one nation against
exploited workers of another.
There is absolutely nothing for the proletariat to gain by defending the
interest of their national bourgeoisie. In 1976, our party wrote:
“A class-based trade union policy must defend neither that nor the other
aspect of the bourgeois economy because its aim is the emancipation of the
working class, the abolition of the wage-labour system. What then should
be the direction of a truly proletarian trade union? It is quickly said:
the workers must not take on any sacrifice, and if their refusal to do so
will be the ruin of the capitalist economy, then ruin it is.” (La via del
sindacato di classe. Il Partito Communista, n. 25 1976)
The trade union leaders, being incapable of wielding internationalism as a
principle above the defense of their national economy, are also incapable
of wielding the “general strike” in any meaningful direction beyond
collaborative bourgeois reforms and are infinitely absent of any
“revolutionary” potential.
However, as a step towards uniting industries into collectively organized
action through what is still the main organizational bodies in the US, the
trade unions, the militant minority of class unionists in all bodies of
struggle, who need to form their own international coordinations outside
of the regime union leadership, is further aided in their efforts. These
formations must struggle to steer the general strike continuously in the
direction of winning common demands for the international class and away
from the collaborative abysses of the business-union boss-linked
leadership.
Who Is Worthy?
Although the general strike as a tactical maneuver has
established itself as a powerful weapon in the class arsenal, it has also
given rise to the error that the general strike itself is to be considered
such a “revolutionary action” that it can allow unions to stand-in for the
class political party.
The “Syndicalists” or “workerists” organizations, forgoing the class
party, instead defend the “intuition of the workers” who, by using direct
action to advance their practical demands through their union activity,
hold the only necessary step towards class liberation, assuming the
individual consciousness of the independent workers will carry on the
upheaval of class society frictionless against the prevailing forces of
counter-revolution. To them, only the great “general strike to end all
general strikes” is needed to break the chokehold of the bourgeoisie and
the flower of socialism will begin to bloom within the shell of the old
society. Our party replies:
“With the general strike alone, with the tactic of folded arms, the
working class cannot achieve victory over the bourgeoisie. The proletariat
must take on the armed uprising. Whoever understands that will also have
to grasp that an organized political party is necessary and that formless
workers’ unions are not sufficient.
The revolutionary syndicalists often talk about the great role of the
determined revolutionary minority. Well, a truly determined minority of
the working class, a minority that is Communist, that wishes to act, that
has a programme and wishes to organize the struggle of the masses, is
precisely the Communist Party.”(Theses on the Role of the Communist Party
in the Proletarian Revolution. 1920)
The important tasks that are required to decisively apprehend the critical
moments of capitalism in its death throes, cannot be improvised from a
group of like-minded “radicals” within the union struggle, but can only be
grasped from the collective organism of the class party engaged in
practical and theoretical application of the scientific communist
programme.
The historical syndicalist tendency in the American labor movement
generally finds its home in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
which in its earliest origins, operated primarily as a class organization
determined to organize workers by the (novel at the time) concept of
“industrial unionism” as opposed to what they saw as the divisive
separation of craft unionism used by the American Federation of Labor
(AFL). In their famous constitutional preamble they outline the diverging
interests of the working class from the employing class and call for far
more radical goals than the AFL, such as the “abolition of the
wage-system” and the end of capitalism.
As a reflexive reaction against the shameless collaboration between the
AFL and the American capitalists, coupled with the revisionism of the
reformist socialist parties of the Second International, the IWW pushed
heavily in favor of “union democracy” instead of regime-union bureaucracy
and strictly shed any political aspirations in order to pursue a strategy
of winning practical demands for the working class while maintaining a
political plurality of membership.
The IWW became renowned for its ability to organize massive strikes in a
range of industries; not by using guerilla war tactics like that of the
mine workers in the later Coal Wars, but on the fundamental level of
withholding labor en masse to disrupt the circuit of capital. The call for
the “general strike” became a rallying point for the IWW, as shown by the
1911 pamphlet of the same name by notable wobbly and socialist Bill
Haywood, which outlines the effectiveness of the general strike as “an
effective weapon of the working class”. The IWW developed malleable
tactics for deploying concise, effective strikes, knowing that the
financial burden and eventual repression of the bourgeoisie would break
any indefinite “siege”, and that success relies not necessarily on the
length of the strike but on its precision to win demands.
While the modern IWW does not formally identify as an exclusively
“syndicalist” organization, the struggle to either “give” or “abolish” the
political character of the union seems to continuously doom it from two
sides.
On one hand, it’s plagued by the rot of leftist inter-class opportunism
that constantly seeks to utilize the class organizational structure to
advocate for popular mass-activism (and as we know: “all activist psalms
end in electoral glory”) or on the other hand, by following strict
syndicalist hostility to the necessary political struggle, the union
begins to treat itself as a “revolutionary” political placeholder,
becoming not only at odds with the class Party as a counter-revolutionary
organization, but sacrifices the basic function of economic defense for
workers in order to uphold a singular tendential strain within the IWW
tradition over effective, centralized organizing to achieve its alleged
radical ends.
Today, having been essentially replaced by the rise of the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO), the IWW still lives on with a quiet
national presence and now organizes mostly small shops, fast food
restaurants, and into decentralized local “branches” of labor activists
that do not operate on any serious industrial level. The union, because of
its more “radical” origins, naturally draws in the more combative and
militant minded workers at periods where the necessity of well organized
class defense becomes obvious, showing slight inflations or deflations in
membership that correspond with the regular intervals of crises in the
capitalist economy, which has always been a historical phenomenon of the
organization. Ultimately, the weaknesses of the union eventually force
some local branches that struggle to have significant influence on the
mass of workers to de-charter due to lack of membership, when surely there
is no lack of workers that need to organize.
It must be said that the organization of small shops to be able to
mobilize a strike, as seen with the recent Urban Ore workers strike in the
city of Berkeley, CA., still offer some level of organization to the
various sectors of workers who otherwise would have few paths to organize
themselves against the petty-bourgeois small business owners, bringing
more workers into the broader organized class struggle and the IWWs
promotion of general strikes towards class solidarity ends and their
overall criticism of the “legal” path of bargaining through the NLRB still
exist within the scattered vernacular of the modern IWW propaganda and
offer at least a rhetorical alternative to the conservative AFL-CIO unions
who still worship the NLRB as sacred doctrine, but the distance between
words and action is immeasurable. Some IWW unions have even started
including “No-strike Clauses” in their contracts, a tragedy that surely
turns the old wobblies in their graves – showing that even the supposed
“radical” unions are susceptible to basic economism without the direction
of the communist programme.
As long as the syndicalist mentality prevails instead of the leadership of
the class Party, as long as the tradition of “decentralization” among the
IWW locals remains instead of a strong centralized class union that
connects them with the militant trade unionists, the “One Big Union” will
remain a minority of radical dreamers incapable of being a serious class
force and is incapable of leading the working class to victory over the
bourgeoisie, despite all its noble efforts.
Only the Class Union and the Communist Party
As we workers approach International Workers’ Day, we celebrate
not our wage-slavery, but prepare for our future. As much as May Day has
become a historic symbol of the proletarian struggle, it is more
importantly a continuous call for action, a continuous reminder that we
workers have yet to wrestle ourselves from the chains of capital.
As long as there is capitalist domination, as long as there is a
proletariat, communism remains not just a possibility, but a necessity for
the end to the imperialist wars, the emancipation of the working class,
and continuance of the species.
The prevailing conditions in the course of global capitalism, the horrors
of imperialist wars and the growing economic demands weighing on the
working class will bring decisive quantitative changes in the class
struggle, but we maintain that there is no “mechanical process” that
automatically connects the workers with their purely economic impulses to
the necessary level of political struggle, or that the revolution can be
“improvised on the barricades.” Without adopting the communist programme,
workers can only develop to a level of trade union consciousness which
severely limits the field of class struggle to the bourgeois rules of
order and only works to strengthen the bourgeois ideology among them.
The tasks at hand for building towards the general strike are still
immense, and despite the calls from the opportunist business union leaders
for the “return of the general strike” to be disposed of for their
bourgeois reforms, the American proletariat must continuously work to
wield such an action effectively for their immediate economic demands, but
also organize towards the permanent end for the need of such demands,
which requires an eventual violent struggle against the bourgeoisie guided
by the leadership of the class party.
Workers!
– Only the class union can effectively wield the general strike
to fight for the international proletariat; by generalizing our struggle
amongst the working people of all countries, by continuing uniting the
majority of workers organized through the conservative trade unions with
the minority of workers in the small “radical” unions into centralized,
coordinated efforts, around definite economic demands that are fought with
coordinated mass actions.
This is how the divisions of craft, industry,
and nation can be overcome nd the true general strike can become
a reality – a true general strike
that shakes off the parasitic collaborationists and opportunists,
annihilates the national interests of the respective national
bourgeoisies.
Only the Communist Party is the worthy champion of the proletariat, has
studied the internal laws and contradictions of capitalism and its
inevitable catastrophes, and is the only organization that can raise the
hard limit of the trade-union struggle to the level of class political
struggle and usher in the era of proletarian dictatorship.
Artificial Intelligence
We are witnessing the production and use of “smart” weapons systems,
drones that seek out and kill civilians.
We already see translators, technical support workers and call center workers
left without work due to the introduction of automatic programs capable of replacing part of their work.
Much tougher struggles are needed on the field of class battle,
of manual workers and even intellectuals, who are awakening to this threat.
The Party must also be updated on the role of the most modern technology in the perpetuation of the bourgeois regime.
Let us be Clear With the Words
Marx already taught us that science and intelligence are embodied in machines,
the effective custodians of the ingenuity and work of past generations,
an impersonal social heritage.
Intelligence (which means “seeing inside”) is always artificial.
Only the petty bourgeois, the intellectual, believes in and claims his own,
indefinable, individual intelligence. Because he tries to make a commodity out
of it and make a living from it. So let’s welcome artificial intelligence
to take away from the bourgeois even this illusory boast of self-sufficiency.
It is an old story. Since the invention of writing we have done without tales
to the young from old men of particularly good and rich memories. Since Pythagoras
hung his Table on the wall, it was no longer necessary for anyone to remember that
seven times eight equals fifty-six.
In a commercial titillation to individualism they called them Personal Computers:
then it was discovered that not connected to the network they were useless.
Intelligence is in the network.
There is no intelligence above classes.
The intelligence of the working class is the Communist Party. Which is a group,
disciplined to a purpose, a doctrine and an action, that goes beyond individuals,
and that gathers the Communists of yesterday and today around the same historical program.
Revolutionary intelligence arises from the historical need of Communism and is kept in the pages of our texts.
If any automatic sieve can help our hatred and contempt for this dying society
and our passion for Communism to find more quickly in our vast library some precious
dialectical shot to keep the theoretical bastions of the Party firm, welcome! The old mole,
even in the field of data processing, always digs for the revolution.
Even the bourgeois will look for their quotes in their texts.
Will a propaganda article soon be needed for the next war or for a chauvinist
or racist campaign? They will ask artificial intelligence. But revolutions are not
decided by propaganda. Otherwise there would never have been any in history,
since the class in power has always had, with the monopoly of its class intelligence,
today also artificial, infinite and much more pervasive means of indoctrination and falsification.
The Old Monopolistic Capitalism
The technology sector, where companies like NVIDIA are currently making record
profits thanks to the boom in so-called artificial intelligence, has long been dominated
by monopolistic companies. But what some today call “techno-feudalism” is neither
a new nor pre-bourgeois phenomenon.
For some time now, gigantic monopolies, especially American and Chinese,
have been making disproportionate profits by imposing their tools, operating systems
and applications, for the execution of intellectual work and calculations in general.
Similar monopolies have also formed in the production of microprocessors.
These products are used by companies as fixed capital, or for personal consumption,
paying a license for the use of an application or a fee for access to a cloud server and, tomorrow,
to “artificial intelligence”.
A high concentration has been achieved in advertising collection
and mail order sales, with devastating consequences for the petty mercantile bourgeoisie.
Thanks to their monopolistic control of the markets, large companies such as Google,
Amazon, etc. are able to set the prices of their services well above the cost of production.
These large conglomerates can buy any competitor thanks to their enormous financial resources.
The strength of this monopoly capital even allows them to operate for a certain period without profit,
in order to crush their competitors. Before the end of the last century, all hardware and software
production in European countries was eliminated.
So it is only rent from a monopoly.
Monopolies that have been created, and are maintained against competitors,
through the energetic protection of large imperial states.
In the price of their software products, the majority is rent, almost no new surplus value.
This income is subtracted from the surplus value produced in all other countries of the world.
An enormous flow of wealth that, for example, from Europe arrives in the United States under the heading of "services".
Also to "solve" this dispute, the capitalists are preparing for world war.
Moreover, every monopoly is not absolute and unlimited. Around new scientific discoveries and new inventions,
an economic war is fought between monopolies, old and new, within nations and between opposing blocs.
For example,
the announcement of the new Chinese application DeepSeek caused the US stock markets to collapse as soon as
investors realized the fragility of the advantage that they thought the US maintained over
its imperial competitors in China.
Taiwan has become a strategic semiconductor hub, but China is ramping up its capabilities in the sector,
ironically spurred by the embargo imposed during the Biden administration.
In capitalism, not even technological progress brings peace. Instead,
the global ramification of technological monopolies serves as an instrument
of imperialist domination, and vice versa. Information technology services are
an integral part of national and military infrastructures, while artificial intelligence
is increasingly used in warfare. These technologies extend the influence of the main imperialist
blocs in the contest between the productions of greatest strategic interest: energy sources and
generation, semiconductors, as well as the personnel of technicians and scientists trained to
build and maintain these systems.
Will AI Save Capitalism?
Capitalists trust in artificial intelligence to stop, if not reverse,
the decline of the rate of profit, especially in the old national industrialisms.
They dream of a new “computer revolution” and talk about investing colossal
sums in the sector, 500 billion dollars in the United States alone.
But the decline, or recovery, of capitalism is not a strictly technical
fact nor of a particular sector of production, but rather a general economic and historical one.
The productive euphoria of the decades following the Second World War
and up to the crisis of 1975 was not ensured by the spread of the use and sale of cars,
for example; on the contrary, the recovery was based on the reconstructions made necessary
after the destruction of the war, which allowed, after a difficult decade,
also the expansion of internal consumption. Since then the crisis has dragged on and
has not precipitated not because of the "computer revolution" but because of the opening
of the Asian markets. Today, these too are saturated.
True production is material. The demandability of the price of a good, of an immaterial
commodity such as information technology, which does not have its own market value,
understood as an average price for its social reproduction, depends only on the force that
protects its monopoly. This is subject to the alternating events of relations between States
and between groups of States, diplomatic and military weight.
How come Pythagoras, and his heirs, don’t get paid by everyone who looks up at his Table?
It is possible then that all this publicity that is being made about artificial intelligence
will finally reveal itself to be just a bubble and at a certain point it will end up bursting,
as it did with the Dot-coms.
Remember the huge post-war investments in the "space race", which also
had military implications: not a single dollar was made. Today billionaires
would like to go on a tourist trip to Mars: if only it were true.
Dead Labor
Artificial intelligence, like all forms of automation used by capital since time immemorial,
is “dead labor” incarnate. Man has worked to create these machines, subsequently
these same machines, with the assistance of new workers or sometimes almost without
any assistance, except for maintenance, carry out the jobs that had been done by
artisans or more specialized workers.
This technical automation, although initially expensive to produce and develop,
has great and revolutionary effects: it increases the productivity of labor; by requiring
production on a larger scale it contributes to crises of overproduction; dead labor,
exceeding living labor in value, induces a decrease in the rate of profit.
It is a dynamic that culminates in the block of accumulation,
which capital tries to resolve by increasing the rate of exploitation and, finally,
through imperialist wars.
Capitalism does not enter into crisis because it lacks "intelligence";
it is the maximum capitalist intelligence, the one that best informs its development
– in productivity, production, trade, etc. – that at the same time most quickly leads
to the accumulation of contradictions that condemn it to explode. If artificial
intelligence can do better than capitalists for capitalism, this will inevitably
come closer to its ruin and, finally, communism.
How it Works
Computer programs have long been used to perform all sorts of functions,
including complex ones that were previously exclusive to the human mind, much faster
than this one: calculators, programs that process large masses of numbers, and even playing chess!
But by artificial intelligence in particular we mean the large-scale linguistic models
(LLMs) currently in use, which are able to process human language in a very similar way to how
automatic sentence completion works, finding the most probable series of words that follow a given one.
It took decades of study and experimentation to get to the LLM stage.
An important advance was the invention of “transformation” procedures that,
instead of guessing the next word to propose one at a time, identify the important parts of the sentence,
which are translated as a whole. The mathematical tool is the “neural networks”,
which are based on the calculation of the frequency of association between words:
for “apple”-“tree” we give 90, for “apple”-“Newton” 5, for example. Obviously the
combinations are a huge number, so very powerful computers are needed.
The possibilities for errors are evident: “Newton ate the apple” could put “intelligence” into crisis.
Then there is the much bigger problem of the reliability of the texts from which one copies.
What appears statistically in Big Data, in the vast archives – generated by users, influenced by
fashions and the dominant ideology – is not necessarily true. As far as we are concerned, the truth,
and the Revolution, lies, on the contrary, in doubt, in paradox, in the denial of the obvious.
Furthermore, more and more texts in online archives will not be produced by scholars but by incompetents,
if not by artificial intelligence itself, which can “short-circuit” models by making
them collapse on themselves, producing truly absurd results.
The Competition of Machines
The future will likely involve the use of language analysis to provide more reliable systems
for tasks currently performed by men, who would be laid off. This type of automation will still lead
to a reduction in wages, even for those involved in intellectual activities. It is already a reality
that the recognition of copyright for one’s work is denied. The Hollywood screenwriters’ union fought
to protect itself in 2023 and obtained some protections, but most of the workers affected by these
applications are not members of a union. And many unions do not even seek protections in their contracts,
having lost any class character.
Historically, workers have resisted the push of automation to de-skill and devalue labor.
The Luddites were an embryonic form of this resistance. Today we say: let capital apply its innovations,
but workers will still fight to maintain their living conditions.
Turning the World Upside Down
Today, artificial intelligence already replaces the most repetitive jobs and is of assistance
for some intellectual activities, but its applications are limited by the capitalist mode of production,
which prevents any technique from being used rationally and for the benefit of all humanity.
The growing inability of capitalism to support its slaves will drive the working class to
organize against its dehumanizing effects and overthrow it worldwide. This will be possible when
workers’ solidarity and coordinated strikes against the bosses and their puppets,
the most effective class weapons against the implacable depravity of capitalism, are revived.
We can then, having traced the leadership of the Communist Party, go further and lead the fight
in this class war for communism.
A future is expected in which capitalism will no longer exist, with the working class
victorious throughout the world. We will then be able to employ these techniques, and the new
extraordinary ones that brotherly humanity will be able to create, for the good and development
of the human species.
Temporary Civilisation Forever Chemicals
Year over year scientists continue to unearth various treasures from not
only humans but the natural world’s colored past. The physical remains of different organisms,
long forgotten objects that range from painted vases to primitive tools, and periodically
scientists even discover the remnants of our past social life. Roads, villages, cemeteries,
and locations where humans practiced agriculture. Through these discoveries our species gets
further access to worlds that may have been up to this point totally isolated from our
collective memory.
We are able to glean information on how our ancestors lived, related, and molded the world
around them through their physical labor. Physical labor being a necessary part
of the species existence is an unbroken link that connects modern man to his most ancient progenitors.
These discoveries aren’t solely important because they scratch an intellectual itch
or our knowledge for our lost past. They are also a testament to the fact that our contemporary
mode of production is not a universal or an eternal part of human societies no matter
how much our dim witted enemies suggest otherwise. In tens of thousands
of years what will these future scientists unearth from our current society?
At the very minimum they are bound to find an abundance of chemical pollutants
that our current crop of geniuses have dubbed “Forever Chemicals”
PFAS aka Forever Chemicals - Per - and polyfluoroalkyl substances are synthetic
chemical compounds that first appeared on the world market in 1938 with the
invention of Teflon. PFAS are useful compounds that can make specific goods
more resistant to heat, water, oil, and grease. They are used in the production
of commodities across a plethora of different industries. These products range
from food packaging to furniture, and even in personal cosmetics. They are in some form,
involved in practically every industry across the globe. The utility of these chemicals
is outshined though, by both their negative effect on human health but also their
amazing ability to bioaccumulate.
Research since the 1970s has shown that PFAS over a certain threshold have a
negative impact upon our bodies functioning. That includes higher rates of different cancers,
lower fertility, and developmental defects in children amongst a myriad of other ill effects.
One could imagine that in a “rational” society when these negative effects were found,
persons would move mountains and rivers to stop the production of such an evident problem.
Global capitalist society, and its constituents, is not a “rational” one though.
Or at the very least its number one raison d’être is to accumulate, and at any social cost.
If it can be profited upon no matter the deleterious effects it is accepted.
The booming tobacco, alcohol, and drug trade is a wonderful example of this.
While PFAs in an economic sense are not a significant part of global chemical
production, they are still a profitable and useful one. The estimated profit
margin sits at around 16%, and the percentage they make up of global chemical
production is only 5%. Due to the necessity of a ROI (as the primary goal)
imposed on enterprises within capitalist production our social web ignores
the reality of harm done to both man and nature. This is happening day after
day in our current world, and it has been a byproduct of capitalism since its
very inception. For an example of the former let us give a quotation from
Engels in his work on the Condition of the Working Class in England.
“Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids
emptied before the doors gather in stinking pools. Here live the poorest of the poor,
the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately
huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those who have not
yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds them, sinking daily deeper,
losing daily more and more of their power to resist the demoralising influence of want,
filth, and evil surroundings.”
The conditions these workers found themselves within may have primarily been
alleviated within the West but is still an everyday reality for the proletariat
in the slums of Africa, and Asia.
For an example of the latter, ignoring the chemical pollution we are writing
about in this very article. We need only reference the fact that since the
1970s the effect of capitalist production on the global climate has been
quietly accepted by segments of the bourgeoisie. There is a very large contingent
who wish to downplay or ignore these facts so as to prevent the interference of
state actors in limiting their ability to accumulate freely. There is even a part
of the bourgeoisie who knows that global temperatures are rising, and that this
crisis will lead to crop failure, heat deaths, and masses of refugees but in the
face of this exclaims this moment is going to be for the “Cooling” industry a profitable one!
“Morgan Stanley’s climate forecast was tucked into a mundane research
report on the future of air conditioning stocks, which it provided to clients
on March 17. A 3 degree warming scenario, the analysts determined, could more
than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year,
from 3 percent to 7 percent until 2030.”
What lucky profiteers. As we rush further into ecological devastation
we are glad the bourgeoisie has something to look forward to.
Continuing the above on bioaccumulation, bioaccumulation is the term
used to describe the process by which PFAS (amongst other compounds) become saturated
in the “natural world”. This accumulation can take place in the Earth itself ie soil,
the air we breathe, water systems, and the animals we consume to fuel our ever engulfing economy.
Since these ingredients in our capitalist system are molecularly very stable they can
accumulate readily over time. Of course, like all other physical matter there is a move
towards deterioration but the effects on water supplies, food chains, and even the human
body will be with us for a long while. Especially so with a society that is producing these
and other pollutants that has no ability to seriously root them out. The estimated cost for
the removal of PFAS from soil alone is in the trillions. Capitalist society is totally
unable to take on this herculean task, and the species will only be able to seriously
redress the damage done to ourselves and our planet when we have smashed private property,
and subjected technology and production to the life plan of the species – Communism. Communism,
a world historic movement arising from the very foundations of this crumbling society
is “the real movement to abolish the present state of things”. This movement is the only
answer to the question of how humans can in an ever more effective way resolve the
contradiction between man’s existence and nature.
“This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as
fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the
conflict between man and nature and between man and man”
To give the devil his due, there has been some push within the EU, and the USA
to ban these chemicals but they have either targeted specific ones (which are readily
replaced by a similar compound that isn’t banned) or there has been an inability
to seriously yank them out of the supply chain. We will see if PFAs will go the way of CFCs,
leaded gasoline, or asbestos but tension between health, and profit will only cease when
a revolutionary wave breaks the dam that is class society.
There is practically no place on Earth that is untouched with this pollution.
PFAS have been found in the Arctic with the belief that migrating birds that are
preyed upon are the culprit. Even if the polar bears ice caps aren’t melting,
they would still be infected with the toxic waste of capital.
From the Arctic to Minneapolis and Malaysia no one or no thing is safe from
the “externalities” created by capital. Notwithstanding the fact that even with
issues that affect all classes, the international proletariat takes the brunt of damage.
From the workers that manufacture the chemicals to the ones who work in landfills where
all our great works go to rot. Proletarians are the segment of humanity that are poisoned
by these toxins more than their compatriots working on Wall Street, or at the local law firm.
The workers who cannot afford to buy organic vegetables or “humanely” raised meat, or enough
wages to purchase water filters that purify whatever filth comes out of their tap.
These chemicals do have a use within the pharmaceutical realm, and “green” technology.
There are actual hard questions that have to be answered in our attempt to reproduce our
existence as a species. We will have to use, produce, and consume things that do have a
negative effect on the species health under a non class society. The issue at hand is that
with the anarchy of capitalist production, it can not only not ask these questions on any
serious terrain, its very nature doesn’t allow it to answer them because the sole motivating force is profit.
This issue of social vs monetary cost is one that will be done away with in our future society.
Under a centralized and rational mode of production humans will forgo the system that puts everything
and everyone on a balance sheet. With its attempts to maximize profit and ignore the cost to the species.
The rationality of the capitalist mode of production has it not only undermining itself within
the process of production by being compelled to do away with its very source of profit – variable capital.
It also has no issue with pillaging and polluting the world it exists upon in its unquenchable thirst for more.
The communist struggle is the only hope for a future for an environment worth living in.
A struggle that’s existence is born out of the antagonisms within class society,
and reaches its apex with a mass revolutionary movement and the International Communist Party at the helm.
Only with the destruction of capitalist society, and the destruction
of all classes as a social relationship will the “workers” of the future be able to breathe easily.
The Iron Hand of Georgian Sovereignty
“Sovereignty” and rabid nationalism has become the new signature of the
Georgian government, which is hellbent on repressing every part of society to
ensure the total domination of the current ruling bourgeoisie.
It all started with the introduction of the so-called law on transparency in
2023, after which the government introduced another repressive law anti-LGBT
propaganda and the law about offshore companies which would make it easier for
the ruling class to launder money.
After the reintroduction of the “law on transparency of foreign influence”
and the brutal crackdown on protests that came after them, the government,
predictably, used intimidation, and vote-buying to ensure electoral victory – an
excellent demonstration of full capacity of the so-called democratic process.
The Georgian middle class is in disarray and effectively is standing against
an existential threat, given the promises from the government about widespread
terror and repression against those who it deems traitors.
There have been protests against the government since it has declared the
freezing of EU integration till 2028, and, in turn, the government has responded
with the use of extrajudicial crackdowns, systemic torture, massive arrests and
terror by far-right thugs.
While the government churns out delusional propaganda everyday and the middle
class and the haute bourgeoisie fight among each other, the conditions of the
working class deteriorate and the State sows
diversion and spreads propaganda where it can, and where it cannot, stiffles out
any sign of dissent among the workers with force and intimidation.
Bourgeois Sovereignty and Nationalism
The government claims it is defending “Sovereignty” of the Georgian nation
against the foreign influence and is justifying the repressions as being
targeted against the traitors of the nation.
The so-called law about transparency is directly tied to this rhetoric – in
reality, it is a tool the government will use to repress and destroy the middle
class and NGOs.
Ironically, the government, at the same time, also passed the law that makes
it easier for offshore companies to operate in Georgia. We can only guess, as
all the law-abiding citizens should, that this will be used to further increase
transparency of finances and will not be used by the current ruling bourgeoisie
with its ties to Russia to launder their money in a more efficient way.
In short, there is no doubt what do nationalism and national sovereignty
entail – the sovereignty of the bourgeoisie class and guarantee of its
domination.
The farcical theatre of nationalism has been playing out in Georgia for
decades already. Right, left and centre alike share identical and identically
absurd fantasies and formulas of nationalism. All of them preach the same words,
chastise the same sins and extol the same virtues. Then it must not come as a
surprise that Georgia has come to such a baffling picture: Everybody agrees but
hates each other.
The ideology is so prevalent that politics cannot exist in its ideological
form, there is no room for disagreement. Even the ruling party, with its obvious
sympathies for Russia, is forced to spew bullshit about joining the EU in 2030.
Everybody loves Europe, Georgian nation, democracy, and sovereignty. And
everybody hates traitors, authoritarianism, and foreign influence. There’s only
a slight problem: Nobody has any clue what these mean anymore. And we doubt they
meant anything in the first place.
Behind these shadows of ideology lay bare the ugliness of bourgeois society
with the self-interest of the ruling class and divisions within. Then the root
of “polarization” becomes clear: There cannot be a “dialogue” between “opposing
views”, because there are no opposing views, there are only the opposing
interests among inter and intra-class lines.
On one hand, there is the relatively affluent petty bourgeoisie, which has
financial ties to Europe and travels there frequently. On the other hand, there
are influential members of the haute bourgeoisie that have ties to Russian
capital and are represented by the ruling party at the moment. There is also a
segment of haute bourgeoisie that is more dependent on the Western capital.
But far the most important and influential is the richest man in Georgia by a
wide margin, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who seeks to establish complete control over
the country. It can be presumed that the small opposition among the haute
bourgeoisie against the current course is not only due to the ties to different
capitals, but also due to the fear that they might be crushed in the future by Ivanishvili.
One Man’s Reactionary Georgian Dream
Bidzina Ivanishvili is the one who is calling the shots. He is the sacred
body of the so-called Georgian nation, similarly to Augustus and the Roman
Empire. He incorporates in himself all of the “independent” branches of
bourgeois government: He owns the executive, the legislative and the judiciary
branches.
Liberals, of course, are not baffled by this dysfunction of their system.
More stupid ones among them may even attribute this defect to the un-exorcized
demon of “Soviet Mentality”. The reality, however, is quite simple: The way
Georgian government works is not completely different from the way the bourgeois
government works in any other case, or in the much-praised USA, for example,
which by the virtue of being a wealthier country with a wealthier bourgeoisie,
has a multitude of oligarchs instead of just simply one.
Ivanishvili simply has the means and ambition to become the sole head of the
capital in the country, and by extension, own the government. His power is
completely based on his capital.
Thus, the State shows him the recognition that he deserves and is almost
deified. His informal standing and status reinforce this, having been bestowed
only the vague title of the “Honorary Chairman” of the ruling party, aptly named
“Georgian Dream”.
The ruling party talks of the mythical “Global War Party”, the Freemasons,
foreign influences, and other scary big words which do not mean anything. It is not completely clear whether Ivanishvili himself
believes in the demons he conjures or is simply making up tales to scare the
populace. In any case, it is clear that he desires to avoid war and
globalization and intends to establish “Georgian Sovereignty”, the grand reactionary dream of turning against the flow of history and of creating an anclave of peace and stability amidst the chaos, war, instability, and increasing globalisation around the world.
The fantasies of Ivanishvili sound awfully similar to the ideology of other
geopolitically similarly aligned countries – in particular, the theory of the
so-called multipolar world.
This multipolarity, of course, just means the freedom of the national
bourgeoisies to repress and exploit the local working classes, instead of the
process of globalization meddling in their affairs.
Left and Right Wings of Capital: One Hand Washes the Other
The left and right wings of capital alike revel in this miserable farce. Both
the left and the far-right, despite their insistence on their opposition to
capitalism, are too enthusiastic to support the march towards authoritarianism
and repression. What is clear is that philistine “anti-capitalism” of both
turned out to be nuanceless geopolitical anti-Americanism and banal nationalism.
These two flanks, despite their seeming opposition to each other, worked
tirelessly for the benefit of the State. The left deployed its propaganda
machine of brainless heads, while the far-right deployed its muscle.
The self-proclaimed defenders of the working
class applauded the repressive apparatus of the ruling class and squealed with
joy at the State’s pathetic attempts at patriotic and religious propaganda. It
is now clear to see, though it was not very hard to see before either, that the
sole worry for these clueless and corrupt politicians was never
the working class, but ideological opposition towards “Liberalism” and whatever
they conjure it up to mean in their deluded minds. For the left, it is simple:
if the bourgeois State attacks liberals, to hell with the working class and its
demands! The left stubbornly refuses to see that it is precisely this government that
oversees the efficient repression of the working class and ensures the unlivable
working conditions.
As for the far-right, it is not difficult to see why they would support the
State on its current path – they do share the fanatic patriotism and glee at the
State’s authority. It is a clear fact that
the government uses fascist militants for their terror aims. The media calls
these thugs “titsushkiy”, in reference to the informal thugs used by Victor
Yanukovich in Ukraine. But it must also be mentioned that these thugs tend to be
overwhelmingly far-right in their beliefs and tend to belong to various fascist
militant organizations.
The only political opposition are the liberals, who decry State now for the
sole reason that it has at this specific point in time turned specifically
against them. And even in this opposition it is mild and weak. Liberals, despite
their repression, refuse to go against State in principle, and only claim that
this current government is “illegitimate” and not really a government at all.
They refuse to believe that the police is not filled with those who are, in the
depths of their hearts, good and honest men who are secretly against the ruling
party, or given enough time, can be reasoned with and shown the absolute truth
of the liberal dogma. In short, they’re as hopeless as ever.
However, of course, there are certain deviations from this liberal dogma, and
the followers of liberalism themselves are becoming more and more confused and
radicalized. Some talk about the defense of constitution as a form of
revolution. There are a lot of misguided calls for revolution without having any
understanding of how the revolutionary process develops.
The Working Class – Repressed As Always
As always, what is left and discarded is the working class. It is whipped and
told to shut up by the State and the far-right, and ignored by the left.
As for the liberals, the petty bourgeoisie, in its best tradition, flees and
begs the proletariat for support. The middle class, when it has no support from the ruling class, is left impotent and unable.
“Strike!” – the petty bourgeoisie demands. These pretentious liberals have just
remembered about the existence of a magical thing called the working class,
which has these mystical ability to strike. It is bewildering how the liberals
invented striking from scratch – some even did not believe in such a concept and
argued that employers would just fire everyone who tried to stop working.
But liberals have seemingly forgotten that it was them who ignored the
existence of the working class before or even gleefully supported its
longstanding repression outright, which has left the proletariat unable to do
anything.
Besides, the petty bourgeoisie moralistically condemns the worker for not
striking, because this is about “the Motherland”, not their self-interest. They
complain about the strikes that are done with the demand for better working
conditions and pay, and instead demand that the workers call for the new
elections. Put plainly, they complain that the working class follows its own
interest and not the interest of the middle class.
While everyone spews this ideological bullshit, the State further strengthens
its repressive apparatus and ensures even better efficiency for repressing the
workers.
But fear not, amidst the repressions against the public workers, teachers of
schools and pre-schools, etc., the government has thrown the workers a bone –
pensions have been raised by 35 GEL, from 315 GEL to 350 GEL. Hooray! This won’t
be enough to even cover the rising prices, but all that matters is patriotic
pride, right? At the very same day, it was decided that the parliamentarians’
salary will be raised twofold to 11,680 GEL We can only imagine the hard work
the comrades at the Deputies’ Trade Union must have put into this achievement.
- For the Class Union
Starbucks Workers Strikes in Chile
After 25 days, Chilean Starbucks workers (organized through Sindicato Starbucks)
have ended their national strike against the US corporate giant, which has spread
its tentacles into Latin America through the corporate shareholder, Alsea, that secures
the interests of American fast-food industries from Mexico where its one of the largest
foodservice providers.
It is approximated that 60 percent of Starbucks workers, across 170 different locations,
participated in this historic strike. At its high point, workers were able to shut down
100 stores a day. The workers demanded higher wages, better conditions, and further
protections against gender and LGBTQ+ biases and discriminations.
Sindicato Starbucks, founded in 2009, is the first unionized Starbucks
in South America and one of the first in the world, seeing a huge boom in membership
during the COVID 19 crisis and now represents over half of all Starbucks employees in Chile.
Facing relentless union-busting from Starbucks, they have fought for 16 years for better
conditions and increases on their pitiful wages, winning some gains, but not enough
to meet their basic needs as made evident by the demands of the recent strike.
The workers note that even a single cup of the cheapest coffee sold at their store
among the countless that they produce on any average day cost more than what a worker
makes for an hour in wages, reflecting the most obvious exploitation of their labor-power
for the company’s massive profits.
The recent 25 day strike comes 14 years after Sindicato Starbucks held the first ever
strike against Starbucks in 2011 that lasted 30 days. Workers were demanding the very
same things then: higher wages, better conditions. However, the union decided to abide
by Chilean labor law that tells workers that after 30 days they either “must” accept the
last offer from the company, or postpone their strike for 18 months. Resolving to continue
the strike in the form of a “hunger strike”, they relinquished their actual strike power.
Of course, the company did not offer a contract that was remotely close to the demands
of the workers and the fight was lost.
Similarly, the recent strike comes just shy of the hard 30 day line in the sand made
by the Chilean bourgeoisie and the union voted to pass a contract that fell quite short
of a major win for the workers.
Compared to the poor leadership of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU),
who can only muster up short, disconnected strikes that last a single
day like the strikes of last December, a 30 day national strike that shut
down over half of the stores in the country is certainly a more
powerful action from the Chilean baristas.
However, the same issue remains for the two unions: playing the unfavorable
game of the purely “legal” union struggle. In the case of SBWU,
who have yet to win a contract, and are not even utilizing the full
limits of the bourgeois NLRB; reducing their strikes to meaningless
symbolic protests that appeal to strictly legal means to win the needed
wage increases for the workers.
In the case of Sindicato Starbucks, the boss – knowing they ultimately have
the last say on the contract as long as they take a dip in sales for a month of strike
– has far more of an advantage over the poor workers who barely survive during a normal
working week; forced to accept contracts that win minor wage increases that are greatly
surpassed by inflation and are therefore actual decreases.
The only way forward for Starbucks workers to win economic concessions
from the capitalists, is to join in building towards the class union and to
mobilize towards national and international general strikes.
The legal labor apparatuses, while offering supposed “rights” to workers,
more realistically outline the boundaries of bourgeois
subordination and are not designed to improve the lives of workers as much
as they are to encourage peaceful wage-slavery.
Corporate giants like Starbucks only understand economic coercion,
they are indifferent to the moral objections of a hunger strike as they
regularly starve their employees worldwide through miserable wages.
The Sindicato Starbucks has made great successes in organizing the
Starbucks and fast-food workers of Chile, but their struggle for
better conditions are lost without the militancy and support of
the class union. If all baristas, organized nationally and internationally,
were to strike for their common demands, both Sindicato Starbucks and SBWU
could really put pressure on the company.
Greece
Workers Take to the Streets Against the Massacres of Capital and for Generalized Wage Increases
On February 28th a general strike was held throughout Greece on the second
anniversary of the 2023 Tempi railway disaster, in which 57 people lost their
lives in a head-on collision between a goods train and a passenger train packed
with young people returning from a short vacation.
During the strike, huge demonstrations took place in the main Greek cities, Athens,
Thessaloniki and Patras, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people. It is said that around
one and a half million people participated throughout Greece, out of a population of only 11 million!
This huge participation was due to various reasons. Undoubtedly there is anger at what happened in Tempi,
which was a massacre waiting to happen, caused by the lack of the most basic safety equipment and the
increasingly onerous working conditions imposed on crews which had been reduced to a minimum. Despite
complaints from the unions, the private company that manages the railways, an Italian company called
Hellenic Train, has blatantly persisted in its policy of achieving maximum profit by cutting back on
safety; a policy that is also being followed in Italy, Great Britain and other European countries.
Anger against the government is growing because it is increasingly evident that it is obstructing
the search for those responsible, which may extend far beyond and be much more serious than it appeared
in the days immediately following the disaster. The victims’ relatives have ascertained that the
government and Hellenic Train are collaborating to hide the real cause of the fire. It is very
likely that the huge blaze that followed the impact was caused by the presence of undeclared explosive
substances on the freight train, perhaps xylene. Xylene and similar substances are much cheaper than
gasoline and are used to adulterate fuel, a profitable business for mafia organizations in league with
the political and business world.
But it wasn’t just the anger at the massacre and the lack of justice that drove hundreds of thousands
of workers onto the streets. The general strike was seen as an opportunity to express their desire to fight
against the employers and the State, against low wages, against precarious and insecure working conditions,
against pensions that are too low, and against a health system that doesn’t work and forces the proletariat
to go without care.
A Model Anti-Proletarian Democracy
Greece is a “model” European capitalism, their country of reference, and small enough to be
used as a “laboratory experiment”. During the debt crisis, the employers mercilessly
blackmailed workers into either accepting jobs with extremely exploitative conditions
or remaining unemployed. And that didn’t change after the government budget crisis ended.
In Greece young proletarians continue to work 40 or 50 hours a week for a salary of 700 or 800 euros,
while the cost of living is almost the same as in countries where salaries are double or triple
that amount. Retirees, who have seen their pensions cut by 40% from one day to the next, continue
to get by on starvation pensions whereas, for Europe, the economy is recovering and the country
is getting its finances back in order!
The Greek state, during these times when everyone is crying “to arms, to arms!” and all
governments are pushing to transform car and tractor factories into ones producing tanks and fighter
planes, has confirmed that it is a model to follow. While in other European countries military service
has been abolished, in Greece it has always remained, with the defense of the
country from the danger of aggressive Turkey given as an excuse.
And military spending, even in the darkest period for the state budget,
has always been maintained at 3.5-4% of GDP while that of Italy, a country
that is certainly not pacifist, is at 1.5%.
In this situation of extreme social stratification, where a small number
of middle class people, businessmen, politicians, mafiosi and the whole apparatus
that serves and defends them, live in luxury while the great majority of
the proletariat and the impoverished lower and middle classes struggle to get by,
it is the populist parties of the opposition and the government that, by diverting
the anger of the masses towards the objectives of the other classes, prevent
the independent organization of the proletarian class, both on an economic and political level.
Certainly the huge demonstrations that have invaded the cities of Greece are something to be appreciated.
They show that the Greek proletariat has not bowed its head and is willing to fight
to improve its living and working conditions, but the power of the bourgeoisie remains firm even
if the right-wing government is faltering. The bourgeoisie is well aware that in order to hang on to power,
the government and even the political class can be changed: the important thing is that the State,
that is the machinery of power, the police, the army, the judiciary remain under its control.
The KKE, the “party of struggle and government” consents to this game,
just as the PCI once did in Italy.
But theirs is a dirty game. You can’t engage in an all-out struggle
to defend the proletariat by occupying seats in bourgeois parliaments.
Proletarian power is not conquered bit by bit, in stages, by penetrating
like rats into the cracks of the system. The proletariat will achieve
its emancipation by means of the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois order,
its state and all of its organs of repression and for the management of its power.
The problem of security is not solved by transferring Hellenic
Train to the public sector without compensation, even if “with the control
of the workers and the company”. These are all empty words. Under the present regime,
the fact that a company is publicly owned rather than privately owned does not provide
the proletariat with any guarantees, nor can there be “control” of company management
by the workers. Only when political power is in the hands of the proletariat will it be
able to exercise its control over all social and productive activities.
The slogan that resonated in the demonstrations: “Either their profits or our lives”
we can make it our own, in fact it is ours and ours alone because it affirms that this regime,
not the Mitzotakis government or the European Commission, but THE CAPITALIST REGIME that
pervades all the states in the world and which is based on the pursuit of profit at any cost,
is now not only the enemy of the proletariat but of the human species.
For this reason it is necessary that the vanguard elements of the proletariat seriously
undertake the path of revolutionary preparation that shuns foolish rebellious aspirations
and instead is based on the day to day work of creating workers’ unions which are truly
independent of the bourgeois parties, which includes the KKE, the PASOK and also the swarm
of little groups of the so-called “left”. The unions we are talking about are those that
propose to defend the interests of the workers, aiming above all to unify the proletariat
in the daily struggle of its members to defend their living and working conditions,
overcoming divisions of work sector, work place, locality, nationality, religion and race.
It is also a question of reconnecting with the tradition of left revolutionary Communism;
with the International Communist Party. This work will pave the way for the social emancipation
of the proletarian class by means of the seizure of political power and the establishment
of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Strikes in Argentina
Today, under Javier Milei’s government, Argentina appears to be the broken showcase
of Latin American neoliberalism. The media celebrate macroeconomic indicators
but cannot hide the social catastrophe: 55% poverty, wages that do not cover
the basic basket (950 dollars), and unemployment that has risen to 8.1%.
The economic crisis Argentina is facing is an expression of the global crisis of capitalism.
But policies of tax cuts and public spending cuts have
further deteriorated the living conditions of the working class.
The myth of economic recovery: figures that make headlines but do not fill plates.
Among the “successes” proclaimed by the bourgeois press are
the record trade surplus ($1.2 billion in 2024) and the “control”
of inflation (98.2% in April 2025 compared to 292% in April 2024).
But this has also led to a free fall in wages, with purchasing power
falling by 22% since 2023. Sixty-five percent of workers earn less than $500 a month,
while the cost of the basic basket exceeds $950. Despite a symbolic
improvement in the minimum wage ($265), it is the lowest in Latin America.
The results of the economic adjustment shock are also reflected in unemployment,
which reached 8.1% in April (compared to 5.5% in 2023),
with 42,000 public sector layoffs since 2024.
Industry is operating at 58% of its capacity, limiting job creation.
Services, which account for 60% of employment, have lost 20% of jobs.
And, as a result of the agreements with the IMF,
we can only expect a further increase in unemployment.
Another important factor is the trend in public debt,
which reached $466.8 billion in 2024, with negative net reserves of $12 billion.
This April, the granting of a new $13 billion loan by the IMF imposes further cuts
in health and education and consolidates the vicious circle of debt, austerity, and poverty.
X-ray of the crisis (2023-2025)
2023
2024
2025
April
Inflation
211%
292%
98.2%
Minimum wage (USD)
320
260
265
Basket of basic necessities (USD)
600
780
950
Sources: INDEC, CEPAL, others
“It should therefore come as no surprise that education and healthcare workers say:
“My children ask me why dinner is bread and mate. I don’t know how to explain to them
that my salary is worth less than a year ago.”
Trade unions, the resistance that never was: demagogic announcements of general strikes,
but with the aim of legitimizing the worsening conditions
The 12 general strikes in 2024 were neither general nor did they affect the functioning
of businesses. Disputes between the CGT and the CTAA (both pro-employer) divided workers into
isolated actions. The leaders of the regime’s unions, while signing agreements at the top,
held back street protests. Workers’ concentrations were only used to negotiate with the
government on how to implement the economic adjustment. In April, they called a “national strike”
that excluded key transport and energy sectors and was yet another example of the betrayal of the
union leadership, despite the discontent and willingness to fight in the streets and workplaces.
The regime’s trade union confederations approved 15% cuts to pensions and accepted labor
flexibility in exchange for crumbs for the trade union bureaucracies.
The parliamentary left: inflammatory speeches but complacent votes in an institution at
the service of the bourgeoisie’s class dictatorship
Last December, the FIT-U (with much propaganda and agitation in the trade union movement)
did not vote against the labor reform that facilitates layoffs. It did not even present initiatives
to increase wages and improve working conditions in lithium mining companies, which in 2024 achieved
a profit of 82.6% ($1.2 billion). Even from the base of the parliamentary left-wing parties, activists protested:
“In the assemblies, they talk about revolution, but in Parliament, they just tweet their indignation,
” or “they call us to fight, but in Parliament, they make deals with the right.” The collaboration
with the bourgeois regime is so dirty that the theatrical poses of the opposition can no longer
fool even their own grassroots activists.
Parliamentarism is once again confirmed not only as a useless tool for the era of imperialism,
but as a real betrayal of the working class, as well as of the revolution. The parties that animate
the Argentine parliament (and in all countries) are there, as a minority and as a majority,
only to give political support to the class rule of the bourgeoisie and to promote its
business and the exploitation of the workers.
In Argentina, the cycle of economic crisis, debt, adjustment, social explosion,
and political control by opportunist parties and treacherous trade union federations has been repeated,
leaving workers defenseless against the various bourgeois governments and the bosses.A workers’
assembly in Salta in April declared: “The only general strike that matters is the one that
paralyzes the country and defeats the regime.” Workers can break the cycle of betrayal and
opportunism and become a powerful force capable of stopping the anti-worker policies of the Argentine government.
The challenge is to multiply the struggles, bringing them together in a general strike to the bitter
end and without minimum services, and to advance in the unity of action of the trade union movement
to make the leap forward in the rebirth of real class-based unions. All this must be done independently
of the current trade union confederations and federations, distancing ourselves from the opportunist
left parties and their parliamentarism, and against calls to defend the homeland and the national economy.
Brussels Strike
As wages stagnate and living costs surge, general strikes are becoming a global rallying cry against.
General strikes have been erupting and restarting almost simultaneously in places like Greece,
Belgium and Nepal. Unions and union confederations are playing out their role as defensive
organizations capable of coordinated actions in attempts to claw back some of the lost wages for workers,
but they are also, at the same time barely putting up any fight and limiting the effectiveness
of the actions by limiting their time duration, collaborating with the business class and its
state and dissipating the energies of the workers, while essential services and livable wages
are increasingly out of reach as militarization is increasing and profit rates are falling
in preparation for the next global capitalist crisis and global imperialist wars looming in the near future.
On March 31, 2025, Belgium capital was temporarily paralyzed by a nationwide general strike, as millions
of workers protested the government’s austerity measures, demanding better wages and social protections.
Schools closed, hospitals operated on an emergency-only basis, and public transport including rail, buses,
and flights was largely suspended.
The government’s plans to slash €5.4 billion from pensions and healthcare,
introduce greater unemployment restrictions, suppress wages, and push nearly 20%
of the population into poverty while expanding military spending by €4 billion
($4.2 billion) to €8.6 billion by 2028.
The general strike saw millions of workers walk out in protest against austerity
measures imposed by Prime Minister Bart De Wever’s coalition, with close to 100,000
of them marching in Brussels and having the effect of shutting down schools, hospitals,
transport, and industrial sectors.
Despite the strike’s massive scale, its effectiveness was blunted by government
and boss linked union leaders, notably the CGSLB/ACLVB administration, which sided
with the government, limiting the strike’s impact by agreeing to negotiation with
the government and limiting the strike action to 24 hours, while the government
mobilized riot police against the workers.
While this strike could have posed a serious challenge to the government’s agenda,
union leaders ensured it remained contained, framing demands in broad economic terms
rather than pushing for indefinite coordinated strikes and crafting clear economic
demands and functioning like a proper defensive organization should, or even going
on the offensive with the power of the strike.
The bourgeois groups like Voka dismissed the strike as "irresponsible",
and mayors were pressured to keep industrial areas operational. The coalition refused
to concede in 24 hours with De Wever making clear that austerity policies would not be reversed.
Yet, the strike shows clear discontent and willingness to strike from workers, with blockades
in retail sectors and mass transport disruptions signaling growing opposition to further
immiseration of the working class in preparation for the next global war. Since union leadership
is playing a collaborationist role with the capitalist class it is clear that workers must seize
control of the unions and form independent decision making bodies on the shop floor of their
workplaces along with coordination organizations inside or outside the established regime union
confederations, depending on the possibilities afforded to them in Belgium, to steer the unions
and and to coordinate indefinite strike action with clear strong economic demands that are actually
able to hurt and cripple the operation of the businesses,
the government and military production for enough time and loss of profits that the bosses have to acquiesce.
Iranian Worker Struggles
In Iran, there has been a strong resurgence of the workers’ struggle against the bourgeois
regime of the ayatollahs. The temporary truce that followed the harsh repression of the workers’
struggles in 2019-20 seems to be coming to an end.
A first strike took place in August, involving nurses protesting against terrible working conditions,
wages, safety at work, reduced working hours and overtime, and the right to strike.
Their average wage is around $220, close to the minimum wage. The strike follows the death
of a 32-year-old nurse in a hospital in Fars province,
caused by overwork. This sparked protests, which then spread to the provinces of Arak, Mashhad, and Yasuj,
with demonstrations across the region supported by the transport union and students,
especially medical students.
The deep crisis, as revealed by the union, is causing between 150 and 200 nurses to emigrate every month
(11,500 healthcare workers have left Iran in the last two years), with serious consequences
for the care of workers and the unemployed.
Pensioners then mobilized nationwide with large protests in Ahvaz, Shus, Isfahan, and Qaemshahr.
In Ilam, they demanded that pensions be adjusted to the cost of living, which has been decimated
by high inflation in the country. In Kerman and Shiraz, they protested against the non-payment
of severance pay. In many of these demonstrations, the slogan “No more wars,
our tables are empty” rang out.
In the bazaars of Tehran, some shopkeepers closed their shops, intimidated by the strength
of the movement, and the closures spread to key markets in other cities.
Other waves of protests broke out among oil workers at the Ofoq Company in the Yadavaran oil field
and in front of the Agh Dere Meshkinshahr mine, where there were arrests, at the Fair Jam refinery,
and at the Gasaran Oil and Gas Company.
In the municipality of Tabas, workers protested against not receiving three months’ wages and two months’
overtime from the municipality. There were also protests for better safety and living conditions by road
workers in Sod Fars. Finally, returning to the health sector,
nurses at Ghadi Hospital in Tehran protested against not receiving their wages for the last three months.
These proletarian struggles are directly linked to those of 2019-20. At that time, demonstrations began
against the 50% to 200% increase in fuel prices and the resulting high inflation of 35%, with a 60%
devaluation of the rial against the dollar. The government was forced to grant subsidies to 60 million citizens,
but this failed to quell the uprising, which was only finally brought under control with a bloodbath.
Violent clashes with security forces left around 1,500 protesters dead. According to Amnesty International,
police fired from rooftops, helicopters, and at close range with machine guns. However,
the death toll is believed to be higher, as the police removed and hid the bodies.
The families of the victims were threatened to prevent them from speaking to the media.
Workers reacted to the harsh repression by storming 731 government banks, including the central bank,
50 military bases, and nine Islamic religious centers, and by toppling statues of leader Khamenei. Meanwhile,
internet access was blocked nationwide, isolating the country from its neighbors where other protests were taking place,
in Iraq and Lebanon. The clashes in 2020 were the most violent since 1979, more so than those
that occurred during the women’s protests in 2022.
In Tehran, a series of demonstrations
began in September 2022 and ended in 2023, triggered by the killing of Masha Amini,
a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who was arrested and killed by the morality police
for violating the hijab law. The demonstrations spread to Kurdistan.
These protests, which had already begun a few years earlier, were mainly carried out by women and students.
Although, in addition to the issue of the veil and women’s freedom, they also concerned the poor conditions
of urban and rural workers, they mainly affected the middle classes in the cities, and were therefore interclassist in nature.
Despite this, they were subjected to harsh repression, with thousands of arrests and killings
of demonstrators deemed ’enemies of God’, including minors beaten to death in front of their classmates.
Foreign Policy
The outbreak of war between Hamas and the State of Israel also served to keep Iranian workers under control
by distracting them from the class struggle with the tried and tested bourgeois tactic of seeking an ’external enemy’.
The Iranian and Israeli bourgeoisies are complicit in the war, in the use of deadly means,
in extending the war to Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria, hoping for a temporary weakening of the class struggle at home.
In July, the elections for the new Iranian president saw the lowest turnout in the history of the Islamic Republic,
below 40% in the first round and 49% in the second.
In a very precarious and discontented situation, the bourgeoisie deemed it
appropriate to present a “reformist” to give the illusion of change,
a government “open to dialogue” with the West, also with a view to renegotiating the sanctions
that have afflicted the country since the US withdrew from the nuclear agreement in 2018.
There are concerns about the stability of the domestic front,
which has been compromised by the economic crisis and,
abroad, by the fall of Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, the decade-long Assad regime in Syria,
and the downsizing of the Houthis in Yemen, which are destabilizing and changing
the balance of power and alliances in the Middle East.
The new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who succeeded Ebrahim Raisi,
who died in mysterious circumstances in a plane crash in May 2024,
has decided to temporarily suspend a new ’hijab and chastity’ law that was due to come into force in December.
The law would have required women over the age of 9 to wear a head covering to hide all their hair
and would have increased penalties for offenders to include imprisonment. The postponement demonstrates
the government’s fear of renewed social protest and its weakened position.
Iranian forces commander Hossein Salami believes that Iran could be the next target, after Syria,
both in terms of bombing and a coup. “Foreign forces have pounced on a lone gazelle like hungry wolves,
and if an army does not remain united, the whole country falls into chaos.” The Iranian bourgeoisie fears
an attack on nuclear sites, which the United States could order the servant state of Israel to carry out,
and losing their influence in Iraq, after Syria, as demonstrated by the visit of US Secretary
of State Anthony Blinken to Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Sudani. To make matters worse, France, Germany,
and Great Britain, signatories to the 2015 nuclear agreement, considering the international war scenario,
have stated that they could “if necessary” propose to the UN to reactivate previous sanctions.
The Economic Crisis
These foreign policy factors are exacerbating the economic crisis in the country,
which has been dragging on for over a decade.
However, Iran remains the world’s third largest oil reserve (13.3% of the total) and second
largest gas reserve (16.2% of the global total). Although sanctions have hit the economy hard,
it still has the possibility of circumventing them through its trade links with China,
which accounts for 90% of its hydrocarbon exports, worth $35 billion.
China therefore has an interest in stabilizing the situation in the Middle East.
However, almost all exports pass through the Strait of Hormuz, where Western navies are present.
In this scenario, if the country’s economy maintains GDP growth of 4.7%,
compared to 4% in the previous year, and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 30%,
Iran will be the country with the lowest growth in the Middle East between 2005 and 2025.
In fact, per capita GDP has fallen by 45% compared to 2012: while in 2005 it was not far from that of Turkey,
today it is well below it; even Egypt, which is more populous and poorer in natural resources,
and despite also being in the throes of a crisis, has come very close to it.
But what makes the situation explosive is inflation, which has risen from 31.2% to 34.5%.
The rial closed 2024 at an all-time low of 821,500 to the dollar,
down 40% since the beginning of the year; on January 23, 2025,
the exchange rate was already at 840,000; today it is at 900,000!
Low wages and soaring prices have led to a severe crisis in domestic demand.
Added to this is the paradox of the ’energy crisis’: despite producing and exporting gas and oil,
Iran is unable to meet its domestic demand for cubic meters of gas, electricity, and gasoline.
The government has called on families to reduce the temperature in their homes by 2 degrees,
and in December there was a partial lockdown with schools and public buildings closed.
The energy crisis has had an impact on industrial production, which accounts for 44.6% of GDP,
including petrochemicals, textiles, food, steel, and motor vehicles.
Industrial plants are estimated to have operated at 41% of their capacity,
with disastrous consequences given that 30% of the working population is employed in the sector.
It is a complex picture. But it is certain that the bourgeoisie in Iran is not sleeping peacefully.
No bourgeoisie in the world can sleep peacefully. Capitalism continues to accelerate
the fractures and crises that will lead the working class to take up the struggle
for its own survival. Its great task is to overthrow a regime that can no longer guarantee stability and peace for anyone.
The working class will take up the struggle, first nationally and then internationally,
against its class enemy and its governments, led by its own international communist party.
The bourgeoisie is dragging humanity into the abyss of destruction.
We are working to ensure that we are not unprepared when we reach this crossroads of history.
Current Trade Union Struggles in Turkey
The workers’ struggles in Turkey, which gained momentum as of the last quarter of 2024,
continue into 2025, spreading to other lines of work, cities and regions.
The advancing economic crisis is driving workers to resistance in order to make a living!
Strike Fever Burning Başpınar
Last month, under the leadership of BIRTEK-SEN, workers in dozens of factories
in the Başpınar Organized Industrial Zone in Antep went on strike demanding a raise
to the minimum wage they were receiving.
Strikes began in early February at Yalçın Kardeşler Weaving, Şireci Tekstil, Çelikaslan Tekstil,
Ufuk Carpet, Özkaplan Carpet, Kaplanser Carpet, Bulut Tekstil, Has Sag, Grand Carpet and Sırma Carpet
and spread to most of the Başpınar Organized Industrial Zone within a few weeks. Ufuk Carpet workers
ended their resistance with a 40 percent raise after one day of resistance.
The resistance at Özkaplan Carpet ended in exactly 2 hours with a 45 percent raise. During this time,
there was a great solidarity between workers from different factories;
Yalçın Kardeşler and Şireci workers said the words that would scare the entire
bourgeois class during their visit to Çelikaslan workers: "There are attempts to divide us, let’s not play this game".
Of course, the bourgeoisie, which has all the repressive apparatus at its disposal, to no one’s surprise,
imposed a ban on demonstrations in Gaziantep.
As if that wasn’t enough, they arrested Mehmet Türkmen, the chairman of BIRTEK-SEN,
on charges of "violation of freedom to work" and "incitement to commit a crime".
"Violation of freedom to work"? It is not the "freedom" to work that is violated,
but your "freedom" to exploit workers! And the "crime" incited is the worker demanding a living wage!
We are not going to give lectures on how the capitalist economy should be organized, nor are we going
to criticize the law in all countries as if it were not bourgeois law, taking refuge in bogus concepts of "rights",
"justice", etc. Oppression is part of the normal functioning of the capitalist economy and bourgeois law.
Despite all these repressions and bans, the workers of Has Sag ended the struggle with gains such
as the reinstatement of dismissed workers and compensation. Grand Carpet and Yalçın Kardeşler workers fought
shoulder to shoulder without giving in to gendarme and police repression. Grand Carpet workers ended the struggle with a raise,
while the strike at Yalçın Kardeşler continues. The union movement is still spreading. On March 4,
Durkar Carpet and Sebat Carpet started resistance. On March 6, Bellatex Carpet workers stopped work and Eviza Carpet,
Durkar Carpet and Sebat Carpet workers ended the struggle with gains such as layoffs or raises. On March 7,
Gür Thread and Alka Polyester workers started resistance.
The resistance in Başpınar has again demonstrated the importance of this industrial zone
for the trade union movement in Turkey. Since the 2000s, Başpınar has witnessed important labor struggles.
We invite our readers to read about these struggles in the study titled "The Last Forty Years of Class Struggle in Turkey:
An Overview from 1980 to 2020". From the moment it appeared on the stage of history,
the working class in Başpınar has repeatedly realized that "it has nothing to lose but its chains";
as the arrested union leader Mehmet Türkmen said, after all, prison is not so different from the factory.
Municipal Strikes
While some of the municipal workers’ strikes that began in November 2024 in Istanbul’s Maltepe,
Kartal and Ataşehir districts and in January 2025 in Izmir have ended, new waves of strikes have begun in parallel.
In Izmir, the metropolitan municipality workers went on strike following the news of a
1.6 billion lira cut from the Bank of Provinces and a cut in salaries by the municipality.
On January 8, a meeting of workers of İZENERJİ and İZELMAN, two companies operated by the municipality,
in front of the DİSK building turned into a march after threats by mayor Cemil Tugay.
After the talks held by DISK during the day, DISK called for salaries to be paid and the strike ended with a win.
In February, subcontracted toilet cleaning workers employed by the Izmir metropolitan municipality
were fired from their jobs due to the struggle for their rights that started in January.
The actions of the subcontracted cleaning workers had started with the demand for the right to work.
At the end of February, after a month of struggle, they reached an agreement with the municipality
administration on their demands and suspended their action. According to the statement made by the workers,
they will return to work in March with their gains.
In March, tobacco workers joined the strike wave started by municipal workers in Izmir.
Sunel and Oriental tobacco workers organized in Branch No. 7 of the Tekgıda-İş Union,
affiliated to the Türk-İş regime trade union confederation, went on strike.
The workers went on strike in 3 different factories after failing to get what they wanted from the collective
bargaining agreement negotiations, and a total of nearly 1700 workers went on strike for their rights.
The workers stated that the salaries they receive do not cover the increasing cost of living,
that the bosses’ proposals are far from reality and that they responded to the situation with workers’
solidarity.
In Istanbul, Beşiktaş was added to the municipal workers’ strike that started on the Anatolian side
(Ataşehir, Maltepe and Kadıköy), organized in DISK. According to reports,
late payment of salaries have become a chronic problem in the municipality in the last month and a half.
However, the municipality is hiding behind the arrest of Beşiktaş mayor Rıza Akpolat on corruption charges
and the "assassination of reputation" discourse they have created with this arrest.
Workers organized around the European Side No. 1 of DİSK Genel-İş will go on strike as of March 15
if no agreement is reached. However, workers in Beşiktaş Municipality’s cleaning, parks and gardens,
veterinary and public works departments have walked off the job independently of the union because
the payment of their salaries has been delayed for months. Upon the workers’ decision to strike,
the CHP-affiliated Beşiktaş Municipality decided to fire the workers and appealed to the CHP-affiliated
neighboring Beyoğlu Municipality to break the strike. The cleaning workers were
also angry with the European Side Branch No. 1 of Genel-İş,
one of the most collaborationist member unions of DİSK,
because the retroactive payments of the contract signed in November
were pushed back to May 2025 without asking the workers.
Parallel to these movements, electricity infrastructure workers are also continuing their protests.
After more than two months of inconclusive negotiations between ISPER.AŞ and DİSK Enerji-Sen,
the Istanbul branch of DİSK Enerji-Sen called for a province-wide strike. The union’s primary
demand was to increase the "handout" wages imposed by the municipality. On February 28,
the union made a press statement in front of the municipal ISKI General Directorate
and announced that they once again rejected the misery wage.
There are also reactions from Adana’s Seyhan Municipality about the workers’ unpaid wages.
The Seyhan Municipality did not comply with the terms of the collective bargaining agreement
it signed and paid the salaries, which should have been 55 thousand liras, as 35 thousand liras.
In response to the underpayment of salaries, workers of Seyhan Municipality held a press statement
on February 25 organized by DİSK Genel-İş.
In February, another call against the rising cost of living and capital’s austerity policies came from Eğitim-Sen, the teachers union. Eğitim-Sen made a statement on its official Twitter account and shared its union demands:
- Reduce the indirect tax rate on essential consumption items of working people to zero!
- All payments, including additional supplementary payments, should be added to the base salary!
- Abolish the interview for public sector jobs.
Çayırhan Miners Resistance
On November 20, 2024, 500 miners in Çayırhan, a town near Ankara,
locked themselves in the mine against the privatization decision. Bourgeois
law is incapable of defending workers’ rights. During the privatization process,
the tender specifications did not include any clause that protects workers’ rights;
on top of that, it was demanded that the lodgings where the workers stay be vacated within 4 months.
This caused a reaction among the workers.
The workers went underground with a steel will and determination; above ground,
their protests received widespread support. The bourgeois state, which has nothing
to fear more than the workers uniting and supporting each other, had its skirts on fire.
The gendarme barricaded the workers who wanted to enter the mine. The workers decided
to wait in front of the barricade until they entered the mine. Talih Kocabıyık,
branch president of the Turkish Mine Workers Union affiliated to Türk-İş,
said "it is a very profitable enterprise, that is probably why it is being privatized",
but no explanation was given about the privatization decision.
The de facto strike
launched by the workers partially yielded results within 10 days.
The Privatization Administration decided to postpone the tender until March 4.
The workers then took action again, chanting "Don’t postpone, don’t cheat,
cancel the sale".
In spite of everything, the workers managed to change
the terms of the tender and won the right to employ 2050 minimum staff for 5 years
and the right to live in the lodging house for one year even if the worker is dismissed.
Tender applications ended on March 4, 2025 at 18.00.
Workers stated that they will keep their tents in the area in order to be prepared
for situations that may cause them difficulties.
Maden-İş Çayırhan Branch President said that they will remain on watch until
the tender process is finalized: "Today was the last day of bidding for 104 days.
We have not received the results yet. As you know, nearly 50 of our friends have been
underground for two days. We did not take the risk because of the health risk,
we took our friends out. The struggle will continue here at the mouth of the mine.
Our tent will continue here until the tender process takes a clear shape.
In case we don’t like it or in case it will put us in difficulty,
our tent will remain here until Friday, provided that we are always ready in any way.
We expect a clear announcement by Friday. Our struggle is not over, our struggle continues".
While Çayırhan workers are determinedly fighting for their rights,
they are also expressing a nationalist reaction in favor of nationalization.
Therefore, through the regime union Türkiye Maden İş, nationalist left and right
opposition bourgeois parties that advocate partial state ownership against
privatization have tried to intervene in the process. At this point,
it should be emphasized again that under capitalism, state ownership and
private ownership are essentially a legal distinction that does not change
the nature of the enterprise and does not eliminate the relationship of exploitation.
KFC and Pizza Hut
Following the end of the agreement between Yum Brands and İş Gıda,
mass layoffs of workers have begun. While İlkem Şahin, who has investments
in many sectors, says that he is bankrupt due to a debt of 7.7 billion,
someone should remind Görkem Şahin that he said "I will not go bankrupt
even if the state goes bankrupt". The company did not pay the last two months’
salaries of its employees and "threw its workers out on the street" when the concordat was declared.
KFC workers believe that the layoffs were planned in advance.
As the company was preparing to declare bankruptcy, the boss attempted
to evade the workers’ rights by putting his assets in his wife’s name and
attempting to divorce her. Even though it was known that a concordat would be declared,
workers were kept working until the last day. They did not receive their salaries,
they were not released from insurance on time, so that they would have to waive their
right to compensation if they wanted to take another job.
This is the essence of the bourgeois judicial mechanism!
İlkem Şahin is able to use the law to get away with mass layoffs by making workers
work until the last day of their employment, and thus profit from it! After creating
this mass victimization of workers (our so-called debt-ridden bourgeoisie!) buys a yacht
for 50 million TL. They are blatantly making fun of the victimization of workers.
The bourgeois state apparatus is one of the partners in this crime.
Its laws protect the bourgeoisie and victimize the working class.
Why don’t these incidents reach the ears of those in the palaces?
The bourgeois law and state have shown how meticulous they are in
sending gendarme and police forces to workers’ struggles.
But when it comes to the workers (not surprisingly) it ignores the injustice!
The workers showed their reaction to this situation by gathering in front
of the company headquarters in Kavacık, Istanbul. At every opportunity the workers
have been and are showing that they are determined in their struggle.
The regime unions and some bourgeois left parties quickly "jumped in" to the protests
in order to mislead the workers with bourgeois democratic rhetoric and to divert them from their path.
The protests are still going on and workers are calling out from the fields of resistance:
"We have kept silent and endured for 2 years, but enough is enough.
We have worked overtime without taking leave, carrying heavy loads.
This brand, which grew with our sweat, now condemns us to starvation.
We know that this situation is not only happening to us. It can happen
to all Yum Brands employees around the world. So we call out to Yum Brands workers
all over the world. Wake up, stand up for your rights, don’t be silent! If we act together,
we can make our voices heard. Let’s put a stop to this injustice by standing shoulder
to shoulder together, let’s make our voices heard all over the world".
The biggest weapon of the working class against international companies like Yum Brands
is international strikes and resistance.
Companies that try to achieve their growth targets by declaring bankruptcy and
shifting their capital from one country to another seem to cover their moving costs with the unpaid wages of workers.
Workers can protect themselves from this predatory global capitalism by protecting their self-organization,
their unions. Forcing the unions to build international links and spread strikes and resistance
to many enterprises will increase the workers’ chances of winning.
Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant
The Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, which is being built
in Mersin through the cooperation of Russian and Turkish capital,
is an opportunity for national capital to achieve the glory of the "national economy"
and a concentration camp for the working class.
Akkuyu has a total of 4 pressurized water reactors and the foundations for all four have been laid.
While units 1 and 2 are under construction,
construction of cells 3 and 4 has been halted by Rosatom and workers are being fired.
Akkuyu workers have to cope with poor working conditions, arbitrary dismissals and unpaid salaries!
The bosses’ arbitrariness is so precious that they leave 500 workers unemployed and don’t need to give a reason.
Not to mention the unpaid salaries since December 22nd!
"If so many workers were to be laid off in a short time, why were they hired? We are already crawling in shacks.
We have no money and no right to work humanely. All we get is three pennies. We sleep in filthy places,
food with filth in it is put in front of us. What for? We already work almost for free.
And this treatment is really shameful". They add, "This is not a construction site, it’s like a Nazi camp!"
In the capitalist mode of production, production is carried out to maximize profit. Maximizing profit means exploiting surplus value as much as possible, that is, cutting workers’ wages and making profit by cheapening even the most basic needs of workers.
Unable to endure these inhumane working conditions, the workers began a work stoppage.
The reaction of the bourgeoisie’s bloody stick, the state, to the work stoppage is not surprising:
sending gendarmes. Wherever there is a worker who seeks their rights, the bourgeois political
order either forces them to cooperate with the state and puts them through legal barriers or,
like the Akkuyu workers, tries to silence them. This is the reality of the rights,
justice and law that the hypocritical bourgeois society treats us to.
It is only through the existence of class unions
and a class party that workers can be liberated from the capitalist order!
- The Imperialist War
Capitalism Needs War
Only the Revolutionary Struggle of the Working Class can Oppose it
Trump’s miserable statements, which European leaders are following,
expose some of the lies and illusions propagated for decades by the bourgeoisies around the world,
and by their right-wing and "left-wing" parties, to hide the ferocity of the world of capital,
which now brings only death and destruction:
- International law is a fiction; it is the right of the strongest.
- In capitalism, war is an economic necessity:
capitalism and peace are incompatible.
Trump is no smarter, stupider,
or crazier than those who came before him.
He merely reveals the true face of capitalism:
this is the anonymous monster that threatens humanity!
It’s not Trump who holds power,
but the industrial-financial complex,
in the hands of the bourgeois class,
which uses the machinery of the state to defend its interests.
This is true for the United States and for all states in the world:
all are bourgeois regimes against the working class.
They are so regardless of the ideology and form
of government they disguise themselves with: from "democracy” to false socialism,
like that of China, or Venezuela, to the theocracy of the ayatollahs in Iran,
or the "Jewish State" in Israel.
The bourgeoisie itself cannot "decide" anything because its policy is imposed on it
by the economic crisis of overproduction in global capitalism. All national capitalisms
and industrial sectors are under attack and overwhelmed by decades of overcapacity: Europe,
the United States, China, and all the smaller bourgeoisies must flood the world with goods
they cannot sell within their national borders, thus colliding with their competitors.
The United States, as the world’s largest capitalist system, is the most vulnerable
to the economic crisis because it is increasingly difficult for it to maintain its global dominance.
Today, the United States bourgeoisie must cut costs and pass the bill on to their "allies".
They are revoking "humanitarian aid", which was once a useful instrument of international corruption.
They are forced to strip the state apparatus of all "superfluous" resources (education, healthcare,
social assistance), reducing it to its essence as a machine for oppressing the working class.
The policy being imposed today in the United States is not "isolationism", which,
although in the interests of this national capitalism, would bring world peace.
It is, instead, a different kind of shifting of US forces, concentrating them in the Indo-Pacific,
a theater of primary strategic interest,
to the detriment of the Atlantic and Europe.
It serves to prepare for war against emerging
Chinese imperialism, in a new division of world markets.
TThe imposition of tariffs on imports – which also
partially harms American capitalism,
but hurts competitors more – is a desperate policy,
an economic-trade war that prepares
for war with weapons. History repeats itself:
the protectionism of all states preceded World War II.
The new "golden age" promised by Trump will be one
of tears and blood for the American working class,
sacrificed to save the bourgeoisie’s profits and social privilege,
in preparation for war.
But it won’t be the bourgeois regimes competing
with the US that will save the global
working class from the Third Imperialist War.
A peaceful multipolar world under capitalism is just another lie.
Driven by the crisis, and increasingly unable to sell other goods,
the bourgeoisie of all countries is throwing itself into the war industry.
The drive toward rearmament is accelerating. The European Union,
after decades of forcing workers to tighten their belts under the pretext of reducing debt,
now claims to be willing to go into debt
up to its neck to produce weapons! Beyond false ideological oppositions,
all bourgeois states share an interest in investing enormous sums in war production
to alleviate the crisis and prepare for war. For this reason, they all have a common interest
in leading workers to war, convincing them that the enemy is not capitalism,
starting with their own bourgeois regime, but an "enemy" alliance.
To this end, it is essential to instill workers in nationalist ideology.
TThe European Union is not only reactionary,
but also impossible – as Lenin asserted as early as 1915 –
because bourgeois states will never renounce their national interests.
There is no such thing as European imperialism,
but rather an alliance between certain European imperialisms:
of the 800 billion euro rearmament plan over four years,
650 billion euro should be allocated to national armies.
Nationalism – which today is called "sovereignty" – is only the other side
of the ideological lie of the European Union. The "multipolar" Europe of
"sovereignty" will be sucked into the vortex of the Third World Imperialist Conflict,
as already occurred in the two world conflicts of the 20th century,
under the pressure of the same economic and political determinants
that are pushing the European Union to arm itself today.
The anti-EU bourgeois parties that today cloak themselves
in pacifism will tomorrow be as warmongering as the pro-EU parties and Trump are today.
The only force that can prevent war is that of the working class united across national borders,
refusing to shed its blood in defense of the homeland. For workers,
it makes no difference whether they are exploited and oppressed by their
own national bourgeoisie or that of another country.
But it is certainly preferable to fight their own social war,
with powerful strikes, up to the point of revolution,
against any bourgeoisie in power, national or foreign,
rather than to die by the hundreds of thousands on the front lines
of the war between capitalist states, on the battlefields,
and under bombardment.
The authentic Communist Party desires and promotes the military defeat
of its own bourgeois state in the imperialist
war because it puts an end to the carnage of war,
because proletarian defeatism on the home front,
with strikes in factories and among soldiers,
infects and united uniformed workers across the front lines,
because military defeat weakens its own bourgeoisie and favors the revolution.
To prevent or halt imperialist war, the working class must be organized.
This means organizing itself into strong class-based unions that unify workers’
struggles in increasingly broad and powerful strikes aimed at defending wages
and reducing the pace and length of the workday. These basic demands
of the proletariat are in themselves unpatriotic
because they damage national capitalism and its competitiveness.
Defending your economic interests today through union struggle
means already being on the path that will lead you to defend your political interests tomorrow,
opposing militarism and the war of the bourgeoisie.
WWe can expect the official trade union federations of all countries,
aligning themselves with their bourgeois bosses in each country,
raising the anti-proletarian banners of nationalism and multipolar capitalism,
to lead the workers to the slaughterhouse of inter-imperialist
world war and the bourgeois dispute over territories and borders.
Combative trade unionism, to rebuild the strength of the
working-class trade union movement and free workers from the control
of the regime’s unions, must act unitedly in struggles across all categories,
to strengthen and unify them, and to promote the struggle against war for the international unity of workers.
- Solidarity among workers of all countries!
- Against all Fatherlands!
- Class war against imperialist war!
Proletarian Defeatism in Gaza
The proletarians of Gaza took to the streets by the thousands
in what were the first mass demonstrations since October 7, 2023.
And they didn’t do it by chanting for the war against Israel,
for the Axis of the Resistance, aiming for martyrdom for a “Palestine
free from the Jordan to the sea”, but by shouting “Hamas out”,
and asking for the end of the war.
The proletarian and disinherited masses of Gaza did indeed mobilize,
but against the war, which was wanted and sought after by both Hamas and
the Israeli bourgeois state.
The demonstrations began last Tuesday, March 26th, in the north of the Strip,
in Beit Lahia, one of the towns most devastated by the war,
with a few hundred participants.
The following day they grew in size and spread not only to Jabilya – also in the north – but also to the Shejaiya and Zeitoun neighborhoods of Gaza City, respectively
to the east and southwest of the city, and to the Nuseirat refugee camp,
in the center of the Strip. Only three days later, on Thursday,
did they decrease in intensity.
One of the most significant aspects, besides the slogans against
Hamas and for an end to the war, is that not even a Palestinian flag was waved,
only some white flags.
The proletariat of Gaza, who defied the ferocious repression to take to the streets,
shows that their support for Hamas and the war is only propaganda.
In the report on the war in Gaza and the Middle East at the general meeting last January,
in this issue published in full, we wrote “now that the Israeli bombs are temporarily
no longer raining down, it will not be easy for Hamas to maintain control
over 2 million 300 thousand people, in the conditions to which the war has reduced them”.
This prediction has been confirmed: peace has been restored after 15 months of massacres,
but when the bombings started again thousands of workers said “enough is enough”
and preferred to risk dying at the hands of Hamas rather than die under the bombs.
The funeral of a young man, whose family members accuse Hamas militants
of having tortured and killed him in response to his participation in the demonstrations
of the previous days, became a small procession, and 6 other Palestinians were allegedly
executed on charges of collaboration.
On the other side of the conflict, in Israel, the end of the truce,
which lasted only two months, has given new strength to the anti-war movement,
and there are once again tens of thousands of demonstrators protesting
against the Netanyahu government.
The words of an article published on March 27th in Haaretz are worth sharing:
“These protests are not only courageous.
They are deeply moving.
They represent the real victims of this war: alongside the Israeli hostages
and the victims of the massacre, these are the civilians whose suffering has gone unheard.
They also challenge Israel’s extremist government directly:
any continued attacks on civilians who are calling for peace
will expose the fact that this is not self-defense.”
Again in Haaretz, March 28: “The Israeli Defense Forces warn
that a crisis is developing in the reserves due to plans
to intensify fighting in the Strip (...) Dozens of reservists
announce that they will not report for duty (...) struggle to report
for further calls not only for political reasons,
but also because they are simply tired.”
In fact, on both sides of the war front, large sections of the population are
fighting against their respective governments and against the continuation of the conflict.
The demonstrations in Gaza can only strengthen those in Israel,
because they weaken the Israeli warmongering propaganda that wants
all Palestinians to be Hamas supporters. The breaking of the leaden
cloak of the bourgeois regime in Gaza can only favor the growth of awareness
that even in Israel there is a social force that opposes Israeli imperialist policy.
The two movements are in fact allies.
What is needed is a political party whose program includes the vital necessity
of the working class to oppose the war by fighting its own bourgeois regime,
united with the workers of other countries.
This is the party of international communism,
necessary for the international union of the working class.
In every country, the trade union movement must be guided by the principle
of an uncompromising struggle to defend the living conditions of the workers,
without taking on the task of defending the economy of national capitalism,
and in the future, defending it militarily.
* * *
The propaganda of the bourgeoisie that supports Hamas,
not being able to deny the demonstrations,
has minimized their size and claimed they
were provoked by opposing parties that collaborate with Israel.
Opportunism throughout the world has endorsed
and spread this warmongering anti-proletarian propaganda – as it has done throughout the conflict.
An example of the opportunist arguments
used to defend Hamas and support the continuation of the imperialist war,
presented as “revolutionary”, is the article published by the political group
that directs the SI Cobas grassroots union in Italy, which reads: “In the last year,
Hamas has recruited about 15,000 new fighters, rebuilding part of its military
and administrative infrastructure and maintaining firm control over the Gaza Strip.
This level of organization and support would not be possible without significant support
from the local population.” What is clearly missing is the fact that in the Gaza Strip,
joining the Hamas military apparatus is almost the only way to feed one’s family.
If the demonstrations were promoted by anti-Hamas parties,
the fact that thousands of people participated means that the demands – out with Hamas and an end to the war – are shared by the majority of the population.
On the other hand, there is no reason why the bourgeois parties opposed
to Hamas shouldn’t promote such demonstrations.
In reality, all the Palestinian bourgeois parties have an interest
in preventing the proletariat from mobilizing.
Even in the event of Hamas being removed from power,
the proletariat would find itself fighting for its living conditions.
This is to the chagrin of all the opportunists who describe the conflict
between Hamas and Israel as a “revolutionary war” of the Palestinian masses
instead of a war between opposing imperialist fronts – Israel,
USA and European imperialists against Hamas, Iran, Qatar, China.
- Life of the Party
Interventions in the Unions and on the Streets
For March 8th, the comrades working on women’s issues prepared the party’s international manifesto,
translated it into 10 languages. For International Women’s Day,
comrades in Pennsylvania and Illinois distributed Party leaflets,
the latter at an event organized by a local coalition of labor unions.
Papers were distributed in Chicago while militants intervened in a march
condemning the actions of U.S. imperialism in Gaza.
In Virginia Party militants intervened with our press in large demonstrations against
the new bourgeois administration organized by opportunists groups but that attracted many beyond it.
Additionally the paper was distributed at multiple events opposing the forced mass deportations
of immigrant laborers happening in the US in Oregon.
Party militants continue work in the Class Struggle Action Network where an online event
putting forward the necessity for generalized strike action
and class unionism featuring union militants
from across the world will be held on April 27th.
One Party militant in the National Education Association (NEA)
recently put forward a resolution at a state level regional assembly for organizing
the 3 million unionists to join the potential May Day 2028 General strike was narrowly
defeated by a vote of 242 to 244 delegates representing 44,000 union members.
In March and April, Comrades distributed our press at
the statewide indefinite nurses strike in Oregon that lasted 40+ days.
Comrades distributed our press at the Build a Fighting NALC (BFN)
postal national day of action in New Mexico and in Oregon.
In Italy, comrades distributed the leaflet
in Rome and Genoa at two demonstrations in March and April
against the rearmament and war: one organized by the USB grassroots union,
the other organized by a bourgeois party that in Italy now poses as a pacifist,
with a large turnout, around 50 thousand demonstrators; this second demonstration
attracted a participation that went far beyond that
of the members of the bourgeois party that organized it.
Our Mourning: Raimondo
Raimondo said that we should not talk about him personally but only remind everyone
of the great cause for which he dedicated his life, unfortunately cut short too soon.
In fact, Raimondo has been a militant, since he was very young, and ever since then,
in the party of international communism, in our party.
Obeying his desire, therefore, we do not recall here his uncommon qualities, of sensitivity,
the lively intelligence in his eyes and the patient smile,
of someone who knows how to understand men and situations,
before intervening with affectionate firmness, respectful towards all.
This is another lesson he leaves us. You can’t talk about a communist without talking about communism.
And Raimondo in particular can be remembered truly, fully, faithfully,
only within his, and our, need for communism.
It is individualism that mortifies and deforms the individual.
Raimondo told us do not speak of me, because by speaking only of him we would have betrayed him.
We overcome personalization not to deny the individual but to exalt him,
to free him in a strengthened and dense network of relationships.
A man is made by his relationships with others. He cannot be defined otherwise.
Raimondo lived, realized and satisfied that need for relationships with all men and things
in the world. And a communist is a communist always, in all the concrete, daily events of life.
Not only in dreams or in an aspiration or, worse, in nostalgia, a regret, or just a ritual.
And this is possible because a communist sees what others cannot see,
blinded by the smoke bombs of this society and deafened by the inappropriate screams
of the monkeys with which they represent all the bloodthirsty states of the world.
Every man, more or less consciously, feels the need for what he knows can
and should be an indistinct better world, and suffers from the abuses on the majority of humanity,
which he calls injustices, imposed for the selfish interests of a tiny minority,
and from the absurdities, wastes, sufferings, mourning and massacres that are imposed on them.
Religions suffocate this need by sending it back to an otherworldly world.
But in this increasingly tormented earthly world the communist sees and feels that communism
is already there. It is not the will of the communists but capitalism itself that progressively
demolishes all its material and ideal presuppositions and foundations.
All our real life is materially ready for communism, even if men cannot know it and only dream.
But man dreams as much as he can dream, what is already within reach.
We will not say that Raimondo did not have time to see communism. Instead, he saw it.
And he saw it completely because he fought for communism together with his companions.
Because of his great tranquility, Raimondo has never shown impatience,
which is a weakness of individualism. What we have not been able to understand and do,
those who come after us will do. And if not here, they will start in other countries and continents.
Communists are never in a hurry.
This patient preparation, carried out according to a plan and continuity of practical attitudes,
day after day, year after year, generation of militants one after the other,
is it not already communism? The negation of envy, disorder,
the contingent and the expedients of capital?
Of course this is not enough to console us. Life has these wounds.
That network that closely connected Raimondo to all of us has been torn,
and we all suffer and feel great pain. We must now re-tie that network,
made of affections and memories, to pass on his life lessons
to the young and to those who will come.
General Party Meeting
25-26 January 2025
[RG151]
Capitalism in mortal crisis that shows its ferocious face of national egoisms,
exterminations and destructions is opposed by the revolutionary Program of Communism
We held our international general meeting on January 25th and 26th,
with a broad representation of all our groups in attendance. It was held via teleconference.
Where we have territorial sections we assist you from the same location.
As usual we have provided a complete translation of all the interventions
and reports in our three current languages, Italian, English and Spanish.
The meeting opened with a report from the centre which took stock of the
development of the party’s tasks over the past year.
Part of these functions is the defense of the organic nature of the internal relationships between militants.
This module – which is not simply organizational but of communist sentiments and collaboration,
in accordance with our usual repugnance for everything that smacks of bourgeois – has already given excellent proof in its effective application for at least six decades now,
allowing the small party to carry out admirably the tasks that the external situation assigns to it,
to the extent possible: from the defense of the program and of Marxist science
to the firm search for contact with the working class and its battles, from which,
ultimately, we derive our reason for being and, in a historical integral, all our strength and certainty.
With the spread of our minimal organization outside of Italy we have been able to happily verify that
those organic modules are naturally applicable to young comrades and distant sections,
who recognize them as appropriate and necessary to the communist militia
and well allow for harmony and common work.
We can already see in this the confirmation of our prediction of the functioning of the future
reborn communist party well rooted in the world working class.
A unity of movement resulting from a close impersonal,
collaborative and non-conflictual work between comrades and groups.
We do not rely on individuals, not even those who are possibly more competent and expert,
but on the effort of elaboration of a collective
body that seeks in the doctrine and in the past the way to the future.
A search, a continuous theoretical and experiential refinement,
as if today’s communists and all those who preceded us were sitting at the same table.
The party is also the result of its own lessons.
The living party is always reborn "more equal" to itself, confirmed and strengthened in its convictions.
Not with a license to innovate, that the doctrine was established once and for all at its birth,
on the contrary, always more faithful and conscious of what we have always been.
Other tests await the party, in these times of approaching the catastrophe of capitalism,
which will renew its desperate attacks against the revolution and against communism,
and against the communists. Not for this reason will we adopt in the party the methods of our enemies.
Today it is enough for us to give continuity to the studies in the various fields of investigation,
their presentation to the party and to the class in propaganda and in publication in the press,
as well as to continue our always difficult
and very demanding serious battle in the unions and among the workers’ struggles.
The current minimal growth of the organization calls us to new commitments and new work,
in a comprehensive vision of the party’s needs and activities.
The new comrades who arrive are encouraged, trained
and helped to tackle every topic and task that the life of the party requires.
As Lenin writes, a true centralization of the party, not a formal one, requires maximum decentralization,
the harmonious distribution of its various responsibilities.
The following are the reports heard in the two sessions of the meeting.
The grueling proxy war in Syria has already been published in the previous issue of this newspaper.
We immediately provide here some brief summaries for the use of readers,
referring the full publication to our magazines “Comunismo” and “Communism”.
The Imperialist War in the Middle East
Today’s Vanquished - Tomorrow’s Winners
The report to the meeting denounced how already at the end of January the truce was proving fragile.
The Israeli state, a long arm of the US war machine, fought on seven fronts: in Gaza,
in Lebanon against Hezbollah, in Syria and Iraq against pro-Iranian militias,
against the Houthis in Yemen, against Iran, and finally against the armed groups
of Hamas and the IPJ in the West Bank.
In this broad framework, the war fought in these 15 months by Israel has been a success.
Hezbollah, militarily much more powerful than Hamas, has been greatly weakened,
with a considerable part of its leadership physically eliminated,
with its logistical structures in southern Lebanon largely destroyed and with equally heavy
blows inflicted along the Beqa’ Valley and in the Shiite neighborhoods of Beirut.
This forced Hezbollah into a truce on November 27, with Israel’s right to strike Hezbollah
if they do not retreat north of the Litani River, a right which Israel
has exercised with near-daily targeted bombings.
Not even a week later, the advance of the
Sunni militias organized by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) began in Syria,
conquering Aleppo on December 2 and taking Damascus on December 8,
deposing the Assads in power since 1971.
This led to the breaking of the so-called "Shiite corridor",
which from Iran passed through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon,
supplying Hezbollah with weapons, and to the flight from Syria of the pro-Iranian militias,
who retreated to Iraq. This was a second heavy blow to the Iranian regime and its ambitions in the region.
The only things left to distract Israeli forces from the conflict in Gaza
are the pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. Indeed,
after the fall of Assad in Syria on December 8, Israel launched a wave of bombings
against the military facilities of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the regular Syrian army,
almost completely destroying all of its air, anti-aircraft and naval forces.
The fall of Assad has favored Turkish imperialism, which with the Syrian National Army – financed, supplied and trained by Ankara – acts in the Northwest of Syria fighting
the Kurdish forces of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the Syrian branch of the PKK,
who lead the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Sunni Arab minority.
The Kurds control the area east of the Euphrates, the richest in oil and agricultural products,
and limited parts in the North.
The Syrian Kurds had a non-hostile relationship with the Assad regime,
which granted them substantial autonomy.
The strengthening of Turkish imperialism in Syria has led the PYD leadership
to seek an alliance with the Israeli regime. It is worth noting how little questions
of principle are worth to bourgeois regimes and parties, which they use to justify their wars.
The Israeli regime denounces Kurdish national
oppression while perpetuating Palestinian oppression in a sea of blood.
At the same time, Kurdish nationalist parties ally themselves with the two imperialisms – the US and Israel – primarily responsible for a national oppression identical to that
which they have suffered. On the other hand, there is no solidarity between oppressed national minorities,
even if they are so geographically close. From the moment that national struggles
no longer have any progressive historical function,
nationalist parties become only puppets of the imperial powers.
The bourgeois ideological justifications are worthless. The United States considers
the PKK a terrorist organization, but not the PYD, the Syrian branch of the same party,
supported by the USA. The HTS was also defined by the United States and the European Union
as a terrorist organization but, through Ukrainian military aid, they were supported by the United States,
finally recognized in power by all Western countries.
Russian imperialism had to evacuate from Syria a large part of its armed forces
– land, air and naval – and probably also the naval bases of Tartus and Chmejmim air base.
For Moscow, the loss of these bases in Syria would represent a hard blow, losing for
it a logistical-operational hub in the Eastern Mediterranean, which was needed
for the Russian imperialist projection towards Africa.
The reaction to the setbacks suffered by Iran and Russia was the signing on January 17
of a “comprehensive strategic partnership treaty” between the two countries. However,
Israel enjoyed almost unlimited access to Syrian airspace coordinated with the Russian command.
In Gaza, however, the outcome cannot be said to be equally in favor of Israel.
Although about 20,000 militants from Hamas and other Palestinian nationalist parties
have died in the 15 months of fighting and their military strength has been greatly reduced,
the Israeli government’s proclaimed goal of destroying Hamas and preventing
it from maintaining power in the Gaza Strip has not been achieved.
Hamas said in the days following the truce that the deployment of its
militiamen and police was intended to “prevent a power vacuum and chaos,
to ensure public order despite the devastation” and that it “managed
to restore all police stations in the Strip to normal operation.” On Thursday,
January 23, the Hamas Interior Ministry announced that its men were facing attacks
on food trucks by “criminal gangs.” It is likely that they are criminal groups,
but also the starving population.
This puts at risk the gains of Hamas and its control over the population.
Now that the Israeli bombs are temporarily no longer raining down,
it will not be easy for Hamas to maintain control over 2.3 million people,
in the conditions to which the war has reduced them.
We must believe the reports that Hamas continues to recruit many young people and very young people,
full of hatred and anger for the massacres and destruction carried out by Israel.
But there is no doubt that among the population there is also discontent
towards Hamas that dragged the Gazans into a ruinous war.
Furthermore, being a militiaman provides a source of income in a destroyed economy.
Hamas’ show of force is therefore not only directed against Israel but also against
the proletariat and the dispossessed of Gaza, to warn them that any uprising will be responded
to with lead from those well-dressed and armed policemen and militiamen.
Even for the Israeli bourgeois state, on the one hand, having signed a truce with Hamas
means admitting that it has not achieved the proclaimed objective of the war,
on the other hand it allows it to maintain a state of emergency within the country,
of impending war, necessary to control the Israeli working class.
The sold-out Israeli bourgeoisie propagates the lie that all Palestinians are with Hamas,
just as, on the other side, the Palestinian bourgeois parties inculcate the idea that
all Israeli workers consent to the extermination of the Palestinians and that
therefore there can be no proletarian solidarity above the front. Therefore,
the objective of destroying Hamas, in addition to being very difficult to achieve,
is not even desirable for the Israeli bourgeoisie.
The roots of Hamas are the funding of the regional powers that support it and
the dispossessed and Palestinian sub-proletarians who enlist in its militias. To destroy Hamas,
bombings from the sky are not enough and more men on the ground would be needed.
This is not sustainable for an army armed to the teeth, thanks to donations from US imperialism,
but which already shows signs of crisis, being able
to count on a population of only 8 million Israeli Jewish citizens,
with a daily drip of victims.
Even if militarily annihilated, Hamas’ lifeblood would spawn a similar party.
Then there is the demographic question. A “Greater Israel” that includes
the West Bank and Gaza would have a population that is 50% Arab-Palestinian.
Capitalism in its youthful and progressive phase would aspire to overcome ethnic
and religious divisions in the nation, with economic growth and with radical positive structural reforms.
Capitalism in its senile, imperialist phase, closes itself in racism, in the oppression of minorities.
In Israel, in the “Jewish State”. For the "Palestinian question" therefore the bourgeois Israeli state
has no solution. On the other hand, the proclamations for the "destruction of Israel"
by Hamas serve to keep Israeli workers terrified and to seek protection in their state,
which will lead them to massacre.
This is why Israel has supported Hamas financially
for years and more recently accepted that Qatar would increase its funding.
This is why today it rejects any plan to entrust political control to the Palestinian National Authority,
which holds it in the West Bank: because saying “no”
to the PA in Gaza is equivalent to saying “yes” to Hamas.
The “solution” that capitalism has to offer to the Israeli
and Palestinian proletariat is a general conflict,
a third world war. In it, it will be possible, through ethnic cleansing and genocide,
to capitalistically “resolve” this age-old conflict,
either with “Greater Israel” or with “free Palestine from the Jordan to the sea”,
according to the imperialist front that would emerge victorious.
In any case, it would be the proletariat that would be defeated once again,
on both sides of the front, united even in defeat because its condition is unique.
In Iran, strikes multiplied at the end of the year and in the first months of January.
The national currency continues to devalue and inflation continues to grow.
If the regime of the ayatollahs were to fall under
the blows of the working class fighting the Israeli bourgeois regime,
the “external enemy” that supports its internal front would disappear.
Both among the Palestinians and the Israelis,
the nationalist and warmongering parties would weaken.
It is true that both sides of this war can be considered winners, because the real loser is the proletariat, of Gaza,
of Israel and of the entire Middle East. A truce desired and decided by the bourgeois forces that wanted the war,
not determined by the rebellion of the proletarian masses on one or both sides of the front,
is only a pause while waiting for the resumption of the conflict. But it is also true that
all bourgeoisies and their states are intrinsically weak, threatened by the economic and social
crisis of capitalism that advances and deepens every day, and that they cannot avoid.
They are all historically already defeated because to save themselves they have nothing
to offer but death and destruction, the devastation of Gaza and the rest of the world.
The proletariat, defeated in every conflict that begins and is consumed to the end,
is the problem that capitalism cannot solve and that, when, due to material determinations,
it will inevitably reconnect with its party overcoming 100 years of counter-revolution,
will be the death for all the war machines of capital.
The Grueling Massacre in Ukraine
The slow advance of Russian troops continued both on the
southern front of Donetsk and in the Kursk region of Russia.
The four regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson annexed by Russia with the referendums
called in September 2022 are not yet fully under Russian military control, apart from Luhansk.
They are included, together with Crimea, in the territorial claims that
Moscow has always set as a precondition for negotiating an agreement.
In Donetsk, a powerful defense system built over years must be conquered meter by meter.
The Russian strategy seems to be to force the Ukrainians to mass troops at certain points
on the front where they can be hit by aircraft or artillery. On the diplomatic front,
Russia does not seem interested in quickly reaching a ceasefire.
The situation of the Ukrainian armed forces, hit by tens of thousands of desertions,
uncertainty about military supplies, a shortage of ammunition and a minimal air force,
opens the way to new successes for Moscow, which must justify to the proletariat
the tens of thousands of deaths and economic damage caused by this conflict.
Russia also demands the demilitarization of what remains of the Ukrainian state
and an assurance that Ukraine will remain outside of NATO.
The recent strategic agreement with Iran has strengthened Russia’s international position,
although the military alliance has precise limits and does not go so far as to foresee that
if one of the two signatories is attacked by a third state the other is obliged to intervene.
During the election campaign, Trump, in contrast to the prevailing “isolationist”
ideas about abandoning Kiev to its fate, had his national security adviser state
that the new administration would push Ukraine to “lower the mobilization
age to 18 to attract hundreds of thousands of new troops,
” thus continuing the war “to the last Ukrainian.”
The leaders of the European Union and NATO insist on their decision to help Kiev
“until victory” with the reconquest of the territories currently occupied by Russia.
They even intend to continue supporting Ukraine even if the United States were to stop doing so.
“If we do nothing, Russia could attack us”, the warmongers representing the European Union shout in chorus,
to mask their common interest in the profits of the arms industries. Currently,
the United States supplies 70% of the weapons to the European NATO states.
There is also an agreement with NATO leaders for member states to increase spending
on weapons to 5% of GDP, which would be more than double the current level.
There are even threats of risky unilateral decisions to send military
contingents from some NATO countries to fight in Ukraine.
The European states, on the other hand, risk being cut out of any peace negotiations
because the US president has already announced that he is ready to get rid of them
and deal directly with Putin, without giving the European states, as always,
a say in the matter. On the other hand, the famous sanctions against
Russia are bringing the European industrial apparatus to its knees rather than the Russian economy,
which has found other buyers on the world market.
Of course, there is no single position among the 27 states of the Union
that pursue different and even contrasting policies.
France has adopted a hard-line military response, recently calling
for the direct involvement of the Atlantic Alliance in the conflict,
and has lifted restrictions on the use of its SCALP cruise missiles
to strike Russian territory. Poland also hoped for direct involvement
in the conflict and has been undertaking a bold rearmament plan
for several years now, with major purchases from the United States and South Korea,
and plans to allocate 4.7% of its state budget to defense next year.
The German government, now out of office, has taken an intermediate position,
sending significant military aid to Kiev but
preventing the use of its long-range Taurus missiles inside Russia.
Italy continues to send weapons and aid to Kiev but has always
declared itself decidedly against sending troops to Ukrainian territory.
The United Kingdom declares itself ready for a direct confrontation
with Moscow and authorizes the use of cruise missiles against Russia.
The new Labour government, in perfect continuity with the previous Conservative one,
has signed a “one hundred year collaboration” pact with the Ukrainian government
that would even include the possibility of installing military bases in the country.
But military circles point out that Her Majesty’s Armed Forces
have never been so weak since the Napoleonic era.
In these power games the Ukrainian state has no role, it depends entirely on its "protectors" in Washington.
This subservience to the government of the "beggar" Zelensky, as Trump called him,
is proven by the role of the Kiev secret services in supporting the advance of the
rebels who overthrew the Assad regime in Syria, alongside the United States that protected and supported them.
The numerical consistency of the armies is a problem that the war in Ukraine is
posing to all the General Staffs of Europe. Professional armies, composed of tens
of thousands of specialists, are not suited to fighting the war that is being prepared.
It will be necessary to mobilize hundreds of thousands, millions of proletarians to be
deployed as cannon fodder. Many states are already preparing to reintroduce compulsory military service.
What is emerging, therefore, despite the propaganda talk about the possibility of peace,
is a prolongation of this war for a long time to come.
The proletarians of Ukraine and Russia, already tested by years of war,
subjected to the iron heel of corrupt and warmongering governments,
could rebel against a new demand to shed their blood and impose on the States their peace,
the only possible one, overthrowing the regime of capital as the Russian proletariat did in October 1917.
Only the proletariat fighting for communism will be able to put an end to the state of permanent war,
misery and hunger, uncertainty and terror of tomorrow into which the capitalist regime, in full crisis,
not only economic and ideological, but tomorrow social and political, has brought all humanity.
Origins of the Communist Party of China
8. Submission to the Kuomintang
The Second Congress of the Communist Party of China (PCC) was held in Shanghai in July 1922
with nine delegates representing the 123 party members.
The documents of the Congress analyzed the political and international situation of China,
with a focus on imperialism and the fight against foreign aggression.
It emphasized the internal division of China, characterized by the presence of warlords and civil war,
which prevented the unity of the country.
A comprador bourgeoisie acted as an intermediary between foreign capital and the Chinese economy.
The impoverished peasantry represented the largest force in the revolution,
but it could only be achieved in alliance with the working class.
The Congress argued that China was in a transitional stage between feudalism and capitalism,
and that the Chinese bourgeoisie should fight against feudalism,
with the proletariat allying with the peasantry to lead the revolution. However,
the documents lacked a clear vision regarding the role of social classes in the revolution,
leaving open a possible interpretation towards a “revolution by stages”,
like that theorized in Russia by the Mensheviks.
The PCdC decided to join other revolutionary forces, including the Kuomintang,
but trying to maintain the independence of the proletariat.
A “Democratic Alliance” was also proposed that would unite various groups,
but the initiative did not find approval from the Kuomintang and was abandoned.
Work in the labor movement remained the main goal of the PCdC,
which sought to promote the independent organization of the working class.
Furthermore, internal disagreements emerged over party centralization,
with a pro-democracy tendency led by Li Hanjun opposing the centralized vision of the PCdC.
Li advocated a less centralized party that was more focused on promoting communism among intellectuals,
a vision that was supported by Maring because of his openness to the Kuomintang.
The Second Congress of the PCdC in 1922 accepted the directives of the
Second Congress of the Communist International regarding the national and colonial question,
but divisions persisted over the tactics to be adopted towards the national-revolutionary movement,
in particular over cooperation with the Kuomintang (KMT).
Although Maring’s proposal to form an "internal bloc" with the KMT was not adopted by the Congress,
Maring obtained a green light from the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI) for his line,
which included the transfer of the PCdC headquarters to Canton and close cooperation with the KMT.
The ECCI approved some of Maring’s recommendations, directing the Chinese Communists
to work closely with him in Canton, where the KMT had strong influence.
Although there was no official statement justifying the Communists’ entry into the KMT,
the ECCI provided guidelines regarding the KMT as a revolutionary organization,
with the aim of supporting its "proletarian wing" and educating future ideologically
independent members towards the CdC.
The ECCI instructions, while not explicitly endorsing Maring’s line,
reflected an ambiguous and opportunist approach, assuming that the PCdC had yet to be
formed and that the Communists should support a wing of the KMT deemed
to represent the “proletarian elements”.
The ECCI produced Instructions for the ECCI Representative in Southern China,
which set out the line to be adopted by the Chinese Communists.
This approach would lead to the advocacy of a “left wing” within the Chinese bourgeois party,
a position that would, in time, have negative implications for the revolution in China.
In mid-1922, the Communist International ordered the Chinese Communists to “organize Communist groups in the KMT”,
a proposal similar to Maring’s that was quickly rejected by the CdC. To overcome internal opposition,
Maring convened the Hangzhou Plenum on August 28‑30, 1922, where, using the authority of the International,
he succeeded in gaining the CdC’s consent to the tactic of joining the KMT.
This meeting marked the beginning of closer cooperation between the CdC and the KMT,
with the Communists forming an “internal bloc” in the Nationalist Party.
The decision of the PCdC to join the KMT marked an important turning point:
the Communists renounced their political and
organizational independence and submitted to the discipline of the KMT.
This process culminated in the Third Congress of the PCdC, when the Communists would finally
hand over the leadership of the national revolution to the KMT. However, many Chinese Communists,
such as Zhang Guotao and Cai Hesen, were opposed to this line,
instead supporting the centrality of the workers’ movement.
But, despite the resistance, discipline prevailed in the International,
and the PCdC leaders, although opposed,
accepted the imposed line. Only the Secretariat of Labor continued to oppose it.
Opposition to Maring’s policies was strong in the party and even detested by members
of the Central Executive Committee. In order to strengthen his position,
Maring suggested expanding it by adding members who were favorable to his line,
such as Li Hanjun and Li Dazhao, representatives of the nationalist right.
Thus, despite the resistance, the leadership of the CdC
gradually moved towards a position favorable to joining the KMT.
Joining the KMT marked the beginning of a cooperation that would see the
Communists participate in the reorganization of the Nationalist Party.
Meanwhile, at the Fourth Congress of the International, possible Soviet military support was being discussed.
The Chinese delegate Lin-Yen-Chin spoke of a “united front” with the KMT,
with the idea that the Communists would join the party individually to strengthen the revolutionary influence.
This tactic of infiltration into the KMT, supported by the International and Maring,
was fundamentally flawed, based on the illusion of being able to wrest influence from the Nationalists.
Radek in his speech criticized the optimism of the Chinese delegates and emphasized the weakness
of the revolutionary movement in China. He considered the situation still far
from being favorable to socialism or a Soviet republic, and suggested that the task
of the Communists was to focus on organizing the working class and establishing alliances
with the revolutionary bourgeois forces to fight imperialism.
Radek did not directly support Maring’s tactics, but the reality of the PCdC entering the KMT
at the individual level of militants condemned the Communist Party to work for the bourgeoisie; it would,
in practice, impose the submission of the Communist Party and the Chinese proletariat to the bourgeoisie.
The International, with its “Theses on the Eastern Question”,
promoted the tactic of an “anti-imperialist united front”,
but without considering the problems of such an alliance in China.
The Fourth Congress of the International and the Communist Party of Italy reaffirmed
the need for ideological clarity and a strong organizational structure,
but in China the penetration of the Communists into the KMT endangered
the political independence and effectiveness of the proletarian movement.
In January 1923, the Fourth Congress of the International formalized its position on China,
favoring cooperation between the CdC and the KMT. The resolution emphasized that the KMT
was the only revolutionary force in China, expressed by the democratic bourgeoisie,
the petty bourgeoisie, the intellectuals and the workers. Since the labor movement was still weak,
the CdC should collaborate with the KMT in the fight against imperialism.
This alliance
with the KMT marked a change from the previous criticisms made by the International regarding
the Chinese bourgeoisie. The policy led to the subordination of the PCdC to the KMT bourgeoisie,
abandoning the independence of the proletarian movement as indicated in previous Congresses.
In January 1923, the International and the PCdC aligned themselves with Sun Yat-sen,
the head of the KMT, who was seeking Soviet support, while accepting that China was not
ready for communism. This Menshevik policy denied the adoption of a radical socialist revolution,
opting for an alliance with the bourgeoisie.
In February 1923, after the repression of the railway workers’ strikes,
the PCdC, despite having a strong influence on the working class, found itself tied to the KMT.
The Third Congress of the PCdC, held in June,
confirmed this alliance with the KMT as central to the national revolution,
abandoning any attempt at political autonomy.
This compromise with the bourgeoisie would lead to the defeat of the working class in the repression of 1927.
At the Third Congress of the CCP, many members, including Mao Zedong,
gave up on the possibility of an autonomous revolution.
The dispute over centralism within the CCP was resolved by adopting measures to strengthen the party center.
As a result, some right-wing members, such as Li Hanjun, left the CCP to join the KMT.
However, relations with the KMT remained controversial.
Many members of the CdC were opposed to the tactic of entryism,
but Maring defended it by arguing that the CdC should focus on the national revolution,
joining the nationalist movement and complementing the strength of the KMT.
He justified this alliance with his assessment of China’s economic and social backwardness,
combined with the weakness of the CdC.
The Third Congress of the PCdC did not completely resolve the issue.
While it recognized the need to influence the KMT,
on the other hand it criticized its military tactics,
which brought it closer to the militarists and imperialists,
considered incompatible with a national revolution.
The PCdC should therefore have aroused a left wing within the KMT,
composed of workers and peasants, to orient it towards a more revolutionary policy.
In November 1923, resistance within the CCP continued.
Zhang Guotao rejected the idea that the KMT was the only revolutionary movement
and argued that the Chinese bourgeoisie was still too dependent on the imperialists.
While recognizing the need to work within the KMT,
Zhang argued that the CCP should maintain an independent position, continuing
to organize workers and develop an autonomous struggle,
avoiding the labor movement being subordinated to the KMT.
Zhang Guotao criticized the KMT as not only a false nationalist party,
but also lacking in real organization, in fact its first Congress took place in 1924.
Some members of the CdC, including Chen Duxiu,
were unwilling to hand over the leading role of the revolution to the KMT
and believed it was important to maintain the political independence of the CdC.
However,
despite internal opposition, the leadership of the PCdC confirmed the line of the Third Congress,
supporting the participation of the Communists in the reorganization of the KMT. In November 1923,
the Executive of the PCdC ratified the decision
to consider the KMT as the central force of the revolution in China,
with the Communists having to integrate into its sections.
The resolution left no doubt about the path taken:
all the work of the Communist Party was to be conducted within the Kuomintang,
now considered the central force of the revolution in China.
The reorganization and development of the Kuomintang had become the main tasks of the Communist Party.
The resolution issued precise directives: Communists, while remaining members of the PCdC,
were to join KMT branches in centers where they were
already present or to create KMT branches themselves where there were none;
the program dictated by the KMT leadership was to be followed;
and the correction of the KMT’s political tendencies was to be carried out
"in accordance with the nationalist principle embodied in the Three Principles of the People".
In December 1923, the PCdC issued a circular requiring the participation of Communists in the KMT Congress,
which was to be held in January 1924. This approach was accompanied by a theoretical reworking that
emphasized the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie in leading the national revolution.
Mao Zedong, just elected to the Central Committee, supported this position,
theorizing that the merchants (part of the bourgeoisie) would be the most motivated
to fight against the militarists and the imperialists, because of their economic interests.
Thus, theorizing a preeminent role for the commercial bourgeoisie,
the classical position of Menshevism was taken, which leaves the leadership of the revolution
in backward countries to the national bourgeoisie.
This interpretation of the revolutionary development in backward countries,
according to which the imperialist yoke would have made the national bourgeoisie
of the colonial and semi-colonial countries more revolutionary
than the Russian anti-feudal bourgeoisie, in subsequent formulations
will be the same with which the degenerate International will justify all the directives
imposed on the Chinese communists, which will lead
to the tragic defeat of the proletarian revolution in China,
while Lenin had already clarified that "the bourgeois revolution
is impossible as a revolution of the bourgeoisie",
definitively separating Bolshevism from the Menshevik current.
Class Struggles in Latin America
Although the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean estimates
the average annual growth rate of the countries in the region at 1% between 2015 and 2024
and forecasts growth of over 2% in 2025 and a downward trend in inflation,
workers remain highly exploited, with a sharp decline in real wages (as well as pensions),
with 46.7% of the workforce employed in informal jobs. Governments are faced with
the need to reduce the tax burden and are considering cutting payrolls
and privatizing centralized state enterprises and services.
Every bourgeois government, along with the parties,
parliamentarians and trade union clowns,
tries to delude the working class that the recovery
of business and enterprises will bring them prosperity.
But the prosperity of national economies will
not necessarily translate into improved wages,
working conditions and the working environment.
Any economic plan of the bourgeois governments of the region
will be based on increasing the rate of exploitation of the working class.
Governments will implement incentives for growth,
capital accumulation and attraction of foreign investment,
accompanied by unemployment and a sustained decline in real wages.
More and more, traitorous union leaderships and opportunist parties will find
it difficult to contain workers’ struggles and channel discontent into the electoral circus.
Conditions that will require the strengthening and extension of the terror
and repression of the bourgeois state.
The struggles are distorted by the influence o
f the petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy.
The regime unions and opportunist parties that influence the labor movement
and control its economic organizations play a fundamental role in the demobilization,
disorganization and division of the union movement.
The workers’ demands are mixed with those of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie:
national sovereignty, against the privatization of state enterprises,
for credit to small and medium-sized enterprises, etc.
However, some workers have taken up the struggle either
by breaking the control of union leaderships or by forcing
them to take the lead in strikes and mobilizations.
Workers have demanded wage increases, payment of arrears,
and defense of their living conditions and working environment.
These struggles have been defeated or have achieved poor results.
But they represent an anticipation of the resumption of the class struggle.
From these episodes a new trade union leadership of the class has not emerged,
nor have there been contacts between these movements and the revolutionary party.
We must evaluate this reality of the workers’ movement neither
with idealism nor with voluntarism, but as confirmation of how
the capital-labor contradiction emerges and imposes itself despite
the control of opportunism and betrayal in the trade union movement.
We have seen the unity of the workers at the base, the decision
to strike indefinitely and without minimum services,
with assemblies and organizations at the base,
the demands for wage increases and related to the social
and economic situation of the workers, rejecting
the treacherous positions of the union leaders.
The political inadequacies of these movements
cannot be overcome without a contact of the union movement
with the direction of the communists. Hence the importance
of persevering in revolutionary propaganda.
The following are to be highlighted at the beginning of this 2025:
Since November 22, meat industry workers in Uruguay have been
fighting with several actions to break the stalemate in collective
bargaining over wages and working conditions. This movement has crossed borders,
receiving the support of the National Confederation of Food Workers of Brazil and other
trade unions in the region. The meat industry, one of the most important economic sectors in Uruguay,
employs thousands of workers and has a significant impact on the country’s exports.
However, working and wage conditions in the sector have been the subject of recurring tensions.
Workers are demanding wage improvements in line with the
rising cost of living and the implementation of measures to guarantee
decent working conditions and safety in production processes.
Many of the sector’s employees receive wages that barely exceed the legal minimum,
despite having to work long hours and conditions that pose health risks.
It remains to be seen to what extent international solidarity will materialize,
starting with that of Brazilian workers in the same industry.
In Argentina, the parliamentary representation of the so-called “Frente de Izquierda”,
an electoral coalition between various opportunist parties,
has presented a bill for the nationalization of the railway system “under the control,
management and administration of workers’ and users’ organizations”.
Yet another nefarious influence of opportunism that seeks to distract workers’
struggles from the demands and confrontation with the bosses. The path of “struggle”
presented by the Left Front (and all the opportunists in the region) is that of betrayal,
of polyclassism, of parliamentarism, of electoralism, to keep the workers’
movement impotent in the face of the offensive of the capitalists and their governments.
In 2024 there were 35,000 layoffs in the public sector and the devaluation
of the currency continued. The Milei government no longer consults the official unions,
but they continue to support the bourgeoisie in the exploitation of workers
and any critical reaction is only a pantomime that excludes the workers’ struggle.
In October 2024, the purchasing power of the minimum wage was
almost 40% lower than in November 2019 and 54% lower than in the same month in 2015.
This is a decline in wages that precedes Milei’s management since the bourgeoisie
still does its business by increasing the exploitation of the working class.
In El Salvador, since March 2022, 33 extensions of the “emergency regime”
have been approved, justified for the fight against criminal gangs,
but also useful for terrorizing the working class, with union leaders persecuted,
imprisoned and killed. Under the pretext of the emergency regime, the government
has cancelled collective agreements and prohibited strikes.
In agreement with the International Monetary Fund,
19 public bodies have been eliminated, spending has been cut,
layoffs have been made and paychecks have been cut in the public sector,
especially in health care and education. New taxes and cuts in subsidies
for the population have been added.
In the countries of the region, the 48-hour working week prevails.
In Venezuela, since the 2012 labor law was enacted, the week has been set at 40 hours,
with 2 consecutive days of rest. With exceptions for some sectors,
in addition to allowing extensions of the day for "justified" reasons.
In Mexico, there is a “40-Hour Front.” There, the week is 48 hours.
The proposal to reduce it to 40 hours is part of the “100 government commitments”
included in the electoral campaign of the current president.
The maximum legal work week in Colombia has been set at 46 hours from July 15, 2024;
on July 16, 2025, it will be reduced to 44 hours and from July 16, 2026, to 42,
over six days a week. However, there are known cases in which Colombian employers
take advantage of this to reduce wages.
Chile is expected to reach 40 hours per week starting April 26, 2028.
In Brazil, a petition to the National Congress in September calling for an end
to the 6x1 working schedule, six days of work for one day of rest, received nearly
3 million signatures. The 6x1 shift is widespread in commerce and services.
Of the approximately 55 million workers, about two-thirds work a 40-hour week.
Eighty-two percent of workers in commerce and services earn less than 2,824 reais, $455,
and 42 percent earn less than 2,100 reais.
But the National Congress has already buried or rejected
at least 9 proposals on reducing working hours in Brazil.
Most of the changes to the legislation on working hours have favored the bosses. In 2017,
a reform established that overtime be compensated with an equal number of hours of rest
within six months, which companies often do not respect. Under the previous rules,
workers received a 50% supplement for overtime, which rose to 100% on weekends.
The Lula government did not express itself against the 6x1 in order not to alienate the workers.
The claim is not supported by the mobilization of the unions but by public opinion and electoral interests.
The proposal to reduce the work week in Central and South American
countries is part of the bourgeoisie’s calculations,
which solves the need for extended working hours through overtime.
In fact, the reduction of working hours is accompanied by its greater flexibility.
Furthermore, the majority of the working class is now precarious or underemployed
and for them no rules are applied. In Brazil, for example, Uber drivers and food
and package deliverers are not classified as employees but as "micro-entrepreneurs",
without rights or Social Security.
The class-based trade union movement will have to take up the demand
for a significant reduction in working hours, without reducing wages
and without increasing overtime and work intensity. For example,
in education by reducing the number of students per class,
or in healthcare by reducing the number of patients per nurse.
For the year 2025, the minimum wage in Colombia has been set at 1,423,500 pesos.
This covers only 52% of the basic needs of a single worker and 35.6% of what
a family of four requires. But the minimum wage only applies to 9.9% of the
economically active population: 10 million workers do not even receive that.
In Venezuela, on January 10, Nicolás Maduro was sworn in as president
for a new term (2025-2031), with a strong media and military-police deployment
and with the arrest of both right-wing and opportunist left-wing parties.
Announcements of arrests of “terrorists” and CIA agents abound.
All the political and media tension that surrounded the election results
of July 28, 2024 and the re-election of Nicolás Maduro reflects an inter-bourgeois struggle,
which in turn is an expression of inter-imperialist struggles for control
of Venezuela’s raw materials, oil and gas. Both the political factions
in government and those that oppose it represent bourgeois
and imperialist interests in the division of the cake.
Paradoxically, while the Biden administration was offering
an increase in the reward to $25 million each for information
leading to the capture of Maduro and Cabello (the same bounty
that was hanging over Osama Bin Laden) and was issuing visa restrictions
for around 2,000 Chavistas, at the same time the White House was reaching
an agreement with the Venezuelan government on the oil and gas business
and was not revoking the licenses of American oil companies operating in Venezuela.
Both political factions in Venezuela protect the profits of the
bourgeoisie and imperialism. Both will use the police-military-judicial
apparatus to repress and crush workers’ struggles. Both seek to align
workers on their side, in a polarization between bourgeois groups.
But
the opportunist left tries to present itself as an alternative to these
two political poles, demanding legality, democracy and human rights.
This left, parliamentary and electoral, nationalist, patriotic and democratic,
is also the enemy of the workers and contributes to their enslavement.
It only calls for some reform that does not change
the essence of the dominant regime of exploitation.
The resumption of the class struggle will have to break not only with
the artificial polarization imposed by the bourgeoisie, but also with
the treacherous currents of the opportunist left.
The path that workers must follow is to return to strike,
for an indefinite period and without notice,
to demand significant increases in wages, pensions and incomes,
support for the unemployed, a reduction in the working day,
relying on the organization at the base, moving forward towards
the rebirth of true class-based unions, grouped in a United Class-Based Trade Union Front
for the clash against the bosses, their governments and their repression.
The Independence of the Sahel States on Trial
At this meeting, the comrade presented the second part of the report
that continued the research on the events that have affected Burkina Faso
and the surrounding Sahel region in recent years,
characterized by strong political instability in the former
French colonial territories, what is now commonly known as Françafrique.
For the summary of the first part, we refer to the report
of the September meeting in issue 431 of this journal.
The history of the region has been described.
The territory now occupied by the State of Burkina Faso was part
of the larger Mossi Empire from the 12th to the 15th century,
whose largest kingdom was that of Ouagadougou.
In 1896, after years of fierce resistance by the indigenous peoples of the Mossi kingdoms,
France, in the course of its inglorious European colonization,
defeated the Kingdom of Ouagadougou and made the surrounding territories a French protectorate.
In 1898, the Anglo-French Convention was signed,
which came to define many of the borders still in force today, including that of Burkina Faso.
During the First World War, the metropolis resorted to the conscription of its colonial subjects,
destabilizing local communities.
Scourged by years of forced labor and heavy taxes, the different ethnic groups united in a revolt,
which began in late 1915 in present-day Mali, Volta, and Burkina Faso.
They fought valiantly, routing the French army with guerrilla tactics.
The colonizers ultimately prevailed using only the most infamous methods.
The anti-colonial resistance of 1915-16 left a legacy that would foreshadow
and influence the anti-colonial revolutions of the peoples of black Africa after the Second World War.
In 1919, the French formally established Upper Volta as a colony,
which became a labor pool for neighboring French colonies, especially
for cocoa plantations in Côte d’Ivoire. A labor migration that still exists today.
France attempted to use the Upper Volta for cotton cultivation.
As usual, monoculture production disrupted the primitive local communist economy.
Corvée labor was imposed on the population in the construction of railways and on plantations.
The region is still severely underdeveloped today,
after decades of colonial and then imperialist exploitation,
and Burkina Faso is still one of the poorest nations in Africa.
The French eventually divided the colony into the states of Mali, Niger, and Ivory Coast.
Anti-colonial agitation only grew. In 1958,
the colony became an autonomous republic but within the French Community,
a colonial legacy in which France sought to maintain its sphere of influence.
Upper Volta achieved independence in 1960. After a series of coups d’état
the popular Thomas Sankara came to represent the revolutionary
and anti-imperialist bourgeois nationalism that tended to free the country
from France and to seek real economic sovereignty in Upper Volta, renamed Burkina Faso.
But the emancipation movement was ultimately betrayed: Blaise Campaoré would govern
for the next 25 years supported by democratic France and the West.
Even today, Burkina Faso has not managed to free itself from the legacy
of its colonial history and its evident exploitative relations with France.
Coming to the current situation, the report described the demographic
and economic makeup of the country. Burkina Faso’s productive activity
is centered on agriculture, which employs about 80% of the workforce,
mostly in subsistence farming. Capitalist industry is concentrated in the South.
Services contribute 48% of GDP and manufacturing less than 10%.
GDP per capita was only $774 in 2019.
The country’s proletarianization process has been extremely slow.
Youth unemployment is high, especially in the North, where Islamist groups use it as a recruitment pool.
Most young people work in agriculture. Only 46% of the population is literate.
Modern agriculture has historically been based on cotton. Gold and cotton account for 85% of exports.
Poverty is entrenched, especially in rural areas.
Limited mechanization of agricultural
capital makes farms vulnerable to cyclical droughts.
The lack of roads is why the domestic market is quite small.
Moreover, Burkina Faso is one of the fastest growing African economies,
with a rate of 5.68% in 2019, despite threats from Islamist groups and the Covid pandemic.
Between 2000 and 2022, the share of GDP of the manufacturing sector fell from 16.2% to 9.9%,
that of agriculture from 26.4% to 21.7% and that of services from 48.8% to 50.5%.
But extractive industries increased from 1.9% to 14.5%.
In the same period, the share of employment in industry went from 4.2% to 7.0%,
that of services from 10.4% to 18.8%, while that of agriculture fell from 85.4% to 74.2%.
The country is thus following the path taken by all capitalist countries. However,
the active population is still mainly made up of farmers.
As in most “third world” countries due to Western colonialism and imperialism,
they have been reduced to suppliers of raw materials,
with the native bourgeoisie earning a rent through the rental of farm and mine land,
acting as an obstacle to the development of the country.
Imperialism blocks the capitalist development of these countries.
And in particular of Burkina Faso.
In 2022, food inflation reached 14.1%.
This, combined with political instability caused by Islamist insurgents,
led to the second coup in less than a year, which placed Captain Ibrahim Traoré in power.
The decline of French imperialism in the region was first evident in Mali,
where two coups took place in less than a year.
This French withdrawal paved the way for Russian involvement,
whose mercenaries have settled in the region.
The popular discontent that fueled these coups was due
to both the inability of previous regimes to combat jihadist insurgencies,
the dramatic increase in food prices, and widespread social instability.
By 2023, over 2 million Burkinabe were internally displaced
and nearly 150,000 had sought refuge in neighboring countries.
Farmers in northern Burkina Faso have found themselves caught
between Islamist violence and army reprisals.
The compulsory enlistment of union members in the army,
as denounced by the Unité d’Action Syndicale (UAS),
reflects the regime’s desperate need to bolster the military ranks.
The Sahel states have expelled all traces of anything French,
in the wake of anti-Western sentiment,
dormant but present throughout West Africa. Niger has extended this expulsion
to the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) and has ordered
the United States to evacuate all its military presence by September.
Senegal, Ivory Coast and Chad have recently wanted to free themselves
of all Western military presence, especially French.
But what, moreover, characterizes all the Sahel states
is the growing cooperation with Russia,
China and Turkey, imperialisms that seek to expand their influence in Africa.
These three states have mainly provided military support.
In 2023, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso formed the Alliance of Sahel States (AES),
aimed at strengthening security cooperation against Islamist groups.
One of the first actions taken by the Sahelian states was to withdraw from the Economic Community
of West African States (ECOWAS). The AES has “irrevocably” cut ties with ECOWAS,
a structure it rightly sees only as a mouthpiece for the West.
In July 2024, the Alliance transformed into the Confederation of Sahel States,
with the express goal of further strengthening mutual economic and political ties.
The Confederation’s ambition is to create
a common currency and collaboration in sectors such as agriculture,
water and energy, in a broader strategy to achieve "economic sovereignty". However,
as history has shown, true economic independence for these nations – if they remain disparate and not united in a true pan-African bloc – is impossible within the framework of capitalism, inserted into
the global system dominated by more powerful imperialisms.
Popular support for the junta, particularly among the proletariat and petty bourgeoisie, is largely the result of the regime’s nationalist and “anti-imperialist” rhetoric. However, this support is fragile and depends on the junta’s ability to deliver on its promises of security and stability.
Burkina Faso has begun to nationalize mines to better exploit its natural resources, especially gold. The government has acquired two mines for about $80 million and seized 500 kilos of gold for “public necessity”. Most gold mines, however, are still foreign-owned, British, Canadian, Chinese, and Indian. We’ll see if the Burkinabe bourgeoisie not only barks but also bites.
(End of report of the meeting in the next issue)