Ninety years ago, the stock market crash of 1929, which announced the economic crisis of 1930, confirmed what the First World War had meant: that capitalism had definitively passed into its period of decadence. In a few months, tens upon tens of millions of people fell into total destitution. Of course, during this period, the bourgeoisie learnt to attenuate the violence of the crisis but, despite the lessons drawn from it, this crisis has never really been surmounted. This confirms that, in the period opened up by the First World War, the contradictions of capitalism could only lead to a degradation of the living conditions of the great majority of humanity.

We are publishing a contribution from a sympathizer in the US which aims at exposing the empty but dangerous ideology about ‘the elite’ which is being used more and more by different factions of the capitalist class today.

Fifty years after the workers' uprising in the city of Córdoba, it is still necessary to reflect on its meaning, because throughout those same fifty years the left apparatus of capital has been presenting distorted versions of its origins and the political responses it generated, preventing the working class from recovering the experiences left by those days of struggle.

Turkey's invasion of northern Syria shows the complexity of inter-imperialist antagonisms in this region - and the willingness of all sides involved to use the local population as cannon-fodder.

From November 2018 to June 2019, the media was filled with news about the social movement of the "gilets jaunes". It was "unprecedented dissent" according to the experts, an expression of a new social model of struggle. For some it was supposed to be better adapted to the evolution of society. In reality the "gilets jaunes" are in no way the expression of a workers' struggle. It is an inter-classist movement, an obstacle to the class struggle. The workers are drowned when they are mixed up with the population in general; outside all considerations of social class, they are diluted into the so-called "people". 

The destruction of the Amazon by flames is not an unfortunate natural disaster, nor is it the fruit of abnormally irresponsible local policies. It is symbolic of what capitalism has in store for all the planet, all species, and for humanity.

150 years ago, in the early 1860s, the workers’ movement internationally was still in its infancy, and its different components had not yet acquired much experience in setting up and defending political organisations. At the same time the working class in Germany was going to be faced with one of the most difficult political challenges, that of confronting the activities of political adventurers, as the following article explains.

This article is part of the series The hidden legacy of the left of capital in which we are proposing how to come to grips with something that is difficult for numerous groups and militants of the Communist Left: it's not only a question of breaking with all the political positions of the parties of capital (populist, fascist, right, left, extreme-left) but it is also necessary to break with their organisational methods, their morality and their way of thinking.

The current climate change protests are being encouraged and praised by a whole segment of the ruling class, from the Merkel to Corbyn. That alone should make us reflect on whether these protests are really part of the solution to capitalism’s devastation of nature. In this forum we will look at the relationship between humanity and nature from a communist starting point, and argue that the class struggle alone can halt the slide into barbarism. Join us for the discussion!

All around the globe, capitalism's growing economic crisis is presenting the working class with a series of attacks on its living standards and posing some fundamental questions for the present and the future.

Situated and divided between India, Pakistan and China, all three of them nuclear powers, and claimed by both India and Pakistan, Kashmir has been a region of instability since the British left in 1947. Recently however, tensions in the area have increased and the stakes are high...

Today, if you walk the streets of the towns and cities of Britain it seems that a permanent feature of city centres are desperate people, young and old, squatting in shop doorways begging for change...

We are publishing a contribution from one of our sympathisers, Mark Hayes, which criticises a number of formulations contained in the resolutions from our recent 23rd international congress, together with an initial reply to the comrade’s critcisms. As we say at the end of the reply, “it is the duty of any revolutionary organisation worth its salt to shine the starkest possible light on the reality of the challenge facing the proletariat. We are convinced that the analysis we are developing is best equipped to do this, but this discussion will certainly continue. We are still at the beginnings of fully understanding all the implications of the unfolding period, and criticism and debate is the only way to develop the clearest way forward for our analyses of the world situation”

Over a hundred years ago Frederick Engels stated that, if left to its own devices, capitalism would lead society into barbarism and ruin. Today, we can say that this is already happening and that if unchecked it will continue to do so and drag us down with it. The following article examines two important examples.

We publishing these extracts from a recent exchange of correspondence with a young reader in Arizona, focussing on the question of elections. In the original message sent by this comrade, he said he was in general agreement with our platform, which he considered to be “thorough and detailed”. However, he expressed one major disagreement: against our “rigid anti-parliamentarianism” he argued that communists can use elections “strictly as a platform to gain public attention”.

As this article was being finalised, the US experienced two more mass shootings on the weekend of August 3rd. These events underscore the deepening crisis of bourgeois social life and demonstrate that the bourgeoisie is itself experiencing an increasing loss of control over society, more and more unable to construct a shared civic narrative that binds the population together in a common identity, however mythical.

We live in a society which makes the very terms “democracy” and the “people” empty of meaning. We live in a capitalist society based on the exploitation of one class by another. The exploiting class holds the vast bulk of wealth in its hands, and the state, political power, is there to guarantee its privileges, as are the means of ideological domination such as the press, the TV, and the mainstream social media. The following article argues that In such a society, the “people” is a term used to hide these class divisions and “democracy” serves to mask the monopoly of power held by the ruling class.

In the first part of this article, we recalled the circumstances in which the Third International (Communist International) was founded. The existence of the world party depended above all on the extension of the revolution on a global scale, and its capacity to assume its responsibilities in the class depended on the way in which the regroupment of revolutionaries from which it arose was carried out. But, as we showed, the method adopted in the foundation of the Communist International (CI), favouring the largest number rather than the clarification of positions and political principles, had not armed the new world party. Worse, it made it vulnerable to rampant opportunism within the revolutionary movement. This second part aims to highlight the content of the fight waged by the left fractions against the political line of the CI to retain old tactics made obsolete by the opening of capitalism’s decadent phase.

Anyone who claims to belong to the communist left has the responsibility to know and to make known the history of this component of the workers’ movement, its origins in reaction to the degeneration of the parties of the Communist International, and the different branches which compose it (the Italian left, the German-Dutch left etc). It is above all important to draw out very precisely the historic contours of the communist left and the differences which separate it from other left currents of the past, notably the Trotskyist current. This is the object of the present article.

Eighty years ago, one of the most important events of the 20th century, the Spanish Civil War, came to an end. This major conflict was at the heart of the world situation in the 1930s. It had been at the centre of international political attention for several years. It would provide a decisive test for all political tendencies claiming to be proletarian and revolutionary. For example, it was in Spain that Stalinism would play a part, for the first time outside the USSR, as the executioner of the proletariat. Likewise, it would be around the Spanish question that a decantation would take place within the currents that had fought against the degeneration and betrayal of the communist parties in the 1920s, a decantation dividing them into those who would maintain an internationalist position during the Second World War and those who ended up participating in it, such as the Trotskyist movement.