October 10, two truck drivers from Seine-et-Marne launched an appeal on Facebook for November 17, entitled: "National blockage against the rise in fuel prices". Their message spread very quickly on social media, attracting up to 20,000 "interested" people while initiatives and appeals multiplied. Without trade unions or political parties a whole series of actions, rallies and blockades were spontaneously organised.

Our comrade Elisabeth has left us at the age of 77. She died from breathing difficulties which provoked a cardiac arrest, on the night of Saturday/Sunday 18 November.

November 11, 2018: exactly one hundred years after the Great War was ended. The "celebrations" planned and organised by the ruling class have been many and spread widely by the media.

The first part of a series looking at the detrimental political and organisational impact that parties of the extreme left of capital - including Socialist and Communist parties, Trotskyism, Maoism, official anarchism and the so-called "New Left" of Syriza or Podemos - exert on the proletariat's revolutionary organisations. 

The ICC held public meetings in a number of cities across several countries to coincide with the 50th anniversary of May 1968. The idea that May 68 had signalled the development of a wave of struggles internationally was generally of no surprise to those present. But paradoxically, it was still not considered the case that May 68 marked the end of the long period of counter-revolution that resulted from the defeat of the first world revolutionary wave and which, at the same time, opened a new course towards class confrontations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat...

In August Internationalist Voice posted a position on the ICC's web forum on the wave of protests in the Middle East affecting the countries of Jordan, Iran and Iraq. Here is a response from a close sympathiser of the ICC.

In this article, we aim to show how the ANC’s project of rescuing and defending capitalist social relations in South Africa was implemented methodically by its successive leaders, in the first place by Nelson Mandela.

It's been estimated that between 300 and 500 people were massacred by the army on October 2 1968 on Tlatelolco Square. While the exact number, and still less the official list of the victims, is unknown to this day, the bourgeoisie has been able to exploit its own crimes, as the recent elections and commemorations around the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre demonstrate...  

A hundred years ago we were at height of the world revolutionary wave – more precisely, the outbreak of the revolution in Germany, a year after the proletariat took power in Russia, in October 1917.

“100 Years ago, the proletariat made the ruling class tremble”. This title may sound odd today because this immense historical event has more or less been consigned to oblivion. The bourgeoisie has succeeded in erasing it from the memory of the working class. And yet in 1918, all eyes were on Germany – a source of hope for the proletariat, and of fear for the bourgeoisie.

The working class had just taken power in Russia. 1917. The Bolsheviks. The soviets. The insurrection...

Germany was the bolt on the door between East and West. A victorious revolution here would open the way to the revolutionary class struggle throughout the old continent of Europe. None of the bourgeoisies wanted to see this door unbolted. This is why the bourgeoisie was to direct all its hatred, and all its most sophisticated manoeuvres, against it. The revolution in Germany would determine the success or failure of the world revolution which had begun in Russia...

We are publishing here a response to the analysis drafted by Emma Goldman (1869-1940) in the first years after the October 1917 revolution. After her expulsion from the United States in January 1920 she spent two years in Russia, then published three books: “I consider then, and still consider, that the Russian problem is entirely too complex to speak lightly of it”, she wrote in the introduction to her first book. We are responding to Emma Goldman because she was a central figure of the revolutionary workers’ movement in the United States at the time of the First World War. Because of her determination to defend a clearly internationalist position against the war she was nicknamed “Emma the Red - America's Most Dangerous Woman” by the American ruling class. But there are other reasons to examine Goldman's positions in more detail...

On November 4 1918 the sailors of Kiel on the Baltic coast mutinied, refusing the order to engage in yet another futile naval battle. Within days armed workers’ and soldiers’ councils were springing up all over Germany. This revolt spelt the end of the imperialist slaughter: the bourgeoisies of the world, who had been at each others’ throats for four long years, now united to face a bigger threat: the extension of the proletarian revolution from Russia to the most industrialised countries in Europe.

A century after, the German revolution has almost been written out of history. It is still in the interests of our rulers to present the revolution in Russia as a purely Russian affair and to pretend that the world revolution was and is an idle dream. And yet the revolution in Germany showed that it was indeed a possibility, despite its failure. It is up to us to draw its principal lessons for future revolutionary movements of the working class, and this will be the main focus of the meeting.

Below are some lengthy extracts from an article in our territorial press of the ICC section in Mexico.

The electoral campaign, running from 2017 to June of this year, has been so overpowering and invasive that it succeeded in turning out 56 million people to vote. This represents the highest level of participation in the history of the country. Everything has been done to feed the image of democracy and elections among the population, in particular among the exploited...

The summer of 2018 has produced the hottest ever recorded temperatures across the northern hemisphere, and across 4 continents with an untold number of people dead as a consequence. There have been horrendous fires around the globe and the oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic has started to break up. It's not just a case of excessive temperatures: there have been storms and flash flooding too... Capitalism is driving the world towards disaster, reflecting its blind and destructive impulses and its historical bankruptcy.

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Seventy years of the National Health Service, founded in 1948, has been celebrated on TV, by a service at Westminster Abbey, and by numerous events in hospitals. The NHS is, in its own words, “our country’s most trusted and respected social institution” . Even those who protest at the way it is run do so because they are against “the assault on the NHS” (Socialist Worker 3/3/18).  People love the NHS, and want to protect it. It all seems too good to be true, a national institution loved by all from the Countess of Wessex at the service in Westminster Abbey (even if royalty invariably use private hospitals) to the poorest in the land, and from right to extreme left of the political spectrum. This ideology, supported by all the bourgeoisie’s political forces, is based on many falsehoods...

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The spectre of an accelerating trade war is haunting capitalism. It may seem difficult to understand in a period where production has never been so global and the “free movement of capital and labour” has been an almost unassailable credo of the world’s leading politicians and economists for decades. But it is precisely the inherent contradiction between capital’s thrust towards conquering the globe, and the inhibiting framework of the nation state, which is behind this new surge of protectionism. 

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Ever since the UK’s Referendum of June 2016 the British bourgeoisie has been in a turmoil of division and instability. For generations identified as an experienced and skilful manipulator of the social situation, the British bourgeoisie, in the form of the Cameron government, made a fundamental mistake when, in trying to take the steam out of increasing populism, it called a referendum which resulted in a vote to leave the EU.

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On 25 May, Harvey Weinstein, the now notorious American film producer, was led in handcuffs from a New York police station to a court where he was charged with rape and sexual abuse. He was freed on bail while awaiting trial and fitted with an ankle bracelet to monitor his movements. At the beginning, media coverage of the “Weinstein affair” served mainly as a pretext for embarrassing US President Trump and pushing towards his impeachment. However, the international impact of this case shows that there is much more involved than yet another Machiavellian strategy of the bourgeoisie. It reveals a real and profound indignation around the condition of women in this society... 

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The following article is one of several through which we plan to deal with the rise of China and its consequences for imperialist relations worldwide. For reasons of space we will focus in this article on the New Silk Road. In future we look in more detail at Chinese ambitions in Africa and Latin America and examine its overall rivalry with the US.

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