Internationalist Communist Tendency's blog

Two articles on the recent developments in the US and UK automotive industry.

A century ago, from 2nd — 6th March 1919, 52 delegates, more than 40 from various political organisations outside Russia, met in Moscow.

Since the 2008 economic crisis, the ballooning global debt has increased from $20 trillion to over $240 trillion. With this exponential growth of indebtedness and an unresolvable crisis of accumulation, capitalism is losing its grip. The effects of this crisis are felt no more clearly than within the maquiladora sweatshops on the northern border of Mexico. Here sub-assemblies are pieced together for the struggling US automobile industry north of the Rio Grande.

A spectre haunts the world today. It is the spectre of “socialism”. Commentators of left and right, of reactionary or reformist inclination, agree that “after three decades in the wilderness, socialism is back.”

War or no war, one thing is certain, and that is the bourgeoisie — Chavista or oppositionist — cannot take society anywhere. There is no viable solution based on the nation and certainly not a capitalist one.

Recent political events in Venezuela have once again brought to the fore its devastating economic situation. The struggle for power between Maduro and Guaidò, or between a fraudulently re-elected president and an opposition candidate who has proclaimed himself president, besides giving Venezuela a grotesque image, hides the real scenario of an economic and political human tragedy.

The article below has been provided by a CWO sympathiser. It gives a brief sketch of a continuing struggle where we again see workers organising themselves against their bosses and against the bosses' props, the Labor Unions. At this point the outcome of the struggle is not yet determined but even now it is clear that the struggle is part of our class's resistance against the capitalists' crisis-driven onslaught.

It is because the AWL appears to attract a number of genuine young militants who are seeking change that we have decided to examine here their politics and activity.

Neither Maduro nor Guaidó have anything to offer the working-class in the face of this turmoil.

We present an article from the Internationalist Communists Oceania (internationalist-communists-oceania.netlify.com), a new Left Communist regroupment effort in the Oceania region.

Two pieces of news from Mexico currently appear in the press around the world: a new historical record in the number of homicides and the explosion of a Pemex pipeline in Tlahuelilpan, which has left almost a hundred corpses already. Everything in Mexico leads us to despair. But there is something important going on that the international media is not broadcasting.

The world economy is in poor shape and the American economy is in even worse condition. The 2008 crisis has not been resolved and many analysts fear a new financial explosion. Capital continues to stay clear of investment in production and is trying to recover without running up more debts. Company returns are low, profit rates are decreasing. Capital is moving more and more into speculation. It is the same old situation, except that the rescue costs of the previous crisis cannot be repeated in the next crisis. The sound of war can be heard in the distance, accompanied by the rising threat of a new, catastrophic barbarism.

A growing gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is in itself only a symptom of the disease. The real problem is that capitalism in crisis has nothing left to offer but increasing misery for the mass of the population. And 2019 will be no different.

At the time of writing – early January 2019 – it is difficult to say whether the movement of the gilets jaunes has entered a phase of reflux before it dies down or if it is going through a pause after more than a month of intense activity and severe clashes with the state.

On this day [15 January] exactly a century ago Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered in cold blood by Freikorps troops under the command of the Social Democratic Party. It decapitated the leadership of the young German Communist Party which then oscillated between putschism and opportunism for the rest of its existence. The consequences were that the world revolution, which the revolutionaries in Russia had counted on, did not take place.

An Italian comrade takes a sardonic look at the latest abasement of so-called “academic Marxists” at the feet of the new imperialist order à la chinois.

On 5 January demonstrators wearing yellow vests assembled in London to demand a ‘hard’ Brexit that will fulfil their nationalist fantasies. In reality that will not happen because it runs so sharply against the interests of the ruling class both in Britain and elsewhere in the European Union.

It was the tripling of bread prices which sparked off the current revolt in Sudan. People first took to the streets in the town of Atbara in north eastern Sudan on 19 December 2018, but they did not restrict their demands to bread even though some had not managed to find any in four days. They had had enough of the brutal military dictatorship of Omar Hassan al-Bashir which has ruled the country since 1989. The protestors not only demanded “freedom, peace, and justice” but also echoed the slogan of the 2011 Arab Spring that “the people want the fall of the regime.” As a symbol of their wider political demands, the ruling party headquarters in Atbara was burned to the ground.

To see the new phase of the crisis, which began with the bursting of the speculative bubble in 2008, as just a repeat of the same decades-long pattern of boom and bust, is a mistake. It is a gross misunderstanding of the impasse that capitalism has come to today.

Pantomimes usually start in December and end early in the New Year. The Brexit version at the Westminster Palais looks set for an extended run.