Blogs

The life of Francesc Sabaté Llopart, aka ‘El Quico’, reads like the story of an anarchist action film: participating in the Spanish Civil War, the anti-Nazi resistance in France and armed struggle against Franco, Sabaté carried out assassinations of fascists, illegal border crossings across the Pyrenees and armed robberies to fund the resistance.

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.

An interview about the recent Imagining Abolition conference and the politics of prison abolition.
From The Word From Struggle Street

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.

A Libertarian Communist analysis of the Great Leap Forward under Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Communists which aims to show that the Great Leap Forward was a capitalist project rather than a socialist, or communist one.

A critical review Peter Gelderloos' How Nonviolence Protects the State, a much-read but rarely analysed book.

If you’ve ever expressed a political view to the left of Tony Blair, chances are you’ve been met with a response along the lines of: ‘Haven’t you ever read any Orwell?’ The irony of this statement is usually in how little Orwell that person has actually read.