left communism

For those not fortunate to have been born with a silver spoon in their mouth and happy with the status quo, who want to see change, the task of finding a political home is no mean feat. For many the answer is obvious enough. It may be a simple ”Leave the EU” or “Get the Tories out”. But for many workers, Corbyn and his Labour Party represent the way out.

Today (‎9/11/19) marks the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (which did not quite make its own thirtieth anniversary). It will be accompanied by the usual capitalist paeans to the wonders of democracy and the capitalist way of doing things. The following article from Communist Review 8 (later Internationalist Communist) appeared in January 1990 but has never been reproduced digitally before. It was our deeper reflection not only on the collapse of the USSR’s empire in the East but the burgeoning crisis of world capitalism as a whole

The document which follows comes from a speech at a public meeting held by the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) on 16 October 1979, two days after the death of Onorato Damen. Neither we nor our Italian comrades have ever made a fetish of Damen, despite his stature as a revolutionary, and the enormous contribution he made to the foundation of what today is our Internationalist Communist Tendency. However, we could not let the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of his death go unmarked.

The role of China in the imperialist pecking order has been covered many times on our website (leftcom.org). Here we deal with China’s evolution from a largely agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse which has also created the world’s largest working class – and what comes with that is, of course, simmering class conflict.