China, a boom with feet of clay

All bourgeois economists are terrified by the catastrophic consequences which may be produced by SARS (the so-called severe acute respiratory syndrome) in the Chinese economy and the consequences on an international level. Will the astonishing Chinese economic development succeed in overcoming the panic of recent months or will it decline, dragging the entire world economy into the vortex of...

Stalin and Stalinism

Politics: 

By one of those ironies of history March 2003 saw both the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Stalin and the one hundred and twentieth anniversary of the death of Marx. Despite all bourgeois denigrations (naturally by those who have not read him) Marx demonstrated that capitalist society was not the final stage of human development.

Background on the Italian Communist Left, Bordiga and Bordigism

(The following text was originally written for the US magazine Discussion Bulletin and did actually appear in its final edition. It was written as a reply to a text published in an earlier edition of the same magazine. This was written by Macintosh, a member of the councilist organisation which publishes Internationalist Perspectives.

Permanent War is American Capitalism’s Response to the Crisis

People: 
Basics: 

The American economy is in a much worse state than the statistics would appear to indicate. What we are witnessing is a crisis which is not only a crisis of neo-liberalism, but also a crisis of those Keynesian ideas, which were, in their day, seen as the solution to the inadequacies of the economic policy of free exchange which held sway in the Great Depression of the '30's.

May Day in Time of War

Publications: 

Fellow workers! · Capitalism’s drive for profitable accumulation has been in crisis for a long time now. In fact we have reached the point where the world’s greatest power [the USA] survives only thanks to its capacity to drain surplus value from the rest of the world in the form of parasitic income and because it does not have to pay its debts - a consequence of the enormous power of both the...

War, imperialism and the working class

Editorial · The new war with Iraq has revealed the barbaric destruction which our rulers are prepared to unleash on the inhabitants of any state which refuses to cooperate with their imperialist plans. This display of savagery is a stark message for the US rivals who have frustrated its plans at the UN.

Iraq - War and imperialist occupation

(Image - US war aims) · With the invasion of Iraq the US has announced its determination to launch pre-emptive wars anywhere in the world where it feels it has important interests and to change the governments of states which oppose its dictates. What is, in fact, announced is that the constraints under which US imperialism has operated up to now no longer apply.

North Korea - Another imperialist war is being

(Image - Only the bourgeoisie could claim the Kim dynasty has anything to do with communism!) · prepared · When Bush delivered his famous “axis of evil” speech in January 2001 he specifically mentioned three countries the US intended to attack, Iraq, Iran and North Korea. We are now seeing the US invasion of Iraq, and although this has assumed a position of centre stage in the spectacle we are...

Firefighters

Restart the strikes - Break out of the union prison · On 19th March the Firefighters’ delegates rejected the latest offer put forward by the bosses, despite the fact that the union desperately urged then to accept. The government promptly announced its intention to impose a settlement on the firefighters by force, using a legal injunction and the power of the state through the courts and the...

The dollar in continual decline

(Image - 120 day record of the dollar against the euro, ending 23rd March 2003 - Note the slight, and probably temporary, recovery caused by the second Gulf War) · ... And the international monetary system falls into crisis - We are publishing a text from the January edition of Battaglia Comunista, the monthly paper of our sister organisation in Italy, the Partito Comunista Internazionalista.

Class Consciousness and Working Class Political Organisation (Part VIII): The Decline of the Russian Revolution and the Cult of the Party

Class consciousness and working class political organisation - Part eight · Introduction · In the last two parts of this article we have looked at the Russian Revolution. Despite taking place more than 80 years ago, it remains the single most important event for shaping our understanding of the question of class consciousness in this epoch.

On Class Composition and Recomposition in the Globalisation of Capital (Part I)

(We are publishing here a text from Prometeo 6, VIth series, December 2002. This discusses the effects of changes in the structure of capitalism on the structure of the working class and the political consequences of these effects. In particular, it reviews the predictions of a text written ten years ago, the translation of which appeared in Internationalist Communist Review no.

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