This document was originally drafted in May for the Annual General Meeting of the CWO. Since then a number of events have taken place, key among them Israel’s attack on Iran and Trump’s threats to impose more tariffs on Europe. On our website you can find further analysis of these developments which only reinforce our perspectives for this period.

In September this year it will be fifty years since the foundation of the Communist Workers’ Organisation (CWO), so it is therefore an appropriate moment to review the strengths and weaknesses of our perspective over that time before posing our analysis of where we are today.

Obviously much has changed in half a century but the central bedrock of our Marxist analysis has not. The CWO was formed shortly after the end of the post-war boom or, in Marxist terms, when the third cycle of accumulation of capitalism’s imperialist epoch had entered its phase of decline. This crisis had provoked a massive upsurge in the class war across the world. There were already signs of it (May 68 in France being the most dramatic example), even before the US government announced its renunciation of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 (which fixed the dollar at $35 to an ounce of gold, and enshrined it as the basic currency of the global financial trading system in all areas of the world not dominated by the USSR). It was this crisis that provided the impetus for the formation of the CWO (in common with many other political forces coming out of the working class at that time). As always in history, attempts at organised political response came a little after the height of those struggles and at a time when it was gradually becoming clear that economism (the struggle for wages rather than a conscious struggle against the capitalist system of wage labour) was dominant everywhere.

Economism was hardly a surprise, even at the time. When we discuss the counter-revolutionary role of Social Democracy we often focus on their support for imperialist war in 1914, and the violent role the parties of the Second International played in crushing the revolutionary wave which brought the First World War to an end, especially in Germany. But that was not where the counter-revolutionary role of Social Democracy ended. Once the isolation of the Russian Revolution to a single country eventually produced the state capitalist monstrosity of Stalinism posing as “socialism”, it was an easy task for Social Democracy to live up to its “power through the ballot box” name. “Democratic Socialism” would play a central role in integrating the working class into the capitalist state over the next 50 years. Whilst the trade unions would police the class war and keep it within the bounds of capitalist legality, the state increasingly came to regulate all aspects of social existence. After the Second World War the incipient signs of reviving working class resistance (and against the alternative threat of the USSR’s allegedly “socialist” society) led the capitalists everywhere to adopt Social Democratic ideas by introducing social security and other welfare benefits. And as the devaluation of the war opened up the possibility for greater profitable investment, the post-war boom that followed became the longest in capitalist history, with the capitalists increasingly able to turn profits into investments creating gradually higher wages for workers and thus a sense of progress for the working class. In France it was “les trente glorieuses” (the thirty glorious years) and in Italy “il sorpasso” (the overtaking) whilst to West Germans after the privations of occupation it became the “Wirtschaftswunder” (the economic miracle). In the UK, the Conservative Prime Minister could even truthfully tell the electorate in 1957 that “most of our people have never had it so good”.⁽¹⁾ As in the 1920s, politicians in the Western capitalist world began to argue that capitalism had overcome its repeated crises as we headed into the “swinging Sixties”. All this began to unravel in the late 1960s, as the pretence that the US’ horde of gold in Fort Knox was equal to the amount of dollars circulating internationally, was undermined by the continuing balance of payments and budget deficits of the US. By abandoning the dollar’s link to gold the US opened the way for its devaluation and the era of floating currency exchanges began.⁽²⁾ The collapse of the post-war boom drew the comrades who founded Revolutionary Perspectives to read, first Paul Mattick’s Marx and Keynes and then, via that, to the volumes of Marx’s Capital. This resulted in the first draft of The Economic Foundations of Capitalist Decadence in 1974 which we are now reprinting and bringing up to the current period (soon to appear as a pamphlet).⁽³⁾ The more experienced Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) had also defended the same economic analysis since the 1940s, so after we accepted many of their political critiques of our organisational positions, it became the shared basis for the formation of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. Subsequently, as new organisations around the world affiliated to it, it would become today’s Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT).

Nothing that has happened in the interim has caused us to doubt the basic message of that original analysis; that the central economic contradictions of capitalism are a result of the law of value, and how that explains the tendential fall in the rate of profit. In the age of state capitalism it also explains how in the highly concentrated capitalism of today the competition between capitalists takes the form of imperialist rivalry between states. What had been cyclical crises every decade or so in the nineteenth century became an infernal round of boom-bust-war in the twentieth century.

It has to be said however that the young comrades who founded the CWO did not expect the crisis to be as long drawn out as the current one. Indeed the alternative of “socialism or barbarism” seemed to be increasingly on the historic agenda especially after it became clear that the economic crisis of Western capitalism was mirrored by crisis in the USSR’s bloc.⁽⁴⁾

But that is precisely what we are still living through. After capitalism’s longest (and richest) boom we have since had the longest period of decline in any cycle of accumulation in capitalist history. In the 1970s we did not expect the capitalists would respond to the massive waves of struggle across the world by abandoning national control of the “commanding heights of the economy”. After all, in an imperialist world, and after two world wars, control of each state’s production of steel and other essential commodities was deemed necessary for national defence. Why would they abandon investment in them? But given the losses they were making, and given the stubborn resistance of workers to accept a decline in living standards, the capitalist class had reached an impasse. The Social Democratic model of the “mixed economy” with its constant printing of money (deficit financing) to “stimulate” economic activity was no longer tenable given the lack of investment due to the falling rate of profit. Printing money in those circumstances only created “stagflation”. From 1979 onwards capitalist governments basically wrote off much of the investment and sacked workers by the millions. Fighting for wages is one thing, fighting for jobs when capital can’t, or won’t, invest is another. Unemployment was as good a way as any of taming the class war and once the great concentration of workers had been cowed (sometimes in massive battles which the unions managed to keep isolated sector by sector) the system could attempt to restore profitability by denationalisation, deregulation and financialisation. At the same time, Western capital poured into China where the followers of Mao Zedong had been defeated after his death in 1976. The “capitalist roaders” of Deng Xiaoping created Special Economic Zones to bring in Western capital which was only too glad to find cheap and compliant labour to exploit there. The rest can be summed up as what we now know as globalisation, with cheap Chinese commodities battering down all walls (with apologies to Marx). The fact that Western capital now sought the cheap labour of China, and elsewhere, was the clearest confirmation that the labour theory of value explained the real source of capitalist profit. Lower paid workers around the world were creating the commodities which global capitalism profited from. The main beneficiaries of this were China … and the US. Whilst the one reaped in the rewards of trade, the other was the one state which has been able to go on printing money, as the dollar has remained global currency standard even though it is no longer linked to gold. The “exorbitant” privilege of the dollar has allowed the US to print money to buy what it likes with few consequences at home for the last four decades. The main consequence has been bloated budgetary and trade deficits — whilst the rest of the world has experienced the full force of the crisis. US capital (unlike the US workers who lost better paid jobs only partially compensated for by being able to buy cheap Chinese commodities!) has been living off the rest of the world since then — the precise opposite of the Trump narrative of “everyone has been ripping us off” but we will return to that later.

The Collapse of the USSR

As stated above, we had already identified the economic crisis in the USSR and its empire in the 1970s (which had nothing “soviet” or “socialist” about it) as not only similar to that of the West, but even worse. One of the great myths of the post-war period was that there were two super-powers who dominated the world but, as we noted at the time, the USSR was not even close to competing economically with the US. If it had not used the protection of non-convertible currency (the real Iron Curtain against the West) it too would have fallen under the control of the US. Whereas the latter had remained unscathed by the Second World War, the USSR had survived at the cost of 20 million deaths and much of its infrastructure destroyed. The only way in which it competed with the US was on the military front especially after the acquisition of the nuclear bomb in 1949. It basically looted German heavy industry to replenish what the Nazis had destroyed in the USSR after 1945 but this was not a real asset as it meant it continued to use older technology. Stalin’s Five Year Plans after 1928 had only been about building a defence industry, and even in the best growth years there was nothing like the growth in the West. When the crisis struck in the Brezhnev “years of stagnation” the plan of the “planned economy” came to dominate everything to absurd and counter-productive levels, which actually discouraged production in some areas and certainly did not boost productivity. And by the mid 1970s such was the crisis of agriculture that the USSR was buying grain from the US.

The invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 (the first time since 1945 that the Red Army advanced outside already occupied territory) betrayed a new anxiety in the Kremlin which only worsened with the revival of workers’ struggles in Poland in 1980. The invasion brought Cold War tensions to a new level and the USSR and the US began an arms race which caused some to speculate that a Third World War was imminent (especially in 1983 when NATO carried out Operation Able Archer and posted cruise missiles in Europe). With the US only spending 6% of its GDP on armaments but the USSR 25% (which still meant a much lower figure in real terms than the US) the Kremlin recognised that reform was necessary but could not agree on what form that should take⁽⁵⁾ and Gorbachev’s “glasnost” and “perestroika” only provoked a revolt of the “apparatchiks” who feared for their vested interests and their coup brought the USSR to collapse. The crisis of the USSR was no surprise but the fact that a major imperialist power could collapse without a war for the first time in history only confirmed the fact that it had never been on an equal footing with the US.⁽⁶⁾

The Hubris of Western Imperialism and the Bursting of the Speculative Bubble

Triumphalism in the West at the “end of history” and the beginning of a “new world order” on the international stage was accompanied by the expansion of so-called “neo-liberal” policies in most countries. At the core of it was the handing over of former state-owned assets to private capital, thus enriching the few whilst lowering the wages of the many. In Russia, Western advice was accepted by the Yeltsin regime. It resulted in the transfer of state property to oligarchs who had the insider knowledge and access to capital to buy up all the shares issued to individuals. It led to the collapse of the rouble. In the West, the deregulation of finance and the abandonment of banking safeguards brought in after the Wall St Crash of 1929 led to a fever of financial speculation. This involved trading “assets” which were based on profits not yet realised and, in some cases, would never be realised. All kinds of financial instruments were created which attempted to disguise the fact that loans were issued to those who could not possibly pay them back. We said for years that that the system was unsustainable and thus the 2007-8 bursting of the bubble did not come as a surprise nor did the fact that the state would have to intervene once again as the financial institutions at the heart of the system were “too big to fail”. The banks got new injections of cash (Quantitative Easing), as the state took on their debts, whilst the rest of us got austerity.

On the international front the much heralded “peace dividend” at the end of the Cold War never happened. Imperialist rivalry will not go away as long as capitalism exists. In particular, the US still had the hegemony of the dollar to defend, as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi discovered in 2003 and 2011 respectively. Both had tried to sell oil in currencies other than the dollar, and both were removed and killed by US-led invasions.

The consequences of these Western interventions, like the US’ policy in Afghanistan where radical Islamists had initially been supported in their fight against the USSR, was to open the door to the rise of radical Islamist organisations like al-Qaeda and ISIS (backed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar). Those coming from states where Islam is the dominant religion, including migrants and asylum seekers fleeing the very wars (like Syria) that outside imperialist interests have fomented and financed, were now demonised. Islamophobia in the West has been a significant factor in the rise of a xenophobic populist nationalism there.

It is however not the only consequence. Despite all the expedients to offset the decline in the rate of profit, growth rates have remained lower than at any time in the history of capitalism. Whilst real wages have stagnated, prices have not, and living standards have continued to fall. Those who were already poor (and the not-so-poor) have increasingly had to turn to food banks to survive whilst the lack of affordable housing has only fuelled hatred of anyone seeking asylum in the supposedly richer countries. Meanwhile the coffers of the billionaires of finance and social media companies continue to fill enabling their even stronger influence over the political process. Never has Lenin’s observation that there can be no democracy without equality been more apposite. When billionaires can offer millions of dollars for votes, “democracy for the moneybags” (Lenin) is out in the open.⁽⁷⁾

The Road to a Third World War

The perspective we first articulated in 1975 about the historic choice between “socialism or barbarism” is now closer than ever. As we have been arguing since January 2022⁽⁸⁾ all the expedients to attempt to kickstart a new cycle of accumulation are now exhausted and once again we are faced with a world heading down the road to generalised warfare. Nothing that has happened in the meantime has done anything to make us doubt that perspective. On the contrary, the US-led West, by its repeated use of the “economic weapon” has created an alliance of convenience amongst the sanctioned powers (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) which has now taken them into conflict with the West. As the war in Ukraine has already demonstrated, this is not a “new Cold War” as some pundits claimed. The situation is totally different. In the Cold War, both the USSR and US were victorious powers and both had more to lose than gain from outright (and possibly nuclear) war, so conflict was not direct. The nearest they came to blows was in proxy wars and manoeuvres on the global chessboard.

Today the situation is entirely different. Given the stagnation of the capitalist system, no power is economically assured of its future, and all have intensifying problems of debt and declining capacity to maintain the kinds of society they have hitherto maintained. The rise of nationalism is not just found in the West. As is now well established, the unintended consequence of US capital seeking greater profits abroad in the face of the class war at home in 1980s and 1990s has been to nurture a challenger to its own hegemony in China. Here, Xi Jinping has cultivated a similar narrow nationalism asserting China’s new-found economic strength in contrast to the humiliation of its past treatment by foreign powers. And this nationalism is not confined to rhetoric about retaking Taiwan. China is already ahead of the US in several areas of technology (processing rare earths for example)⁽⁹⁾ and in AI. China also has an LEO satellite system that could replace the GPS system currently dominated by the US. This would not only give it increased surveillance over the planet (until now a US monopoly) but allow China to draw poorer states into its orbit instead of using US-based systems.

US military power is still far ahead of the rest of the world, and it is still the only global player in this respect. But cyber-technology and the fact that China has built a more modern fleet, etc., means the gap is closing and there is already a technological arms race between both powers. The rivalry here is not new and not confined to Trump. It was the Obama administration that first recognised the threat when it adopted the “pivot to Asia” in 2011 but the policy then was to get involved with other Asian states (at the time 40% of growth in the world economy was located there) whilst at the same time maintaining direct links with China. Under both Trump and Biden US policy has become more aggressive towards China but whilst Biden sought to build alliances (AUKUS, etc.) in defence of “democracy” against the “authoritarian” states, Trump’s MAGA could be restyled “Make America Go it Alone”.

Trump’s premise in his MAGA policy is that the US is in decline (otherwise why does America have to “become great” again?). For this he, and all the radical Right leaders in their different ways, don’t blame the laws of capital but previous policies that failed to deal with the profound structural crisis the whole world capitalist system now finds itself in. To Trump, past policies like globalisation and investment abroad have “ripped off” America. Now he wants to cut US debts since the servicing costs of these alone amounts to $1.2 trillion which coincidentally is equal to the huge US annual trade deficit. His aim is to cut these amounts by bringing jobs (i.e. investment) back to the US via massive tariffs on commodities made abroad (including those by US firms with overseas production, like Apple).

He also is no longer concerned to present the US as the policeman of the world. He saw the futility of the Bush era “forever wars against terror”, so his “peace” initiatives, like that in Afghanistan, basically means pulling the US out of an area whatever the consequences. Next is Europe, where Trump has been leveraging every bit of US economic power in both his terms in office. Europe acted as the forward base of the US in the Cold War but NATO has now become “a rip-off” unless the Europeans cough up more money. As we said in the ICT statement in January:

... the economy of Europe, the “loyal servant” of the US, has been brought to its knees. In fact, the “Ukraine campaign”, was a war between the US and Russia, fought on the backs of the Ukrainians and paid for in economic, commercial and energy terms by Europe. With its energy source cut off, detached from its reliance on Russia and trade relations blocked by sanctions, Germany has entered into recession while France and Italy have seen their rate of GDP growth decline by up to 50% compared to previous levels. Governments have had to revise their growth outlooks downwards resulting in the dismantling of welfare benefits, and the usual repercussions on wages, healthcare and education.⁽¹⁰⁾

Europe’s subservience to the US has thus increased whilst Ukraine and Russia have fought themselves almost to a standstill making it easier for Trump to make a deal for the US to obtain much-needed Ukrainian rare earths in return for continuing US military aid. The second part of his scheme to browbeat both Ukraine and Russia into a peace deal has not been achieved for the simple reason that in this imperialist conflict there is no basis for peace. Russia will not give up the territory it has conquered at such material cost, and Ukraine cannot sign any deal that would leave it open to yet more attacks.

There is even less scope for a solution of the “Palestinian question” under capitalism. The hypocrisy of the US “two-state solution” was exposed long ago but the post 7 October events have made it quite clear that Israel intends to colonise not only Gaza but the West Bank as well. The massacres in both places are intended to drive the Palestinians out of the territories completely. Trump’s arrival in the White House has torn off the mask of US hypocrisy as he openly supported the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It also coincided with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria which has completely undermined Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance”. Even this victory has not been enough for the Netanyahu regime which has continued to attack Syrian targets in order to ensure that no Islamist regime there will ever have the means to fight Israel. As we have said many times, the only viable solution in the Middle East (and elsewhere) is a “no-state solution” where national boundaries cease to exist in a world community of freely associated producers. At present this is only a chimera and what we see instead is the kind of death, criminal atrocity and destruction in the Middle East (and elsewhere like Sudan and Congo) that will be visiting a neighbourhood near us all unless the behemoth of the capitalist system is stopped.

Instead the path to a wider war is looking shorter. Trump’s talk of “peace” in Ukraine is just a readjustment to prepare the ground for the one war all the US ruling elite are agreed on. As is now clear, his tariff war has principally only one target — China. Trump may actually believe in the coherence of his vision but most of his policies in the international field seem to be counter-productive. His withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in his first term for example has only benefited China which has been able to enter into enhanced trade relations with other countries. And to Trump’s obvious surprise, China, instead of coming begging for a deal, retaliated to his tariffs of 145% with 125% tariffs of its own. It is a trial of strength which will determine the fate of the world. We do not yet know where the current tariff war will end but given that these are the kind of tariffs not seen since before the Second World War we can only remind ourselves that tariff wars have generally preceded shooting wars.

Here the Ukraine War has been a wake up call for all the major powers. Supplying the weaponry (missiles, shells and tanks) to Ukraine alone over the last three years has exposed the problem of abandoning the “commanding heights” of the economy back in the 1980s and 1990s. Military supply chains are not easy to restart (and this is one factor which will delay a wider global conflict), but rearmament and retooling for war have already begun.

World military expenditure reached $2718 billion in 2024, an increase of 9.4 per cent in real terms from 2023 and the steepest year-on-year rise since at least the end of the cold war. Military spending increased in all world regions, with particularly rapid growth in both Europe and the Middle East. The top five military spenders—the United States, China, Russia, Germany and India—accounted for 60 per cent of the global total.⁽¹¹⁾

Warfare rather than welfare is now the main priority with every country increasing military spending, whilst ignoring, or cutting, social programmes. In the UK the government has stepped in to maintain the country’s last two blast furnaces at Scunthorpe because the Chinese owners were planning to run the plant down. This would have left the UK as the only G7 country without the capacity to produce its own virgin steel, and would have made it dependent on … China.⁽¹²⁾ The German capitalist class are also going for the “guns not butter” strategy, even arguing that arms production will lift the national economy out of recession. But as our German comrades of the Gruppe Internationalistischer KommunistInnen (GIK) have pointed out, such “military Keynesianism” may have short term economic benefits but in the end (as with the Nazis in the 1930s) only leads down the road to war. Needless to say, arms producing firms shares are now booming.⁽¹³⁾

The other victim of the current heightened international tensions is any concern about global warming and climate change. The capitalist world has never been serious about dealing with climate change⁽¹⁴⁾ but, now that the demands for “energy security” have increased, there is even less interest in net zero, or any other necessary step to reduce global warming. On the contrary, with Trump in charge of the biggest polluter (on a per capita basis) in the world, there was never any chance that there would be any other outcome. Today’s decaying capitalist system has more than one way to prepare the annihilation of humanity.

Such are the various material factors which, in all their contradictions, have brought us to today’s increasingly deadly and dangerous reality.

How Can the Revolutionary Working Class Respond?

In subjective terms the economic stagnation of the last decade has given rise to the serious growth of the radical Right which goes beyond the Trump presidency in the US. With the traditional parties of the Left and Right having failed to resolve the fundamental problem of low growth the capitalist class is increasingly turning to nationalist populism. In Portugal, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands and Belgium, anti-immigrant parties now have more than 20% of the vote (and Reform in the UK has the same in opinion polls). With the simplistic message that all the ills of the world are due to migrants they have their scapegoat, and can promise the instant “solution” of deportation and closed borders. With social media outstripping other sources of information all kinds of conspiracies can be, and are, concocted, appealing especially to those workers who have suffered most from the decades-long decline of manufacturing in the old heartlands of capitalism due to globalisation and financialisation. The forces of the radical Right have significant backing, both in political terms, from the current US administration, and financially. Meloni (FdI), Milei (LLA), Farage (Reform), Weidel (AfD), Morawiecki (PiS), Zemmour (Reconquête), Van Grieken (Vlaams Belang), Abascal (Vox), and Ventura (Chega) were all invited to Trump’s inauguration (even if for various reasons not all could attend), whilst the likes of Charles Koch, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, finance social media propaganda and electoral campaigns to spread conspiracy theories and their narrow nationalist agenda.

The rise of the radical Right has been made all the easier because the Left of capital abandoned the working class decades ago to seek votes in identity politics. A strategy which has only divided the working class everywhere. And yet the working class, the majority of humanity who depend on wage work, remains the only real force capable of putting an end to the false alternatives of the capitalist Left and Right. However, they only can apply that force once they are more conscious of what is at stake, and have organised themselves in both the workplace, and in an international political organisation to coordinate the fight against world capitalism.

This will not happen “naturally” as a consequence of workers fighting against further attacks. There is no shortage of obstacles given that the class has been in retreat for decades. The old labour movement has been, to all intents, smashed, but its remnants are still in unions and parties which cannot see beyond finding a way to make capitalism “better” or at best the myth that capitalism can be abolished through the ballot box.

Additionally, the old communities of workers, clustered around some productive unit like a factory, have gone in the old capitalist countries, whilst the workers in the Special Economic Zones and “maquiladoras”, etc., are having to acquire a new tradition of struggle. Everywhere capitalism has done everything it can to reduce the worker to a single individual facing the system, either on short term or zero-hour contracts, or by laughingly giving us “self-employed” status.

But exploitation remains, and from time to time workers still resist as the contradictions of the system are not only not going away but increasing. In the longer term, anything can happen. Even revolution. At some point some workers will be unable to carry on living with the pressures of intensifying exploitation and denigration. They may not succeed at first, but could forge an exemplary model that could inspire workers everywhere to take up resistance. And this would then allow us to confront the next obstacle — the fragmentation and lack of communication between those who already are conscious of the imperative of getting rid of this system.

We said at the beginning that we are still under the shadow of a century of counter-revolution and that has had a divisive effect on revolutionary minorities. By “revolutionary minorities” we don’t include either those who think capitalism can be reformed, or those who think that the Russian Revolution finally ended in “socialism”. There can never be socialism in just one country and the isolation of that revolution of 1917 had by 1921 led to the demise of its original liberating programme and the rise of new form of state capitalism. Millions across the world mistakenly still see this false alternative as their only hope.

By “revolutionary minorities” we mean those that recognise that the Russian revolution did produce the beginnings of a solution of how to create a society without state oppression but which allows workers themselves to actively participate in decision making. The soviets of workers’ deputies, directly responsible and recallable by those who elected them at any level of social administration are the historically discovered form of genuine, workable democracy of the working class. Thousands across the world can already see this but the counter-revolution has left us with another terrible legacy — a fear of political organisation. Our contention is that without a new International, a new world workers’ party, any struggle which does develop will fall prey to this or that capitalist solution once again, as there will be no clear political organisation to put forward a clear revolutionary programme. Sadly, when we articulate this we are often greeted with cynicism and suspicion. We do not want to repeat the past, but to salvage from the debacle of the counter-revolution those things we need in order to get to a new society. And the task has become even more urgent in recent years given the drive to war and the warming of the planet.

We have always held the view that it will take a noteworthy struggle to get revolutionaries to confront their differences seriously. So far that has not happened, at least not on a scale to force revolutionaries to come together and examine what is needed in the here and now. Although we can take heart from the early signs of refusal to fight in wars in Israel, Russia and Ukraine and evidence on the Palestinian side of rejection of both Israel and Hamas, the conditions for a new International don’t currently exist despite the depth of the crisis. This is why in the meantime we have adhered to the “No War but the Class War” (NWBCW) initiative. It is not a substitute for an international party, and is not its forerunner for the reasons already given, but it is an attempt to work with those who do not necessarily agree on our overall political framework yet do see that the world is spiralling (and it seems accelerating in the last three years) towards a Third World War. It has had some success, in that committees have been formed in many countries across the world, but we are still faced with several problems. The first is that they have to reach a wider working class than they have so far. But a second is that we are also faced with otherwise broadly sympathetic “political bystanders” who seem to deny the reality of the current period and its dangers. The unwanted legacy of the counter-revolution is still a suspicion of all organisation. In this view, any organisation of the working class is either a “racket”⁽¹⁵⁾ or, as the councilists and autonomists maintain, unnecessary since the spontaneous movement will take care of itself. Our task is to try to convince them that these are mistakes which only disarm us in the face of the class war. The new International is not a government in waiting but the spearhead of those who lead the fight for a different world. A fight that can only be won if the mass of the class take up the lessons of our collective past and organise. If we are serious about what we stand for we need to engage with all who genuinely want a stateless, classless society without exploitation, war, and all the other evils of capitalism, in order to build a modicum of communication and organisation before we are all silenced by the repression of wartime conditions, as happened to our predecessors in two previous global conflicts. That is the burning task of the coming years.

Notes:

(1) Harold Macmillan’s speech in Bedford actually did include a worry about whether it would last. “Let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you’ll see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime- nor indeed ever in the history of this country. What is beginning to worry some of us is ‘Is it too good to be true?’ or perhaps I should say ‘Is it too good to last?’” Apparently the phrase “never had it so good” was borrowed from the US Democratic politician, Adlai Stevenson in 1952. oupacademic.tumblr.com

(2) Or as we wrote in 2021: “On 15 August 1971, President Richard Nixon unilaterally announced the “temporary” cancellation of the mainstay of the Bretton Woods agreement: the system of fixed exchange rates based on the direct convertibility of the US dollar to gold. In effect the dollar was the unit of international trade. As trade picked up and countries like West Germany and Japan began to account for a bigger share of international trade, demand for dollars outside the USA grew, as did financial wheeling and dealing on the Euro dollar market. By the early Sixties there were more dollars outside the USA than could be covered by the gold in Fort Knox. As inflation edged up towards the end of the Sixties more and more of those dollars were being converted to gold, increasingly not at the official rate of $35 per ounce. The system was unsustainable. The USA was already running a growing budget deficit, largely due to expenditure on the Vietnam war. But in 1971 the US balance of trade showed negative for the first time since the war. The ‘Nixon Shock’ spelled the beginning of the end of the Bretton Woods economic frame for the world economy. By the time Nixon confirmed the permanent end to a fixed exchange rate with gold in 1973 the price of gold had reached $100 per ounce. The equivalent price today is around $1,900. Clearly there can be no going back.” See: leftcom.org

(3) To view all six of the chapters of Capitalism’s Economic Foundations start here: leftcom.org

(4) As we wrote in “The Crisis of Comecon” in Revolutionary Perspectives Series 1 No.7 (1977)

(5) A problem compounded by the successive deaths of First Secretaries, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko within three years (1982-5).

(6) Andropov saw the arms race as a US’ plot, not to go to war, but to bleed the USSR’s economy white as it tried to compete with defence spending.

(7) Although what goes on at elections is pure theatre compared to the influence of lobby groups and other forces on the framing of the policy of the bourgeois state.

(8) See “Ukraine and Taiwan: Flashpoints in an Uncertain World” from Revolutionary Perspectives 19, at leftcom.org

(9) China is the main source of 5 out of the 10 rare earth minerals and, since this document was first drafted has been blocking their export as part of its retaliation to Trump’s tariffs but also because these rare earths are essential for war production. For a deeper analysis of the issue, see the recent article: leftcom.org

(10) leftcom.org

(11) According to the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research. See: sipri.org

(12) theconversation.com

(13) For example, Rheinmetall shares traded at less than €85 in 2020 but are today (accessed 26 May 2025) at €1795.00. ir.rheinmetall.com

(14) And given the fact that all “green” policies seem to be predicated on making workers rather than capitalists pay more, they are an easy target for populist climate change deniers. For our critique of the failures of climate change policies see (for example): leftcom.org

(15) The word is from the late Jacques Camatte. See: marxists.org