When the world is facing the trial of the Covid-19 pandemic, we in the ICC have also been through the painful experience of the passing away of our comrade Kishan on 26th March, 2020. This is a great loss for the ICC and its section in India, and we will miss him greatly. Kishan made an important contribution to the life of the ICC and was a comrade with a great fighting spirit till his last breath.

This report was written for a recent congress of our section in France and will be followed by other reports on the world situation.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit at the beginning of 2020, the tendency towards increasingly chaotic imperialist tensions and conflicts was already underway. All the indications are that the pandemic will accelerate these tendencies. 

The two articles under this heading examine different aspects of the bourgeoisie’s growing lack of control over its own political and economic system. This tendency is world-wide, but among the most ‘developed’ countries it is exemplified by the increasingly evident incoherence of the Johnson government in the face of Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the accelerating economic crisis.

The two articles under this heading examine different aspects of the bourgeoisie’s growing lack of control over its own political and economic system. This tendency is world-wide, but among the most ‘developed’ countries it is exemplified by the increasingly evident incoherence of the Johnson government in the face of Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the accelerating economic crisis.

Given its lack of preparedness to deal with a global pandemic, the bourgeoisie has had little choice but to resort to the mediaeval policy of quarantining the population, which has paid a heavy price in terms of impoverishment and social atomisation.  

The choice of which party or president takes the reins of government is a false choice that cannot turn capitalist civilisation away from the path towards catastrophe. This applies to the coming US elections as much as to any other electoral circus. 

Forty years ago, in the summer of 1980, the working class in Poland made the whole world tremble. A massive strike movement was spreading across the country: several hundred thousand workers launched wildcat strikes in the different towns; it shook the ruling class in Poland and those in other countries.

August 8th and subsequent weekends saw thousands of UK health workers protest against poor pay and the failure to protect them against Covid-19. Similar anger has been displayed by proletarians in cities around the world...

Fire ravages Moria camp, already unfit for human habitation

The humanitarian speeches of the ruling class can't hide the real inhumanity of their policy towards the growing mass of refugees.

The huge exploision in Beirut

The catastrophe in Beirut shows the criminal negligence not just of the ruling class in Lebanon, but of an entire social order.

The development of the situation in the Middle East between 1990 and 2010 has shown vividly that the imperialist confrontations, the militarism and barbarism, which are essential characteristics of the period of the decadence of capitalism, have not only intensified but, above all, in the phase of the widespread decomposition of capitalist society, their irrational and chaotic nature has become more and more evident.

Draped in the national flag

The working class has nothing to gain by taking in part in mobilisations in favour of bourgeois elections

This text does not aim to develop a history of recent conflicts in the Middle East but to show how the understanding of the decadence and decomposition of capitalism is an essential framework for understanding the explosion of contradictions which plunge this region of the world today into warlike bestiality and chaos. This barbarism has a history, and it reflects the rotting of the system.

The discussion texts we are publishing here are the product of an internal debate within the ICC regarding the significance and direction of the historical phase in the life of decadent capitalism which was definitively opened up by the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc in 1989: the phase of decomposition, the terminal phase of capitalist decadence.  

The laws of capitalist competition prevent states and enterprises from engaging in effective cooperation to find a vaccine against Covid-19

An account of the discussions at our public meetings on the "Yellow Vests" movement in France. The issues raised in these meetings have a wider significance than this particular movement, since the working class today is being called on to participate in a whole series of protests which are either of an interclassist character, like that of the "Yellow Vests", or which are posed on a directly bourgeois terrain, like the "democratic" protests in Hong Kong or the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

Racial tensions in the United States are related to the role played by the slave system in the development of primitive accumulation in that country. Slavery existed throughout the Americas and the Caribbean (Brazil, Spanish colonies, the Caribbean islands) but in no other developed country has this system conditioned social relations and the obstacles to working class unity as much as in the US. At another level of development and importance, the case of South Africa has some similarities.

Since we wrote about the elements that were to found the Anarchist Communist Group (ACG) in February 2018, this organisation has gone through a process of defining its course and determining its programme. Its main objective was to turn away from the domination of identity politics, as had developed in the Anarchist Federation and in the anarchist milieu in general, and to return to the class struggle as the fundamental basis of its activities. After the group was founded it made some steps, as it said, “to break with the swamp of traditional anarchism” and in the direction of class positions. This article shows the limitations of that break. 

A close sympathiser of the ICC makes an appeal to the organisations of the proletarian political milieu to take up their responsibility in response to the dangerous manoeuvres of an adventurer.