Internationalist Group -- Reforge the Fourth International!

For a Revolutionary Party, Not the “Tagtail of Any Bourgeois Party”
An Open Letter to Socialist Alternative Oppositionists, Past and Present
By the Class Struggle Education League
“Our politics must be working-class politics. The workers’ party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goals and its own policy” (Karl Marx, “Apropos of Working-Class Political Action,” 21 September 1871). The Class Struggle Education League was founded in Fall 2017 by members of the Lowell/New Hampshire branch of Socialist Alternative (SAlt), the U.S. group in solidarity with the Committee for a Workers International (CWI). Our growing disagreements with the organization came to a head over its blatant tailing of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the organization’s ever-increasing adaptation to the Democratic Party. Marx warned against being a “tagtail” to bourgeois parties – but that is exactly what SAlt does, and what it is. To put it another way, our experience as members led us to conclusion that Socialist Alternative is a thoroughly reformist group that, for tactical reasons, internally pretends to be a revolutionary party that is just pretending to be reformist. Some of the former opposiiton have left SAlt for the Greens, or the DSA, or the Socialist Party; others have embraced Maoism, black nationalism, anarchism... But in their different ways, they (like SAlt) turn their backs on the principle of working-class political independence. As we move toward fusion with the Internationalist Group/League for the Fourth International, we uphold the conviction that the central task of revolutionaries today is the forging of a Bolshevik-Leninist party that, armed with a genuinely Trotskyist program, can lead the workers and all of the oppressed to the seizure of power though world socialist revolution. An Open Letter to Socialist Alternative Oppositionists, Past and Present (31 May 2018)

PROTEST TORTURE ATTACK ON LABOR ACTIVISTS’ FAMILY IN MEXICO
On midday May 7, the teenage son of Dr. Arturo Villalobos and his wife, Patricia Méndez, was tortured and beaten unconscious by thugs who broke into the families' home. We hold the Mexican government and its imperialist overlords in Washington and Wall Street responsible for this vile attack on oppositional labor activists, which is a threat to the left and to all opponents of state control of labor. Protests have been called outside Mexican consulates in Boston, New York and Portland, Oregon and in Los Angeles. We urge defenders of workers’ and democratic rights to join us. Protest Torture Attack on Labor Activists’ Family in Mexico (9 May 2018)

URGENT CALL FOR SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN
Brutal Torture of Son of Grupo Internacionalista Leader in Oaxaca
On Monday, May 7, thugs entered the house of comrade Dr. Arturo Villalobos and his wife, Patricia Méndez in Oaxaca, Mexico. Both are prominent oppositional activists in the movement of health workers against government “reforms” that are gutting Mexico’s public health system. Not finding our comrade there, the attackers brutally tortured and beat the couple’s adolescent son, Nizván. After ransack the house, as the thugs left, they slashed the teenager and struck his head, leaving him unconscious. Arturo Villalobos is a well-known spokesman in Oaxaca for the Grupo Internacionalista, Mexican section of the League for the Fourth International. In addition, the attackers asked the whereabouts of two other family members who are also members of the GI. In 2016, Dr. Villalobos organized and led the courageous action by Oaxaca doctors in defying a police blockade to provide medical assistance to the surviving victims of the police massacre in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca on 19 June 2016 that left eleven dead during the militant three-month teachers strike. Not long after, the threats of legal action against him by the state attorney general began. We do not know at this time who perpetrated this heinous assault, but everything points to one conclusion: fue el estado (it was the state), as protesters chanted over the 2014 disappearance of 43 teachers college students from Ayotzinapa. Brutal Torture of Son of Grupo Internacionalista Leader in Oaxaca (8 May 2018)

Grupo Internacionalista Press Bulletin: Against Bourgeois Repression, Class Mobilization (7 May 2018)

May Day in New York City and Los Angeles
On May Day 2018, the international workers day, the Internationalist Group together with comrades of the Class Struggle Education League (CSEL) from New Hampshire, Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (RIY), the CUNY Internationalist Clubs, Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) and Tabajadores Internacionales Clasistas (TIC) organized a contingent of more than 50 demonstrators in the annual May Day march from Union Square in New York City. Chants for the demonstration included “Defend Syria, Defeat U.S. imperialism,” “Asian, Latin, black and white, Workers of the world, unite,” “Luchar, vencer, Obreros al poder” (Fight to win, workers to power) and, referring to the recent teachers strikes, “West Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona, How about New York? Smash the Taylor Law!” Also “Not Trump, Not Democrats, Build a workers party!” Underscoring the struggle against police murder, marchers chanted “Stephon Clark, Saheed Vassell, Michael Brown, Shut the whole system down!” In Los Angeles, a group of students from Pasadena City College joined in marching with transport workers, whose banners called (in English and Spanish) for full citizenship rights for all immigrants and to unionize immigrant workers. Most of the workers wore bright red union-printed shirts with “Transport Workers Against Deportations” on the front and “La lucha obrera no tiene fronteras” on the back. May Day in New York City and Los Angeles (May 2018)

Organizing Workers Strikes Against War and Repression
Lessons of the 2008 Longshore Strike Against U.S. Imperialist War
By Jack Heyman
May Day 2018 is the 10th anniversary of the longshore strike against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which shut down all West Coast ports from the Canadian to the Mexican border to demand the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. The shutdown and protest by members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) was a stunning show of labor’s power and a call to action addressed to other unions. It was the first strike action by U.S. workers against a U.S. imperialist war in 90 years. At the same time as the 2008 May Day strike and march against the war, an economic crisis was brewing across the U.S. Yet, there has been virtually no labor fight-back because the trade-union bureaucracy and, in Europe, the social democracy have collapsed in the face of this neoliberal capitalist attack. Worse yet, they’ve become the cheerleaders and enforcers of these new social contracts. Until a fighting leadership can be forged with the program and guts to fight for the interests of working people and all oppressed sectors through to the end, the promise contained in the 2008 May Day West Coast port shutdown cannot be realized. That means ousting the “labor fakers” who tried to prevent, then undercut and then divert this signal example of militant class-conscious workers action. Lessons of the 2008 Longshore Strike Against U.S. Imperialist War (1 May 2018)

From the Current Issue

The Internationalist No. 51
(March-April 2018)
click above or on image
for full list of articles

Teacher Revolts Across U.S.
Needed: A Class-Struggle Leadership
Beginning in mid-February, a series of statewide teachers strikes broke out, first in West Virginia, then in Oklahoma and Kentucky followed by Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina. They are all states where teachers unions have historically been weak and where salaries and school funding have been at the bottom of the scale nationwide. After years of cutbacks and falling pay, the rebelling education workers (including staff and bus drivers) had had enough and walked out. In each case, the strikes were sparked by rank-and-file teachers holding school-wide meetings and using social media, while the leaders of the state affiliates of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers had to scramble to keep up. And when NEA and AFT tops in West Virginia and Oklahoma settled for token gains, the strikers voted to continue the walkouts. The strikes won important but limited gains, in itself a rare event in recent decades of union defeats. But they lacked a leadership capable of waging hard class struggle and an organizational framework to counter the sellout labor bureaucracy. Central to the lessons to be drawn from these important struggles is the need to break with the bosses parties and fight for complete independence of the unions from the capitalist state. West Virginia Teachers Revolt, A Challenge to U.S. Labor (11 March 2018)

Special: The Great Coal Strike of 1978

Cops Kill Far More Every Week
Democrats Exploit School Shooting to Push Racist Gun Control
The horrific slaughter of 14 students and 3 teachers at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida set off a national uproar. With young survivors of the massacre in the forefront, a mobilization for gun control was launched. This immediately became part of the liberal campaign to get out the vote for Democrats in the November mid-term elections. The shooting was a heinous crime, but the “movement” for more restrictions on ownership of firearms is a reactionary drive, thoroughly orchestrated by the Democratic Party, to strengthen the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. This will not stop a deranged and/or racist mass murderer. Gun control in the United States has from the beginning had a racist character, to disarm African Americans, and in recent decades derived from the backlash against Malcolm X and the Black Panthers in particular. Weapons searches have been used as the excuse for police persecution of black youth (“stop and frisk”) and for outright police terror, such as the 1993 Waco Massacre by Democrat Bill Clinton. The Internationalist Group has from its inception opposed gun control and upheld the right of self-defense, and in particular the right of black armed self-defense. We have called on class-conscious workers to begin the work now of building workers defense guards, based on the mass organizations of the working class and oppressed, to counter the threat of violent racist and outright fascist forces. Democrats Exploit School Shooting to Push Racist Gun Control (April 2018)

How Armed Self-Defense Stopped a Lynching (April 2018)

Aiding and Abetting the Capitalist Democratic Party
“Socialists” Chase After Anti-Gun Movement
The cynical exploitation of traumatized youth by the Democratic Party to further its agenda of gun control has provided an X-ray into the politics of a panoply of left groups. When key sectors of the most powerful ruling class in world want to disarm the populace, slashing a key democratic right in order to leave the oppressed defenseless, how do socialists respond? In the last few weeks, as liberals, police chiefs and Democratic mayors (“the bosses of the racist killer cops”) push for gun control, almost the entire U.S. left has marched in lockstep with them. Why? Because they are chasing after the young marchers who have been enrolled in this campaign to bolster the capitalist state. The bourgeoisie’s rule is made possible in large part by its ability to perpetrate violence against those it rules over. Gun control has historically been used to disarm black people and intensify racist repression. While some opportunist leftists voice qualms or reservations about some gun control measures, they all end up supporting them. A “left” that plays into the hands of the Democratic Party can only lead to defeat. A struggle for revolution is counterposed to this “movement” for gun control and for the Democratic Party of imperialist war, mass deportations and racist police terror. “Socialists” Chase After Anti-Gun Movement (April 2018)

Statement of the Class Struggle Education League
Where We Come From and Where We Are Going
The Class Struggle Education League seeks to take its place as revolutionary working-class activists and cadres in the fight to reforge an authentically Trotskyist Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution. The CSEL has its roots in the Lowell/New Hampshire branch of Socialist Alternative (SAlt). The founding members of the CSEL had been part of the inchoate internal opposition to SAlt’s blatant tailing and building of the Bernie Sanders campaign for the presidential candidacy in the Democratic Party of racism, war and exploitation. This opposition was a far cry from a principled, programmatically cohesive Leninist faction modeled on the tradition of James P. Cannon. Through the course of this oppositional struggle, and continuing subsequently, the CSEL founders undertook a reexamination of the meaning of Marxism, Leninism and Trotskyism. After studying the programs of several groups they embraced the historic Trotskyist program that was upheld for three decades by the Spartacist tendency (now International Communist League), which the ICL has increasingly decisively abandoned in the wake of the counterrevolutionary destruction of the USSR, and which is now carried forward by the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International. The CSEL's perspective is concretized in an agreement for joint work between the CSEL and IG/LFI with a perspective for early fusion. CSEL: Where We Come From and Where We Are Going (January 2018)

Agreement for Joint Work Between the Class Struggle Education League and the Internationalist Group (26 January 2018)

Drive the Imperialists Out of the Middle East!
U.S./NATO: Get Your Bloody Claws Off Syria!
The U.S., British and French missile attack on Syria on April 14, was blatant imperialist aggression. Coming almost exactly a year after Trump’s previous attack, it was based on the same pretext: supposed retaliation for alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government on the civilian population. This is an imperialist lie, and quite likely an orchestrated provocation from the start. Any blow struck against the U.S./NATO imperialists and their allies in Syria is in the interests of the world’s workers. Antiwar demonstrations have raised demands such as “U.S. Hands Off Syria,” “No War in Syria” and similar slogans which avoid taking sides in the battle. These are liberal and reformist appeals for a more “peace-loving” U.S. imperialist foreign policy, in contrast to the revolutionary call to defend Syria and defeat the Western imperialists. War planners in Washington seem to figure they can strike in Korea or the Middle East with impunity, but one misstep (or deliberate provocation) could lead to a far wider conflagration. The Middle East is already on the brink of a regional war. While there are are several wars going on simultaneously in Syria, one layered over the other, the Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International have called from the outset to drive the U.S./NATO imperialists out of the Middle East, including by workers action in the imperialist heartland. U.S./NATO: Get Your Bloody Claws Off Syria! (15 April 2017)

Workers Revolution Will Avenge Marielle Franco
RACIST EXECUTION IN RIO
For Workers Mobilization Against Military-Police Occupation!
Drive the Military Police and Army Out of the Favelas!
The assassination of Marielle Franco, a councilwoman in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on March 14 was a state crime. It was a summary execution carried out by professionals. The reason for the attack is utterly clear: it was a reprisal for Marielle’s denunciation of the racist repression that for many years has been carried out by the multiple police and military forces in Rio, particularly in the impoverished favelas (slum districts) like the Maré district where she grew up. Now, as the rapporteur of a commission named by the city council to monitor the intervention of the army in Rio she had become a priority target to be eliminated by the “forces of order.” Around the world, Marielle’s execution has been met with protests and demonstrations expressing grief for the loss of this fighter, a comrade fallen on the field of battle. But now is the time not just for rendering homage. This must be the spark to set off a struggle to massively mobilize the power of the working class to expel the UPPs (Police Pacification Units), the PM (Military Police) and the army from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and to defeat the army/police occupation of the city. Racist Execution in Rio (16 March 2018)

The “Anti-Fascism” of the Bourgeoisie is a Fraud
Lesson of Macerata: For Mass Worker Action to Defend
Immigrants and Stop The Fascists!
The point-blank shooting by a fascist of six African immigrants in the Italian town of Macerata on February 3 was attempted mass murder. Taking place in heat of the election campaign,Matteo Salvini of the Lega (formerly Northern League) justified the fascist gunman’s actions and called for expelling half a million immigrants. His coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi then one-upped him by calling for deporting 600,000. In response, more than 25,000 people marched in the small town to denounce the murderous fascists. There were significant numbers from the bourgeois popular-frontists, but also hundreds of workers, from the metal workers of the FIOM, to members of the syndicalist SI COBAS and the CGIL, who together showed the potential for working-class mobilization. Politically, though, it was a different story. Almost all of them call on the capitalist state to act against the fascists. Yet the repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie is a breeding ground for the fascist action squads, and their ultimate protector. We of the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia, section of the League for the Fourth International, say that what is needed are mass mobilizations that bring out the power of the working class to stop the fascists. Lesson of Macerata (24 February 2018)

(italiano) La lezione di Macerata (24 febbraio 2018)

Bourgeois Populism and Social-Democratic Reformism: A Dead End
Italy: Anti-Immigrant Election Hysteria
The campaign for the March 4 Italian elections has been dominated by vile xenophobic anti-immigrant chauvinism. All the competing bourgeois parties and coalitions attack the bogeyman of “illegal immigration.” The racist Lega (ex-Nord) rails about the “invasion of aliens, drug pushers, delinquents and illegals,” raising slogans such as “Italians first! Now or never! Stop the invasion!” With the populist Cinque Stelle (Five Star) movement running first in the opinion polls, its historic leader, Beppe Grillo, recently called for immediately deporting all “illegals.” The strategy of the Democratic Party government has been to put itself at the head of the anti-immigrant hysteria by aggressively extending the sway of Italian imperialism in the Mediterranean, Libya and to the south. This imperialist drive to the south is accompanied by a campaign of all-sided racist repression against immigrants and refugee seekers in Italy. What the domesticated left is counterposing to the three main bourgeois coalitions of Forza Italia/Lega, Cinque Stelle and the PD with its various appendages of homeless bourgeois politicians, is a mixture of bourgeois populism and social-democratic reformism. in the present climate of anti-immigrant hysteria and fascist attacks, what is needed are mass mobilizations bringing out the power of the working class to stop the fascists. Above all, we must forge a genuinely Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard. Italy: Anti-Immigrant Election Hysteria (24 February 2018)

(italiano) Elezioni del 4 Marzo: Isteria anti-immigrati (24 febbraio 2018)

Boston: Let Siham Byah Come Home! No Deportations!
By Class Struggle Education League
On January 27, hundreds of defenders of immigrant rights from many leftist organizations, labor unions, churches and sanctuary networks rallied in Boston to protest the deportation of Siham Byah. A prominent Occupy Boston activist and single mother, Byah was grabbed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) police last November 7, torn from her son, beaten in a local jail, driven to Virginia and then deported to Morocco. The Class Struggle Education League, based in Lowell, Mass. and New Hampshire participated in the protest, emphasizing the importance of mobilizing the power of workers action to stop the I.C.E. deportation machine. It also noted the parallel to the struggle against slave-catchers under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, a battle which came to a head in Boston and set the stage for the U.S. Civil War. The CSEL is undertaking joint work with the Internationalist Group. Boston: Let Siham Byah Come Home! No Deportations! (4 February 2018)

For Workers Action to Smash Trump Racism, and to
Block the Capitalist Deportation Machine Obama Built
LET HAITIANS STAY!
Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!
Donald Trump’s racist smear of immigrants from Haiti and Africa as well as El Salvador, calling their homelands “shithole” countries, has enraged millions. His vile words are not just an insult, they are an expression of his criminal cancellation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans and soon Hondurans, leading to mass deportations of tens of thousands of immigrants. The racist rhetoric is tied to racist policies , and it’s not just the white supremacist in the White House who is an enemy of immigrants. Remember that Democrat Obama paved the way for Republican Trump by deporting a record 5+ million immigrants (over 8 million if you include the “voluntary departures”). The hated I.C.E. police are part of a bipartisan capitalist deportation machine. Class-conscious working people and defenders of democratic rights must not only denounce Trump’s blatant racism, but also call for mass worker/immigrant action to block deportations, to stop the attacks on TPS and DACA, and to demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants! LET HAITIANS STAY! (19 January 2018)

Revolution

Publication of the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth and of students from the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York (click on masthead to go to Revolution index)

Revolution No. 14
(January 2018)
click above or on image
for full list of articles

Beware Trump/Democrat Deal
Defend DACA and All Immigrants!
By CUNY Internationalist Clubs and the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth
On September 5, Donald Trump rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Many of the estimated 800,000 young undocumented immigrants could face deportation as early as March 2018. The CUNY Internationalist Clubs joined protests, raising the call to defend DACA and ALL immigrants, and for mass worker/immigrant action to defeat the racist onslaught. In the Revolution leaflet printed here, we had warned that Trump would try to make precisely such a deal with the Democrats, using the immigrant youth registered under the program as bargaining chips. Sure enough, a few days later, Democratic senators Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi announced that they had made a “deal” with Trump, in which DACA recipients could stay in exchange for Democratic support for increased “border security” and immigration enforcement. Some immigrant activists saw right through the “deal,” and threw it back in Pelosi’s face at an event September 18 promoting the DREAM Act, chanting “we are not a bargaining chip.”As revolutionary Marxists, we warn that the Democrats as well as Republicans are enemies of immigrants, and deporter-in-chief Obama paved the way for Trump. We oppose any deal with Trump to “save” aspects of DACA at the expense of the millions of supposedly “less talented and deserving” immigrants. We demand: full citizenship for all immigrants. Defend DACA and All Immigrants! (7 September 2017, updated 27 December 2017)

Revolutionary Internationalist Youth Founded
This past August, the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth was founded as the youth section of the Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International. One hundred years after the 1917 October Revolution, the RIY aims to be a training ground for young revolutionaries, as part of the common movement of the IG/LFI, to carry through to victory the genuine communist program of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. The formation of the RIY has involved extensive study of the history of Marxist youth groups going back to the Communist Youth International, founded in 1919 on the tradition of Karl Liebknecht and the Leninist principle of combining study with action. It is has been forged through sharp political struggles against the class-collaborationist politics of Maoism and the various brands of social democracy and for the program of revolutionary Trotskyism. We publish here the Founding Declaration of the RIY. Revolutionary Internationalist Youth Founded (August 2017)

For Labor/Black Mobilization Against Racist Cop Terror
Trump’s Racist Vendetta Against Black Athletes
Donald Trump has been on a racist tear this season, engaged in an furious vendetta against protesting black athletes of the National Football League. It started in 2016 when Colin Kaepernick, then quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand for the “Star Spangled Banner” in protest against the ongoing racist police murders of black and Latino people. Kaepernick has been blacklisted by the NFL, but the “Kaepernick effect” hasn’t gone away. The protests of 2017 became more widespread in response to Trump’s blatant racism. Last year there were at least 1,188 people killed by cops. Part of the reason for the prominence of protests by black players has been the dearth of mass protests like those in 2014 and the beginning of 2015. Many of the main leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement have channeled support into the Democratic Party and diverted the protests into electoral politics. There should be tens of thousands in the streets mobilized against racist police murder. But to actually have an effect requires much more, above all breaking the political stranglehold of the partner parties of capital. Trump’s Racist Vendetta Against Black Athletes (January 2018)

NFL: Players Are Expendable, Profits Are Not (January 2018)

DSA Dodges Debate
“Socialism: What It Is (and Isn’t)”
Since the election of Donald Trump, the term “socialism” has been a popular topic of discussion among those disillusioned with the status quo. Although the word has gained currency, still fixed in the minds of many are the lies about socialism propagated by the bourgeois class. These lies have also been used by pseudo-socialist groups that want to reform an unreformable system, and by capitalist politicians like Bernie Sanders to funnel disillusioned youth back into the Democratic Party. On September 7, the Hunter College Internationalist Club issued a debate challenge to the Hunter College Young Democratic Socialists of America on the topic “Socialism: What It Is (and Isn’t).” Six weeks later the YDSA responded that they had “no intention of continuing to engage” with us. The Internationalist Club went ahead with the event anyway, holding a forum/“open chair debate” on October 19, leaving a chair on the platform open in case they changed their minds. We took the opportunity to explain our revolutionary communist perspective on socialism and how it differs from the junior social democrats. “Socialism: What It Is (and Isn’t)” (January 2018)

U.S. Imperialism and British Colonialism in the Indian Ocean
The Chagos Archipelago, also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), was excised from Mauritius (then a British colony) in 1965. Its largest island, Diego Garcia, has been home to a U.S. military base since 1971. The base on Diego Garcia is of great geopolitical importance for the British and U.S. imperialists, serving as a staging ground for imperialist attacks in the Middle East, a projection of imperialist power in Africa and South Asia, and a “black site” for their program of “extraordinary rendition,” moving “terror suspects” from country to country for detention and torture. In order to secure this prime location as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” the entire population of the archipelago was coerced into leaving the islands or forcibly removed between 1965 and 1971. This is the story of how this colonialist/imperialist crime took place. U.S. Imperialism and British Colonialism in the Indian Ocean (January 2018)

Hurricanes, Colonial Government, Wall Street and Washington
University of Puerto Rico Students, Faculty and Workers Under Siege
For All-Out Worker/Student/Teacher Action to Defeat the Assault on the UPR!
Following hurricanes Irma and Maria this past September, the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) was left in tatters. Meanwhile, several thousand UPR students have abandoned the island altogether. This mass migration of youth is a direct result of Puerto Rico’s economic crisis, exacerbated by the extortionate demands of Wall Street hedge funds and Washington bureaucrats. Today the bankers and U.S. imperialist government completely control the island’s finances through the Junta de Control Fiscal (Financial Control Board) put in place by Congress and then-president Barack Obama. And the University of Puerto Rico is tops on la junta’s hit list. What that means for the UPR is massive budget cuts. Upon hearing of plans for a budget-ax murder of their school, UPR students took swift action. After initial protests, beginning on April 5, students occupied the university for 72 days, blockading the gates. Today, with the mass of the population in desperate straits deprived of the basic necessities of modern life, the immediate struggle is for survival. But if that fight is waged with a political perspective taking aim at the ruling class that has condemned them to misery, this calamity can be a starting point for militant class struggle. The demand for free, quality public education for all, along with other democratic demands (including for the independence of Puerto Rico) will only be assured when those who produce the wealth take power and extend socialist revolution internationally. University of Puerto Rico Students, Faculty and Workers Under Siege (December 2017)

I Am Not Your Negro
James Baldwin in Racist America
I Am Not Your Negro is a documentary film based on two works by the great black gay novelist, playwright and essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987). It is directed by Raoul Peck, the Haitian-born film maker who also directed Lumumba, about the assassination of the Congolese independence leader, and The Young Marx. The film is important for young revolutionaries to see. It powerfully combines dramatic historical footage and Baldwin’s stirring, courageous denunciation of the centrality of racism to U.S. society. Thus, while the movie doesn’t put forward a revolutionary program – nor does it claim to – it vividly dramatizes why the “color-blind” liberalism and tepid reform schemes for a “juster” capitalism under a refurbished Democratic Party put forward by the likes of Bernie Sanders cannot overcome racism. The material reality of black oppression continually generates the racist ideology that America’s rulers use to divide the working people. As opposed to the lilberal integrationism of Martin Luther King, or the dead-end of black nationalism, we fight for revolutionary integrationism, to pull up capitalism’s system of racial oppression by its roots. That requires learning the lessons of history, and this honest film can be a powerful aid in learning those lessons. I Am Not Your Negro, James Baldwin in Racist America (January 2018)

The Bolshevik Revolution, Leon Trotsky and the New York Public Library
Here it was: the 100-year anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and the New York Public Library had organized an exhibition. So when the Library announced a symposium on the Russian Revolution with some academic “experts,” we in the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth decided to attend. All five of the speakers were decidedly against the October Revolution (big surprise). Lenin and Trotsky were demonized, misquoted and slandered. The gains of the October Revolution were not mentioned at all. They even retailed an apocryphal story about Lenin calling to compromise with capitalists to get American financing. For all their made-up stories, it was curious that nobody mentioned a real story about Leon Trotsky and the New York Public Library. The night that Trotsky got off the boat in January 1917, Nikolai Bukharin dragged him and Natalia Sedova up to the 42nd Street library where the lights were blazing and any worker could come and read until almost midnight. No longer. Lenin also admired the NYPL. But in this epoch of decaying capitalism, public services are cut to the bone. The Bolshevik Revolution, Leon Trotsky and the New York Public Library (January 2018)

From the Previous Issue

The Internationalist No. 50
(Winter 2017)
click above or on image
for full list of articles

Aftermath of Irma and María … and the Devastating Debt Crisis
Colonial Capitalist Disaster in Puerto Rico
Following the back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes that swept through the Antilles in September, the immediate toll of death and destruction in Puerto Rico has been magnified many times over by U.S. imperialist rule. Ever since the U.S. conquered the island in 1898 and made it a colony, it has treated the population as second-class citizens. The belated and limited relief efforts of the Trump administration showed criminal indifference to the suffering of the population. But it was Democratic president Bill Clinton who set off the deindustrialization of Puerto Rico in 1996 and it was Democrat Barack Obama who last year appointed a Financial Control Board to pay off his Wall Street backers while imposing vicious austerity on Puerto Rican workers. The fact that two and a half months after Maria, over half of Puerto Rico’s population still is without electrical power is a direct result of the privatization offensive aimed at busting the militant electrical workers union UTIER. And the only way the debt will be wiped out is by overthrowing capitalism. The Internationalist Group calls to drive out Yankee imperialism – independence for All Colonies! – and for a Puerto Rican workers state in a socialist federation of the Caribbean. Colonial Capitalist Disaster in Puerto Rico (11 December 2017)

SL/ICL on Puerto Rico: Annexationist “Socialists”
In 1998, the Spartacist League and its International Communist League announced that they would no longer “advocate” independence for Puerto Rico. The SL/ICL thus not only abandoned its longstanding principled position and that of the Trotskyist movement since its founding, it meant that it would not have been allowed into the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky, which insisted that any party wishing to join would have to fight for independence for colonies, in word and deed. In 2010, the SL/ICL vociferously supported the U.S. invasion of Haiti in the guise of earthquake relief, before admitting that this was a social-imperialist betrayal. Now in 2017, these ex-Trotskyists have gone a step farther, announcing that they would support statehood, that is, an imperialist annexation that would threaten the existence of the Puerto Rican nation. SL/ICL on Puerto Rico: Annexationist “Socialists” (11 December 2017)

Defend North Korea, Defeat U.S. Imperialism!
U.S. Beats War Drums Over North Korea
The U.S. is giving off multiple indications that it is gearing up for military action against North Korea. This goes beyond the bellicose threats that the seriously unstable U.S. president has been bandying about, the “preemptive war” scenarios emanating from the fevered brains of neoconservative strategists, and “table-top war exercises” in the Pentagon. The escalating economic sanctions and military maneuvers are deliberate provocations designed to elicit a response from the embattled North Korean regime, that could then be used as the excuse to strike. The aim is “regime change” in Pyongyang, seizing or destroying its nuclear deterrent and restoring capitalism. The ultimate target is China. Contrary to the media hysteria, it is the predatory warmongers in Washington who are aiming at mass murder. Against the mounting imperialist assault, it is the duty of all class-conscious workers and revolutionaries to unconditionally defend North Korea – and all the bureaucratically deformed workers states. U.S. Beats War Drums Over North Korea (27 December 2017)

DSA, ISO, Left Voice...
On North Korea: “Socialists” Who Capitulate to Imperialism
What is the response of ostensible socialists when the most powerful ruling class in the world threatens to rain “fire and fury” on a nation where it already killed 3 million people, in the Korean War of 1950-53? The Internationalist Group has taken a clear stand in defense of the DPRK, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, against U.S. imperialism. The struggle to defeat the imperialist aggression of one’s “own” capitalist ruling class should be fundamental. Yet most of the U.S. “left” – including Democratic Socialists of America, the International Socialist Organization and Left Voice/Trotskyist “Fraction” – has echoed imperialist liberals who portray the clash between the U.S. and North Korea as a face-off between two “unhinged despots.” The social-democratic heirs of anti-Trotskyist renegades Max Shachtman, Tony Cliff and Nahuel Moreno, respectively, all refuse to defend North Korea. Their supposed “Third Camp” is nothing but a stepping stone to outright support for imperialism. On North Korea: “Socialists” Who Capitulate to Imperialism (27 December 2017)

“Left Voice” of Social Democracy (27 December 2017)

The League for the Fourth International Holds First International Conference
The League for the Fourth International held its First International Conference this past November. The gathering brought together delegates from the five national sections of the LFI – Brazil, Germany, Italy, Mexico and the United States – as well as guests and visitors. The Conference provided the opportunity to report on and evaluate the activity of the LFI, to debate disputed issues and lay out perspectives to guide our future work. The main point of contention in the months leading up to the international meeting was over Catalonia, where the LFI calls for the right of self-determination but has not advocated and does not presently call for independence from the Spanish state. Overall, the priorities decided upon stress ensuring the regularity of our high-quality Leninist press, building up a party apparatus and above all cadre development. The possibility of increased repression was underscored, particularly in connection with imperialist war threats (notably against Korea). Overall, the First International Conference of the League for the Fourth International is an important milestone in the struggle to build anew a Fourth International that Trotsky would have recognized as his own. The League for the Fourth International Holds First International Conference (December 2017)

Call for the First International Conference of the League for the Fourth International (December 2017)

The Struggle to Reforge a Genuinely Trotskyist Fourth International
Document of the First International Conference of the League for the Fourth International
The League for the Fourth International in our first two decades of existence successfully withstood the pressures of a temporarily triumphant bourgeoisie, holding fast to the Marxist program in an adverse (but contradictory) period. With our limited forces, we have established sections and are publishing a high-quality Trotskyist press in five countries and five languages. We have a layer of worker and immigrant cadres that is unique on the left, have achieved some important victories and waged international campaigns. Now we are facing new challenges, both of growth and in confronting the political consequences of the advanced state of putrefaction of the capitalist-imperialist system. And with the recent dramatic abandonment of Leninism on the national question and embrace of bourgeois nationalism by the ICL, along with an extensive purge of its leading cadre, the unique position of the LFI as the political continuity of Trotsky’s Fourth International is thrown into sharp relief. The Struggle to Reforge a Genuinely Trotskyist Fourth International (December 2017)

1917-2017: We Fight for New Bolshevik Revolutions
On 7 November 1917 (25 October according to the old style Julian calendar), the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky led the Soviets (Councils) of Workers and Soldiers Deputies in the insurrection that took power in the crumbling Russian empire and established the first workers state in history. The October Revolution became a beacon for the struggles of the oppressed the world over. Despite the subsequent degeneration of the Soviet Union under the Stalinist-nationalist bureaucracy and the imperialist-led counterrevolution that finally destroyed the USSR, proletarian revolutionaries still stand on the internationalist program of Krasnya Oktyabr, or Red October. A lot of groups on the left had some kind of event around this 100th anniversary who have no intention of carrying out that program. They all talk of the continued “relevance” of the October Revolution, but have a very different program for today. On November 5, the Internationalist Group held a celebration in New York City of the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. 1917-2017: We Fight for New Bolshevik Revolutions (5 November 2017)

Revolutionary Marxism vs. Sanders “Socialism” for Democrats
The ABCs of the DSA
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is proclaiming that it has surpassed 25,000 members. This would make it the largest self-styled socialist organization in the United States in decades. The sudden expansion of the DSA reflects the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who calls himself an “independent” and “democratic socialist” while being a long-time member of the Democratic Party caucus in Congress. Clearly, the DSA has picked up a significant number of disappointed Bernieites, who despaired when he lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton and even more when Donald Trump was elected president. The Democratic Socialists of America is perhaps the most successful of various opportunist leftist groups seeking to cash in on the crisis of the mainstream bourgeois parties. In good part this is because this staid social-democratic organization is so embedded in the two-party capitalist political system of the United States that it has long been known as the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America. Many of those joining Democratic Socialists of America are unfamiliar with what the organization really stands for and its history. The DSA's growth does not signify a break from bourgeois liberalism, or even from the Democratic Party. Even less is it support for socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist system. With their talk of “democratic socialism,” the leaders of the DSA (including its “left” wing) are building a virulently anti-communist, social-democratic obstacle to revolution. The ABCs of the DSA (4 August 2017)

Toward a Multiracial Revolutionary Party
Imperialist Social Democracy vs. Black Liberation
As the civil rights movement picked up in the U.S. South in the 1960s, the images of Ku Klux Klan night riders and cops with German shepherd dogs fire-hosing black marchers, many of them children, revealed the ugly reality of U.S. “democracy.” This undercut Washington’s effort to counterpose itself to British colonialism in Africa and what the imperialists saw as the Soviet “Communist threat.” In stepped the virulently anti-Soviet Cold Warriors of U.S. social democracy, dominated by followers of one Max Shachtman. The Shachtmanites, grandfathers of today’s DSA, talked of “realigning” the Democratic Party as an alliance of organized labor and the Southern black population. In practice, they acted to keep civil rights activists subordinated to the Democratic Kennedy and Johnson administrations which rested on support from the Dixiecrats. As soldiers in this reactionary cause, Shachtman deputies Michael Harrington and Bayard Rustin sought to tame, sideline or drive out radical elements from the struggle. The Trotskyists, in contrast, fought for the program of revolutionary integrationism. Imperialist Social Democracy vs. Black Liberation (December 2017)

Despite Exemplary Militancy, Failure to Spread to the Industrial Proletariat Resulted in a Draw
Mexico Teachers Strike of 2016: The Struggle Continues
The Mexican teachers’ strike that lasted from May to September of 2016 was a truly epic class battle. The federal government sought to impose the “educational” counter-reform dictated by imperialist financial agencies to annihilate public education and destroy what it sees as the prime obstacle to these designs: the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE). On the other side, hundreds of thousands of teachers organized in the CNTE put up a determined resistance against brutal state repression that reached its peak in the 19 June 2016 massacre in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca. There was an enormous potential to extend the strike to the education sector nationally and to key sectors of the industrial proletariat. This was blocked, first by the fact that in most of the country, the education workers are regimented under the corporatist National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), a government organization dedicated to preventing independent workers unions. Secondly, the “independent” unions did nothing to join with the teachers’ struggle. And third, illusions in the bourgeois populist MORENA fostered by the CNTE leadership undercut the strike. In this epoch of imperialist decay, only the struggle for workers power, for a workers and peasants government, can achieve the most elementary democratic gains, as part of an international socialist revolution. Mexico Teachers Strike of 2016: The Struggle Continues (June 2017)