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"All talk to the effect that
historical conditions have not yet
'ripened' for socialism is the product of
ignorance or conscious deception. The
objective prerequisites for proletarian
revolution have not only 'ripened,' they
have begun to get somewhat rotten.... The
historical crisis of mankind is reduced to
the crisis of the revolutionary
leadership." |
Welcome! The Internationalist Group, section of the League for the Fourth International, fights for international socialist revolution, the conquest of power by the working class, led by its Leninist party, championing the cause of all the oppressed. After a decade and a half in which the ruling class trumpeted the supposed "death of communism," the imperialists are bogged down in losing wars of colonial occupation in the Near East while a global economic crisis shakes the foundations of the capitalist order. With mass unemployment, poverty and hunger ravaging the planet, once again there is talk of socialism and revolution. But as in the past, the key question is that of forging a vanguard to lead the struggle of the workers and the oppressed.
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The founding statement of the Internationalist Group is available on this site, as well as the LFI's declaration, Reforge the Fourth International, in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Tagalog.
For Labor/Black/Immigrant Action to Fight Racist Terror
Fury Over Minneapolis Police Murder of George Floyd
Only Revolution Can Bring Justice!
“I can’t breathe,” George Floyd kept saying as a Minneapolis police officer dug a knee into his neck. For millions across the country and the world, it hauntingly, unbearably recalls the last words of Eric Garner, the Staten Island, New York man that a cop killed by chokehold in 2014. The racist cop murder of George Floyd set off furious protests in Minneapolis that soon spread to other cities. This latest racist outrage occurs in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is killing African Americans and Latinos at staggeringly high rates. The African American, Latin American, Native American, poor and oppressed communities in the Twin Cities, including a sizeable Somali population, have long been targeted by the police. The names Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, Thurman Blevins, Chiasher Fong Vue are testimony that the police lynchings never stop. We call for mass workers action joining with the black population and all the oppressed to shut the Twin Cities down. The inescapable fact is that justice for George Floyd and all those killed by this racist system can only be achieved by socialist revolution. Fury Over Minneapolis Police Murder of George Floyd (28 May 2020)
Capitalism Is Killing Us
Homelessness and Coronavirus in NYC
Much of New York City ground to a standstill amid the coronavirus pandemic. State and city governments appealed to the population to “Stay Home, Stay Safe.” This was impossible for 4,000 homeless people living on the street, as well as for another 79,000 in city shelters, who have no place where they can safely “stay home.” The latest figures show 961 confirmed COVID-19 cases in homeless shelters, of whom 76 have died from the disease. In 2013, Democrat Bill de Blasio ran for New York City mayor with a campaign highlighting the fight against homelessness, which had ballooned under Republican plutocrat mayor Michael Bloomberg. De Blasio has since issued plan after program after initiative, yet the numbers in city homeless shelters keep increasing. There are plenty of rooms to be had in empty hotels and vacant luxury apartments to house the homeless. They should be occupied now! But ultimately it will take international socialist revolution to lift the impoverished out of destitution. Homelessness and Coronavirus in NYC (24 May 2020)
Friedrich Engels on the Housing Question (May 2020)Workers Courageously Fighting in Coronavirus Hot Spot
Victory to Yakima Packinghouse Strikers!
Amid the deadly coronavirus pandemic, hundreds of workers in Yakima Valley, Washington, are courageously fighting for their livelihoods, and their lives. On Thursday, May 7, dozens of workers at a packinghouse in Naches walked out. The workers, mostly Latina women, are demanding cleaning and disinfectant, “social distancing” safety measures, personal protective equipment , a minimum of 40 hours work weekly and a “hazard pay” bonus to their poverty wages. Within days, workers at a half dozen other packinghouses joined the strike movement. By Monday the management at one packer conceded a $100 per week bonus. But other employers are resisting even such a concession, evidently playing for time to wear down the strikers, hoping that economic desperation will force them back to work. Meanwhile, the bosses are no doubt conferring with their union-busting lawyers on the swiftest and most economical way to return to “normal” conditions of profitable exploitation. This will be a hard fight. Victory to Yakima Packinghouse Strikers! (17 May 2020)
MTA Bosses’ Coronavirus Disaster
For Workers Control of NYC Transit!
Right up at the top of the list of unsung heroes of the pandemic are New York City transit workers, at least 120 of whom have died of COVID-19. Transit workers are disproportionately falling victim to the disease because many are in close contact with large numbers of people, and because of perilous work conditions fostering lung disease, but also because of criminal actions of the employer. The Metropolitan Transit Authority refused to hand out personal protective equipment which had been stockpiled for a pandemic, even as workers were being infected. MTA managers, and their bosses in the State House and City Hall, have amply proven that they are incapable of producing a safe, efficient, clean and comfortable mass transit system – and certainly not one that would be in the interests of the workers who run it and the poor and working people who use it. From the “deferred maintenance” of the 1970s to the subway crashes and ever-worsening performance of the 2010s, the subway bosses focused on paying off Wall Street. The only way to clean up the subway mess is for the workers to take charge. MTA Bosses’ Coronavirus Disaster: For Workers Control of NYC Transit! (13 May 2020)
Shutting Down 24/7 Service Is No Answer to NYC Subway Crisis
On May 6, the New York City subway system began shutting down daily for four hours. According to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the aim is to “intensify disinfecting operations, cleaning its fleet of thousands of cars and buses every night” amid the coronavirus pandemic. Actually, it’s to eject the homeless. To solve the problem of large numbers of homeless camped out in the subways during the crisis, affecting other riders and workers, it's mecessary to provide everyone who needs housing a comfortable, safe place to stay, and plenty of social services. Start with the thousands of rooms standing empty in NYC hotels. But the late-night shutdown is ultimately not about the homeless. Nor is it about cleaning the trains. It’s about money, and profits. Leading capitalist spokesmen in New York have long called to get rid of all-night subway service. But New York City does function 24/7 year-round. To restore 24-hour New York City subway service, we need workers control. Shutting Down 24/7 Service Is No Answer to NYC Subway Crisis (11 May 2020)
The Internationalist No. 59
Coronavirus and Capitalism
(March-April 2020)
click above or on image
for full list of articles
Since the beginning of the year 2020, the world has been thrown into an unprecedented crisis by what is now the pandemic of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19. First appearing in Wuhan, China, after some initial missteps it has largely been brought under control there by the extraordinary measures enacted by the Chinese government. But now COVID-19 is racing through the capitalist world, ravaging whole regions such as northern Italy, largely due to the criminal failure and outright refusal of the authorities, political and medical, to test widely and quarantine when the numbers of infected were small. Across the U.S., much of the economy has shut down. Meanwhile, the vast bulk of the $2 trillion in “rescue” funds will go to prop up giant corporations like Boeing, while workers get a few crumbs in jobless pay – and millions of immigrants get nothing but stepped-up threats and repression. Where in the centrally planned Chinese economy the shutdown can be temporary, under capitalism the devastation will be vastly greater. In these catastrophic conditions, communists insist that the class struggle continues, and the need for revolutionary leadership is even more acute. We print here the presentation, to a teleconference meeting of the Marxist Study Group in New York. Coronavirus and Capitalism (29 March 2020)
Detained Immigrants in Mortal Danger: Set Them Free!
Shut Down I.C.E. Jails Now!
Some of those most endangered by the coronavirus pandemic are the more than 35,000 immigrants (including over 6,000 children) being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) detention centers. With detainees jammed together in close quarters, often in unsanitary conditions, the accelerating spread of the virus could quickly turn these jails into death camps. As desperate prisoners engaged in hunger strikes, dozens of protests across the U.S. have demanded that the detainees be set free. With most of the country under quarantine, protesters have turned to car caravans circling I.C.E. facilities and government offices. Supporters of the Internationalist Group, Revolutionary Internationalist Youth and Class Struggle Education Workers participated, but with revolutionary politics counterposed to those of the liberal organizers. Shut Down I.C.E. Jails Now! (28 April 2020)
As “Chauvinist Hydra” Devours SL/ICL
Some History Ex-Trotskyists Would Like to Keep Hidden
Attentive readers will have noticed that something’s up in the Spartacist League. First Workers Vanguard was reduced from eight pages to four while the SL Political Bureau sidelined the editorial board, “due to the COVID-19 crisis.” Then came the notice that WV had skipped the next issue. Meanwhile, Spartacist announced that a leadership meeting of its International Communist League had furthered the “Struggle Against the Chauvinist Hydra,” as the bizarre – and transparently dishonest – report on the ICL’s 2017 conference was titled. Two ex-members who had been involved with its Greek group were expelled for “racist” conduct. This followed expulsions last year from its Polish section amid charges of racism and echoing Polish nationalism and anti-Jewish bigotry. Yet, while claiming to fight chauvinism, the ICL has in fact become outright apologists for imperialist chauvinism, from opposing demands to let refugees in to the U.S. and Europe to championing “Brexit.” To underscore the fact that the SL/ICL’s record of chauvinist behavior goes back quite a ways, we reprint a section of our 1998 article on the “Crisis in the ICL” laying out, among other things, how in a fight in the French section the ICL leadership (including present top leaders) explicitly set out to “humiliate” an opposition of leading cadres from North Africa. Some History Ex-Trotskyists Would Like to Keep Hidden (28 April 2020)
Defend China Against Imperialist Threats and Trade War!
U.S. Response to Coronavirus: China-Bashing and War Moves
On April 21, two U.S. warships entered the South China Sea. This is a new step in the continual provocations in which the U.S. repeatedly trespasses into China’s territorial waters. This incursion could presage aggressive moves against the several islands, shoals and reefs in this strategic waterway where China has established military and research facilities to ward off imperialist attack. The military escalation is part of a campaign by the administration of Republican president Donald Trump to target China in order to divert attention from the U.S.’ disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the anti-China campaign is bipartisan. The current aggressive military posture against China did not start with Trump, but rather with Obama. In the U.S. today there is wall-to-wall China-bashing extending from right-wing Republicans to liberal Democrats (and most of the left). The imperialist rulers are determined to “take back China,” and have been ever since the 1949 revolution, because the very existence of a Chinese workers state, even bureaucratically deformed, is a threat to their world domination. The League for the Fourth International calls for all U.S. warships, bases and troops out of Asia and to defeat the U.S. imperialist drive for counterrevolution in China. U.S. Response to Coronavirus: China-Bashing and War Moves (27 April 2020)
In the Time of Coronavirus
A Tale Of Two Cities: Wuhan – New York
The discovery of a new infectious disease now referred to as COVID-19 in late December 2019 was dealt with very differently at its point of origin in Wuhan, China and in New York City, which has since become the epicenter. In China, after initial missteps, everyone who tested positive for coronavirus was hospitalized or sent to an isolation center. Orders swiftly went out to erect two new hospitals to treat COVID-19 patients, which was accomplished, within ten days, from start to finish. In New York, after the governor and mayor bragged about having the best medical system in the world and that they were going to “kick coronavirus ass,” the hospitals were soon overwhelmed. A series of improvised steps to expand capacity – a militarized “hospital” in a convention center, a naval hospital ship, a field hospital set up by a proselytizing, anti-Islamic, homophobic Christian evangelical outfit – were a mess. Worse yet, people testing positive for coronavirus were not hospitalized or isolated but sent home, where they could infect family members and others. The experience of two cities – Wuhan and New York City – in the coronavirus crisis is a powerful proof of the qualitative superiority of a centralized, socialized planned economy which is geared to fill social needs rather than the chaos of capitalism. A Tale Of Two Cities: Wuhan – New York (24 April 2020)
CSWP Calls for Workers Action in Coronavirus Crisis
Our brothers and sisters in Class Struggle Workers – Portland have issued a call for action by the unions and workers organizations in the face of the current coronavirus/economic crisis. Working people – and particularly those who live paycheck to paycheck – are being pushed into unbearable situations. The CSWP raised a series of demands including that all workers unable to work because of the virus should get full pay for time missed, all workers should be provided with needed personal protective equipment as they determine, all testing and medical treatment should be free and available on demand. Additional calls included for health and safety committees, to be elected at every workplace, free childcare facilities for all who need them, stopping the raids and deportations, shutting down the detention centers, as well as others. While the ruling parties are exploiting this crisis, with the lives and livelihoods of so many workers and oppressed people in the balance, the only way forward is class struggle. CSWP Calls for Workers Action in Coronavirus Crisis
For Class-Struggle Unionism! Organize the Unorganized! No Safety, No Work!
As the COVID-19 Pandemic Rages, Workers Fight for Health and Safety
As the deadly coronavirus pandemic has spread throughout the United States, some 95% of the population is under “stay at home” orders by state governments and local municipalities. At the same time, millions of workers continue to go to work, performing vital tasks while facing grave risks to their health and lives. Nurses, doctors, orderlies and other health-care workers are in the front ranks of this battle, heroically treating the sick, often in horrendously overcrowded medical facilities. In addition, the frontline workers include public transit workers, postal workers and delivery workers, as well as grocery store, drug store, deli, food service, cleaning and other service workers. Even in these jobs that truly are essential in providing basic necessities, the bosses’ criminal disregard for workers’ health and safety has led to widespread protests, walkouts and strikes. What can and must emerge out of this crisis is a newly invigorated labor movement. But a continuation of the same old legalistic “business unionism,” such as has been practiced by the AFL-CIO trade-union bureaucracy for many decades, is a dead end. What’s desperately needed is a labor movement based upon the program of class struggle, of the working class mobilizing its own social power of behalf of all the oppressed, in a fight leading to international socialist revolution. As the COVID-19 Pandemic Rages, Workers Fight for Health and Safety (13 April 2020)
Chelmsford, MA UPS Workers:
No Safety, No Work!
UPDATE: Faced with the failure of UPS to take action, on April 3, union activist Mike Gath issued a second leaflet, again demanding, “NO SAFETY, NO WORK!” Job actions, walkouts and protests are breaking out in many workplaces around the U.S. against employers’ brutal indifference to elementary health and safety during the coronavirus crisis. At the Chelmsford, Massachusetts UPS facility, union officials and workers have denounced the fact that, while management plays company videos boasting about making lots of money during the crisis, the bosses at the round-the clock facility did not inform the 1,500 workers about COVID-19 cases there, nor did they provide any forms of protection for the workers. We print here a flier by Mike Gath, an activist in Teamsters Local 25 who has worked at the UPS facility in Chelmsford, Massachusetts for over a decade. No Safety, No Work! (3 April 2020)
Let Cruise Workers Off Death Ships Now!
Solidarity with the Trapped Seamen: We Demand Testing, Treatment, Housing, Union-Scale Wages and the Right to Repatriation!
Maritime workers are among those who have been hit hard by the cornoavirus pandemic. Particularly vulnerable have been crews on giant cruise ships, not only deck hands and engine room workers but also hundreds of food service, cleaning and maintenance personnel and others. With up to 3,000 passengers and over 1,000 crew members crammed together in tight spaces, “social distancing” is impossible. The densely packed vessels act as incubators, greatly accelerating the transmission of COVID-19, turning these party ships into death ships. When cruise liners have finally been able to dock, passengers have been allowed to disembark, but the crews have been confined on board and the ships ordered out to sea to circle for weeks as the disease spreads. In the San Francisco Bay Area, trade unionists and community groups have protested in solidarity with the crew of the Grand Princess. As the giant cruise companies fly “flag of convenience” and pay crews poverty wages, there should be a massive campaign to organize the crews in real unions, but that will require replacing the moribund leadership of the trade-union movement with class-struggle leadership. Let Cruise Workers Off Death Ships Now! (22 April 2020)
To Meet Urgent Demand, Workers Power Is Key
How Capitalism Sabotaged Ventilator Production
As the coronavirus pandemic ravages the country, with New York City as the epicenter, hospitals and government at all levels have been caught wholly unprepared. A cut-throat ventilator bidding war is going on, in which state governments compete against each other and federal agencies to get their hands on these desperately-needed life-saving devices. There should be a crash program to produce tens of thousands of new ventilators – yesterday! So why hasn’t that happened? Ventilator manufacturers are loath to ramp up production on the massive scale needed because it would virtually eliminate their profits. The ventilator shortage has been known for years. Medical professionals and even some government officials had been ringing the alarm bells, warning that a pandemic would leave U.S. hospitals in the lurch. But when a federal program was begun in 2008 to purchase up to 40,000 new ventilators, the company was bought out by a larger competitor in order to stop production of the lower-cost machine. Workers at General Electric have called on the company to rehire laid-off workers and retool plants to produce the vital machines. Faced with the refusal of the bosses to do so, GE workers should take control to gear up ventilator production, on the road to socialist revolution. How Capitalism Sabotaged Ventilator Production (14 April 2020)
While Chinese Workers State Contained Outbreak
Coronavirus Pandemic Ravages Italy, Overwhelms Capitalist Medical System
Italy is where the novel coronavirus hit Western Europe first and hardest. The exploding public health disaster reflects the massive cuts in health care that have been carried out over the last decade. The result has been devastating, dramatically exposing the inability of the capitalist system to protect the lives of the population, much less provide adequate medical care. In contrast to the bleak and terrifying picture of the situation in capitalist Italy where the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage out of control, by mid-March China had largely beaten back the pandemic. The scope of the successful actions and coordination in China against the coronavirus could only be done in a workers state with a planned economy. In Italy, there has been a wave of spontaneous strikes and walkouts across the country as workers refuse to labor without protective clothing and equipment and safe conditions. The structural chaos and anarchy of the capitalist economy is determined by production for profit, which renders it incapable of effective coordinated intervention. We call for workers control as part of the struggle for socialist revolution, in Italy and internationally. Coronavirus Pandemic Ravages Italy, Overwhelms Capitalist Medical System (4 April 2020)
A Militant Program to Win UC Grad Student Workers Strike
For months, graduate student workers across the University of California have been demanding a cost-of-living adjustment to offset skyrocketing rents. Grad students at UC Santa Cruz went on strike in early February, in defiance of the leadership of the statewide union, UAW Local 2865, which refused to authorize the walkout. UC president Janet Napolitano (head of Homeland Security in the Democratic Obama administration) has taken a hard line throughout, and on February 28 effectively fired 82 Santa Cruz grad student workers. The Revolutionary Internationalist Youth, Class Struggle Education Workers and the Internationalist Group have sought to build support for UC grad student workers from the outset. We present here a program to actually win the strike, by spreading the strike UC-wide and shutting the campuses down. What’s key is to mobilize working-class power. That means fighting politically, above all breaking with the Democratic Party. A Militant Program to Win UC Grad Student Workers Strike (4 March 2020)
Urgent: Protest Arrest of Leftists in Bolivia
The rightist de facto government of Bolivia that seized power in last month’s “civic-police-military” coup has carried out a new act of repression, arresting Carlos Cornejo, correspondent of leftist Internet publication La Izquierda Diario, and the artist Leonel Jurado, charging them with “sedition.” They were seized yesterday afternoon in the city of El Alto, where they were helping prepare an event in solidarity with families of the at least ten people killed in the police massacre against a protest at the Senkata gas plant there on November 19. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International demand the immediate liberation and dropping of all charges against Carlos Cornejo, Leonel Jurado and all victims of rightist repression in Bolivia! Urgent: Protest Arrest of Leftists in Bolivia (17 December 2019)
For Labor/Black Mobilization Against Racist Police Attacks!
Cops Off the Trains and Out of the Stations!
Upwards of a thousand people have protested in recent weeks against a wave of racist police brutality in the New York City subways. Cellphone videos taken by bystanders have shown cops storming subway cars and brutally beating black youths. In response, first in downtown Brooklyn on November 1 and then in Harlem three weeks later, protesters marched through the streets chanting “being broke is not a crime” and “What’s our mission? Abolition.” The police assault has been defended by liberal Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio, while Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo has ordered 500 more police to flood the subways, trains and buses. The Revolutionary Internationalist Youth joined in the protests, calling for cops out of the subways, and to rip out the turnstiles – for free mass transit, run by the transit workers rather than the real estate speculators and Democratic Party pols who control the system today. TWU Local 100 representing transit workers is the stronghold of NYC labor, and if they were to intersect with the fight against cop terror in the subways it would produce a social explosion that would rock the city. But such a struggle must be waged politically and requires a fighting leadership prepared to take on the capitalist parties responsible for running the transit system into the ground. Cops Off the Trains and Out of the Stations! (November 2019)
The Internationalist No. 58
For Workers Mobilization to Defend China
(Winter 2020)
click above or on image
for full list of articles
Hong Kong “Democracy” Riots: Pro-Imperialist, Anti-Communist, Fascist-Infested
For the past eight months, the territory of Hong Kong, a former British colony and since 1997 a Special Autonomous Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), has been wracked by demonstrations and riots that have been almost universally hailed in the West. The protests are described as a “pro-democracy” movement, with “radicalized youth” in the lead, just as the Occupy Central or “Umbrella movement” of 2014 was portrayed. In reality, the mass marches led by middle-class professionals are seeking to preserve the special legal status of this capitalist enclave, while the black-clad offspring of Hong Kong’s bourgeois elite have launched violent attacks aimed at the working class (e.g., torching subway stations) and mainland Chinese. Many leaders call for separation from the PRC. Ultimately, they and their imperialist patrons are looking to spark counterrevolution in the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state. The opportunist left has desperately sought to cover up the blatantly pro-imperialist politics of this movement, which is a little hard to do when the protesters are waving U.S. and British colonial flags. Genuine Trotskyists call to extend the liberating gains of the Chinese Revolution to Hong Kong, to expropriate the capitalists and drive out the imperialists. Hong Kong “Democracy” Riots: Pro-Imperialist, Anti-Communist, Fascist-Infested (February 2020)
Washington’s Hand Behind Anti-China Riots in Hong KongOn Bolivia, Haiti, Puerto Rico…
The escalating and increasingly violent protests in Hong Kong, a capitalist enclave in southern China, are routinely referred to in Western media as a “democracy movement.” In fact, from the outset, the protests have been instigated, advised and funded by U.S. imperialism, fueled by virulent anti-communism and directed against the People’s Republic of China. In this article, we detail how this “astroturf” (fake grassroots) movement has been remote-controlled from Washington. We show how every one of the leaders have been sponsored by the U.S., through the National Endowment for Democracy, its sub-conduits including the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, Freedom House and others. The purveyors of anti-communist subversion are not only right-wing Republicans but in particular liberal Democrats. Washington’s Hand Behind Anti-China Riots in Hong Kong (February 2020)
SL/ICL Flip-flopping Toward Oblivion
Recently the Spartacist League and the International Communist League corrected its long-standing position that Bolivia supposedly has had no proletariat, an absurd claim about the South American country whose militant miners have historically been in the forefront of worker-peasant struggle, and continue to be despite rampant privatization. The correction in Workers Vanguard admitted that this position denied the possibility of workers revolution. But this is only the latest of a series of de facto corrections, this time explicit, of positions it has vociferously asserted for a decade (its denial that Haiti has a proletariat) or two decades (its refusal to advocate the independence of the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico). In each case they had reversed the historic positions of the ICL, which the Internationalist Group has upheld throughout. A main motivation for their now-vacated positions was to attack the IG/LFI as supposed apologists for Third World nationalism, but behind it was also a pronounced strain of imperialist arrogance. With its social-colonialist line on Puerto Rico, and its social-imperialist support for the 2010 U.S. invasion of Haiti, the ICL would never have been let into the Communist International. Yet far from representing a return to revolutionary Marxism, it now declares it would support statehood, i.e., annexation, which would destroy the Puerto Rican nation.The ICL is spinning like a top, wobbling ever more wildly on the way to oblivion. The degenerated SL/ICL, a caricature of Trotskyism, can never forge a genuine world party of socialist revolution. That task falls to the League for the Fourth International. SL/ICL Flip-flopping Toward Oblivion (February 2020)
Hail 75th Anniversary of Soviet Army Liberation of Auschwitz
Expel Zionist Occupiers from the West Bank –
Defend Gaza, the New Warsaw Ghetto
No to Trump/Israel West Bank Annexation Plan!
On January 28, U.S. president Donald Trump unveiled his phony Middle East “peace” plan in a joint appearance at the White House with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is actually a plan to escalate the imperialist-backed Zionist war on the Palestinians by annexing the Israeli-occupied West Bank. It is a naked Zionist land grab to crush and humiliate the Palestinians. All “two-state” plans that have been floated since the Israeli army’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war have been frauds to the extent that they made any pretense of fulfilling the rights of the Palestinian Arab population under the boot of Zionist occupation. Trump’s “vision” is the most cynical of all. But while opposition politicians in both countries criticize its timing and ostentatiously one-sided nature, many of these same Democrats and “moderate” Zionists support the basic elements of the “deal.” Zionists of all stripes and their imperialist patrons are for imposing indefinite Israeli control of the West Bank. Against this the League for the Fourth International calls to drive the Zionist occupiers out of the West Bank, and for an Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Near East. No to Trump/Israel West Bank Annexation Plan! (2 February 2020)
To Drive Out Macron & Co., Fight for Workers to Power
French Strikers Challenge Attack on Pensions
Build a Workers Party Based on the Revolutionary Program of Lenin and Trotsky
The battle over the French government’s assault on pensions has entered its decisive phase. After a month on strike, French workers have already surpassed the record of the December 1995 strike (22 days) that defeated an earlier pension “reform” and the 1986-87 rail strike (28 days) to be the longest since 1968. As President Emmanuel Macron plays for time, trying to wear down the strikers, it is crucial that the action spread to other sections of the working class, especially the private sector. Above all, it is vital to raise a program, establish forms of organization (mass strike committees and workers councils) and forge a leadership that go beyond defense of the status quo to a fight for workers power. This is not an ordinary union battle – it’s a showdown between labor and capital. At issue is which class shall rule. French Strikers Challenge Attack on Pensions (6 January 2020)
From Obama to Trump: Down with U.S. Murder, Inc.
Defeat U.S. Imperialism – Defend Iran!
For International Workers Action – Drive the Imperialists Out of the Middle East
The January 2 assassination of Qassim Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, by a U.S. drone strike was a blatant “act of war” – but more than that, it was the opening salvo of a U.S. imperialist war on Iran. In ordering the murder of the second most powerful leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, U.S. president Donald Trump left the regime no choice but to retaliate against the marauding superpower that threatens its very existence. In this war, class-conscious workers and revolutionaries everywhere have a side: the Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International call to defeat U.S. imperialism and defend Iran. We call in particular for international workers action against Washington’s war. The Democrats, one and all, hail Obama’s 2015 agreement with Iran (as well the European Union, Russia and China) limiting Iran’s nuclear program. Yet this pact subjects Iran to blackmail by U.S. imperialism and the militarist Zionist regime which has hundreds of nukes, and whose leaders are crazy enough to use them. The LFI defends Tehran’s right to develop nuclear arms for its defense against these kill-crazy warmongers. We stand for defense of Iran against the U.S. attack, while giving no political support to its capitalist government. The LFI calls to bring out the power of the working class to bring down the Islamist, monarchist, militarist and Zionist regimes, drive out the imperialists and establish a socialist federation of the Middle East. Defeat U.S. Imperialism – Defend Iran! (3 January 2020)
Down with Stalinist Exclusion!
From Berlin: For Proletarian Opposition to the Coup in Bolivia
The League for the Fourth International has mobilized its sections in protests against the November 10 “civic-military-police” coup d’état in Bolivia that put ultra-rightist, virulently racist and even fascistic elements in power. In Berlin, Germany, the Internationalistische Gruppe joined protests with signs calling for “Bolivian Workers: Smash the Coup!” and “For Worker-Peasant-Indigenous Self-Defense Against Racist Rightist Attacks.” However, twice we have been physically excluded by organizers linked to the Stalinist DKP (German Communist Party), who threatened to call the police on our comrades, amid slanderous accusations of being racists because we give no political support to ousted president Evo Morales and his bourgeois populist Movement to Socialism (MAS). The Stalinists were not calling for unity in action against the coup but rather for political support to the ousted government. The sort of “unity” they seek is a popular front; that is, chaining the working class to the bourgeoisie. The League for the Fourth International stands for revolutionary class struggle against imperialism rather than popular-frontist class collaboration that paves the way for such coups. From Berlin: For Proletarian Opposition to the Coup in Bolivia (20 November 2019)
Whitewashing American History
The WPA Mural Controversy in San Francisco
By Jack Heyman
There has a been a controversy percolating the last couple of years over protests against the 13-panel “Life of Washington” murals painted in 1936 by Works Progress Administration (WPA) artist Victor Arnautoff that are on display at George Washington High School in San Francisco. These murals dared to challenge the patriotic stereotype of Washington, instead portraying him as a slaveholder and military commander overseeing the genocide of Native Americans. Yet now the San Francisco Board of Education has voted to obliterate this militantly anti-racist artist’s depiction of history that the racist rulers always sought to deny. The argument justifying this censorship is that the images were “disturbing” to students. The threat to freedom of expression and free speech is real, and its real targets are the left, labor and those who understand that historical truth is a weapon for the oppressed and exploited. Here it’s being undermined not only by white supremacists and Trump but by “identity politics” Democrats and “progressives.” Whitewashing American History (21 July 2019)
“No Pay, We Stay” – Stop Blackjewel in Its Tracks!
Harlan Miners’ Fight: Inspiration for Workers Everywhere
Updated. Coal miners from Harlan County, Kentucky stood in the railroad tracks outside the Cloverlick #3 mine last Monday and stared down a CSX freight train laden with stolen coal. The miners have been laid off – and ripped off – by Blackjewel LLC, the sixth largest coal producer in the U.S, which filed for bankruptcy on July 1. The news from Harlan County has spread across the world. It strikes a chord with workers all over who know how the owners get away with murder, while they get lied to, ripped off and thrown on the scrapheap by the bosses’ profit system. To help win victory for the Harlan miners’ fight, the power of workers solidarity must be brought to bear to stop Blackjewel in its tracks. A massive union turnout in support of the Blackjewel miners that got their jobs back would shake the region and could spark an organizing drive as far away as Wyoming. After years of setbacks, it’s high time for a union counter-offensive. Harlan Miners’ Fight: Inspiration for Workers Everywhere (3 August 2019)
in Existential Crisis
An Internationalist Group Pamphlet
With the Bernie Sanders candidacy and the dramatic growth of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America, the left reformists have been thrown into crisis.
This 84-page pamphlet features documents from oppositionists who fought inside left groups to uphold the revolutionary politics of Lenin and Trotsky.
To order a print copy of the pamphlet, click here
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)
Democratic Party: Faux Friends of Women
Women’s Liberation
Through Socialist Revolution!
“The extension of women’s freedom is the general principle for all social progress.” So wrote Charles Fourier in 1808. By that measure and so many others, society is getting more unfree and more oppressive by the day, under both Democrats and Republicans. In the U.S. today, immigrant kids are ripped from the arms of their mothers and thrown in child prisons; as we go to press, no less than five states have so-called fetal heartbeat laws on the books, which ban abortion once a cardiac pulse can be detected in a fetus. Meanwhile, the Democrats pretend to be friends of women’s rights, lauding the recent “blue wave” of women elected to Congress. Prominent among such faux friends of women are leaders of bipartisan U.S. imperialism such as Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, infamous for sponsoring Haitian sweatshops that pay women workers $5 a day and her role in designing the 1996 bill to “end welfare as we know it,” which threw millions of black, Latina and white poor women off AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children). This issue of Revolution consists in large part of presentations made at RIY’s Educational and Organizing Conference and at the March 8 forum organized by CUNY Internationalist Clubs, titled “International Women’s Day and Immigrant Rights: From the Origins to Today.” Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! (April 2017)
She Cred Liberation (April 2017)Spokane Marxist Group and Marxist Student Group
Magnus Hirschfield: A Pioneer in the Struggle for Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Rights (April 2017)
Fuse with Revolutionary Internationalist Youth
On March 8, International Women’s Day, the Spokane Marxist Group (SMG) in Washington state and the Marxist Student Group (MSG), leadership of the Marxist Student Union at Central Connecticut State University, fused with the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth, youth section of the Internationalist Group (U.S. section of the League for the Fourth International). The fusion followed a period of common work, a high point of which was RIY’s Educational and Organizing Conference in January. The SMG had its roots in Socialist Alternative, U.S. affiliate of the pseudo-Trotskyist Committee for a Workers’ International, while the MSG emerged from a youth group originally affiliated with Socialist Action, another organization misusing the name of Trotskyism. The fusion comes as most self-proclaimed Marxist organizations in the U.S. have been thrown into crisis by the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America after the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. This has led these groups to jettison just about every remaining pretense of upholding class politics in order to tail after “progressive” Democrats. In contrast, RIY seeks to train young revolutionaries to help forge a revolutionary workers party in intransigent proletarian opposition to all the parties and politicians of “our own” imperialist rulers. Spokane Marxist Group and Marxist Student Group Fuse with RIY (March 2019)
Massive Class Struggle Needed to Win “7K” for CUNY Adjuncts
The City University of New York runs on a multi-tier academic labor system that pits tenured and tenure-track faculty against the majority of academic employees – adjunct instructors hired on a “contingent” basis – and relegates the latter to poverty pay, job insecurity and the lack of most benefits. As of fall 2017, CUNY employed 15,000 adjunct faculty compared to 7,000 full-time faculty. The struggle against this divide-and-conquer system has reached a boiling point over the last year and a half since the expiration of the union contract covering faculty and many staff members at CUNY. Going back well over a decade, CUNY Internationalists have played a key role in this struggle, linking it with our call for no tuition, open admissions, abolition of the Board of Trustees and student-teacher-worker control of the university. A key demand is to raise minimum starting pay per course to $7,000 for adjuncts, who are paid half that amount. The “7K” demand was initiated by comrades active in Class Struggle Education Workers and CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU), an organizing group within the faculty/staff union, the Professional Staff Congress. In recent years, a range of activists have popularized the slogan “7K or Strike.” But how can this be won? As opposed to the ivory-tower worldview of a graduate student-based grouping called “CUNY Struggle,” the CCU has emphasized the need for class struggle to unite with the power of NYC’s workers and oppressed. The clash over these counterposed perspectives led to an outright ban on leftist literature that wrecked a “7K or Strike” organizing conference which the class-struggle forces had initiated and intensively built. Massive Class Struggle Needed to Win “7K” for CUNY Adjuncts (April 2019)
How They Rammed Through Anti-Red Ban (April 2019)
Socialist Action’s “Solidarity with Solidarity”
How Fake Trotskyists Carried the Bags for Imperialism
While the reformist left in the United States is in profound crisis, tripping over each other as they chase after the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America, Socialist Action has remained relatively stationary and appears more red in comparison with those social democrats who are now being devoured by their own opportunism. In reality, SA’s program is pink social democracy. At every key juncture where defense of the degenerated/deformed workers states has been posed point-blank, Socialist Action has lined up with imperialism, from Poland in 1981 to the USSR in 1991 and continuing today. Poland was a key episode in the imperialist drive against the Soviet bloc, which led to capitalist restoration whose devastating consequences continue to be felt around the world. Today SA denounces China as imperialist and North Korea as capitalist while genuine Trotskyists defend them against imperialist threats and attack. And it’s not just words. When the chips were down, these fake-Trotskyists hailed their comrades’ direct and concrete role in delivering vital CIA-financed equipment to counterrevolutionary Polish Solidarność. Read the details here. How Fake Trotskyists Carried the Bags for Imperialism (April 2019)
“American Apartheid” by Design
A Review of Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
By Charles Brover, Class Struggle Education Workers
After more than a decade of hard struggle and the passage of laws in the mid-1960s against official Jim Crow segregation, the civil rights movement suddenly stopped. What was termed de facto segregation was deemed off-limits, or at least had to be left for another day. Rothstein’s book conclusively proves that rigid residential segregation and discrimination against African American, Latino and Asian minorities was always de jure, officially sanctioned. This has had a devastating effect on everything from school integration to murderous police repression. But while laying out key elements of the structural foundation of black oppression in the U.S., The Color of Law fails to go to their root in the system of racist American capitalism. In the United States in 2016 there were 2.3 million evictions: 6,300 a day, four every minute. And with over 3.5 million homeless people in the country, there are 19 million unoccupied dwellings. This powerful essay from Class Struggle Education Workers demonstrates that it will take nothing short of a socialist revolution to solve the housing question. “American Apartheid” by Design (21 November 2018)
While “Democratic Socialist” Ocasio-Cortez Chimes In
Bipartisan War Criminals Celebrate War Hawk John McCain
U.S. imperialism lost one of its most vocal and active warmongers on August 25 – Arizona Republican senator John McCain. Universally praised by ruling-class politicians as a “war hero” and “maverick,” McCain’s funeral at the National Cathedral was attended by some of the most infamous mass murderers of this and the last century, from Henry Kissinger to former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Far from being a “war hero,” a “man of honor” or paragon of “human decency,” Senator John McCain was a war criminal who bombed civilians. He was shot down over North Vietnam on a bombing run against a civilian factory. But McCain’s most valuable service to U.S. imperialism was as an inveterate war hawk in Congress. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Ukraine, Libya and Syria, he beat the drums for murderous imperialist intervention. What’s striking about McCain’s war crimes and endless warmongering is that in virtually all cases, he was joined or supported by Democratic politicians. And, notably, among those praising McCain was Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her eulogy was consciously paying the price of admission to the bipartisan imperialist club of the U.S. Congress. Bipartisan War Criminals Celebrate War Hawk John McCain (September 2018)
As The Boss, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Blames Black Community for Violence
Chicago: Democrat-Led Cops Continue Racist Killing Spree
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution
On July 14, Chicago police gunned down yet another black person, Harith Augustus, a barber. “Snoop” Augustus, known as a peaceful man, was stopped on the pretext of exhibiting the “characteristics of an armed person,” and was shot dead even though he had a valid gun license. For the police in this rigidly segregated city, and throughout this country founded on the bedrock of slavery, it is always open season on black people. And on Latinos, immigrants, Native Americans … the list goes on. Moreover, in Chicago and almost every other big city, Democrats are the bosses of the racist killer cops. This is all coming to a head in the upcoming trial of killer cop Jason Van Dyke for the murder of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. And Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel, running for a third term, is stoking racist reaction by blaming lax “morals” in the black community for the violence engendered by rampant poverty, unemployment and brutal police occupation. Yet some of the same themes are echoed in protests, where instead of denouncing racist police repression the focus is on opposition to “gun violence” in general. Talk of “reforming” the police or controlling guns only serves to divert protest away from a revolutionary perspective and to strengthen the repressive agencies of the capitalist state, while leading protesters into the dead-end of bourgeois pressure politics. The stark fact is that there is no solution to war, poverty and racist repression under capitalism. Chicago: Democrat-Led Cops Continue Racist Killing Spree (August 2018)
Drivers of Yellow and Green Cabs, Black Cars, Uber, Lyft and Others:
Taxi Workers Unite Against the Wall Street Attack!
Demand $25 Per Hour Minimum Pay
Only an Alliance of all Taxi Drivers of all Branches in a Single Union Can Give a Class Leadership to Our Struggle
No Confidence in Bosses’ Politicians
On August 8, the New York City Council voted overwhelmingly to approve two measures regulating “app-based” companies such as Uber and Lyft that have flooded NYC in the last three years. This has led to a drastic fall in income for drivers of traditional taxis (yellow cabs) and livery/black cars, as well for Uber/Lyft drivers. These measures have been hailed as the first action in the U.S. to crack down on the largely unregulated Wall Street-backed companies that seek to monopolize the taxi industry. However, with 100,000+ app-based vehicles already clogging the streets, these measures won’t substantially raise drivers’ incomes. On the eve of the City Council vote, Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas/Class Struggle International Workers leafletted rallies called by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance advocating a guaranteed $25 an hour minimum pay for all taxi drivers, in order to cut across divisions being exploited by the taxi bosses to set one group of drivers against another. At the same time, we emphasized that any real fight against the taxi monopolists requires sharp class struggle against the parties of capital who back them. Taxi Workers Unite Against the Wall Street Attack! Demand $25 Per Hour Minimum Pay (August 2018)
An Internationalist Group Pamphlet
(click on image to order)
A 70-page pamphlet analyzing the organizational and political history of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America. Includes articles on:
The ABCs of the DSA (August 2017)
Imperialist Social Democracy
vs. Black Liberation (December 2017)
The Real Heritage of Michael Harrington's DSA
“Democratic Socialism” in the Service of U.S. Imperialism (February 2018)
DSA Debacle Over Cop “Union” Organizer (September 2017)
DSA Dodges Debate: “Socialism: What It Is (and Isn’t)” (January 2018)
Bernie Sanders and the Pressure Politics of the Opportunist Left (June 2015)
No, Bernie Sanders Is Not a Socialist (March 2016)
Yesterday’s “Obama Socialists,” Today’s Bernie Boosters (December 2015)
James P. Cannon on “Third Parties
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)
Guess Who’s Bernie Sanders’ Foreign Policy Go-To Guy, and What Power Bishop Is His Vatican Fixer
But, of course, one and the same Jeffrey Sachs who designed the post-counterrevolution “shock treatment” in Poland. Also in Bolivia where it led to tens of thousands of workers fired and brutal anti-union repression. In preparation for the no-photo-op pope-meet-and-greet, Bernie and Jeffrey dined with Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, “the pope’s right-hand man and one of the Vatican’s top power players.” This is the same cardinal who helped engineer (together with Hillary Clinton) the 2009 Honduran coup, and before that covered up for bloody massacres and “disappearances” in the 1980s. But then, Pope Francis himself is a veteran of Argentina’s 1970s dirty war. Guess Who's Bernie Sanders’ Foreign Policy Go-To Guy, and His Power Bishop Vatican Fixer (17 April 2016)
A Question of Whose Class Interests Prevail
Flint Water Crisis: Capitalism Is Poisoning Us
The residents of Flint, Michigan have been living a nightmare ever since in early 2014 the city’s state-appointed “emergency manager” and the governor’s office decided to switch the water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. As a result, the population has been subjected to lead poisoning, particularly affecting the very young and elderly. The levels of contamination are astronomical. For almost two years Republican state authorities and Democratic federal officials refused to do anything about complaints. Now an emergency has been proclaimed, but the water is still undrinkable. Meanwhile, the same “emergency manager” has been overseeing Detroit schools as they descend further into the abyss. The emergency has been created by decaying capitalism: industrial pollution, closing factories and a bipartisan attack on teachers and public education. The dictatorial managers must be kicked out, but changing parties will change nothing. The bottom-line issue is which class is in power. Capitalism is literally poisoning our futures. Flint Water Crisis: Capitalism Is Poisoning Us (3 March 2016)
The State of Pennsylvania Seeks to Bar His Lawyer
The Frame-Up of Corey Walker
By Charles Brover
Corey Walker was arrested in July 1996 on a bogus murder charge from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He has been behind bars ever since. Evidence of his innocence was withheld. He is the victim of prosecutorial misconduct and incompetent legal representation. Lorenzo Johnson, who was arrested in the same case, also remains in prison even though a federal appeals court recognized the insufficiency of the evidence against him, but was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court. Now the state is trying to deny Walker the attorney of his choice, Rachel Wolkenstein, who has defended Mumia Abu-Jamal. Pennsylvania authorities will stop at nothing to cover up lying and manufacture of evidence, coercion of witnesses and suppression of evidence of innocence by police and prosecutors. This requires silencing Corey Walker and short-circuiting his legal appeal. In seeking to disqualify Wolkenstein from representing him, the state attorney general's office cites her political views that the judicial system is an organ of racist oppression that must be overthrown by socialist revolution. This witch-hunting attack and the continued incarceration of Walker and Johnson go to the heart of Jim Crow “justice system.” Free Corey Walker and Lorenzo Johnson! The Frame-Up of Corey Walker (4 February 2016)
Jim Crow Justice and the Capitalist State (4 February 2016)Occupation of Hundreds of Schools Blocks Threatened Closures
Whose Life Is On the Line? Cop Stats (4 February 2016)
Bad Apples, Broken Windows, and Other Myths About the Police (4 February 2016)
Student Revolt Shakes São Paulo, Brazil
By Class Struggle Workers/UFT
For the last three weeks, the city of São Paulo, Brazil has been convulsed by a combative upheaval of high school students protesting the state government’s plan to close 92 schools and order hundreds of thousands of students to change schools. When the state governor tried to ram through this plan without consultation, students responded by occupying almost 200 schools. Then, when military police began clearing out occupied schools this week, students took chairs and tables and set up class in busy intersections and highways. The students, backed by teachers, also refused to take high-stakes test. After several days, the governor backed down. This is a dramatic example of how the international capitalist offensive against public education should be fought – by mass action in the streets, bringing out students, teachers, parents and mobilizing the power of the working class. Student Revolt Shakes São Paulo, Brazil (4 December 2015)
The Haitian Revolution and U.S. Imperialism
July 28 marks the 100th anniversary of the first U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915, under Democratic president Woodrow Wilson. This led to an occupation of 19 years, as well as occupations of the Dominican Republic next door, of Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras and Veracruz, Mexico, and followed the 1898 U.S. invasion and occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Philippines. But the occupations didn't stop there. In 1994, Democrat Bill Clinton invaded Haiti a second time, and in 2004 Republican George Bush II invaded a third time. Haiti today continues under imperialist occupation, this time outsourced to a United Nations “peacekeeping” force. As proletarian internationalist opponents of imperialism, on this centenary we republish articles from Workers Vanguard when it was the voice of revolutionary Trotskyism on the 1915-34 U.S. occupation, and a two-part series on Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution that led to the first black republic in history, as well as sparking slave revolts throughout the Caribbean and in the United States. (30 July 2015)
Yankee Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934Protest the Police Lynching of Sandra Bland
Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, Part 1
Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, Part 2
On July 10, Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African American activist and education worker, was driving from Illinois to her new job at the historically black Prairie View A&M University in Texas, her alma mater. Sandra was pulled over by a Texas Ranger, supposedly for changing lanes without signalling. The trooper abusively demanded she get out of the car, theatening to use a Taser electric shock on her. After having her head slammed on the ground, Sandra was arrested for supposed “assault on a public servant,” for insisting on her rights. Three days later, she was found dead in her cell in Waller County, Texas. The authorities claim she committed suicide. We say the police are guilty. Sandra was lynched by the cops. On July 22, hundreds gathered in New York City's Union Square to protest the police murder of Sandra Bland. Class Struggle Education Workers, CUNY Internationalist Clubs and the Internationalist Group joined in. Protest the Police Lynching of Sandra Bland (22 July 2015) (video)
NYC May Day 2015
The Internationalist Group, CUNY Internationalist Clubs and Class Struggle Education workers had a spirited contingent in the May Day march in New York City. Leading the contingent was a group with red flags with the hammer, sickle and 4 of the Fourth International. Then came a banner made by the Hunter Internationalist Club, proclaiming:“Ayotzinapa-Ferguson-NYC, Smash the Racist Capitalist State, Workers to Power. Signs emphasized the call to Defend Black Baltimore following the occupation of the city by the National Guard to squelch the upheaval over the police murder of Freddie Gray, and to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, who faces execution in prison by deliberate medical neglect. Also highlighted was the call for workers action against police terror, noting the historic action by ILWU Local 10 that shut down the port of Oakland on May Day and marched on City Hall calling to stop police terror.NYC May Day 2015 video (9 May 2015)Sunset Park Fights Back Against Police Attack
NYC May Day 2015 photos (6 May 2015)
NYC May Day 2011 video
NYC May Day 2010 video
It’s been only two months since Eric Garner was chokeholded to death in Staten Island by the racist cops, and barely a month and a half since the police murder of 17-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But despite the national outcry and a thousands-strong march in New York in late August, two incidents in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn show once again the face of racist police violence under liberal Democratic NYC mayor Bill de Blasio. The first involved a heavy‑duty arrest of a vendor after a festival in the park; in the second, a cop slammed a pregnant woman on the pavement on her abdomen and her son and husband were arrested. The residents of this heavily immigrant neighborhood feel singled out for aggressive enforcement under NYPD chief William Bratton’s “broken windows” strategy of massive arrests for minor infractions. On Saturday, September 27, some 300 people came out to protest against the brutal police siege. While many called for Bratton’s resignation, racist cop terror is endemic in capitalist America. To put a stop to it will require nothing less than workers revolution. Sunset Park Fights Back Against Police Attack (28 September 2014)
Defend North Korea and China Against Imperialism and Counterrevolution
U.S. War Provocations Push Korea to the Brink
For the Revolutionary Reunification of Korea, North and South!
Over the last month and a half, the United States and South Korea have engaged in an escalating series of military provocations against North Korea. Simultaneous “war games” have simulated a nuclear aerial bombing of the North, a ground invasion from the South, annihilation of the leadership and the “insertion” of tens of thousands of U.S. troops searching for nukes. While the imperialist media are, as usual, strenuously demonizing the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and playing up blustering statements coming out of the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, the Pentagon has been laying the basis for a military strike against the North. The whole operation is part of detailed plan elaborated by the Obama administration, dubbed “the playbook,” for U.S. shows of force. But this is no football game. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International defend North Korea, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, against the war provocations, economic blockade and any attack by U.S. imperialism and its South Korean junior partners, no matter how it starts. We also defend North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, its main deterrent against a war by the power which laid waste to the North in the Korean War. U.S. War Provocations Push Korea to the Brink (13 April 2013)
The founding statement of the League for the Fourth International
La Declaración de la Liga por la IV Internacional se encuentra aquí en español.
La Déclaration de la Ligue pour la Quatrième Internationale se retrouve ici en français.
A Declaração da Liga pela Quarta Internacional é disponível aqui no português.
Deklarasyon ng Liga para sa Ika-Apat na Internasyonal.
Introducing
The InternationalistEl Internacionalista
es el órgano en español de la Liga por la IV Internacional.Vanguarda Operária
é o jornal da Liga Quarta-Internacionalista
do Brasil.Liga für die Vierte Internationale
Artikel und Erklärungen der LIVI auf Deutsch.Contact us at the following addresses:
U.S.A.
To contact the League for the Fourth International write to: Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY, 10008, U.S.A. Tel (212) 460-0983. Fax (212) 614-8711
E-mail: internationalistgroup@msn.comBRAZIL
To contact the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil write to: Caixa Postal 084027, CEP 27251-970, Volta Redonda, RJ, Brazil
Caixa Postal 3982, CEP 20010-974, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
E-mail: lqb1996@yahoo.com.br
GERMANY
To contact the Internationalistische Gruppe in Germany, write to: Postfach 80 07 21, 21007 Hamburg, Germany
E-mail: permanenterevolution@posteo.de
ITALY
To contact the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia, write to: Anna Chiaraluce, Casella Postale N. 6, 06070 Ellera Umbra (PG), Italy
E-mail: it_internazionalista@yahoo.com
MEXICO
To contact the Grupo Internacionalista/México write to: Apartado Postal 12-201, Admón. Postal Obrero Mundial, CP 03001, Mexico D.F, Mexico
E-mail: grupointernacionalista@yahoo.com.mx
We would like to hear from you. If you are interested in learning more about the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, contact us at: internationalistgroup@msn.com
