Internationalist Group -- Reforge the Fourth International!

Left Reformists
in Existential Crisis
An Internationalist Group Pamphlet

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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.

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From the Previous Issue

The Internationalist No. 56
(May-June 2019)
click above or on image
for full list of articles

Mobilize Worker/Immigrant Power to Shut Down
the Democrat/Republican Deportation Machine!
Trump Targets Millions of Immigrants for “Removal”
A wave of panic swept across the United States as Donald Trump tweeted in mid-June that “Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens.” Immigrant families were hit with the prospect of being picked up in their homes or on the street, parents separated from their U.S.-born children and packed off to detention centers for immediate deportation. As usual, Trump’s pronouncement was a political ploy, intended to whip up anti-immigrant and racist frenzy in conjunction with kicking off his reelection campaign for president. Currently, tens of thousands of migrants – mostly Central Americans fleeing violence and economic devastation caused by U.S. imperialism – are suffering in wretched concentration camps in the U.S., including thousands of children kept in brutal conditions in private prisons. The United States is a police state for immigrants. As Trump stokes xenophobia (fear and hatred of foreigners), the rights of all are threatened by this unbridled exercise of police power. Trump’s terror plans could backfire. But for that to happen, we must act. The Internationalist Group calls on all defenders of immigrants’ and democratic rights to mobilize to stop these raids, flooding the streets to block the unmarked vans and snatch squads. Raids and arrests must be met by mass protest, including labor/immigrant/student action to block the deportation cops. Above all, we fight to break with Democrats, Republicans and all capitalist parties, to build an internationalist workers party Trump Targets Millions of Immigrants for “Removal” (24 June 2019)

Concentration Camps U.S.A. (24 June 2019)

Democrats, Republicans, Courts, Congress: Enemies of Full Right to Abortion
Defeat Racist Abortion Bans With Class-Struggle Action
For Free Abortion on Demand! Labor: Defend the Clinics!
In a frenzied move to roll back women’s rights by several decades, so far in 2019 nine states have passed new, draconian restrictions on abortion rights. Any restriction on a woman’s right to an abortion is an infringement on her basic right to control her own body. As Marxists and defenders of women’s rights, we say that the decision to give birth or not must be that of the woman alone, because it is her life and her future that will be irrevocably altered. The anti-abortion “god squads” who besiege the clinics really don’t give a damn about so-called “sanctity of life”. Rather, they are obsessed with putting women in their place. There is another important social underpinning to the anti-abortion drive. The Internationalist Group has called to defeat the racist abortion bans. The push to illegalize abortion is driven by racist fears that white women are not producing enough white babies. Today, the Democratic Party is seeking to use the abortion bans in order to win women’s votes in the 2020 elections. But, in fact, the Democrats are no defenders of women’s fundamental right to abortion. The Internationalist Group calls for free abortion on demand. We stand for militant defense of abortion clinics, including against “pro-life” terrorists who target the courageous doctors and nurses who perform this vital medical procedure. And we fight in the unions to defend this elemental right of women. Defeat Racist Abortion Bans With Class-Struggle Action (24 June 2019)

As DSA Grows, SAlt Splinters, ISO Implodes
Left Reformists In Existential Crisis
Buffeted by social and political crises, the United States is already neck-deep in the muck of the next presidential campaign. While most “progressives” would vote for anything, including maybe even an actual donkey, if it won the Democratic nomination to oppose Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign has once again drawn the hopes and illusions of the majority of self-identified leftists. Sanders’ last campaign, together with revulsion at the election of Trump, led to the mushrooming of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a long-stagnant social-democratic pressure group on and in the Democratic Party. This posed an existential challenge to reformist socialist groups like the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Socialist Alternative (SAlt) which occupied political space a bit to the left of liberal Democrats. The ensuing period has been one of growing crisis for reformist groups nominally to the left of the DSA. SAlt, which unabashedly threw itself into the Sanders campaign, has lost a huge chunk of its membership and a whole series of locals. The International Socialist Organization hailed the bourgeois politicians Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as fellow socialists while hovering at the edge of formally endorsing them. Although the final act of the ISO’s demise was marked in particular by its embrace of #MeToo Democratic Party feminism, its collapse is fundamentally due to the predicament it found itself in as the burgeoning DSA occupied its hoped-for political space. The ISO and SAlt have been devoured by their own opportunism. Left Reformists In Existential Crisis (24 June 2019)

The ISO and “Socialism from Below” (24 June 2019)

France: “Yellow Vest” Revolt and the Struggle for Socialist Revolution
It is now more than six months since the first demonstrations of the “Gilets jaunes” (Yellow Vests) in France. Thousands of people are still demonstrating. Ferocious repression has reduced the demonstrations to a hard core, and an unrelenting media propaganda campaign has eroded initial high public support, but the guerrilla warfare is far from ended. The increased taxes on fuel, which especially hit working people, was the drop that made the glass overflow. Across Europe, social unrest following the financial crash in 2008 has taken the form of a variety of populist movements and parties, among them the Yellow Vests. Such multi-class movements – whether of the “left,” right or center – are bourgeois in character, and thus cannot lead a revolutionary struggle to bring down capitalism. To go forward it is necessary to mobilize the proletariat to overturn the class axis of the struggle. The situation cries out for a workers leadership that goes beyond simple trade-unionism, on a program to unite the entire working class and rally the pensioners, the youth, the unemployed and immigrants in hard class struggle. France: “Yellow Vest” Revolt and the Struggle for Socialist Revolution (6 June 2019)

Stop the Repression of the Yellow Vests (June 2019)

The Opportunist Left Hitched to the Yellow Vests
When the Yellow Vests burst upon the scene, it was a godsend for the bulk of the demoralized French “far left.” The various pseudo-Trotskyist currents, in contrast, have schooled themselves in what Lenin’s Bolsheviks called khvostism, or tailism, the art of chasing after whatever “movement” is currently in vogue. While various opportunists seek to hitch their trailer to the Yellow Vests, Leninists seek to split this amorphous movement along class lines and win the toiling masses among them to a workers movement fighting to take power. The Opportunist Left Hitched to the Yellow Vests (June 2019)

The ICL Against Asylum for Refugees in Quebec
Quebec’s right-wing prime minister François Legault has announced his intention to reduce immigration by 20% this year, one way or another. Quebec has a veto on overall immigration, but not on the entry of refugees. So in addition to canceling 18,000 applications for immigration, Legault demanded that control over all aspects of immigration be handed over to the Quebec government. The French-language newspaper of the International Communist League in Quebec and Canada writes that since “the struggle for Quebec to have its independent state cannot be separated from the struggle to control its borders,” therefore “Legault’s current demand that immigration ... be brought back under the jurisdiction of Quebec is legitimate from this standpoint.” Thus the ICL openly supports the “legitimate” right of a bourgeois government to turn back refugees in order to control the borders of an independent state, which, moreover, does not even exist! Genuine Marxists assume no responsibility for the organization of the repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie when they support the call for independenceThis is a betrayal of the internationalist principles of communism. The ICL Against Asylum for Refugees in Quebec (6 June 2019)

Arrest of Algerian Workers Party Leader by Military Regime Threatens Entire Working Class
Free Louisa Hanoune!
On Thursday, May 9, Louisa Hanoune, General Secretary of the Algerian Workers Party (PT), was called before the military tribunal of Blida as a witness in the scope of an inquiry against the clan of the deposed President Bouteflika. However, she was then placed in preventive detention accused of being somehow involved in “attacks on the authority of the army” and “conspiracy against the authority of the state.” This arbitrary arrest is a direct attack on the rights of millions of people who have demonstrated in recent weeks and presages a hardening of the military power. The League for the Fourth International demands that Louisa Hanoune be immediately released. Free Louisa Hanoune! (12 May 2019)

Call for a Constituent Assembly? Constitutional Tinkering Will Not Put an End to Capitalist Misery – For a Workers and Peasants Government!
Algeria: For Workers Revolution Against the Military Regime!
Sweep Away All the Bourgeois Clans and Overthrow the Capitalist System!
Hundreds of thousands of Algerians have gone into the streets every Friday, at first to demand the departure of a silent and invisible president, and later to call for the end of “the system.” There is talk of a "February 22 Revolution." This is an illusion, in the same way that the uprisings that overthrew Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt (in 2011) were described as a revolution, only to be followed by the rise of the Islamists, and then the return of the military. People chant, “System get lost!” Yes, it’s a whole system, not just a president or a clan. Nor is it only the absence of (bourgeois) “democracy.” But whether it’s corrupt cronies or powerful generals, they will never leave power willingly – they must be overthrown. After the resignation of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on April 2, dictated by the generals under pressure from the street, the Algerian regime is regrouping. This system of massive unemployment and low wages, of all-encompassing repression, is called capitalism, and to sweep it away we need an internationalist, socialist workers revolution. Algeria: For Workers Revolution Against the Military Regime! (24 April 2019)

Throw Off the UGTA’s Stranglehold on the Working Class!
Against State-Controlled “Trade Unionism,” Forge a Revolutionary Leadership (24 April 2019)

Program Is Key: Fight for Permanent Revolution
South Africa: Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party Challenge to ANC Neo-Apartheid Regime
Critical Support to the SRWP in May 8 Elections!
From April 4 to 6, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP) of South Africa held its inaugural congress with a thousand delegates and guests outside Johannesburg. The party, which defines itself as communist and “Marxist-Leninist,” was initiated by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the largest and most militant trade union in the country. This is a major development in the South African class struggle, reflecting the continuing unrest and protest against the neo-apartheid regime following the horrendous 2012 police massacre of 34 striking miners at Marikana. It is a direct challenge to the Tripartite Alliance – consisting of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party (SACP) and Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) – which has governed the country since the end of formal white minority rule in 1994. What replaced the rigidly segregated apartheid system was a black bourgeois government presiding over a capitalist economy still based on the superexploitation of black labor. After a quarter century of this “democratic” capitalist regime, South African poor and working people are fed up. The appearance of an explicitly communist party based on militant sections of the South African proletariat has tremendous potential, which could shake the entire continent. But that requires the leadership of a Leninist party based on the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. South Africa: Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party Challenge to ANC Neo-Apartheid Regime (7 May 2019)

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. 16
(May 2019)
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for full list of articles

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)

Magnus Hirschfield: A Pioneer in the Struggle for Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Rights (April 2017)

Spokane Marxist Group and Marxist Student Group
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)

DSA: Fronting for the Democrats
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)