    
|
"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.
War on Immigrants: Flashpoint Los Angeles
Labor Must Act: Drive I.C.E. Out of L.A.!
Bring Out Workers’ Power to Stop Mass Deportations, Police-State Occupation
Since Donald Trump began his second term on January 20, pressure has been mounting on immigrant communities across the country. On June 6, the pressure cooker exploded in Los Angeles. The start of militarized workplace raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) police predictably set off angry protests. In rapid-fire reaction, Trump federalized and deployed National Guard troops and activated Marines to invade Los Angeles. As Trump rules by decree in a drive toward a beefed-up “strong state” regime, he is seeking to get the population used to seeing the military repressing civilian protesters in U.S. streets. Trump’s war on immigrants is an assault on the democratic rights of all. The Internationalist Group calls on labor to mobilize its power to stop the police-state occupation and the I.C.E. raids and deportations. This requires a fight against both Republicans and Democrats, capitalist parties of mass deportations and genocidal war. Labor Must Act: Drive I.C.E. Out of L.A.! (13 June 2025)
Not Democratic “Faux Friends” But a Revolutionary Workers Party!
Against Trump’s Blitzkrieg of Bigotry, Labor Must Defend Trans Rights
Starting on the first day of his second presidential term, Donald Trump unleashed a series of attacks on one of the most vulnerable social groups in the United States: transgender people. In his inaugural address on January 20, he proclaimed that “there are only two genders, male and female.” With a stroke of the pen, Trump & Co. seek to erase transgender people. Trump’s executive order had many immediate effects, among them assaulting transgender health services. For us as revolutionary Marxists – whose outlook is based on science and reason, not obscurantist prejudice – decisions on such intimate and consequential questions, and on medical issues in general, are a matter for the person and their doctor. We say: Hands off trans kids! While Democratic liberals started posturing as trans people’s “allies” in the recent past (only to abandon this when they decided it was electorally expedient), revolutionary Marxists’ support for gay and trans people’s democratic rights goes back well over a century. Remembering that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” labor must use its power against the deadly dangerous offensive targeting the rights and very existence of transgender people. Against Trump’s Blitzkrieg of Bigotry, Labor Must Defend Trans Rights (May 2025)
For Workers Action to Stop Mass Deportations
In neighborhoods across the U.S., immigrants are being targeted and seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) police and other federal agents as the government ramps up its operations to implement President Donald Trump’s campaign threat of the biggest mass deportations in U.S. history. It is a war on the working people of this country. The Internationalist Group and fraternally allied groups are organizing in the labor movement to form committees to defend immigrants in schools and workplaces. In the Pacific Northwest, Class Struggle Workers – Portland put forward a “Resolution to Defend Immigrants Against Mass Deportations and Racist Violence” which was passed by six area unions. In New York City, a Labor Committee to Defend Immigrants (LCDI) was established at a conference on January 9 attended by more than 70 members, organizers and officers from unions, worker-organizing and immigrant-rights groups, including six Teamsters locals. The Committee has established working groups including construction and building workers, education, healthcare, hospitality, transport and warehouse workers, students, and outreach. Class-conscious workers and immigrants’ rights defenders around the U.S. are encouraged to undertake similar initiatives. For Workers Action to Stop Mass Deportations (May 2025)
Trump, White House Witch-Hunters Besiege Academia
The Gleichschaltung of American Universities
U.S. universities are under attack like never before. It began on March 8 with the seizure of Mahmoud Khalil, a politically moderate Palestinian graduate of Columbia University. In the following weeks, while pushing to deport international students, the federal government launched an assault on academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus intended to be much more deep-going than even the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s. Washington is seeking control over hiring, enrollment, governance and course content, while demanding the expulsion of liberal “activist” faculty and students. The basic outlook of the administration can be summed up by the title of a 2021 speech delivered by now vice president J.D. Vance: “The Universities Are the Enemy.” As Vance put it in a July 2024 interview, the Trump regime seeks to “replace the existing ruling class with another ruling class.” As the U.S. lurches toward authoritarian rule, we are facing a drive to control all education, whipping educators into line to march in lockstep with the MAGA agenda, imitating the German Nazis’ Gleichschaltung (synchronization) of the schools. The Gleichschaltung of American Universities (May 2025)
NYC Higher Education Unions Rally Against Attacks on Universities, Immigrants
Hunter Internationalist: “We Are All Under Attack!”
In early March, the Trump administration began abducting pro-Palestinian international students for deportation, simultaneously threatening to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding from elite universities deemed insufficiently hard on protests against Gaza genocide. The initial response of college administrations (epitomized by Columbia University) was to capitulate. But when it was announced that 17 international students at the City University of New York had their visas revoked, the CUNY faculty/staff union Professional Staff Congress along with students from the CUNY Internationalist Clubs sharply protested. Shortly afterwards, a national day of action was called by higher education unions for April 17. A student representing the CUNY Internationalists and the Hunter College Committee to Defend Immigrants spoke at the NYC rally. Hunter Internationalist: “We Are All Under Attack!” (May 2025)
Video of Hunter Internationalist’s speech (May 2025)Not the Democrats, But Workers Action Against Mass Deportations and Layoffs!
Trumpland USA: Lurching Toward Authoritarian Rule
Against Police-State Repression: Fight for Workers Revolution!
The second presidency of wannabe autocrat Donald J. Trump started with a tsunami of executive orders, 26 on Inauguration Day (January 20), now up to 141 by Day 100, an all-time record. As the barrage of decrees targeting one group or institution after another has kept up, with a new abomination every day, fear has spread among vulnerable populations across the U.S. First on Trump’s hit list are immigrants, now facing mass deportations. Next came witch hunts in academia, deporting pro-Palestinian international students and slashing budgets of institutions that failed to fall into line. Then Trump declared a trade war against just about every country on earth, setting off panic. The talk is of chaos, but the avalanche of actions shows a well-prepared plan: Trump is systematically preparing a counterrevolutionary war on China. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International say you can’t fight Trump with the Democrats and fight for workers action in the struggle to stop deportations. Defending China and Russia against the imperialist war drive, we warn that there is no reformist alternative to the drive by all wings of the imperialist bourgeoisie for a “strong state” based on a militarized police apparatus. The answer is to fight for international socialist revolution, and to forge a workers party on the program of Lenin and Trotsky to lead it. Trumpland USA: Lurching Toward Authoritarian Rule (29 April 2025)
Elon Musk Goes After Federal Workers, and He’s Coming for Your Social Security (29 April 2025)Student/Labor Protests Stop Immigration Cops’ Provocation at CUNY Campus
White Supremacists Push State-Enforced Pregnancy (29 April 2025)
Fascism, Bonapartism and Donald Trump (29 April 2025)
On February 27, a campaign of protest and exposure caused the Customs and Border Protection agency to cancel a special recruitment session it scheduled at one of the main campuses of the City University of New York (CUNY). The planned session at the John Jay College career fair was a dangerous provocation, seeking to make the largest urban public university in the U.S. a recruiting ground for the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” drive. It was stopped as the result of two protests, initiated by the CUNY Internationalist Clubs, demanding “DHS/ICE, Border Patrol: Out of CUNY Now!” in front of the campus building where the job fair was held. The first, on February 25, on the opening day of the “CareerCon” fair, drew some 150 students and faculty/staff union members. Many students came from Hunter College, under the banner of the Hunter Committee to Defend Immigrants. Linking up with the power of NYC’s labor movement was a key theme of the protests. More than a dozen members of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) faculty/staff union from different campuses participated, and several spoke, as did a Teamster warehouse worker, an NYC teacher, a restaurant worker and students from several campuses. Another important theme was that the deportation machine Trump relies on was beefed up by Democratic “Deporter-in-Chief” Obama and his successors in the Biden/Harris administration, point to the need for a revolutionary workers party. Student/Labor Protests Stop Immigration Cops’ Provocation at CUNY Campus (March 2025)
PROTEST – NEW YORK CITY – TUESDAY, FEB. 25For a Revolutionary Internationalist Workers Party
DHS/ICE, Border Patrol: OUT OF CUNY NOW!
Beginning this Tuesday, February 25, agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – which the mass deportation machine of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are part of – will be recruiting at a job fair at the City University of New York’s John Jay College. They’re trying to recruit shock troops for the anti-immigrant, racist onslaught of raids and deportations – right here at CUNY! The CUNY Internationalist Clubs call on all defenders of immigrant rights and opponents of police-state terror to join us this Tuesday in front of John Jay College, 59th Street between 10th and 11th Avenue, Manhattan, in a rally of protest and exposure demanding DHS/ICE, BORDER PATROL: OUT OF CUNY NOW! We say: Stop the raids and deportations! ICE out of New York! DHS/ICE, Border Patrol: OUT OF CUNY NOW! (24 February 2025)
German Elections 2025: For Class Struggle Against Militarization, Austerity, Mass Layoffs and Deportations!
Mobilize the Power of the Working Class to Defend Refugees and Immigrants Against Racist Persecution
The German Bundestag (parliament) elections on February 23 are taking place in an atmosphere of generalized crisis. Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets “against the right.” Brazen U.S. intervention in the German election campaign. A NATO crisis over Russia and Ukraine. Repression of protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Hysteria about “migrant crime.” But despite the polarization, all major parties are for increased militarization, more austerity cutbacks and stepped-up deportations. However the usual coalition dance ends, the next federal government will continue the reactionary policies of its predecessor, only worse. There is nothing in these war-and-austerity elections for working people and the oppressed. From worker/immigrant mobilization against racist/fascist attacks and deportations to factory occupations against the threat of layoffs, the key is to form the nucleus of a revolutionary workers party. German Elections 2025: Class Struggle Against Mlitarization, Austerity, Mass Layoffs and Deportations (19 February 2025)
The Internationalist No. 74
MAGA Regime: Billionaire “Populists” on the Warpath
(September-December 2024)
click above or on image
for full list of articles
Democrats Reap Bitter Fruit of Scorning the Working Class
Trump 2: Gearing Up
to Rule by Decree
Break with the Parties of Capital –
For a Revolutionary Workers Party
The 2024 U.S. election is a turning point in recent history, the end of an era. That is the era of U.S. global hegemony since World War II. The “American Century” is over. The victory of Donald Trump was against the Democratic Party of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the Republican “establishment.” Their defeat reflects the long-term decline of the United States in the world capitalist economy, and now also in its failing military power. The Democratic Party lost a large part of the youth and many liberals over the genocidal U.S./Israel war on the Palestinian people in Gaza. The erosion of working-class support for the Democrats has reached the breaking point. But while Trump got 3 million more votes than in 2020, Harris got 6 million less votes than Biden in 2020. Rather than a sharp shift to the right of the U.S. population, the 2024 election was a vote – from the right and the left – against the Democratic Party. While Donald Trump adopts populist poses, he is now forming a government of billionaires. The world situation of extreme danger cries out for proletarian revolutionary leadership. Trump 2: Gearing Up for Rule by Decree (December 2024)
“Left” Electoralism and Coalitionism: A Dead End (December 2024)The Man Who Would Be “Dictator on Day One”
Says Hitler Did Good Things
Is Donald Trump a Fascist?
A lot of people in the United States – and not only – are very afraid of what a second term for Donald Trump as president will mean. At the same time, many want to fight the looming catastrophe. In order to do so effectively, it’s important to have a clear understanding of the nature of the enemy we are confronting. There is a lot of talk about Donald Trump as a “fascist.” This loose use of the term mischaracterizes the fascist movement in Italy, Germany and elsewhere in the 1920s and ’30s, and fascist groups today. It also builds illusions in bourgeois “democracy,” which can be plenty repressive. Donald Trump is a would-be strongman, aspiring to command a one-man authoritarian regime that intimidates or crushes any potential opponents. The FBI, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, armed forces and police are to be his personal army. His talk of being a “dictator on Day 1” tells you all about Day 2, and after. Is Donald Trump a Fascist? (December 2024)
Republicans and Democrats Declare War on Immigrants
Mobilize Working Class Power to Stop Deportations
A war is about to be unleashed on the working people of the United States by the government of the United States. Fueled by a hysteria whipped up against “illegal” immigrants, depicted as “the enemy within,” in reality it is an attack on the working class and the democratic rights of all. To carry out his threatened mass deportations, the incoming president, Republican Donald Trump, is planning to declare a national emergency. Constitutional rights, including to due process, will be “suspended” (that is, eliminated) for a huge sector of the population. This assault must be fought tooth and nail, in particular by unleashing the enormous power of the working class, of which immigrants are a key component, that can bring the deportation machine to a screeching halt. And that requires taking on both of the partner parties of U.S. imperialism, Democrat as well as Republican. Mobilize Working Class Power to Stop Deportations (December 2024)
October ILA Strike “Suspended” After Three Days,
January Showdown Over Bosses’ Automation Threat
ILA Longshore Workers: To Defeat Job-Killing Automation, Strike for Union Control of Tech!
After the brief strike of port workers on the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts in October, the unresolved issue was automation. On December 12, Donald Trump issued a statement supporting the union’s opposition to the introduction of automated machinery on the docks. But the shippers have not relented. Whatever the odds, any union “strategy” that banks on the whims of a multi-billionaire CEO of United States, Inc. can’t win lasting gains. With Trump, everything is “transactional.” What will the unions give up? A real victory in the battle over job-killing automation will take an all-out fight for union control of technology, and a political fight against the politicians, parties and government of the bosses. ILA Longshore Workers: To Defeat Job-Killing Automation, Strike for Union Control of Tech! (28 December 2024)
Deep-Sixing Their Own History
SL’s Latest Longshore Lies
For the last several decades, the latter-day Spartacist League has pursued an unrelenting vendetta against Heyman. Almost without fail, whenever he was leading struggles, the “post-revolutionary SL” would slander and/or boycott them. The successful picket of the Neptune Jade in solidarity with locked-out dock workers in Liverpool, Britain (1997); the shutdown of all West Coast ports to demand “Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” (1999); the West Coast port shutdown against the U.S. imperialist war in Afghanistan and Iraq (2008); the struggle to unionize the scab Export Grain Terminal in Longview, Washington, when the SL grooved on the assault on ILWU activists and supporters by a bureaucratic goon squad (2012); the list goes on... Now a born-again SL feigns approval of an ILWU Local 10 motion for the union to boycott military cargo to Israel amid the genocidal war on Gaza, but then publishes a long account by a supporter slamming Heyman, the author of the resolution. His letter to the editor of the SL’s newspaper Workers Vanguard is printed here. SL’s Latest Longshore Lies (December 2024)
Jack Heyman, Letter to the Editor of Workers Vanguard (23 December 2024)Unionize Amazon with Class Struggle!
Bring Out All Labor to Win Amazon Teamster Strikes!
On December 19, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters launched strikes at seven Amazon facilities around the U.S. after the company ignored a deadline to agree to begin negotiations for a union contract. Amazon is the world’s third largest corporation whose executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, is the third richest man in the world. The e-commerce giant is a hardline anti-union employer. Overcoming the Amazon bosses’ opposition will take hard class struggle. It is urgent that all labor – as well as students, immigrants and other union supporters – come out in large numbers to build mass picket lines to shut down the warehouses and stop the deliveries. The Internationalist Group, Revolutionary Internationalist Youth and class-struggle unionists came out to Amazon picket lines at several locations. Many picketers had illusions that the National Labor Relations Board could force Amazon to the table. But the NLRB is an agency of the capitalist government, set up in the 1930s to regulate and stifle militant class struggle and to hogtie union organizing with a web of bureaucratic processes. Strikes, unions and contract gains are not won by relying on the bosses’ government or the bosses’ parties. Class-struggle trade unionists oppose all government control of the workers movement and call to break with all capitalist parties, to build a workers party to fight for a workers government.. Bring Out All Labor to Win Amazon Teamster Strikes! (21 December 2024)
For Workers Action Against Imperialist and Zionist War
Greek Workers Block Arms to Israel and Ukraine
Brandishing red flares and chanting “Free Palestine!” on the night of October 17, dozens of dockworkers in Piraeus, Greece, blocked a container with 21 tons of ammunition from being loaded aboard a ship bound for Israel, to be deployed in the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza. The ship departed without its death cargo. The action was carried out by the dock workers union ENEDEP, affiliated with PAME, the labor federation associated with the Greek Communist Party (KKE). A delegate of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, (PGFP), which has appealed to workers internationally to stop transport of military goods to Israel, thanked the Greek dock workers. Then on November 6 KKE-led demonstrators blocked a shipment of ammunition and rockets to the U.S./NATO puppet regime in Ukraine. Italy and Greece are the only countries where left-wing unions have actually blocked war cargo in response to the PGFP appeal. Stopping a container of ammo to Israel, a convoy of war cargo to Ukraine, a one-day strike or port shutdown – these are first steps, but they are vital in pointing the direction that struggle imperialist and Zionist war must take. Greek Workers Block Arms to Israel and Ukraine (26 November 2024)
Claims of Anti-Jewish “Pogrom” Are a Lie
Operation Amsterdam: Zionist Soccer Hooligans Stage Racist Rampage
On Friday, November 8, “mainstream” media around the world exploded with a story of supposed “antisemitic attacks” on Israeli football fans in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The showpiece supposedly illustrating this was a video that indeed showed a mob hunting and attacking defenseless individuals. But what the video actually showed was the exact opposite of what has been claimed: the attackers were actually rioting Israeli “fans” of the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team, chanting anti-Palestine slogans, charging at and beating Arab local residents. There were no antisemitic mobs attacking Jews on November 7-8, there was no antisemitic pogrom. What there was, was an organized rampaging mob of Zionist hooligans marauding through central Amsterdam, tearing down Palestinian flags, spewing out racist filth, brandishing metal rods and makeshift clubs, throwing rocks at passers-by and buildings, threatening and assaulting Amsterdamers. And throughout this, they were escorted and protected by the police, who even led them to buildings with Palestinian flags. Operation Amsterdam: Zionist Soccer Hooligans Stage Racist Rampage (12 November 2024)
Mobilize Workers’ Power to Free Anti-Austerity Protesters in Nigeria and Kenya
In August protests in Nigeria against drastic austerity measures, including elimination of fuel subsidy leading to record price increases for food, 40 people were killed by police well over 1,000 arrested. Of those, three months later 29 children were still in jail, charged with treason and facing the death penalty. The Nigerian protests were inspired by huge anti-austerity protests in Kenya, in which police killed over 50 demonstrators. The presidents of both African countries are imperialist toadies. Kenyan president William Ruto dispatched several hundred police to Haiti, acting as mercenaries to put down unrest there. The League for the Fourth International supported protests demanding freedom for arrested protesters in Nigeria, and called for U.S. mercenary Kenyan police out of Haiti. Mobilize Workers’ Power to Free Anti-Austerity Protesters in Nigeria and Kenya (7 November 2024)
Argentina: Drop the Charges Against Polo Obrero, Stop the Persecution of the Piquetero Movement
Ultra-rightist Argentine president Javier Milei’s “shock” program of brutal austerity, massive cutbacks, layoffs and wholesale privatizations1 has gone together with criminalizing protest and escalating repression against the left and broader social movements. This campaign to “retake” the streets from protesters has been accompanied by a judicial offensive targeting above all organizations of the left. The most prominent recent offensive has been an indictment of leaders of the Polo Obrero (Workers Pole), the mass unemployed organization of the Partido Obrero (PO – Workers Party). The left and labor must solidly oppose all attempts to persecute and prosecute those who resist the depredations of the capitalist state, including the deeply corrupt judicial caste, both under the ultra-rightist Milei government and its Peronist and conservative predecessors. At the same time, it is necessary to draw a balance sheet of the “strategy” of acting as a recipient of government funds. The League for the Fourth International calls to drop all charges against the Polo Obrero, and for complete independence of the workers movement from the capitalist state. Argentina: Drop the Charges Against Polo Obrero (September 2024)
No Vote for the Bosses’ Parties and Politicians!
On Ballot Props: Vote for Defending Basic Rights
The Internationalist Group has called repeatedly to “Break with the Democrats, Bosses’ Party of Racist Repression, Imperialist War and Gaza Genocide,” for “no vote to any capitalist party or politicians” and for a revolutionary workers party. Now that the elections are upon us, some who oppose both major capitalist parties, and the alternatives, nevertheless feel the urgency to vote on hotly contested ballot propositions, particularly on abortion. In many states there is a plethora of initiatives, often confusingly worded, and we have received a number of queries about where revolutionary Marxists stand on those issues. This article is in response to those questions. On Ballot Props: Vote for Defending Basic Rights (4 November 2024)
Democrats, Republicans vs. Public Education
We Need a Class-Struggle Workers Party
By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT
During the past school year in which Democrats as well as ultra-rightist Republicans slandered pro-Palestinian, anti-Gaza genocide protests as supposedly “antisemitic” and brought in police to shut them down. Now the final spurt to the November elections is in full swing, and teachers unions are going all out to elect the Democratic Party slate. After President (“Genocide Joe”) Biden dropped out, the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association jumped Kamala Harris. Adding to the enthusiasm was her vice-presidential pick, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a former high school football coach and teacher. As the Democrats posture as supposed friends of labor, women and educators, over the years, the historic alignment of the teachers unions with the Democratic Party has not put an end to, or diminished Republican attacks on public schools and teacher-bashing. On the contrary, Democrats have chimed in on the agenda of charterizing, corporatizing and privatizing public education. Teachers unions are in the crosshairs of racist reactionaries and Wall Street money men, Democrats and Republicans alike, because they are an obstacle to the drive to gut public education.The Democratic Party is a capitalist party, a party of the bosses. We need is a fighting workers party prepared to lead hard class struggle to defeat the bipartisan capitalist war on public education. CSEW: We Need a Class-Struggle Workers Party (16 October 2024).
The Fruits of Mayoral Control (16 October 2024)
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 archive)
All-Purpose Bigot Trump or Genocide Joe’s VP Harris?
The Only Choice: Build a
Revolutionary Workers Party
After Joe Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from the presidential race and replacement by his vice president Kamala Harris, the mood in U.S. capitalism’s governing Democratic Party turned from gloom to what it’s hyping as an explosion of “joy.” In Gaza, the explosion of bombs provided by the Biden-Harris administration to Israel continued to obliterate schools, hospitals and entire neighborhoods, burying whole families under the rubble. In her acceptance speech, Harris vowed that “as Commander-in-Chief,” she would ensure that the U.S. has the “most lethal fighting force in the world.” While Republican ex-president Donald Trump is, once again, demonizing “illegal immigrants,” Harris’ response to Trump’s provocations has been to try to outdo him in anti-immigrant rhetoric. As the genocidal war on the people of Gaza rages on, and U.S. imperialism’s bipartisan drive toward World War III accelerates, the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth and CUNY Internationalist Clubs say no to Harris and Trump, no to the Democrat/Republican war machine, and call to build a workers party that fights for socialist revolution. The Only Choice: Build a Revolutionary Workers Party (August 2024)
DNC: Militarism on the March (August 2024)Women’s Liberation through Socialist Revolution!
AOC: Biden-Harris’ Prime-Time Promoter (August 2024)
The Rap Sheet of “Top Cop” Kamala Harris (18 September 2020)
A Struggle for Survival: Women in Gaza Today
Women in Gaza today – under the bombs supplied to Israel by U.S. imperialism’s Biden-Harris administration – face a desperate daily struggle for survival. Driven from one part of the besieged enclave to another, feeding their children becomes nearly impossible. Homes, hospitals and entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, with families buried beneath the ruins. Famine looms, and the starvation is intentional. Now bourgeois feminists who wanted Hillary Clinton to become Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism in 2016 hope to pass that torch to Kamala Harris. Many students are rejecting the “official story” of the U.S. role in the world that they were taught, in which the crimes of the capitalist rulers around the globe are presented in humanitarian garb, “human rights” rhetoric, or sometimes in feminist garb. For Palestinian Arab women today, the double oppression of women fundamental to capitalist society is made even more dire by this genocidal war, compounded by the oppression by the religious/ethnic-based Israeli state. Zionist and imperialist oppression and war can’t be defeated through a nationalist program, but only through internationalist class struggle leading to socialist revolution worldwide.. A Struggle for Survival: Women in Gaza Today (September 2024)
Mass Arrests Hit Gaza Solidarity Encampments Across U.S.
Flash Point UCLA: Student Workers Strike Against Repression of Pro-Palestinian Protesters
On the night of April 30/May 1, the Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles was subject to a vicious attack by Zionist and fascistic thugs. The organized goon squad attack was carried out in tandem with the university authorities, and followed up by mass arrests of those defending the encampment. The union of graduate student workers at the University of California, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811, responded to the attack by voting to strike for free speech. Tens of thousands of academic workers took strike action to defend democratic rights and to show their solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people. But instead of striking the whole UC system, UAW leaders called on select campuses to be shut down while keeping large parts of the membership at work. A class-struggle leadership is needed to shut down the entire UC system and bring in other sectors of labor and the oppressed, to defend the democratic and union rights of all. Flash Point UCLA (August 2024)
Hunter College Students, Faculty Demand: “NYPD, Out of CUNY Now!”
Speak-Out Against Repression of CCNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment
On May 1, the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York held a speak-out outside Hunter College, bringing out approximately 200 students and members of the CUNY faculty/staff union, to protest the New York Police Department’s violent dispersal of Gaza solidarity encampments at City College and Columbia University the previous night and early that morning. Four members of the Hunter Internationalist Club were among those arrested. The NYPD attacks were part of the nationwide wave of repression launched by university administrations, as well as state and local politicians (including Democrats from City Hall to the state house to Congress), who unleashed the cops to brutalize and disperse campus protests against the joint U.S./Israel genocidal war on the Palestinian people. Speak-Out Against Repression of CCNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment (August 2024)
Defend the Palestinians! Defeat the Witch Hunters!
McCarthyite Film Ban at Hunter College Struck Down By Student-Faculty Protest
As the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza rages on, it has been accompanied by a “war censorship drive” on the “home front.” Campuses around the country are being hit with bans and witch hunts that bring to mind the McCarthyite period of the early anti-Soviet Cold War. At Hunter College, CUNY Internationalist activists were centrally involved in a fight to defeat the college president’s attempt to stop the screening of a film critical of Israel. McCarthyite Film Ban at Hunter College Struck Down By Student-Faculty Protest (February 2024)
Spartacist League: A Weird and Desperate Frenzy
For Mass Student/Labor Action Against U.S./Israel War and NYPD Repression
By CUNY Internationalist Clubs
After the arrests in the early hours of May 1 of hundreds of participants in Gaza solidarity encampments at Columbia University and the City University of New York, within hours, the CUNY Internationalist Clubs called an emergency speak-out at Hunter College that drew almost 200 students and faculty to protest the police/CUNY repression. In the aftermath, the Spartacist League put out fliers calling to “Strike the Campus!” When there was no walkout, it tried to explain the failure to suck a “strike” out of its thumb by trying to scapegoat the Internationalist Club. While the used-to-be-revolutionary group going under the misnomer Spartacist flits from one stunt to the next, the Internationalists fought for mass CUNY- and city-wide union/student march against the repression and witch hunts targeting pro-Palestinian protesters. For Mass Student/Labor Action Against U.S./Israel War and NYPD Repression (11 May 2024)
Then and Now: Democrats’ War Abroad, Police Brutality at Home
The 1968 DNC Protests
As the Democratic National Convention assembled this August, promoting “joy” for a new commander-in-chief of U.S. imperialism, they hoped the hoopla would blot out horrific images of the U.S./Israel war on Gaza and of last spring’s violent police repression against pro-Palestinian campus protests. Yet the fact that the quadrennial imperialist shindig was being held in Chicago inevitably harkened back to the infamous DNC of 1968, held amid nationwide protests against the mass murder being carried out by another Democratic administration: U.S. imperialism’s dirty colonial war on the workers and peasants of Vietnam. Despite the brutal cop attacks on protesters at the ’68 convention, and the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton the next year, many antiwar protesters found their way back to the Democratic Party with the 1972 presidential campaign of Democratic Party “dove” George McGovern. The historic task of breaking the stranglehold of the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties, and forging a revolutionary workers party, remains on the agenda. The 1968 DNC Protests (September 2024)
To Uproot Racist Oppression: Socialist Revolution
Black Liberation – Struggle and Strategy
For many young people who have gotten involved in revolutionary politics in recent years, the protests of 2020 were a deeply politicizing and life-changing experience. It was clear at the time that the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a cold-blooded killer cop was only the tip of the iceberg. We live in a racist country where African Americans are killed for “walking while black,” driving or just being in your car, or sleeping in your own home while black. The 2008 election of the first black president, while a social change, was not a political change. Marxists understand that racism is rooted in the material reality of racial oppression, arising from the profit-making mechanisms of slavery and the slave trade. It is continuously reproduced based on the massive inequalities of capitalist society. To fight racism, Marxists stand on the program of revolutionary integrationism, rejecting liberal accommodation to the racist status quo, and looking to unite the working class across the color line. A strategy based on separation, such as black nationalism in its various incarnations, is illusory. This illusion, arising in times of defeat and despair, cuts against the actual struggle for black freedom. Black Liberation – Struggle and Strategy (September 2024)
What We Saw – and Didn't – at Important Met Exhibit
Black and Red Keys to Harlem Renaissance Story
This summer, activists from the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York and the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth visited the “Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was exhilarating to see the incredible art in the exhibit, but the exhibit left much of the “red” – the radical political connections and reverberations of the Harlem Renaissance – out of the picture. To understand the sources of, for example, the poems “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay and “White Man” by Langston Hughes, it is necessary to look at the history of the “Great Migration” to the North of the Southern black population, the “Jim Crow” system of violent racial segregation and the explosion of artistic creativity and innovation in the first years of the Russian Revolution. Yet while displaying a glorious oil painting by Elizabeth Catlett and Winold Reiss’ portraits of Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, the exhibit noted nothing about their leftist radicalism, and the word communist was not mentioned at all. We have to fill in the blank spaces the exhibit left out. Black and Red Keys to Harlem Renaissance Story (September 2024)
Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) (September 2024)Facing U.S. Rulers’ Democrat/Republican Duopoly
Party for Socialism and Liberation: A Revolutionary Alternative?
Facing the “choice” of Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, a good number of young people can’t stomach backing war-criminal politicians. A few express some interest in the Green Party, a minor bourgeois party whose purpose is to pressure the Democrats. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is running its own presidential campaign under the watchword Vote Socialist 2024. The fight for a sharp break from the Democratic Party is at the center of genuinely revolutionary politics in the United States, yet the PSL’s actual politics cut against that struggle. Throughout its history – and today – it advances “tactics” that help tie workers and youth to the Democrats. In 2016 and again in 2020, the PSL called called on people voting in the Democratic presidential primary elections to vote for Bernie Sanders, and this spring it hailed the movement to “vote uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries. Moreover, in Chicago the PSL joined an “Abandon Biden Convention” in a political bloc with the Green Party. What is urgently needed today is a class-struggle workers party that puts forward genuinely revolutionary politics counterposed to all capitalist parties and politicians, and forthrightly advances a program of international socialist revolution. That the PSL most certainly does not. Party for Socialism and Liberation: A Revolutionary Alternative? (August 2024)
Cosplay Communism
From Bernie Boosters to “Revolutionary Communists of America”
An article on the group’s website declares that “Hundreds of millions watch launch of the Revolutionary Communists of America!” Other articles bombastically announce, “I Built a New Communist Cell Over My Spring Break,” and “I Met Another Communist on the Street and 30 Minutes Later, He Was an RCA Member.” They plaster stickers on street light posts with an image of Karl Marx depicted as Uncle Sam, asking “Are You a Communist,” complete with a QR code for a form to join the brand spanking new RCA. Actually, it is the transmogrification of the staid old International Marxist Tendency, now calling itself the Revolutionary Communist International, hyped up with gimmicks galore to give off a “with it” vibe. This is the same outfit that over years has supported “strikes” by and “unions” of police and prison guards, claiming that these professionals of state repression are “workers in uniform.” It’s the same reformist social-democratic group that only a few a years ago was among the most assiduous boosters for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, was “excited” to be best builders of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America, and avoided the word “communist” like the plague. After the makeover, the facade is different but the politics are still reformist. A genuine communist party is not built by such self-aggrandizing posturing and unserious stunts From Bernie Boosters to “Revolutionary Communists of America” (September 2024)New Members Not Supposed To Know About ItFight for Socialist Revolution!
RCA/IMT’s Long History of Supporting Cop “Unions”
When new members of the recently rebaptized “Revolutionary Communists of America” are confronted with their organization’s longstanding support for police “unions” and “strikes” they tend to voice angry denial, or sheer disbelief. Older members, more experienced in the twists and turns of opportunist politics, try to change the topic. Yet these social democrats in Trotskyist garb wrote a 30,000 word diatribe against the Internationalist Group defending their call to include the protection societies of the professional strikebreakers in the labor movement. Real Trotskyists call for “cops out of the unions.” Providing the proof, we cite the RCA’s the shameful record on the armed fist of the bourgeois state. RCA/IMT’s Long History of Supporting Cop “Unions” (September 2024)
On Joining the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth
The Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (RIY), youth section of the Internationalist Group, was founded in 2017 by young activists radicalized by the clash between illusions of “hope and change” under liberal Democrat Barack Obama and the harsh reality of unending racist oppression, which continues today under his former vice president Joe Biden. A key source of RIY’s growth has been its consistent struggle against illusions that opportunist “leftists” pushed in capitalist politicians from Obama and Biden to Democratic (Party) Socialists of America idols Bernie Sanders and “AOC.” Several young activists explain why they joined the RIY. On Joining the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (September 2024)
Labor: All Out to Support Boeing Machinists Strike!
On Friday, September 13, some 33,000 workers of the aircraft manufacturing giant Boeing near Seattle, Washington went out on strike for the first time since 2008. The strikers are members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), and although the union leadership had negotiated a tentative agreement with the company, the deal was overwhelmingly voted down (with over 94% of the members voting against it while 96% voted to strike). This is a key class battle for unions and working people not only in the Pacific Northwest but nationwide, and all of labor should pitch in to help win it. Key demands are a greatly increased pay scale (right now, starting pay for Machinists is below that of fast food workers in Seattle) and to bring back defined-benefit pensions, which the IAM tops negotiated away in 2013. A strike to restore pensions would galvanize the labor movement coast-to-coast. Given Boeing’s abysmal safety record, another key demand would be for union control of safety. Labor: All Out to Support Boeing Machinists Strike! (15 September 2024)
The Internationalist No. 73
Israel Out of Gaza, the West Bank and Golan –
(June-August 2024)
click above or on image
for full list of articles
U.S. Imperialists Out of the Middle East!
Gaza Genocide Made in USA
For International Workers Action to Defend Palestinians, Defeat U.S./Israel Slaughter
Day after day, people around the world see photos and videos of harrowing scenes from the Israeli invasion and gruesome war on the Palestinian Arab population of the Gaza Strip. What is happening, and what millions are witnessing, is an actual genocide unfolding, aiming at the destruction of an entire population. The Zionist militarists are waging a one-sided war to drive out and decimate the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza – who for decades have been locked up in the tiny enclave on the shores of the Mediterranean – while preparing a possible sequel in the occupied West Bank. And in carrying out this slaughter, the Israeli forces are dropping monster bombs, manufactured and supplied by the United States, from fighter jets built and supplied by the U.S. Without the U.S. armaments, it would be impossible for Israel to carry out mass murder on this scale. A detailed analysis of the planned genocide underway in Gaza, and the U.S. role in it. Gaza Genocide Made in USA (10 August 2024)
Genocide by the Numbers (10 August 2024)For a Class-Struggle Workers Party
Break with the Democrats, Republicans and
All Capitalist Parties
From the beginning of July, the world’s interest suddenly shifted from the horror show of the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza, and the continuing U.S./NATO war against Russia over Ukraine, to focus on the upcoming elections in the United States. The faltering, almost paralyzed performance of Democratic president “Genocide Joe” Biden in the first presidential candidates’ debate on June 27 threw Democrats into a panic. Under pressure from billionaire financiers and Democratic Party grandees, three weeks later Biden withdrew from the race. In two days, Vice President Kamala Harris nailed down the nomination. Meanwhile, Trump picked a fascistic ideologue, JD Vance, as his running mate. So in November, U.S. voters will have the “choice” between immigrant-bashing fascistic Republicans preparing to introduce police state measures, and a Democratic ticket that smears pro-Palestinian protesters as “antisemitic” and is careening toward a thermonuclear World War III. “Pick your poison” is no answer. The Internationalist Group, which calls to defend Russia and China against the U.S. imperialist war drive, and to defend the Palestinians and defeat the Israeli mass murderers in Gaza, says: no vote to any capitalist party or politicians. Break with the Democrats, Republicans and All Capitalist Parties (20 August 2024)
Marjorie Stamberg
(1944-2024)
Revolutionary Trotskyist, Marxist Educator,
A Leader of Struggles for All the Oppressed
Our comrade Marjorie Stamberg died on May 29 after a three-year battle with ovarian cancer. She was 79 and had been active in the New Left, was a pioneer fighter for women’s liberation, a Trotskyist activist and leader since her ’20s, a teacher for the last quarter century, and a revolutionary all her adult life. Throughout, she fought tirelessly for the working class, for black people, women, immigrants and all the oppressed. In different arenas, she defended all those exploited and downtrodden by capitalism. She was the candidate of the Spartacist League for New York state assembly and New York City mayor. Later, as an educator and delegate of the United Federation of Teachers, she defended immigrant students and families. Up to her last days, as a central leader of the League for the Fourth International and its U.S. section, the Internationalist Group, Marjorie continued the struggle for international socialist revolution, which was her life. She never stepped back from that goal. It was a measure of Marjorie’s fortitude that in November 2023, when it was increasingly difficult for her to walk, she participated in three Gaza solidarity protests in one week. She was determined to show her opposition to the slaughter by the Israeli Zionists and U.S. imperialists; to refute the slander by the purveyors of genocide who equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism; to speak out on behalf of the Palestinian Arab people under attack, and to defend the rights of others to do so as well. Firm in her communist convictions, she was also a warm collaborator, mentor and friend of so many who worked with her. Her comrades and colleagues cherish her great contributions, which will continue to inspire us and hopefully many others in years to come. Read an extensive account of Marjorie’s revolutionary life. Marjorie Stamberg, Revolutionary Trotskyist, Marxist Educator Who Led Struggles for All the Oppressed (June 2024)
Women’s Liberation and the Class LineMobilize Workers Action Against U.S./Israel Genocide in Gaza!
A Voyage of Discovery and Rediscovery
By Marjorie Stamberg
A historical account of the rise of what is now called “second wave feminism” out of the New Left, and what it meant in practice. Marjorie outlines how the most class-conscious fighters against the oppression of women came to grips with the contradiction between feminism and Marxism. Reading Engels and rediscovering the work of pioneering communist women, suppressed by the Stalinists, they were won to the program of women’s liberation through socialist revolution. Women’s Liberation and the Class Line (October 2015)
Marjorie Stamberg Protests Gag Order, Speaks Up for Palestinians
In November 2023, when she was already having trouble walking, Marjorie went to three Palestinian solidarity events in one week. She spoke at a protest called by Class Struggle Education Workers on the steps of the headquarters of the NYC Department of Education, against an order by the schools chancellor trying to intimidate teachers, students from protesting the genocidal war on Gaza. Here is what she said (video link in article). Marjorie Stamberg Protests Gag Order, Speaks Up for Palestinians (16 November 2023)
“BDS” Dead End: Liberal Divestment Schemes, No Road to Liberation of the Palestinian People
Calls for “boycott, divestment and sanctions” (BDS) against Israel were a main demand of just about all of the 100+ encampments that sprang up on college campuses across the United States this spring to protest the genocidal war on Gaza. The encampments served to keep antiwar protests going and even, in a certain sense, represented an escalation from the innumerable marches calling for a ceasefire, which did not diminish the relentless slaughter. Many in the Gaza solidarity encampments were desperately looking for some way to take action against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. But the liberal “divestment” call, while it provides a “hook” to raise demands on local authorities, diverts attention from the most immediate issue: the role of the United States in jointly carrying out, together with the Israeli warmongers, a monstrous genocide in Gaza. And it does not point to a way forward in liberating the Palestinian people from Zionist domination. The fundamental issue is what force to look to: the rulers of U.S. imperialism who liberals think can be pressured into being a force for good, or the power of the international working class. “BDS” Dead End (22 July 2024)
Israel: Not Just an “Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier” for the U.S. (22 July 2024)
Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s First Woman President
New Face, Same Old Ploy of the Bourgeoisie
The landslide victory of Claudia Sheinbaum, candidate of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) in Mexico’s June 2 presidential elections, has generated enormous enthusiasm in vast sectors of the country. In a country of rampant machismo (male chauvinism), in which the oppression of women takes on blatant forms, the fact that a woman has been elected president represents, and reflects, an important social change. Her election victory also reflects that she is seen as the guarantor of the continuation of the policies of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his bourgeois populist government, in particular the increases of the minimum wage and the welfare measures of AMLO’s social programs. Nevertheless, in the Mexican elections of June 2, the three candidates for the presidency all represented the capitalists. Their differences are at most tactical. Their common purpose is to maintain the system of exploitation of this semicolonial country, in the service of the imperialists. Thus the Grupo Internacionalista, Mexican section of the League for the Fourth International, called for “Not one vote for the bosses’ parties: MORENA, PRI, PAN, PRD, MC, etc. Whoever wins, the exploited and oppressed lose. Forge a revolutionary workers party!” Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s First Woman President (July 2024)
Argentine Economy in Freefall, Brutal Austerity On the Way
Argentina Elections: Mr. Chainsaw vs.
Washington’s Favorite Peronist
Workers Left Front (FIT) Tailing After the Peronists
On November 19, Argentine voters went to the polls in the second round of presidential elections in the midst of an economic crisis that has hit the most vulnerable sectors of the working class, while the dramatic fall in purchasing power and real wages affects all but the elites. The election was won by Javier Milei, an ultra-conservative, free-market economist and supporter of dollarization, running against Sergio Massa, the minister of economy of the incumbent Peronist government and the official candidate of “stability” (i.e., more of the same). Milei is a supporter of former U.S. president Trump (and of his Brazilian counterpart Bolsonaro) while Massa has collaborated closely with the Biden administration. For the working class, the programs of both bourgeois candidates would result in an economic crisis even more brutal than the current escalation of prices bordering on hyperinflation. There was no choice for the workers in the election. However, in the face of the hysteria of sectors of the government and the left about a supposed “Argentine fascism,” not one of the components of the Workers and Left Front (FIT) called for a “no” vote (blank ballot). This electoral cartel only serves as a left pressure group on Peronist bourgeois populism. Argentine workers should have cast a blank ballot while preparing for sharp class struggle against the coming austerity. Argentina Elections: Mr. Chainsaw vs. Washington’s Favorite Peronist (16 November 2023)
Class Struggle Education Workers Protest D.O.E. Attempt to Ban Opposition to U.S./Israel War
Down with the Gag Order Against NYC Teachers!
By Class Struggle Education Workers
Almost immediately after Israel launched its massive bombing campaign against Gaza, Israel’s imperialist backers went on the warpath to squelch opposition to the unfolding Zionist slaughter. In the United States the repressive campaign was directed at universities in particular, where support for the Palestinians is widespread, but also against K-12 schools. Any and all protests against Israel’s mass murder were labeled anti-Semitic. In New York City, as Palestinian solidarity protests mushroomed, ex-cop mayor Eric Adams and his schools chancellor David Banks issued a joint statement blasting “toxic rhetoric and division at educational institutions.” Then, on the day before a November 9 day of action, walkout and after-school rally, which was endorsed by several teacher groups, Banks fired off an email decreeing that teachers and staff “should not express their personal views about political matters during the school day” or while on school grounds, or “even outside of the workplace and via social media posts or otherwise.” Class Struggle Education Workers responded with a protest outside the Department of Education headquarters on November 16. Down with the Gag Order Against NYC Teachers! (30 November 2023)
Un folleto de Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas
(click on image to download pdf)
As the coronavirus pandemic erupted in the United States, the first epicenter was in the neighborhoods of New York City with the highest number of immigrants, where Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas (Class Struggle Immigrant Workers) has been active. Read the reports from TIC activists and teachers in Class Struggle Education Workers on the impact of this capitalist disaster, and the lessons to be drawn from it. Also reports from the strike of packinghouse workers in Yakima Valley, Washington. (In Spanish)
To order a print copy of the pamphlet, click here
Defend Combative Immigrant Workers Against Repression
Italy: Draghi Government of Repression, Impoverishment and Death
Mobilize the Entire Working Class to Defeat All-Sided Attack!
No to Dead End of Reformism – Forge a Revolutionary Workers Party!
In the ongoing emergency of this second year of the coronavirus pandemic, the Italian bourgeoisie decided to dump the weak and unstable coalition government of the Democratic Party and Cinque Stelle (Five Stars) movement, replacing it with Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank. The first shots of the Draghi government have been to increase repression against the workers movement, in particular against the S.I. Cobas “rank-and-file” union of mainly immigrant workers. Some of the most deeply exploited sectors of the working class have undertaken trade-union and solidarity actions, centered on logistics. The response of much of the ostensibly socialist left has been to form an Action Pact with political supporters of S.I. Cobas, a political coalition of heterogeneous forces based on a reformist 15-point political program. This program consists overwhelmingly of appeals for the capitalist government to take action, rather than for workers themselves to enforce their demands. What genuine communists must say to the masses in the harrowing coronavirus crisis is that the working class must establish its revolutionary class rule, seizing and collectivizing the means of production and organizing production to satisfy human need, not the profits of the few. This fight requires above all the forging of a revolutionary workers party. Italy: Draghi Government of Repression, Impoverishment and Death (26 April 2021)
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
Slavery and the Constitution: Origins of U.S. Capitalist “Democracy”
Long ago and far away in the B.C. (Before Coronavirus) era, bourgeois politics in the United States fixated briefly on impeachment. The Democrats leading the lower house of Congress did not, of course, impeach Donald Trump for his crimes against the oppressed, for example his vicious persecution of immigrants in the U.S. After all, the record deportations under the Democratic administration of “deporter-in-chief” Barack Obama paved the way for Trump. Trump was “brought up on charges by the wrong class for the wrong crimes,” we noted at the time. One generation after another is brought up with the mythology of the Constitution as an embodiment of “democracy” in general, to be worshiped alongside the “Founding Fathers.” Yet the authors of the Constitution understood very well that they represented not “the people” in general but the ruling class of planters and merchants, and wrote it to safeguard their interests, in particular to bolster and uphold the power of the slaveowners in the newly established American republic. The U.S. Constitution established a series of institutions that are strikingly anti-democratic. They remained so even after slavery’s abolition through the Civil War. Revolutionaries explain the need for a revolutionary workers party to lead a socialist revolution to overthrow the entire capitalist system. Slavery and the Constitution: Origins of U.S. Capitalist “Democracy” (August 2020)
PSL Targeted for Marches Against Cop Murder of Elijah McClain
Defend Denver Anti-Racist Protest Leaders!
On Thursday, September 17, police raids were carried out in Denver, Colorado against the organizers of protests denouncing the racist murder of Elijah McClain, a young black man, by police in suburban Aurora in August 2019. Six of the protest leaders were arrested, including four members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which has played a leading role in the protests. They have outrageously been charged with multiple serious felonies, including the absurd charge of “kidnapping.” Following Trump’s failed attempt at imposing martial law in Washington, D.C. and the subsedquent the dispatch of federal agents to Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Denver arrests mark a new escalation of police-state measures that are a threat to the civil liberties of all. The Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth denounce this ominous attack on the right to protest. We demand that the arrested activists be immediately released and that all charges against them be dropped. Defend Denver Anti-Racist Protest Leaders! (18 September 2020)
Elijah McClain (1996-2019) (August 2020)“We’re All in This Together.” You Think?
Top Ten Lies in the Time of Coronavirus and Mass Protests
By Charles Brover
U.S. capitalism is in the midst of a triple whammy crisis – economic, social, and public health. Inspiring massive protests against racism and cop terror not seen in their size and scope since the 1960s have set this nation’s cities aflame day after day, and have spread internationally. The historic protests are occurring against the backdrop of unconscionable government delay, deception, ignorant happy talk, and anti-scientific incompetence. Official public health malpractice has driven the confirmed death toll from COVID-19 to over 160,000. This plague is disproportionately ravaging black, Latino, and immigrant working class communities. For Marxist revolutionaries the racist system that is at the root of the oppression of black people in the U.S. (and elsewhere) is class-based capitalism. While the cities are in paroxysms of rage, grief and plague; while millions are fighting to save their livelihoods and their lives, the capitalist rulers, their politicians, and tamed pundits promote lies, damn lies, and even more murderous lies. Here are our top ten picks. Top Ten Lies in the Time of Coronavirus and Mass Protests (8 August 2020)
Millions of Undocumented Immigrants and Their Families Facing the Abyss
New York: We Demand Equal Treatment and Emergency Support for Excluded Workers!
Declaration of Class Struggle International Workers (TIC)
In the sixth month of the health crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pademic, infections are spiking in much of the country while mass unemployment continues to grow and marches against racist police brutality continue. New storms of crisis are coming for the working class, and for immigrants in particular, beginning with a threatened wave of evictions. Nationally, undocumented immigrants are denied “stimulus” aid, unemployment benefits or any official support. In New York some 200,000 undocumented workers have lost their jobs or cannot find work, while over a million workers considered “essential,” a majority of them immigrants, receive poverty wages while running great risk of contracting the virus. Class Struggle International Workers demands that the state of New York include all workers, particularly the undocumented and those in the “gig economy,” among those eligible for unemployment benefits; that state and city governments make up for the exclusion of immigrants from federal support; and that rent be canceled and all residential evictions be prohibited during the pandemic. New York: We Demand Equal Treatment and Emergency Support for Excluded Workers! (11 August 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)
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
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)
An Internationalist Group Pamphlet
(click on image to download pdf)
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”
To order a print copy of the pamphlet, click here
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, C.P. N. 78, Ufficio Postale San Sisto, 06132 Perugia (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
