    
|
"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.
Cops Murdered Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tortuguita in Atlanta,
It Never Stops – Mobilize Workers’ Power Against Cop Terror
Under Biden and the Democrats,
Racist Police Terror Rages On
Solidarity with Bay Area ILWU Port Shutdown Demanding Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal!
On the evening of January 7, Tyre Nichols was savagely beaten to death by a half dozen police officers in Memphis, Tennessee. Less than two weeks after the Memphis Police Department’s execution of Tyre Nichols, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (Tortuguita), was gunned down in a hail of police bullets during a military-style sweep of an activist encampment in suburban Atlanta, Georgia. The back-to-back police murders in Memphis and Atlanta are a brutal reminder that the plague of racist cop terror continues to hold black America in bondage. While Democrats try to keep the lid on with cynical talk of “police reform,” the police cannot be reformed, and whatever happens to the five killer cops (all black), there is no justice for the oppressed in the capitalist courts. It is up to the defenders of black rights and democratic rights, with the multiracial working class in the lead, to mobilize our power against that of the murderous capitalist state. Under Biden and the Democrats, Racist Police Terror Rages On (16 February 2022)
Memphis, Atlanta: Horror Show of Cop Terror (16 February 2023)NUMSA General Secretary Irvin Jim Launches
Campaign for Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal
On February 16, Irvin Jim, the general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the largest union in South Africa and on the entire African continent, announces an international solidarity campaign demanding that former Black Panther, renowned journalist and champion of the oppressed Mumia Abu-Jamal be immediately released from prison in Pennsylvania where he has been locked up for 41 years (29 of them on Death Row) after being framed by the police. NUMSA General Secretary Irvin Jim Launches
Campaign for Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal (16 February 2023)
BLACK HISTORY MONTH TEACH-IN
Mumia’s Freedom Is Labor’s Cause
An Injury to One Is an Injury to All, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
In solidarity with the action of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 stopping work and shutting down the ports of San Francisco and Oakland on February 16 to demand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a labor-centered teach-in is being held in New York City. There will be messages from Mumia, from the Bay Area docks, from Memphis and South Africa, along with presentations by trade-unionists, historians and activists in the campaign to free comrade Mumia from prison hell. Mumia’s Freedom Is Labor’s Cause (16 February 2023)
Biden, DSA’s AOC and “Squad” Vote to Ban Rail Strike
Democratic Party Strikebreakers Shackle Railroad Workers
Rip Up the Railway Labor Act with a Powerful Rail / Truck / Port Strike!
Break with the Bosses’ Parties and Politicians – Build a Workers Party!
At the beginning of December, some 115,000 railroad workers were poised to walk off the job, tying up 40% of all U.S. freight, at the height of the holiday shopping season. A majority had voted against a Tentative Agreement that outrageously did not include even one paid sick day. A major labor battle was posed. Instead, Democrat Joe Biden, who proclaimed himself the “most pro-union president you’ve ever seen,” signed legislation passed by Democrats in both houses of Congress, imposing a presidentially dictated contract and banning a strike. This blatant strikebreaking sums up countless reasons why the capitalist Democratic Party is a noose around the neck of labor. This underlines why workers urgently need to break with all the bosses’ parties and build a class-struggle workers party to lead the battles of all the oppressed. Democratic Party Strikebreakers Shackle Railroad Workers (29 December 2022)
Democrat-Brokered Deal Guts Key UC Strike Demands
UC Strike: VOTE NO! To Win, Escalate Class Struggle
For an Elected Mass Strike Committee
By UCLA Internationalist Club
In the state-wide University of California student worker strike, a slim majority of the bargaining team for United Auto Workers Local 2865 and Student Researchers United-UAW agreed on December 16 to a tentative agreement that would gut core demands that strikers have been marching, picketing and sacrificing for over the course of the past five weeks. This deal sponsored by the Democrats that control the bucks and call the shots for the UC tops, is slated to be voted from December 19 to 23. We say: VOTE IT DOWN! Defying the relentless calls for a cave-in, rejecting all calls for demoralized defeatism, strikers should follow up a decisive “No” vote by taking the strike into their own hands and charting a course to WIN it. UC Strike: VOTE NO! To Win, Escalate Class Struggle (18 December 2022)
On Strike Means Shut It Down! Cops Off Campus!
UC Strike: Cave In? Hell No! Escalate the Strike to Win!
For an Elected Mass Strike Committee
No to Any Sellout! 54K, COLA, Full Childcare Benefits, Accessibility, End of NRST and PDST...
By UCLA Internationalist Club
The strike of 48,000 University of California student workers is at a crossroads. As we enter the fourth week of the largest higher ed strike in U.S. history, across the country, workers and students are watching this fight. In recent days strikers have carried out building occupations at various UC campuses. In Los Angeles, teaming up with union militants important successes have been scored in stopping deliveries and building strategic pickets of construction sites. Now is the most crucial moment, when exams, grading and deadlines are just around the corner. This is the time to not just stand fast for what strikers have been fighting for all along, but to intensify the struggle, and organize the means of winning it. This means decisively rejecting attempts by the bosses – and by the UAW union bureaucracy acting as a conveyor belt for pressure from the UC administration and its ruling-class/Democratic Party godfathers – to shove a sell-out deal down the throats of the strikers. Mass meetings of strikers should be held now, on every campus, to vote to uphold the strike’s original demands; to continue – and intensify – the strike, rejecting any sellout; to reaffirm the call for cops off campus; and to organize concretely for the next steps in the struggle. UC Strike: Escalate the Strike to Win! (4 December 2022)
Democrats: Faux “Friends” of Women
Fight for Abortion Rights with Class Struggle
At an October 25 forum at Hunter College in New York City, the Internationalist Club emphasized that the fight for free, unrestricted abortion on demand is part of the struggle to achieve the real and full emancipation of women and all the oppressed. This is why we fight to break the chains that have long subjugated the workers and oppressed to the Democratic Party. To fight for abortion rights, to fight for women’s liberation, requires unchaining the power of the workers and the oppressed. This perspective contrasts sharply with that of CUNY for Abortion Rights, initiated by Left Voice, which recently called what was billed as a walkout to “pressure CUNY admin to take a stand on abortion rights.” Moreover, this same group recently held an event at the People’s Forum, where security personnel tried to stop the Internationalist Clubs from distributing a leaflet – repeating past anti-communist censorship. Genuine communists insist that you can’t have socialism without the liberation of women, and you can’t liberate women without a socialist revolution. Fight for Abortion Rights with Class Struggle (November 2022)
Yet Again, Censorship Stands in the Way of Struggle (November 2022)Shut It Down – Picket Lines Mean Don’t Cross!
All Out to Win the UC-Wide Student Workers Strike!
On November 14, some 48,000 student workers at the University of California went out on a statewide strike against poverty pay and huge rent burdens in the cities where they work. It is the biggest strike in the country since 2019 and the largest higher education strike in U.S. history. The UC strikers – including teaching assistants, tutors, graduate and postdoctoral researchers, and others, organized by the United Auto Workers (UAW) – are fighting for a whopping raise with cost-of-living adjustment, $2,000/month reimbursement for childcare and other key demands. At UCLA, activists of the Internationalist Club have organized to win undergrad support for and participation in the struggle, emphasizing that “Picket lines mean don’t cross!” This basic principle of labor solidarity has been taken up by hundreds of strikers, and has made headway as construction workers, Teamsters and others are respecting strike lines. It is vital that unions representing other sectors of the UC workforce respect the picket lines and stop work now. Mass pickets should completely shut down all work and classes to turn “Shut It Down” from a chant into a reality. All Out to Win the UC-Wide Student Workers Strike! (19 November 2022)
Lessons of the 2020 COLA Strike (March 2020)Vote Yes on Illinois “Workers’ Rights Amendment”!
Amendment 1 on the Illinois state ballot on November 8 would amend the Illinois state constitution, banning any law that “interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively.” This measure amending the state’s Bill of Rights is meant to prevent the enactment of any “right to work” law that bans unions from requiring fees to be collected from non-union members covered by collective bargaining agreements. Militant class struggle is crucial when it comes to gaining and holding onto essential rights for the workers and oppressed. At the same time, class-conscious workers should support measures which simply provide some degree of legal protections, however partial or minimal, against union-busting. The straightforwardly worded Amendment 1 is clearly supportable. Vote Yes on Illinois “Workers’ Rights Amendment”! (November 2022)
The Internationalist No. 67-68
Not Bourgeois Nationalism But International Proletarian Revolution
(May-October 2022)
click above or on image
for full list of articles
Defeat the Imperialist War Drive and U.S./NATO Proxy Regime in Ukraine
Defend Russia, China Against War-Crazed U.S. Rulers
The war between Russia and Ukraine has been waged with white-hot intensity for eight months, dominating world politics and economics, with no end in sight. U.S. and European imperialist leaders vow to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. For Moscow this poses an existential threat. From the beginning of the military operations, the League f or the Fourth International opposed the nationalist Russia-Ukraine war, as part of our overall struggle to defeat the imperialist war drive against Russia and China. But we foresaw that the the character of the war could change. This has now happened. As U.S. and NATO officials now determine battlefield strategy, supply the armament, control the use of advanced weapons and de facto have integrated Ukraine into NATO, the conflict has been turned into an imperialist “proxy war” against Russia. In this situation, proletarian revolutionaries’ call to defeat the imperialists’ war drive against Russia (a regional capitalist power) and China (a bureaucratically deformed workers state) means standing for the defeat of the U.S./NATO proxy regime in Ukraine, and for military defense of Russia, while giving no political support to the reactionary bourgeois nationalist Putin government. As mass discontent spreads over the consequences of the war and the imperialist anti-Russia sanctions, what is urgently needed is workers action leading to a struggle for international socialist revolution. Defeat the Imperialist War Drive and U.S./NATO Proxy Regime in Ukraine, Defend Russia, China Against War-Crazed U.S. Rulers (22 October 2022)
We Meet Dr. Strangelove Again in Washington (May 2022)As Racist Courts Again Block Appeal
Portland Painters Call for Workers Action to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
On October 26, a judge in Philadelphia rejected the request by Mumia Abu-Jamal for a new hearing on his case, based on evidence of prosecution misconduct and bias from materials that had been hidden in the District Attorney’s office. Mumia is the most prominent class-war prisoner in the United States, imprisoned for over four decades, on death row for almost 30 years, on frame-up charges of which he is entirely innocent. A week before this latest outrage in court, the Portland, Oregon, Local 10 of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades passed a resolution highlighting how Mumia Abu-Jamal was railroaded to jail, sentenced to death by a racist “hanging judge” at a rigged trial in 1982, and ever since prevented by the capitalist judicial system from proving his innocence. In the face of the stonewalling of the courts, the Portland Painters resolution should be a clarion call to workers and defenders of black and labor rights around the globe to spark workers action to free Mumia now. Portland Painters Call for Workers Action to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal(October 2022)
Message from Mumia: Workers of the World, Unite! (October 2022)Mobilize Workers Power Leading the Masses Against the Police/Military Regime!
Brazil: “Broad Front” Blocks Workers Mobilization Against Militarist Threat
For Socialist Revolution Against Deadly Capitalist Rule
In the first round of the Brazilian elections on October 2, the “broad front” slate of ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won 48% of valid votes, while ultra-rightist president Jair Bolsonaro got 42%. In the second-round runoff election, to be held on October 30, the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil, section of the League for the Fourth International, is again calling for a “no” vote against both of these bourgeois alternatives, and for working-class mobilization in the streets against the rightist militarist threat. As Bolsonaro threatens to refuse to recognize the election results, most of the left is supporting the candidacy of Lula, the historic leader of the Workers Party (PT) together with Geraldo Alckmin of the PSDB, the traditional party of the conservative right wing, as his vice president. But this bourgeois lash-up will not repeal the vicious anti-worker “reforms” rammed through by Bolsonaro’s bonapartist (police/military) regime and the preceding right-wing government. Some pseudo-Trotskyists called for voting for an independent candidate on the first round, but are now advocating a vote for Lula, and thus for the class-collaborationist coalition. The authentic Trotskyists of the LQB, in contrast, have consistently refused to vote for the PT when it runs (as it always does) in a popular-front coalition with bourgeois forces, seeking to administer the capitalist state. Our comrades call instead for a revolutionary workers party to fight for socialist revolution. Brazil: “Broad Front” Blocks Workers Mobilization Against Militarist Threat (October 2022)
Taiwan and Hong Kong Are Part of China – Imperialist Hands Off!
U.S. Anti-China War Provocations Over Taiwan
Defend China Against Imperialist Drive for Counterrevolution!
For Revolutionary Reunification of China – Expropriate the Capitalists
Late in the night of August 2, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and her Congressional entourage flew on U.S. military aircraft into the Chinese territory of Taiwan, explicitly flouting numerous warnings by the Chinese government against this provocative stunt. During her stay, Pelosi all but advocated Taiwanese independence, referring to the island as a “country.” Such talk points to war with China, which has insisted for 70 years that reunification with Taiwan is imperative. The fact that the island is a separate entity from the mainland is the result of the dismemberment of China by imperialism going back to the mid-19th century, and the imperialists’ continued use of Taiwan as a spearhead to restore capitalist rule in China. Pelosi's visit is only one part of an escalating U.S. imperialist war drive whose ultimate aim is to restore capitalist rule in the largest remaining bureaucratically deformed workers state. Trotskyists call to defeat the imperialist war drive against Russia and China, and to defend the remaining gains of the Chinese Revolution through proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy, expropriate the capitalists and extend those gains to Hong Kong and Taiwan through revolutionary reunification. U.S. Anti-China War Provocations Over Taiwan (September 2022)
Not “One Country, Two Systems”Unpayable Debt, Food Shortages, Runaway Fuel Prices Hit Dozens of Countries
For Revolutionary Reunification of China
Reunification of Taiwan with the People’s Republic of China is the culmination of the drive to undo the imperialist dismembering of China going back to the mid-1800s. To win the masses of working people in Taiwan to reunification, it is necessary to combat the anti-communist Taiwanese nationalist/separatist ideology promoted by the imperialists and their flunkeys in the U.S. neocolonial government of Taiwan. But rather than nationalism or patriotism, what'x needed is to raise revolutionary class consciousness. Workers in Taiwan together with their comrades in mainland China have the power to expropriate the Taiwanese bourgeoisie and institute the soviet democracy of workers councils under authentic communist leadership, while extending the revolution internationally. For Revolutionary Reunification of China (September 2022)
Sri Lanka Economy Collapses, Masses Rise Up, President Flees, But Capitalist Crisis Remains
Forge a Trotskyist Party on a Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution
For the Right of Tamil Self-Determination! For a Socialist Federation of South Asia!
Since early this year, Sri Lanka has been rocked by the most severe economic, social and political crisis it has experienced since independence from Britain in 1948. After several years of rising income from a flourishing tourism industry, the bottom dropped out. By March, the island nation off the southern tip of India had run out of foreign exchange and by May it had formally defaulted. Daily life has become unbearable for the masses, unable to purchase basic goods. For the past five months, the country has been in almost constant upheaval, with massive protests, leading to the resignation and flight of the Rajapaksa family. Yet this has done nothing to alter the deep capitalist economic crisis, and now their successor is preparing to impose brutal austerity measures in conjunction with the International Monetary Fund. Sri Lanka was the first country to blow, but there are dozens of others saddled with unpayable debt, increasingly unable to pay for food and fuel. Revolutionaries call to intervene in the mass protests with transitional demands pointing to socialist revolution, the only answer to the present capitalist immiseration. Sri Lanka Economy Collapses, Masses Rise Up, President Flees, But Capitalist Crisis Remains (29 August 2022)
Democrats Push Gun Control, Tool of Racist Capitalist Repression
Gun Bans Won’t Stop Racist Mass Shootings
For Worker/Black/Latino Mobilization Against Cop Terror and Racist Attacks
Another year, another spate of grisly mass shootings in the not-so United States of America. May 14, Buffalo, New York – 10 people shot to death. May 24, Uvalde, Texas – 21 people killed. July 4, Highland Park, Illinois – 7 people gunned down. The now-routine spectacle of mass murder followed by calls for far-reaching gun control legislation has become a fixture of American culture. While professing concern for the deaths of black people in inner-city neighborhoods, liberals and reformist leftists are actually pandering to racist fears of white suburbanites and demagogic appeals to militarize the ghettos and barrios. This leaves the population defenseless, while trigger-happy cops, criminals and fascists are all heavily armed. The Second Amendment, upholding the “right of the people to keep and bear arms,” is a fundamental democratic right which we strongly defend. It is doubly important to working people and the oppressed, who are beset by a well-armed ruling class and its professional enforcers. The mass shootings were neither random nor inexplicable. In all three recent instances – Buffalo, Uvalde, Highland Park – racism fueled the homicides. Gun Bans Won’t Stop Racist Mass Shootings (15 August 2022)
Whatever Happened to “No Contract, No Work”?
ILWU: Prepare to Strike for Shorter Workweek, Union Control of Tech
Fight for 6-Hour Shifts x 5 = 30 Hours, No Loss in Pay
As the contract between the West Coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) was set to expire on July 1, the stage was set for a major showdown and the possibility of a big labor victory. Instead, the ILWU tops and marine bosses, under pressure from President Biden, announced that work would continue without a contract. Longshore workers are facing a major attack by capital, which are thirsting to automate the port unions out of existence. The ILWU should join with rail and port truckers, with solidarity action from East Coast dock workers, and backed by allies including teachers and students, to launch a strike for a shorter workweek with no loss in pay, and for union control of technology to ensure no job losses. ILWU: Prepare to Strike for Shorter Workweek, Union Control of Tech (8 August 2022)
Against PMA’s “Robo-Dock” Fantasy, Fight for Union Control of Technology (8 August 2022)Free Abortion on Demand –
Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution
Supreme Court Cancels Right to Abortion:
Trigger for Ultra-Rightist Mobilization
On June 24, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision which for almost 50 years was the basis for women’s constitutional right to abortion. In response there was an outpouring of anger as tens of thousands went into the streets to protest around the country. Establishment abortion rights groups seek to channel the outrage into support for the Democratic Party. But voting for the Democrats will not restore the right to abortion, and any law they might pass would be struck down by the reactionary Court. While opportunist leftists sought to pressure the Democrats, Internationalist contingents participated in the protests denouncing the Democratic Party and calling for a revolutionary workers party. We emphasized that the anti-abortion crusade is rooted in racism. The fight over abortion rights and gay and trans rights is already a flashpoint for emboldened ultra-rightists and fascists, who now feel that the capitalist state has their back. In the post-Roe U.S., abortion clinics are threatened by vigilantes, bounty hunters, racists and fascists. We call to mobilize union power to defend the clinics and disperse anti-abortion bigots.The Bolshevik Revolution first legalized abortion on demand, and it will take a socialist revolution to achieve it today. Supreme Court Cancels Right to Abortion: Trigger for Ulltra-Rightist Mobilization (7 August 2022)
Racism and the Deadly Anti-Abortion Crusade (7 August 2022)¡Todos parejos! Equal for All!
To Win Abortion Rights Fight, Pro-Democrat Marches Are a Dead End (13 May 2022)
Cabricanecos: Indigenous Immigrant Workers Fight Deadly Conditions in NYC
By Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas
Facing flagrant management abuse and a wave of retaliatory firings, a courageous campaign by 40 demolition/construction workers – mainly indigenous immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico – shines a spotlight on deadly dangerous conditions on the job faced by many thousands in the New York area and beyond. “We are human beings, but they use us up and then just throw us away,” a worker who suffered multiple injuries unloading heavy materials for Best Super Clean/ISK Group said, echoed by fellow campaign activists. Organized by the Laundry Workers Center (LWC), the campaign, presently focused on winning key improvements in job conditions and wages, is called “Cabricanecos,” because many of the workers are originally from the town of Cabricán in Guatemala. The Cabricanecos campaign is a link in a chain of struggles underlining both the need and the great potential for militant organizing among sectors of immigrant workers who are key to making the city run, at the same time as they are denied basic rights and treated as “undocumented” pariahs while often risking their lives due to intolerable working conditions. Cabricanecos: Indigenous Immigrant Workers Fight Deadly Conditions in NYC (10 July 2022)
Ohio Cops Fired 90 Bullets at Unarmed Black Man
Jayland Walker, Executed by Akron Police
The Racist Killer Cops Never Stop
Under Democrats or Republicans the Police Murder Machine Grinds On
Only Revolution Can Bring Justice!
On June 27, police in Akron, Ohio were in hot pursuit of a car driven by Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old black man, supposedly for unspecified equipment and traffic violations. When Walker bolted, running for his life, eight police officers discharged a fusillade of 90+ shots mere seconds after exiting their vehicles. When a crowd gathered outside city hall and police headquarters to protest after bodycam video footage was released on July 3, cops and state troopers arrested scores. An execution for a supposed traffic violation – such is the “justice” meted out by the racist police in capitalist America. In the summer of 2020, millions took to the streets to protest the racist police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and countless others. The killer cops keep on killing, but with Democrat Joe (shoot ’em in the leg) Biden in the White House and Democrats controlling Congress, protests this year and last against the unending police murder have been few in number and small in size. The Internationalist Group calls for worker action against racist police terror, emphasizing that only revolution can bring justice. Jayland Walker, Executed by Akron Police – The Racist Killer Cops Never Stop (7 July 2022)
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)
Break with the Democrats – Build a Workers Party!
Free Abortion on Demand
How Revolutionaries Fight for It
The United States Supreme Court – that reactionary institution of unelected, appointed-for-life, black-robed dispensers of capitalist “justice” – overturned the Roe v. Wade decision on June 24. Shredding the ruling that was the basis for the constitutional right to abortion since 1973, it opened the way for even further onslaughts against basic democratic rights. The impact was quickly felt. Due to so-called trigger laws on the books, thirteen states immediately banned abortion in most, if not all, cases. Eight more quickly passed their own prohibitions. Bans in even more states are working their way through the courts. Back in May, when Justice Samuel Alito’s deranged draft decision was leaked, it sparked mass protests in cities around the country. After the decision was put into effect, many thousands more came out in protest. The following article is an expanded version of a talk by the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth in late May, at events organized by the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York. Free Abortion on Demand, How Revolutionaries Fight for It (September 2022)
U.S. Capitalism and Its Supreme Court (September 2022)Selling Imperialist War, from 1898 to ... WWIII?
Sinister Symbiosis: Homophobic Bigotry and the Anti-Abortion Crusade (September 2022)
“You Furnish the Pictures, and I’ll Furnish the War”
If you want to push a war drive abroad, flood the public with war propaganda on the home front. Feature blood-curdling images, sound bites, and plenty of propaganda for good vs. evil, us vs. them. Lay it on as thick as possible. Don’t let up – it’s got to be relentless. So say U.S. imperialism’s media masters of war. It’s all on daily display right now in these United States. Casting Russia and China as the evil empires to be vanquished, the big business media egg on Washington’s escalating war provocations, from the Taiwan straits to the Ukraine/Russia front. But the pattern was set long ago. In 1897, mass-media mogul William Randolph Hearst worked out the playbook. “You Furnish the Pictures, and I’ll Furnish the War.” This, the history books tell us, is what Hearst cabled to his star illustrator in the lead-up to the Spanish-American War. a chronology of U.S. war propaganda from the beginning of the 20th century to today, with World War I, WWII, the anti-Soviet Cold War up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq (mythical “weapons of mass destruction”) and much more. “You Furnish the Pictures, and I’ll Furnish the War” (September 2022)
Beethoven Bans and “Liberty Cabbage” (September 2022)NATO “Socialist” War Squad
In May, 368 House of Representatives members voted to approve Biden’s $40 billion package of aid to the Ukrainian regime in its nationalist war with Russia touched off by the U.S./NATO imperialists. Among those voting for this war measure were the members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress. Among the weapons paid for by this package are the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) that have been used by the fascist-infested Ukraine military to strike at civilian targets in Donetsk and in shelling near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. All with the votes of the NATO “Socialist” elected officials of the DSA. This is what social-imperialism looks like. NATO “Socialist” War Squad (September 2022)
Bolshevik Revolution First Legalized Abortion on Demand
In today’s struggles over abortion rights, an important fact is little known: abortion on demand was first legalized in Bolshevik Russia. The connection between women’s rights and the struggle for a classless society free of exploitation and oppression was basic to the revolutionary program going back to the founders of the socialist movement. But it was the 1917 October Revolution in Russia that made it possible to start putting that program into effect. It was in this context that free abortion on demand was established in 1920. This went together with establishing communal laundries and cafeterias, as well as creches and daycare centers, to free women from household burdens and help them enter fully into social labor, political and cultural life. Bolshevik Revolution First Legalized Abortion on Demand (September 2022)
Claude McKay on the Russian Revolution and Women’s Rights (September 2022)“Heterogeneous Movement” or Revolutionary Class Struggle?
Why History Matters in the Fight for Abortion Rights
There are important differences on the left that shape counterposed approaches to the abortion rights struggle. What most of the left tries to do, on one burning issue after another, is to pressure the Democratic Party. Since this has manifestly failed to protect abortion rights, some self-styled “socialist feminists,” such as Left Voice, seek to carve out a niche slightly to the left, criticizing the Democrats. But at the same time, they call for a “mass heterogenous movement,” together with bourgeois feminists and pro-Democratic outfits like the Women’s March, MoveOn, etc. This program of class collaboration is a dead-end, and there is a history to it going back to the Vietnam antiwar movement. Revolutionary Trotskyists call instead for mass mobilization bringing out the power of the multiracial working class, fighting for the full and unrestricted right to abortion as part of the struggle for women’s liberation through socialist revolution. Why History Matters in the Fight for Abortion Rights (September 2022)
The Internationalist No. 66
Oppose Imperialist-Provoked Russia-Ukraine War –
(January-April 2022)
click above or on image
for full list of articles
For Revolutionary Struggle Against the Capitalist Rulers in Moscow and Kiev!
Behind the War: U.S./NATO War Drive Against Russia, China
Defend Self-Rule in Southeastern Ukraine! Smash the Fascists – For Proletarian Internationalism Against Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism!
On February 24, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched a military operation in Ukraine. The first day consisted of dispatching troops to bolster the breakaway “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Lugansk, accompanied by air strikes against military targets in many parts of Ukraine. This quickly turned into an invasion by Russian ground forces surrounding and launching attacks on several Ukrainian cities. After previously talking of defending the embattled regions of the Donbass, upon launching his military attack Putin declared its purpose to be to “to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.” This is now a war between the Russian capitalist state, with its nationalist ruler in Moscow, and that of Ukraine, whose nationalist regime in Kiev has acted as a cat’s paw of Western imperialists and uses fascist forces to besiege the Russian-speaking population of southeastern Ukraine. We Trotskyists call for revolutionary defeatism on both sides in this reactionary nationalist war, for internationalist proletarian struggle against both capitalist regimes and, above all, against the U.S. and European rulers who set off this conflagration. Behind the War: U.S./NATO War Drive Against Russia, China (28 February 2022)
Ukrainian Fascists and Nationalists Hands Off Donbass!
Defend Self-Rule in Southeast Ukraine!
Defeat U.S./NATO War Drive and Sanctions Against Russia!
Statement of the League for the Fourth International
On February 21, after weeks of increasingly hysterical imperialist war propaganda and daily escalating attacks by Ukrainian government and fascist/nationalist forces against the breakaway Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin formally recognized the independence of these embattled self-styled people’s republics and sent in troops. The United States, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and the European Union immediately condemned Russia for its defensive action and announced they would impose severe economic sanctions. Class-conscious workers and all opponents of imperialism should denounce the U.S./NATO imperialist war drive, which raises the spectre of world war. The imperialists seek to isolate, provoke and demonize Russia, which despite Putin’s imperial ambitions is an intermediate, regional capitalist power. Yet the imperialists’ ultimate aim is to spark counterrevolution in China, Cuba and North Korea. Facing the escalating threats and dangers, we call on the world working class to defend China and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states against imperialism and counterrevolution. Defeat U.S./NATO War Drive and Sanctions Against Russia! (23 February 2022)
Russian Nationalist Putin vs. Bolshevik Internationalist Lenin (23 February 2022)The “Green Tide” in Latin America: A Festival of Class Collaboration
The Struggle for Full Abortion Rights, From Latin America to the U.S.
Free Abortion on Demand – For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution
The battle over abortion is at a critical point throughout the Americas. As reactionary forces in the United States wave the banner of the “right to life” and “the family” to eliminate rights won in the past, elsewhere in the hemisphere there has been an upsurge in actions to eliminate laws that have sent thousands of women to jail for the “crime” of ending an unwanted pregnancy – or just having a miscarriage. In Latin America much has been made of an advancing “Green Tide,” as feminist groups have labeled the mass mobilizations in Argentina that won a partial legalization of abortion. Yet that movement was led by bourgeois political currents – bringing with it obstacles and limitations to winning crucial rights. In the U.S., the issue is sharply posed of how to fight against the assault on women’s rights, abortion rights, gay and transgender rights. The new/old dead-end “strategy” of bourgeois feminists is to vote for the Democrats, who despite the hype are no friends of women.Everywhere, the issue of control of women’s bodies by the state is poised point-blank, as decaying capitalism endangers the rights of all the oppressed. The pending calamity in the U.S., where the constitutional right to an abortion is on the verge of being eliminated after being in force for a half-century, underlines the need for a revolutionary class struggle for the liberation of women. The Struggle for Full Abortion Rights, From Latin America to the U.S. (March 2022)
Democrats Uphold the Hyde Amendment: Race, Class and the Right to Abortion (March 2022)For Vaccine Mandates and Free Testing
“No Cis Dudes”: Feminist Sectoralism Ad Absurdum (March 2022)
“Vaccine Passports” = Police Control, Not Public Health
Fascistic Forces Take Lead of Reactionary Anti-Vaccine Protests
Since last summer, from Europe to Canada, fascistic and outright Nazi/fascist forces have taken the lead in organizing protests over mandatory vaccination against COVID-19. A dramatic case of this ominous development was the storming of the offices of the main Italian labor federation in October by squads from an anti-vaxxer demo led by leaders of the fascist Forza Nuova terror squad. Later, in the port of Trieste, an attempt was made to portray a no-vax sit-in as a workers protest, although only a small minority of the dockers participated. Sensing a new “movement” budding, some on the left have opportunistically tailed after ultra-rightist-led anti-vaccine mobilizations. As a public health measure to protect the population from the deadly virus, the League for the Fourth International supports obligatory anti-COVID vaccination to the extent feasible. We do not support “vaccine passports,” which do nothing for public health, and oppose repression of anti-vaxxers by the forces of capitalist state repression, which would much sooner go after labor and leftists. Rather, from the onset of the pandemic, the LFI and fraternally allied trade unionists have put forward a program for workers control of safety, and actively sought to implement it in workplaces. Fascistic Forces Take Lead of Reactionary Anti-Vaccine Protests (April 2022)
Imperialist Press Fawns Over Ukrainian Ultra-Nationalist Militias
Smash U.S./NATO-Backed Nazi-Fascist Mass Murderers!
The Truth About Ukraine’s Fascist Infestation
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24 was announced by Russian president Vladimir Putin in a speech declaring a “special military operation” to “de-nazify” and “demilitarize” Ukraine. The bourgeois press in the United States and in the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) imperialist countries immediately mocked the notion. The Ukrainian state apparatus, particularly its repressive forces, is in fact riddled with fascistic nationalists, outright fascists and Nazis, would-be ethnic cleansers, some of whom are openly anti-Semitic and admirers of Hitler. Fascist militias are a large component of the military forces that have relentlessly besieged the Russian-speaking population of the Donetsk and Lugansk self-proclaimed “people’s republics” that broke away from Ukraine eight years ago. Moreover, many of these fascist and pro-Nazi squads have been financed, armed and trained by the U.S. and NATO. The ultra-nationalist fascists and Nazis embedded in the Ukrainian state and its repressive organs must be rooted out, permanently stopped and brought to justice, and their program of “ethnic cleansing” smashed. To have a lasting effect this must be accomplished by the working people themselves, on an internationalist basis. The Truth About Ukraine’s Fascist Infestation (4 April 2022)
Question Answered: Who Was Behind the 2014 Maidan Massacre?Pseudo-Trotskyist Imposters Line Up with Imperialism
The 20 February 2014 massacre in Kiev’s Maidan (Independence Square), in which 48 protesters and several policemen were killed, was the trigger that set off the coup d’état, led by fascist and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, that the very next day overthrew the government of Viktor Yanukovich. The coup plotters, the imperialist press and U.S. authorities in unison blamed the riot police of the Yanukovich government, which they considered pro-Russian. But from the outset there were numerous questions about where the fusillade came from. At the time, we published an article asking: “Who Were the Snipers Who Killed Kiev Protesters and Police on February 20?” Since then, particularly due to the painstaking work of Canadian academic Ivan Katchanovski, the answer to this question has become crystal clear. The massacre was a false flag operation carried out by the fascist action squads in the Maidan and their oligarchic Ukrainian nationalist backers. Question Answered: Who Was Behind the 2014 Maidan Massacre? (10 April 2022)
NATO Socialists in Italy
In the present Russia-Ukraine war, instigated by the imperialist powers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), communists in the imperialist centers, including Italy, are duty-bound to fight for working-class actions against the war, to oppose imperialist sanctions against Russia and to mobilize to defeat the NATO war drive through class struggle against “their own” imperialist bourgeoisie. The main enemy is at home, especially in the warmongering European Union, Britain and United States. But in Italy and elsewhere, a large part of the left has lined up with their own imperialist bourgeoisie and sided with the NATO-backed Ukrainian “resistance.” These NATO socialists are actively supporting the imperialist war drive. NATO Socialists in Italy (April 2022)
Report from Germany
Imperialist Racism and the Russia-Ukraine War
Every weekend now, tens and hundreds of thousands of protesters pour into the streets of German cities in “peace” demonstrations supposedly against war in Ukraine. In reality, many if not most of these are pro-war demos in that they are overwhelmingly for support to Ukraine in the war with Russia. Many speakers called for arms deliveries to Ukraine, i.e., by the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) imperialists who provoked this fratricidal war in their escalating war drive against Russia and China. Meanwhile, in stark counterpoint to the chauvinist backlash against refugees from Middle Eastern wars, there has been an unprecedented outpouring of support for Ukrainian refugees. This has been whipped up with outright racist media coverage stressing that Ukraine is a “relatively civilized, relatively European” country, with “people with blue eyes and blond hair.” And it is reflected in the sharply contrasting treatment at the border of white refugees fleeing Ukraine and those considered non-white. Today, as almost 3 million Ukrainians (so far) have fled the war we call for for revolutionary defeatism on both sides of the reactionary nationalist Russia-Ukraine war, for revolutionary struggle against the capitalist rulers in Moscow and Kiev, and to defeat the U.S./NATO war drive pointing to World War III against Russia and China. Imperialist Racism and the Russia-Ukraine War (19 March 2022)
Democrats, NLRB No Friends of Labor
Amazon Labor Union Victory at JFK8
Unionize All of Amazon with Class Struggle!
On Friday, April 1, the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) won a historic vote to unionize the massive JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, New York, by a decisive margin. This is the first union victory in North America against the giant distribution and e-commerce monopoly, which has 1.1 million employees in the U.S alone. The vote, which the media are calling “one of the biggest victories for organized labor in a generation,” came amid growing restiveness in the working class, and followed large strikes last fall at Midwest industries. It will be a beacon for millions of workers at Amazon and throughout country who desperately need unionization to fight against the low wages, miserable “benefits” and deadly working conditions that are the standard in capitalist America. It will take genuinely revolutionary political struggle to break the stranglehold of capitalist Democrats and pro-capitalist labor bureaucrats that has been driving the unions to the grave. Key to winning the major class battle at Amazon, as well as to organizing the unorganized and building a fighting labor movement overall, will be to forge a solid core of class-struggle militants in the warehouses, factories and other workplaces. Amazon Labor Union Victory at JFK8 (14 April 2022)
Interview with ALU Worker at Staten Island JFK8 WarehouseUse Union Power to Keep Schools Open Safely
Unionizing Amazon Will Be a Huge Class Battle
The Internationalist interviewed Will, a supporter of the Internationalist Group who works at Amazon’s big warehouse in Staten Island, New York and has been part of the Amazon Labor Union effort almost from the start. Interview with ALU Worker-Activist at JFK8 (14 April 2022)
By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT
The rapid spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant of COVID-19 has caused much justified worry among educators, parents and students. This concern has been seized on by some in the teachers unions to push to return to “remote education,” possibly for an extended period of time until the current high levels of infection are past. Calling to close the schools is a huge mistake. It does not protect teachers, it will almost certainly increase infections among students, and it plays into the hands of enemies of public education. This includes not only Trump Republicans but also Biden Democrats like the mayors of New York City and Chicago, Eric Adams and Lori Lightfoot. These forces, who back charter schools and are out to break the power of the teachers unions, are angling to mobilize parents against teachers on a program of keeping the schools open. Instead, Class Struggle Education Workers calls to use union power to keep schools open safely. That includes, first and foremost, demanding a drastic reduction in class sizes, entailing hiring thousands of new teachers, custodians, counselors and nurses; and requiring frequent testing of all in the schools. Use Union Power to Keep Schools Open Safely (12 January 2022)
UCLA Internationalist Club Statement of Class-Struggle Solidarity
Victory to the UC-AFT Strike – All Out to Win!
The Internationalist Club at the University of California at Los Angeles is helping mobilize students and workers in support of the November 17-18 University of California system-wide strike called by the UC-AFT. In addition to the unfair labor practices cited as the legal grounds for the walkout, the strike motivation flows from the desperate situation of lecturers and other campus workers who are essential to making the university run, but receive only poverty pay and lack job security. All sectors of the campus workforce need to unite in genuine solidarity. It's a basic principle: One out, all out. Picket lines mean don’t cross! And it is necessary to take on the Democratic Party, which is the boss that the UC-AFT is striking against. We say: On strike means shut it down. All classes should be stopped, and students brought out en masse to the pickets and rallies. Victory to the UC-AFT Strike – All Out to Win! (16 November 2021)
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)
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
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
