The illusion of the regime of capital’s immortality is fraying at the seams as it desperately works to terrorize the world proletarian into perpetual subordination amid its crumbling economic foundations. Over the course of two days on October 15th and 16th, banks borrowed $15 billion from Federal Reserve’s short-term lending facility, the largest amount borrowed since the Covid-19 Pandemic, when a similar rush on these special reserve funds by major financial institutions was a precursor to the 2020 economic crash which forced the U.S. bourgeoisie to implement a broad program of quantitative easing under the CARES act, dispensing of $2.2 trillion dollars in government checks to millions of unemployed workers to maintain consumer demand, amid mandated lockdowns and civil unrest agitated by economic conditions that exploded into the 2020 George Floyd uprisings.

These recent events occurred alongside the failure of two major financial institutions, First Brands Group and Tricolor Holdings, the second string of major financial institutions to crash just this year, occurring alongside a major fall in the crypto market in October.

Meanwhile despite the promises of the bourgeoisie to bring back high paying manufacturing jobs to the United States, unemployment swells as the overproduction crisis intensifies. Workers face increased material immiseration and higher rates of exploitation due to automation and austerity in the form of massive government spending cuts forcing millions into lower wage jobs. In October, despite growing production output, U.S. industry experienced the largest inventory build up in decades as demand flat lined or slumped in most industries including AI, agriculture and steel, leaving stacks of unsold goods piling up in warehouses across the country. Meanwhile, the relative growth in U.S. manufacturing capacity has not led to any new jobs, with manufacturing employers having cut 12,000 factory jobs in August and a total of 42,000 positions since April, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress (CAP).

As the Federal Reserve increasingly finds itself forced into taking contradictory actions to respond to crises which emerge at ever faster rates and the exploding national debt narrows the field of actions it can take to save the situation in each event, the signs of an economic catastrophe loom. Thus the U.S. capitalist class threatens to stir up war in Venezuela as a means of both stabilizing its profit rates and ensuring the subordination of the U.S. working class as it faces deepening immiseration. Today, the U.S. working class is disciplined by a renewed red scare, an attack on vulnerable immigrant workers, an attack on established unions, and the imposition of a strict regime of austerity eliminating services necessary to maintain the lowest paid workers as the ongoing attack on workers real-wages in the form of increased costs of living is met with perpetually stagnating wages. Now this full scale assault on the working class is accompanied by the deployment of military forces to cities across the country to pre-emptively ward off any potential proletarian revolts in anticipation of the next economic crash and the outbreak of war.

In full demonstration of the capitalist’s desperation for imperialist conflict, the U.S. has deployed a significant military presence in the Caribbean, including the assignment of over 4,500 Marines and sailors from amphibious ready groups, warships, numerous aircraft and a nuclear fast-attack submarine, alongside the deployment of the CIA for on the ground covert operations. The build up is all aimed at Venezuela under the guise of combating “narco terrorism” in order for the U.S. to gain more control over the country's oil and critical mineral supplies. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie extends the terrain of this renewed “drug war” into American cities unleashing thousands of masked federal agents to combat the so-called “enemy within”; however, on both fronts the true enemy for the bourgeois is the international proletarian.

As the masses of workers are pushed further into abject poverty in the face of an increasingly decadent bourgeois, who flaunt their wealth with extravagant rocketship rides to space, superyachts and now the construction of large ballrooms and triumphal arches in Washington D.C. amid a government shutdown which sees millions going without paychecks and food benefits, the bourgeoisie have resorted to labeling so-called anti-fascists (which in the Republican administration's rhetoric includes the totality of the Democratic Party) as terrorists, amid a string of assassinations of CEO’s and capitalist politicians. Yet the new laws will only be used to do old work, targeting and attacking proletarians who organize themselves to oppose capitals onslaught.

Workers must dedicate themselves to the difficult work of rebuilding the militant working class proletarian defensive organizations, the class unions, and developing the capacities of the working class to engage in collective labor actions and build towards the general strike. Likewise, workers must break from the bourgeois political parties and organize themselves under the leadership of the International Communist Party, the only party which despite over a century of counter-revolution and opportunist distortions of revolutionary Marxism, advances the true program of the working class to realize its historical aims of the abolition of class society itself, and towards the preparation of the final offensive struggle to end the regime of capital. As we reported in TICP 61, the bourgeoisie know their true mortal enemy well, it is the communists who the Republican Party listed more than any other as their primary target for political repression in both Project 2025 and the Republican Agenda 47.

Approximately every 8-10 years in the United States there is a major economic crisis. While the next economic crisis may come sooner or later than that date, it is fast approaching and 2028 marks an important year. A year where many large unions across the country have committed to building towards a general strike & the year the next presidential election is slated to occur, all of which will likely unfold in the thick of a major financial crisis and expanding imperialist wars across the globe and an American society which will be more deeply polarized along class lines unlike any other point in the last half century. As the U.S. capitalist class eliminates many of its key counter-revolutionary welfare programs established during the so-called “New Deal” and “Great Society” periods which were critical for the corruption of the U.S. proletariat and the development of the U.S. labor aristocracy that tied itself to its nation rather than its international class, the social contradictions will only continue to intensify creating a powderkeg of class antagonisms, which will likely lead to the ripening and the expansion of the militant working class movement in the difficult years to come.

Inter-imperialist conflict between the U.S. and Venezuela and the future war against China, will be fought to preserve a putrefying capitalist system. In the conflicts of the future millions of proletarians will be asked to sacrifice themselves for their national bourgeoisie amid ruthless campaigns of repression domestically. The workers must refuse to fight and support these wars for their cruel masters. Workers have the power to put the brakes on the slaughter but they must organize themselves to take up the slogans of proletarian defeatism to meet the patriotic calls of bourgeois nationalism and militarism.

With the deployment of multiple warships, along with a nuclear-powered submarine, present in the area since early August and equipped with missile and intelligence capabilities, along with P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, and a military contingent of more than 4,000 marines, the US government ordered the execution of the operation to demonstrate its military power and deterrence in the Caribbean.

The troop movement is based on the US government's August 8 order to use the armed forces against foreign drug cartels. Prominent among these cartels are the Mexican and Colombian cartels, but also the so-called "Tren De Aragua" from Venezuela.

Simultaneously with this deployment, the United States government, specifically Attorney General Pam Bondi, announced in August that it was increasing the reward for information leading to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, President of the bourgeois Venezuelan government, to $50 million. The first time a reward was established for Maduro was on March 26, 2020, when the State Department, during the previous Donald Trump administration, offered $15 million. In January 2025, the administration of then-President Joe Biden, already ending his term, increased the reward from $15 million to $25 million.

While they are demanding a reward for Maduro, they maintain communication and reach business agreements with his government regarding oil (in the first half of August, the US received two ships with oil extracted by Chevron), migrants, and other issues.

The plot of this novel is already well known, as are the supporting actors. US imperialism has already presented its strategy for combating drug trafficking, with an unprecedented deployment in the Caribbean, despite the UN's reports indicating that the majority of drug shipments entering the US from South America do so via the Pacific coast. It is well known that North America's real strategic objective is the control of oil, gas, and other natural resources of high economic value, located in its immediate area of ​​influence between the Gulf of Mexico (which they now want to call the "Gulf of America") and Venezuela (including the Essequibo territory disputed with Guyana). It is also known that US military movements and their coordination with several countries in the region have been ongoing for some time, but have now been given significant media coverage for political purposes.

The Venezuelan government is tearing its throat out with screams and is posturing an "anti-imperialism" that cynically admits pacts, agreements, alliances, and business deals with both the local bourgeoisie and transnational corporations, guaranteeing them cheap labor and labor peace based on the actions of the state repression/regime unions duo. The government's plan also includes a call for national unity against the external enemy. And this is the plan of most opposition parties, both right and left, who raise the banner of defending the homeland. The plan of the trade unionists, of the regime's trade union federations, is to ask workers to put their demands aside, because the homeland comes first. And there's no shortage of harangues against the "traitors", with which Chavismo takes advantage of the opportunity to persecute its opponents and internal dissidents and stun the labor movement with threats and blackmail.

But just as the Americans put on a show of military deployment, the Venezuelan bourgeois government is doing the same. In response, President Maduro announced on August 18 the deployment of 4.5 million militia members in response to "threats" from the United States. The Militia, made up of some 5 million reservists, according to dubious official figures, was created by former President Hugo Chávez. It later became one of the five components of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB). Maduro asked his government's political bases to advance the formation of peasant and worker militias "in all factories". "Rifles and missiles for the peasant force! To defend the territory, sovereignty, and peace of Venezuela", he said. "Missiles and rifles for the working class, to defend our homeland", Maduro emphasized. On August 21, Nicolás Maduro announced a call for a readiness campaign for the "militia forces" on August 23 and 24. This campaign would take place at military barracks, military units, central public squares, Bolívar Square, and at the headquarters of the popular integral defense bases. This campaign was held and extended to August 30 and 31, and the government announced that the number of militia members had reached 8.5 million and that from now on, their enlistment would be permanent and military training would begin. However, although these figures are dubious, what is certain is that many public sector workers were forced by their employers to enlist as "militiamen".

These announcements are fraught with demagoguery. The government is putting on a political show, taking advantage of the American announcements to elevate its patriotic rhetoric and try to distance the wage-earning masses from their discontent and motivations for class struggle. The Venezuelan militia force is a poorly armed (not to say unarmed) contingent, joined by some of the unemployed and elderly in search of a few crumbs to help them survive. It is employed in institutional security and other tasks that do not involve physical confrontation, combat, or the use of weapons. But these announcements fill the headlines in the war of lies unfolding in the media and social networks.

There has been no shortage of groups and parties that define themselves as "left" that have supported Maduro's call to enlist as militia members. In this context, calls to assume the role of "patriots and anti-imperialists" are really calls to submit to the bourgeoisie, to withdraw from the class struggle, and to take the counterrevolutionary path.

But the labor movement must react with a class stance, outside the plot of this novel of the bourgeoisie and imperialism. In Venezuela, as in all capitalist countries, the working class does not have to fight against the invasion of an army from another bourgeois state, because the bourgeois government that calls on it to enlist in the militia is always against it: it is its first enemy. The struggle of the working class, as long as it does not seize political power, is not military but social, in defense of wages and better living conditions, and also a political struggle to defeat the power of the bourgeoisie, regardless of whether it considers itself nationalist or a puppet of a foreign power.

There is no alliance with the bourgeoisie or unity for the defense of the homeland. The labor movement must advance its organization for a consistent struggle against capitalists (public and private), for significant increases in wages, pensions, and retirement benefits, a reduction in the working day, a reduction in the retirement age, improved working conditions and hygiene, etc. The call for national unity and the defense of the homeland subjects the working class to the control of the bourgeoisie and its parties. The working class has no homeland.

No alliance with imperialism. Not American, Russian, Chinese, or any other. You cannot confront American imperialism and count the governments and corporations of China, Russia, or any other capitalist power as friends. All capitalist states are enemies of the proletariat.

Promote the GENERAL STRIKE. All workers' demands must converge in the general strike, which must be an indefinite strike without minimum services and must include workers in both the public and private sectors.

Restore Class-Based Unions. True organizations of consistent struggle for workers' demands. Confront discrimination and division among workers based on nationality, occupation, religious beliefs, sex, or skin color. Restore assemblies and grassroots organizing. Union organization should be based on the locality where workers reside, rather than on the workplace. Incorporate the unemployed, pensioners, and retirees.

In its latest assault on migrant workers, the bourgeois state has ordered ICE and elements of the Texas and Illinois national guard into Chicago, Illinois, brazenly calling this attack “Operation Midwest Blitz”. The Department of Homeland Security claims that it has detained at least 1500 migrants since the beginning of the operation in early September. No doubt, this number has increased since that report. Across Chicago ranks of masked ICE agents marching down city streets have been deployed in order to provoke a conflict with locals to serve as justification for further militarization. The assault peaked when ICE conducted a televised helicopter raid, broadcast live on a high rise apartment complex, pulling dozens of women and children out of their homes in the night for mass arrest. Silverio Villegas González, an immigrant worker, was shot and killed by ICE agents on September 12, and Marimar Martinez was shot multiple times by Border Patrol agents on October 4 in Chicago. This wielding of bourgeois state power follows the short-lived proletarian revolt against ICE raids in Los Angeles (as covered in TICP 64) and the deployment of the National Guard in Washington D.C. and Memphis.

The terror being perpetrated by the state is accomplished with or without legal precedence, with or without pitiful “resistance” from the Democratic Party that now cries “law and order”. Of the thousands of people arrested by ICE, many in Illinois were sent to the Broadview ICE facility, a prison that is stated to only house detainees for short-term sentences until they are sent elsewhere. In this hell trap, there are no beds, no medical staff or supplies, no kitchens, no sanitary supplies, open toilets, and barely any space to breathe. Like cattle, undocumented proletarians are shuffled into facilities like these, which don’t even pass the bare minimum legal standards of sanitation or safety. Even before Trump’s Midway Blitz, the facility had imprisoned 143 people for two days or more since the beginning of 2025. Little data has since been provided, and there remains a lot of secrecy around the operations of this facility, but suffice to say, it likely has more people being held as the operation continues to reign terror.

In response to the federal government’s assault, the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago filed lawsuits against the federal government for its deployment of National Guard troops on October 6, citing a lack of emergency warranting their deployment. Amidst this legal battle, 500 national guardsmen from Texas and Illinois have been stationed 55 miles southwest of Chicago, awaiting clearance to enter the city. Despite Chicago’s status as a “Sanctuary City” and a bastion of the Democratic Party in Illinois, the Democratic Party once again leaves the proletariat to fend for itself while espousing itself to be a party that defends migrant workers. The state’s governor, J.B. Pritzker, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson have done little besides voice their “strong condemnation”, appeal to the country’s “humanity”, and channel discontent into ineffective legal disputes and bureaucratic state agencies. While it may seem commendable that the progressive Johnson has enacted executive orders to spread “Know Your Rights” resources and set legal limits on ICE’s use of city property, it is being done in service of Capital in order to stifle the proletariat and tie them to interclass movements dominated by the bourgeoisie.

On October 18, 2025, Mayor Brandon Johnson stood before over 100,000 people at the "No Kings" rally and called for a general strike, invoking his enslaved ancestors who "lead the greatest general strike in the history of this country". Likewise, Johnson has recently been discussing the Democratic Party “popular front” with activist groups, unions and NGO’s as the primary tool to combat fascism in the United States. When Johnson invokes American mythology and Pritzker wraps resistance in “defending Chicago", when mobilization centers on "our city" rather than international working-class interests, class struggle is subordinated to national struggle. Pritzker told crowds: "We will never surrender! Black and Brown people are being targeted for the color of their skin. Children are being zip-tied and separated from their families". The oppression is real. But the response, "protect our city", "defend our democracy", support "good" Democrats, leads not just to a dead end, but a reinforcement and defense of the very system which is used to persecute these sections of the proletariat. Thus the American liberal, the wolf in sheep's clothing once again plays its part. This is the classic Popular Front formula devised first under Stalin, to unite all "democratic" forces against the "fascist" threat, subordinating independent class struggle to preservation of bourgeois democracy. These coalitions compromise and subordinate the workers' movement, catering to those who would forever tie workers to capitalist state sufferings. Johnson may appear like an ally, but as soon as the situation gets out of control and the interests of his faction of the bourgeoisie are threatened, the true face of progressivism will show to be yet another defender of capitalism.

Our prior analysis of the Democrats’ response to ICE raids in Los Angeles rings true in Chicago. The policies of “Sanctuary Cities” don’t do nearly enough to truly defend migrant workers from ICE, which has the facilities and authority to circumvent any legal fiction and act with the full power of the federal government. Appeals to morality amount to nothing when confronted with the faceless necessity of Capital to exploit the most vulnerable of workers backed by its monopoly on violence exercised through its state. The supposed pro-immigrant rhetoric of the Democrats is also laughable, considering their silent participation in the exploitation and heavy deportations of migrant workers during the Obama administration on the heels of the 2008 economic crash. They defend their participation in the detention and deportation of migrant workers by heeding the call of “realistic reform”, promising easier routes to citizenship and leniency for those with criminal records. However, such promises are seemingly forgotten about with increased funding for ICE seen during the Biden administration and a calculated regulation of immigration to satisfy the demands of the petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeois donors who rely on the ability to exploit migrant workers for lower wages.

Protests against the treatment in the Broadview facility and against ICE in general have erupted in Chicago with attempts to block ICE vehicles, generating intense state retaliation. We, of course, celebrate the willingness to struggle, but condemn the inter-classist coalitional nature of the anti-ICE movement across the country which is increasingly coming under the leadership of the Democratic Party. Spontaneous inter-class organizations have also emerged to assist those hunted by ICE, but only in ineffectual ways that focus on awareness of state activity and legal defense. The proletariat doesn’t need the institutions of the bourgeoisie to defend itself nor does it need so-called allies within the government. Only the real contest of forces between classes is the deciding factor. What is needed in defence of immigrant proletarians is the resumption of class struggle, of combative class unionism within workers’ organizations, the leadership of the proletariat with its class party in general and particular struggles, and ultimately the proletarian dictatorship which alone can truly abolish ICE and end the reign of terror against those deemed illegal by capital.

The recent raid on a Hyundai plant being constructed in southern Georgia has served to expose the contradictions within the rhetoric of the American bourgeois regime. On September 4th, 475 workers were arrested on allegations that they were in the country illegally or did not have the proper documentation to work there. The raid occurred at a plant jointly owned by Hyundai and LG, which is being built for the purpose of manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles. The plant was part of an investment of over $12 billion dollars, and it is estimated that by 2031 over 8,000 workers will be employed there.

Of the 475 workers arrested, 316 were South Korean nationals, contracted by Hyundai to do the complex work of installing and testing the machinery used for the manufacturing of the batteries. It was said by an attorney representing some of the workers who were detained that it would take an American 2 to 3 years of living in South Korea to learn the required skills to do this work.

Soon after the raid, President Donald Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to say that foreign companies who are investing in American manufacturing are welcome to bring over their skilled workers to train Americans to create the complex products that are now mostly made in other countries. He said further that he didn’t “want to frighten off or disincentivize investment into America by outside countries or companies…”. This was likely in response to statements that the raid could potentially deter future investment by South Korean companies, with the South Korean president Lee Jae Myung calling the raid “bewildering”.

It has previously been the accepted practice for South Korean companies to send workers to the U.S. for the purpose of establishing factories under B-1 travel visas, due to the limit on the number of H1B foreign professional work visas that are issued each year. 140 of the South Korean workers who were detained were in the U.S. under B-1 visas, which, they were told by an “authoritative interpretation”, would allow them to install and test equipment.

This mutually understood interpretation of the nature and limits of the B-1 visas, was likely undermined by the need of immigration officials to ramp up the number of arrests and deportations, in order to achieve Trump’s supposed goal of deporting 15 to 20 million immigrants. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has called for daily arrests quotas of 3,000. In opposition to the claim by South Korean officials that they had been assured that the B-1 visas would allow South Koreans to work in the U.S., American immigration officials maintain that they strictly enforced the law.

Despite the fantastic claims made by the bourgeois on social media, and the footage of ICE shock troops playing constantly on the news, the number of daily arrests and deportations remain comparable to those from the previous administration. Even still, Republican officials will continue to claim that they are the ones doing the work of saving the American worker from the crushing hand of global competition. The events of September 4th demonstrate the impossibility of balancing actions which fulfill the isolationist rhetoric of Trump’s campaign promises, with the reality of a capitalist economy which is by necessity a global phenomenon. This did not come as a surprise to us Marxists, who realize that once the limits of accumulation have been reached within a country's borders, Capital must look elsewhere to quench its undying thirst for profits.

Every day, the vision of a reinvigorated American manufacturing, protected by tariffs, and staffed by a well compensated and complacent native workforce, is proving to be more like a mirage. What is revealed behind the misty veil of bourgeois propaganda is a dying imperialism, starved of surplus value, and strangled by contradictions which at every move grow even tighter. The tariffs which were put in place for the purpose of restoring and protecting American jobs, are making the construction of the new plants necessary to achieve this purpose prohibitively expensive. According to a survey of the Associated General Contractors of America, over 40 percent of contractors included in the survey have had jobs delayed or cancelled due to increasing costs. According to Ken Simonson, the chief economist of the AGCA, It is unlikely that any amount of investment by foreign companies like Hyundai could counteract this, even assuming that they aren't dissuaded from investing in the first place by the risk of having their employees rounded up into detention centers.

The claim of the Republicans, and the hope of all those proletarians who have been shackled to the right wing of the representatives of capital, is that by removing from the country more easily exploited undocumented workers, employers will be forced to pay native-born workers a “fair wage”. In reality they are only continuing the work of maintaining the reserve army of labor, according to the needs of capital for more or less workers. Any average pay increase resulting from the shrinking of the supply of labor is quickly overshadowed by rising costs of living – precipitated by tariffs – and the fall in the value of the dollar.

Accordingly, we find a proletariat in no better shape than it was under Biden. Trump’s approval rating has plummeted, and it is likely that in 2028 the Democrats will return to power, but the workers have nothing to hope for in a change of command. The continued descent into poverty, strife, and global war, is not the product of the decisions of individual policy-makers, but rather the predictable outcome of the continuation of a rotten system, built on exploitation, and destined for the garbage can of history. We urge all workers to reject subordinating themselves to the national interest and instead act on the principles of international solidarity. The only path forward is the path of class struggle and ultimately proletarian revolution.

The following is a leaflet written by Party members that was distributed in cities across the United States after the deployment of the military in cities across the country.

The capitalist class voraciously devours ever-increasing profits while condemning workers to greater suffering. Mass layoffs, lack of healthcare, and the disappearing ability to afford basic cost of living affect more and more workers. Meanwhile, immigrant workers are pushed into conditions of modern-day slavery through intimidation and forced removal.

In response, the big bourgeois pigs are sending troops into cities across the United States where workers are most prepared to organize in their defense. These troops are not deployed because of any current movement that threatens their power. Rather, they are positioned in anticipation of the next major economic crisis on the horizon. Such a crisis will inevitably produce an upsurge of worker rage and action, requiring the state to exercise more drastic measures to maintain order.

Workers need to organize differently than the dead-end protests and popular front activist coalitions that have proven ineffective. These coalitions, in the name of inclusivity across the political spectrum, compromise and subordinate the workers’ movement and its demands. They cater to the comfort and preferences of those who would forever tie workers to the inherent sufferings imposed by the capitalist state. The capitalist state will never yield any true, meaningful, long-standing change without being confronted by genuine worker power. Only the class union and unconstrained general strike action can achieve this.

These coalitions and Democratic party funded groups like 50501, Indivisible, No Kings, Workers over Billionaires etc., that disguise themselves in names invented to appeal to a broad base, funnel workers into yet another parade around the city and demand a substitution of bourgeois politicians, some kind of reform, or make no demand at all! Activist groups call for individuals to show up on the street and gather aimlessly, undefended, to be shot at with so-called "less lethal" weapons as a mere symbol of discontent. They do not hold any sort of power to coerce our class enemy into yielding real, lasting results.

It is capitalism that births the horrors experienced by the international working class both in its “good cop” mask-democracy, or its “bad cop” costume-fascism. The capitalists who take the reins of the upsurges of resistance (or drive them) via the Democratic Party and its activist front groups, applying their multitude of strategies to channel worker rage to fight for their party’s recapture of power from the opposition, present you with slogans urging the masses to fight the Trump regime, or maintain municipal interests with the call to defend Portland, Chicago, DC etc. The working class has no borders, and are made to bend to capital’s will by local municipal government bodies and their paid enforcement agents, just as they are by the federal government and its troops. Our liberation lies in our commitment to the complete abolition of the capitalist system on an international scale.

Anti-fascism is a dead end, in that it implies that bourgeois democracy is something worth struggling for.

Anti-capitalism seeks to chop down the entire tree of capitalism of which fascism and democracy are two branches of. As the crisis of capitalism deepens we need to organize ourselves not for the Democrats, or democratic socialists, but for the proletariat.

Workers! Organize your workplaces, coalesce worker organizations across sectors and regions so that you can coordinate your collective labor power to increase bargaining power and leverage. Rather than organize a protest, call for workers assemblies that unite the organized and unorganized workers to come together in collective action. Organize a general strike that shuts down the city or country until the ICE kidnappings stop. This is the power and strength of the working class united against the capitalist class. Not your vote, not your ability to maintain hearing through the piercing sound of flash bang grenades, or how much tear gas you can inhale.

If your official union leaders or worker organizations choose to align with the bosses and their state, instead of promoting participation in these mobilizations that would trap you in the hamster wheel of struggle within the capitalist framework, discard them, because the union is the organized workers, not paid mediators with the boss. This isn’t to say that a call for a general strike can be made by one of these organizations or an individual just because it is the correct path. General strike action must be the product of coordinated efforts prepared to turn out and sustain such an immense show of strength. It is critical to organize unions (with or without governmental or boss recognition or contracts), build class struggle caucuses in your unions that influence the broader base within, call a meeting of workers across unions into assemblies where these groups who would have you compromise the necessary aims of the worker’s struggle are absent, their so-called solutions poisoning and paralyzing the body of the workers movement.

Workers! Exit the squirrel cage of symbolic actions and activist coalitions based on compromise with those who would have you throw your bodies on the line in service of the next capitalist politician or return to the normalcy of the so called ‘lesser evil’, and the ridiculous notions that this fight can be fought without clear organization and leadership. Only the International Communist Party, the only party unwilling to compromise and capable of achieving the emancipation of the international working class can provide this leadership. As we have argued for over a century, fascism and democracy, are one and the same capitalist system that, one way or another will continue to exploit, murder, perpetuate genocide and otherwise bring us under their yoke by whatever means necessary to generate their profits. Workers cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of old.

Towards the worker organizations capable of coordinated general strike action!

Towards the building of the class union!

As members of the National Guard are deployed to U.S. cities amid a government shutdown as the capitalist class cannot even decide how to appropriate its own budget amid implementation of its aggressive regime of austerity necessary to preserve itself, members of the armed forces in the United States turn to relief organizations for emergency loans and line up at food banks to feed their families. The facade of military privilege crumbles and it becomes clear that the material interests of enlisted personnel do not coincide with those of the capitalist state they are paid to serve, but with those of the working class.

The current crisis makes this brutally clear. The increasing economic impoverishment faced by military personnel and their families is not dissimilar to that of any other sector of the proletariat, living from paycheck to paycheck amid increasingly expensive cost of living. Shielded as they may be from rising prices due to government subsidized programs, many of these face cuts from veterans healthcare, housing subsidies and even proposals floated by the Trump administration to privatize the military commissary system by an independent corporation which were only rejected after dissent. While soldiers in the United States become wards of the state, acting in a way as indentured servants bound to the state through the duration of their contract, as professional soldiers they are paid wages in order to be recruited and retained, which many of their families still rely upon to meet their daily consumption needs.

Yet as capital attacks workers wages, so too are the U.S. militaries professional soldiers quality of life stagnating or in decline, called to make sacrifices under the patriotic rhetoric of “service” and “honor,” not to fight and die in a battlefield but to take more off their plate to feed the capitalist class, just as healthcare workers were persuaded to give up decent wages and workplace protections during the Covid-19 pandemic, while the capitalist class reaped historic profit margins. Members of the armed forces received a 5.2% pay increase in 2024, which was lower than inflation, which had peaked at over 9% in 2022 and remained high at 8.7% in 2023: wages chase inflation, always lagging behind, never catching up.

Soldiers who enlist are led to believe that their risks and sacrifices are devoted to noble causes: protecting Americans, defending democracy, ensuring national security. To promote this fairy tale, in 1947 the US government renamed the “War Department” the Department of Defense. Now the illusion has vanished with the restoration of the original title of “Department of War”. The reality is finally acknowledged: soldiers sacrifice their lives in defense of the imperial interests of capitalists while their families struggle with poverty.

Today in the United States the military and National Guard are being deployed in cities across the country under the guise of fighting crime and narco-terrorism, but the real reason is to prepare the military to be used against proletarians in the event of war or the next economic crisis; however, this is nothing new and while the capitalist class arrogantly thinks this is a risk free approach for itself, history proves otherwise.

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the first major national labor uprising in U.S. history, erupting in July 1877 after the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O) imposed a 10 percent wage cut, the second such reduction within a year, amid a deep economic depression. The strike began in Martinsburg, West Virginia, where rail workers seized trains and refused to allow freight to move until their pay was restored. When the state militia failed to disperse them, the governor called on federal troops, marking the first large-scale use of the U.S. Army in a labor dispute. The strike spread rapidly along major rail lines through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri, halting rail traffic in much of the nation. In Pittsburgh, militia units fired on unarmed demonstrators, killing over 20 people and triggering a mass uprising that destroyed more than 100 locomotives, 2,000 railcars, and railroad facilities worth an estimated $5 million. In Chicago, tens of thousands of workers joined the movement, paralyzing industry, while in Baltimore, troops and crowds fought running battles that left multiple dead. By the end of July, an estimated half a million to one million workers had participated nationwide, including miners, textile workers, and iron molders, marking an unprecedented eruption of working-class solidarity across racial and occupational lines.

At the same time, in St. Louis, the strike took on an explicitly political character under the leadership of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WPUS), an organization that had evolved from the American section of the First International (International Workingmen’s Association) after the General Council was moved to New York in 1872. The Workingmen’s Party organized strike committees and mass meetings, proclaiming that “the workingmen have no country” and calling for workers’ control of production. In late July, the St. Louis strike committee effectively governed the city for several days halting commerce, rail transport, and industry in what the press dubbed the “St. Louis Commune.” Modeled consciously on the Paris Commune of 1871. The federal and local authorities swiftly repressed it with combined militia, police, and federal troops, killing dozens and arresting strike leaders.

The strike also exposed the deep unreliability of state militias, many of which were drawn from the same working-class communities as the strikers. In several instances, militia units refused orders to fire on protesters, or openly sided with them. In Reading, Pennsylvania, members of the local militia joined the strike, while in Baltimore and Chicago, troops hesitated or mutinied rather than attack fellow workers. These acts of sympathy alarmed state and business leaders, who realized their traditional, volunteer-based militias were politically unreliable for suppressing labor unrest. In the years following 1877, state governments undertook sweeping reforms to reorganize, professionalize, and centralize their militias laying the groundwork for the modern National Guard. New legislation in states such as Pennsylvania (1878) and New York (1881) increased state funding, standardized training and discipline, and mandated construction of urban armories to ensure rapid deployment in future disturbances. These armories, many still standing today in major cities, symbolized a new, permanent apparatus of state military power aimed at domestic control, built in direct response to the upheaval of 1877.

The federal government also redefined its legal relationship to domestic deployment of troops. In 1878, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of federal army forces for domestic law enforcement without congressional approval, a reaction both to military overreach during Reconstruction and the federal troop interventions in the 1877 strike. However, this limitation was balanced by the Insurrection Act of 1807, which allows presidents to deploy the military or federalize the National Guard in times of “insurrection” or when state governments cannot enforce the law. This act has been invoked repeatedly to suppress labor unrest and civil uprisings, including during the Pullman Strike of 1894, the West Virginia mine wars, and various race riots in the 20th century. More recently, the Trump administration discussed expanding presidential authority under the Insurrection Act to override Posse Comitatus restrictions during domestic protests in 2020, reflecting a recurring tension between civil liberties and the use of military force in maintaining internal order, a tension that traces directly back to the lessons of the 1877 railroad strike.

In Russia, as World War I dragged on and casualties mounted, and soldiers faced hunger and cold in the trenches while the aristocracy and bourgeoisie lived in luxury, ordinary soldiers began to recognize their common cause with striking workers and rebellious peasants. When, in February 1917, regiments were ordered to fire on demonstrating workers, the soldiers instead joined them, turning their guns on the officers who ordered them to kill their class brothers and sisters. Soldiers' councils emerged as political organs of revolutionary power: coordinating with workers' and peasants' councils, they first overthrew the power of the tsar, then that of the bourgeois provisional government.

In Germany in 1918, the mutiny of sailors in the Imperial Navy stationed in Kiel began when they refused orders to fight a suicidal battle against the British fleet: the officers sought a final “honorable” confrontation; the sailors refused to go to their deaths. The mutiny sparked councils of soldiers and sailors throughout Germany, leading to the fall of the Kaiser, but not to the establishment of proletarian power.

The role assigned to soldiers contradicts their immediate interests. They are trained and deployed to suppress workers' strikes, quell protests, occupy foreign territories, and protect the interests of capital on a global scale. Yet their material needs, housing, food, security for their families, are the same as those of the working class. The capitalist state would fire them just as it gets rid of factory workers when profits demand it. Their pay is only slightly higher than that of a full-time minimum wage worker, but they face the prospect of deployment to the front lines, separation from their families, and obedience to orders that could cost them their lives.

When Russian soldiers in the early 1900s faced similar conditions, exhaustion, deprivation, being used as cannon fodder while their families starved, they understood that the enemy was not in the opposing trenches but in the palaces and officers' quarters. When German sailors were ordered to die needlessly, they refused and sparked a revolutionary wave. Your refusal to serve as an instrument of capital's violence will have a similar result tomorrow.

In revolutionary times, soldiers with the help of the active intervention of the communist party through its propaganda and agitation, will come to understand that their interests coincide with those of the international working class, with the exploited proletariat. This will lead to the organization of troops to defend themselves and refuse the role assigned to them as instruments of capitalist violence. When ordered to repress striking workers, occupy foreign lands, or defend corporate property, under the leadership of the International Communist Party, they will refuse and, together with all workers, overthrow the regime that oppresses them.

Historical experience shows that when soldiers identified with the communist line and rejected their assigned role as instruments of bourgeois violence, revolutionary transformation became possible. The Russian and German soldiers' councils in 1917-1919 expressed this potential. It was certainly not an easy path, but one imposed by the very course of history.

As the current ruling capitalist party in the U.S. continues its headlong offensive against the living standards of the domestic proletarian and removes all the guardrails against rampant financial speculation in order to preserve profit rates, the economic anarchy grows. Thus, it will be up to its Democratic Party counterpart to prepare for the future regulatory clean up job to restore capital after the next crash, and likely to conduct the war with China, even if today it must roll up its sleeves for its classic dirty work of corrupting the stirring proletarian masses with the noxious populist democratic ideology and inter-class activism in order to secure its return to power and instill a renewed patriotic discipline upon the working masses under the familiar slogan of defense of democracy. As the Democrats work to build a popular front of opportunist union leaders, social democrats, NGO’s and liberal billionaires, it aims for the apparently noble goals of restoring American democracy from authoritarianism, reasserting the “rule of law” against lawlessness, and preserving an imaginary pure petite-bourgeosis capitalism from oligopoly, which really only means securing and repairing the bourgeois state after the crash so that capital accumulation can continue unabated in its exploitation in its next evolution.

But this can only happen if the workers forget that it was under the Democrats that the most ruthless fascist economic policy has been exerted against the American working class. Recall that it was under Democrats, that the 2022 railroaders strike was snuffed out before it could begin. It was under Democrats that the Federal Reserve organized its most brutal opening attack on the working class in 2022, softening the “labor market” through raising interest rates so as to generate more unemployment and drive down workers wages and bargaining leverage. It was under Democrats that this surplus squeezed out of workers was used to buy more bombs to fuel the proxy wars by U.S. imperial puppets in Ukraine and Gaza. It was under Democrats that Obama earned the title “Deporter in Chief”, and it was under Democrats that an alliance with the opportunist wing of the labor movement was built so that the working class could be shipped off to die in both world wars for U.S. capitalists, under a supposed crusade of “save democracy” and “oppose fascism”, justifications to cover up the true imperialist motivation of the war on all sides.

We can see the problem here, it is not fascism that we must oppose, but capitalism! It is capitalism which creates fascism through its democracy, whenever it is needed! And let's not forget that this process works the other way around too! The Democrats are the worst enemy of the working class for it is they who are the worst deceivers of the workers as they pose as their only practical protectors against the naked aggression under their colleagues in the Republican party, only to stab the working class in the back over and over again! The workers would be better off under a Republican dictatorship that fully destroyed the Democrats, because they would have no recourse to diffuse the proletarian from the track of revolution without the Democrats! The workers must dump the Democrats, and see that both parties are part of one ruthless capitalist class dictatorship, they are both fascist & even worse they are both democratic! Together they form the insidious and dynamic two party state of the capitalist class dictatorship in the United States, that never has and never will serve the interest of the working class! It is only the International Communist Party that represents the true interests of the working class, not the parties of the enemy classes. It is only under communism, that the working class will find a final conclusion from the present hell of class society.

Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. The result is reaction all along the line, whatever the political system, and an extreme intensification of the antagonisms in this field. Particularly intensified become the parasitism and decay of the capitalist countries.”

— Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Chapter 10

Today in the United States we live in a decaying capitalist society. A process that will not relent until the whole edifice is kicked over by the future proletarian dictatorship. The ascent of the Trump dynasty, from real-estate speculators and television personalities to the gilded hopeful sovereigns of a degenerating republic, is not an episode of corruption; it is the symptom of capitalism’s terminal senility. Since January, Joe Biden, Bernie, AOC and the liberal democrats have not stopped croaking about the oligarchy in the United States which they would like us to believe has only sprung up as a result of Trump policies. The progressive democrats present Trump and the Republicans as somehow an anomaly to the normal order of things. The solution they claim is anti-trust laws and redistribution of wealth to break; however, historically such reforms have only ever had cosmetic results and ultimately only worked to further the concentration of capital into a few monopolies.

Despite capitalist distortions about the New Deal and the Great Society programs, there has never been a massive redistribution of wealth in the United States where workers received “their fair share”. No, the affluence for some workers in this era was due to their allotments of imperialist plunder after the last world war, given to a section of the proletariat called the “middle class”, in exchange for total subordination in the slaughter of their class brethren in various imperialist wars abroad. Far from harming the capitalist class and its profit making ability, these programs were counter revolutionary and designed to ensure accumulation, not thwart it. This continued until the onset of the current overproduction crisis in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. This period witnessed massive interclass movements in the United States, which we are told succeed thanks to democracy, not as a result of proletarian combativity.The delusions of the social democrats is fueled by the fictitious stories told in bourgeois schools, that it was the non-violent student protestors who ended the Vietnam War, not the demoralized proletarian conscripts blowing up their commanding officers who made the war unfightable, that it was the nonviolent civil disobedience and votes of white liberals that ended segregation not the real threat presented by the waves of black proletarian rebellions during the long hot summer of 1968 and the threat presented by the black power movement.

Throughout U.S. history, waves of reform movements and populist campaigns have been launched under the banner of fighting “corruption,” yet these struggles have often served to preserve rather than challenge the capitalist system itself. From the Democrats’ attacks on Grant’s administration and the spoils system during Reconstruction, through the Progressive Era’s anti-trust crusades under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the rhetoric of purging corruption was used to delude workers into the illusion that capitalism could be cleaned up. Roosevelt’s New Deal later revived this tradition, portraying regulation and public works as means to restore fairness rather than dismantle class domination. Even the post-Watergate outrage over Nixon’s corruption promised moral renewal without confronting the deeper economic contradictions that sustained political rot. In each case, the call to reform capitalism diverted working-class anger into faith in “good government,” while wealth and power continued to consolidate into ever fewer corporate and financial hands. The same process is playing out again today.

Since their return to the apparatus of state power, the Trump clan has openly transformed bourgeois public office into a mechanism for direct personal accumulation, with all levers of the state secured under their party and fully and explicitly put to the political and economic interests of themselves and their insider circle of the big-bourgeoisie. Their rule is marked by an unprecedented intertwining of public authority and private enrichment: the payments channeled from foreign governments to Trump-owned businesses during the presidency, including from Chinese government-controlled entities alone. The monetization of the presidency through licensing, donations, and international deals; the placement of family members like Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in key advisory posts to advance private holdings; and the use of state intelligence for financial leverage, all these exemplify a new level of bourgeois parasitism, one where the state apparatus is openly ran like a family business. The Trump network of shell companies and Super PACs, his manipulation of tax loopholes and offshore accounts, and his open extortion of foreign governments for personal political and economic gain exemplify this.Trump-linked entities have engaged in insider trading around defence and energy contracts, have funneled state subsidies into private ventures, and have turned campaign funds into revolving doors of personal enrichment. Their associates have trafficked in influence, selling access to the administration through the Trump family’s social orbit and fundraising galas. As Trump-aligned corporations and hedge funds become among the largest holders of Bitcoin and defence-industrial stocks, the more or less open sale of pardons, ambassadorships and regulatory exemptions reveals the real content of “America First”: a racket for the financial oligarchy.

But in the last act, the Trump policies represent nothing truly new or unique, only a more honest portrayal of the real relations between capital, its state and the individual billionaires who do its bidding. Capital, increasingly concentrated into an ever smaller circle of firms managed by a clique of financiers orbiting Mar-a-Lago, now rules unmasked, capital as emperor with no clothes, As the big bourgeoisie advance their interest the petty-bourgeois cries of corruption and unfairness. The proletarian on the other hand have no interest on either side of this dispute.

As hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned for the construction of new monuments amid a government shutdown that will leave millions of workers without food stamps and pay-stubs, the so-called “Arc de Trump,” the vast palatial complexes and ballrooms planned for White House renovation, are not anomalies but expressions of parasitic, decayed capitalism. The gold-plated offices, the nepotistic contracts awarded to family firms, the indulgent use of military funds to host political rallies, and the laundering of donor money through real-estate projects stand as Versailles reborn under the neon light of late imperial America. There, amidst chandeliers and mountains of debt, the courtiers of finance capital and bourgeois propaganda dance while the proletarian masses, dispossessed and atomised, are told to worship the splendor of their masters. The bourgeois White House, the so-called “People’s House” now converted into a palace, is not an aberration but the logical terminus of capitalism intoxicated with its speculative madness. And like the French and Tsarist courts before their revolutions, it prefigures its own downfall, not through moral awakening, but through the irresistible contradictions of a system that can no longer reproduce itself without spectacle, graft, and absolute moral decay, which will only continue until the whole rotten edifice is removed from the historical stage by the future proletarian revolution, no matter how much the petty-bourgeosis attempt to bring back “normalcy”.

The maniacal bourgeois will never relinquish control of its state and will never itself be able to escape the economic laws of Capital accumulation which drive it to immiserate the working class, to continue to accumulate wealth into the hands of an ever smaller and more isolated clique of ultra-wealth who flaunt its opulence, to engage in imperialist wars and ultimately to set the material conditions for future proletarian revolution; however, the proletariat cannot be deceived that revolution will somehow ever come via the ballot box without a real and serious class struggle and vicious battle with the class enemy.

The accelerating crisis of global capitalism is forcing a powerful reaction from the ruling class to prevent a backlash from the working class and anything that hinders its power. The bourgeoisie must prevent workers from gaining consciousness of themselves as a class and exerting their will, only existing through the organic unity to their class party.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, a prominent figure in capital's "right-wing" propaganda, has unleashed a media frenzy reminiscent of the days following the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the McCarthy era.

Kirk was famous for promoting a form of racism known as Christo-nationalism, in an open-air debate format, which also exposed him to gunfire coming from the rifle fire of a young man, who felt personally harassed by his rhetoric and had "had enough of his hatred". The alleged shooter was not a member of any political organization, let alone a Communist, but was engaged in the now all-American pastime of highly individualistic and nihilistic gun violence, only this time the bullets hit a prominent figure in bourgeois politics, rather than schoolchildren, co-workers, people of other races or religions, or others.

The murder bears some similarities to the case of Luigi Mangioni. With the same results: that CEO was quickly replaced, and the void of fascist rhetoric will be filled by another similar propagandist.

Kirk "whispered to the youth" a reactionary rhetoric tailored for white, middle-class Christian families fearful for their economic survival, and for this he was generously funded by the bourgeois regime.

During a crisis, the bourgeoisie is driven to intensify the rate of exploitation. The policies of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which is the policy guide of the current administration, and which organization was funded and backed by the same bourgeois that funded and backed Kirk, spell out exactly this type of plan. Much of its goals have already been reached, such as the gutting of social programs, taking over of Congress and the courts, installing functionaries willing to do the job in bureaucratic institutions, funneling illegal immigrants into more exploitative labor outside the country and in the pathway of more exploitative legal immigration at home and what remains to be done by them is lowering the minimum wage, rolling back overtime protections and workplace safety rules, including making it easier for employers to hire children for inherently dangerous jobs.

But the goals are the same as those of capital's "leftist" propaganda: to attempt to fill the vacuum among workers, making them complicit in the ideals of the national bourgeoisie, in which workers are reduced to little more than slaves, and whose first victims are immigrants, racial, gender, sexual, and other minorities, followed closely by the white aristocratic workers themselves, when necessary.

Shortly after Kirk's death, in a presidential memorandum, and in order to create a climate of fear, the administration declared a broad group of activities, including "anti-capitalism" as being "anti-fascist" and while also designating "anti-fascism" as a form of domestic terrorism, which designation allows for the effective bypassing of a legal process that would slow down the intimidation and harassment of anyone out of line with the bourgeoise’s plan. The IRS is currently being used to investigate donors to any bourgeois opposition parties and RICO indictments, usually reserved for mafia bosses, have instead been both used and threatened against leftist activist groups.

Continuing consistently along the lines of previous administrations, the current bourgeois government is consolidating the power of the state at the federal, state and municipal level. The administration is using the threat of defunding and cancellation of programs as well as layoffs and mass firings to push opposing bourgeois factions' loyalists, including local politicians, agency bureaucrats and university administrators into compliance. Many of them have bent in compliance as widespread firings, suspensions, expulsions, cancellations for alleged antisemitism, etc., continue to be part of the arsenal of the administration to consolidate its power at federal, state and municipal levels. There has been some fight in the courts regarding this but even when the court's decisions have been against the government, the ruling bourgeois faction simply ignores its own courts and marches forward with its plan regardless.

Any counterattack launched by the opposition to the current administration from within the ranks of the bourgeoisie and its supporters remains fatally compromised and impotent because it is located within the structural confines of bourgeois politics and returns to the very problem it is trying to solve through its popular fronts and anti-fascist struggles, electoral campaigns, legal maneuvers, and moralistic posturing.

By prioritizing the "defense of democracy" within the existing framework and implicitly relying on political organizations linked to the Democratic Party, any opposition movement of this kind ends up subordinating the proletariat's revolutionary agenda to the preservation of the bourgeois state.

To achieve the historic goal of the working class, even the minimal goal they propose today, "defeating the authoritarian agenda championed by billionaires", it is necessary to dismantle and destroy the entire spectrum of bourgeois power, the same power that fills us with sacred patriotism and respect for bourgeois law and order, yet pushes us into opportunistic dead ends that only strengthen and deepen the conditions in which workers find themselves.

The only revolutionary force capable of responding is the proletariat, united with its party in its historic mission to overthrow capital. This long-term political offensive can only succeed when the Communist Party transmits its thinking and directives through the organs of struggle of the proletariat, the combative and coordinated unions, which workers are now trying to revive through a battle within and outside today's compromised unions.

Only by completely severing all ties with the bourgeois political apparatus and intensifying the level of class coordination and organization, leading to broader and more general strikes and winning over workers from the army and other repressive state bodies to the cause of the proletariat, will it be possible for the working class to seize state power. Only then can the deadly cycles of capitalism, class society, and repression be eliminated and replaced by a rational, classless system of production, government, and administration not based on the exploitation of man.

The overproduction crisis in the United States is beginning to hit all corners of industry which continue to see production levels mostly in stagnation, decline or saturated with overstocked inventories as demand dwindles. According to the October 2nd article By the S&P, US Manufacturing PMI: Five Key Takeaways as Production Growth Slows Amid Tariff Disruptions, in May the largest unsold inventory of raw materials in decades stacked up in warehouses across the country as companies prepared for the tariffs, and now in October the largest inventory of unsold finished goods in nearly 20 years has grown as companies utilized these extra materials for production but are now finding no demand for them due declining consumer buying power. The result is likely to be cut prices, and hastened slow down in production across the board. Despite the Trump administration demands for increased oil production, declining prices are leading to reduced drilling of new oil wells and diminished production numbers. In the farm sector, a recent article in The American Prospect points out how U.S. corn and soybean production is being encouraged by subsidies and mandates even while export markets (especially China) are pulling back resulting in gluts of supply and depressed prices. The tech industry has committed huge resources to AI: cloud infrastructure, data centers, compute hardware, AI-software layers, yet market research firms say there are already “too many” AI solutions/tools on offer relative to real demand. The Bank of England has flagged risk of a sharp correction among AI-focused tech stocks, amid warnings of a possible “bubble” with high valuations, massive investment, but increasingly unclear returns.

As we have previously reported in TICP 64 in the article World Imperialism’s Struggle For Control of the Seas, The Chinese shipbuilding industry which currently dominates the global shipbuilding industry, is experiencing an overproduction crisis which has diverted many ships into Russia’s “Shadow Fleet”. Meanwhile the U.S. is desperately working to rebuild its own shipbuilding industry so as to enable it to wage global war, and to do that it must retain its steel industry which is a backbone to any shipbuilding industry; however, despite its attempts to re-energize U.S. steel manufacturing through tariffs and expanded production, production is already facing its own overproduction crisis due to stagnant demand. In turn, high steel and labor costs continue to plague the development of a domestic shipbuilding industry creating a chicken and egg scenario. As China dominates in the shipbuilding market, so too does it in the global steel market, with its output now accounting for over half of world crude steel production. As domestic demand in China has begun to weaken (especially in sectors like real estate and infrastructure), a surplus of production capacity is pushing Chinese firms to export more steel at lower prices. In response, the U.S. has imposed steep tariffs on steel and aluminium imports claiming national-security justifications.

According to an August 26th article by the Wall St. Journal titled, The Boom in New Steel Mills is Outpacing Demand. Today the United States has the highest prices for steel the world over as the U.S. steel industry has enthusiastically embraced the tariffs. As foreign markets are glutted with steel leading to price depressions, the U.S. steel prices are twice the price of foreign steel reaching upwards of $800 a ton. The tariffs have allowed U.S. steel mills to corner the domestic market cutting out foreign competition that manufacturers were historically dependent upon. In expectation of a large-scale reshoring of manufacturing to take place alongside the tariffs a massive expansion of steel industry production capacity has also gotten underway over the last year; however, the expected boom in manufacturing has not occurred, leading to a developing market glut of steel. The recent acquisition of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel led to the company pledging $14 billion to build a new steel mill and modernizing old plants, Nucor, the largest steelmaker in the U.S., Steel Dynamics and ArcelorMittal have expanded U.S. production and South Korean steelmakers Hyundai Steel and Posco want to build a Louisiana plant to supply steel for Hyundai’s made-in-the-U.S.A. cars. Twenty-one million tons of additional steel production capacity have been announced, placed under construction or completed in the past four years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of market data from Argus Media. That figure is roughly a quarter of total U.S. production of the metal that will sit with no expected increase in demand which has shrunk from 2015 levels when demand flatlined a decade ago.

The developing glut in the steel market is a sign that the U.S. bourgeois may soon become even more thirsty for an expanded military conflict. Steel gluts themselves don’t mechanically “cause” world wars but historically, they have marked moments when capitalist economies reached their limits of peaceful expansion. In those moments, ruling powers often turned to military production and imperial confrontation to resolve crises of overproduction as excess steel can easily be absorbed in the countless weapons of war demanded by imperialist states at war.

The Tariff War, The Economic Decoupling Before World War

As the overproduction crisis worsens and economies contract across the globe, tensions between the imperialist powers are exacerbated as tariff walls are implemented around key military and strategic industrial sectors and the national industries are pushed into struggles for conquest of raw materials and destruction of the opponents productive powers. The profitability of the military defense sectors then become key drivers in propping up the entire decaying capitalist economy, thus further incentivizing militaristic conflict. This basic feature of imperialism is on full display in recent months as deeply protectionist measures have been raised around key strategic rare earth minerals shipbuilding and steel industries.

Over the past month, the United States and China have rolled out reciprocal measures targeting their rival’s shipping sectors, turning port access and vessel ownership into the latest arenas of trade conflict. Starting October 14, 2025, the U.S. implemented “special port fees” on vessels judged to be Chinese-controlled, built in China, or operated by Chinese entities. China responded the same day with its own levy. Vessels owned, built, flagged or operated by U.S. entities must now pay per net ton for their first Chinese port call, with fees set to continue to rise. Together, these moves have already disrupted routing decisions, pushed shipping rates higher, and signaled that shipping and ship-yards are now treated as strategic national-security zones, in the conflict between the two super-powers.

Parallel to the fee battle, the U.S. is doubling down on industrial investment in domestic shipbuilding to lessen reliance on China’s dominance in commercial shipyards and supply chains. For example, Hanwha Ocean’s $5 billion upgrade of Philly Shipyard is aimed at turning an annual build-rate on one ship a year into as many as twenty new vessels. Meanwhile, Huntington Ingalls Industries’s partnership with HD Hyundai Heavy Industries on naval design, advanced manufacturing and workforce training reflects a broader industrial pivot to building up war manufacturing capabilities. In October 2025, China imposed sanctions on five U.S.-linked subsidiaries of South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean, accusing them of aiding U.S. investigations into China’s shipbuilding sector, in order to pressure Seoul and disrupt U.S.- South Korean defense industrial cooperation. Further, top U.S. financial institution JPMorgan Chase announced a 1.5 trillion dollar investment into U.S. defense industries including a multi-billion-dollar long-term investment for critical maritime infrastructure and shipbuilding capacity. These moves are explicitly framed as part of the “revival of American shipbuilding” but in reality are part of a wider arms race and military build up between the imperialist powers as the United States must rapidly expand its minuscule naval capacity if it ever hopes to win a war with China.

Also in October, China announced new restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals, a critical market for technological finished goods that the Chinese have a near monopoly on. According to an October 21st article by Reuters titled Goldman Sachs Flags Risk of Disruption in Supply of Rare Earths, Key Minerals, analysts estimate that a mere 10% disruption in global rare-earth supply could cost up to US$150 billion in lost industrial output. With China producing about 69% of global rare earth mining, 92% of refining and 98% of magnet manufacturing, its export curbs on rare earths are seen as a serious threat to sectors from EVs to defense. This move will likely force the United States to more aggressively seek territorial acquisitions for these minerals elsewhere.

Already, the U.S. has begun reacting with an $8.5 billion critical-minerals deal in October with Australia to boost alternative supply chains, alongside Australia’s announcement of a doubling of it’s naval fleet capacity to counter China. Meanwhile, U.S. agencies are exploring investment in the Tanbreez deposit in Greenland, amid the U.S. continued menacing of a military territorial conquest of the arctic island.

During their meeting in Busan on October 30, 2025, Trump and Xi reached a one-year trade truce in which China agreed to suspend planned export controls on key rare-earth minerals that it had threatened as leverage. In exchange, the U.S. offered to reduce its “fentanyl-tariff” on Chinese goods from 20% to 10%, lowering overall tariffs on Chinese imports. The deal also includes China committing to buy large quantities of U.S. farm products (soybeans, sorghum) and remove certain measures against U.S. chip-companies, while the U.S. agreed to pause its threatened 100% tariff on Chinese exports. The end result is that U.S. access to Chinese-controlled rare earths has been temporarily safeguarded and a major tariff escalation has been averted, but the agreement is time-limited (one year) and China retains broader structural leverage as the U.S. was forced to make significant concessions in the form of tariff reduction to secure access to strategic minerals rather than China giving up its dominance.

The rush for strategic resource acquisition is occurring among a world consumed by tariffs and a vast military buildup. Across Europe, Asia and the United States, a clear trend of remilitarisation is now well-underway. In Europe, military expenditure jumped by 17 % in 2024 to about US $693 billion. Within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization area, 18 of 32 members in 2024 spent at least 2 % of GDP on defense, the highest number since 2014. In Asia, the region’s largest military spender, China, raised its budget to about US $314 billion in 2024 (+7 % year-on-year), while other Asia-Pacific nations saw rapid growth in procurement and R&D. As traditional industrial growth slows and civilian investment becomes more constrained, defense has emerged as one of the few expanding sectors worldwide with global military-expenditure hitting over US $2.7 trillion in 2024. The combination of rising tariffs, stagnant or declining broader economic growth, and high geopolitical uncertainty means governments are diverting scarce capital into defense procurement, research & development, and infrastructure. In effect, the defense-industry complex is one of the only sectors experiencing sustained growth globally as fiscal priorities shift under pressure.

The Financial and Monetary Crash

Just as the global overproduction crisis is pushing the bourgeois states across the world into increased investment into military production, it’s financial and monetary policy reflect a system which is becoming more unstable by the day.

Currently, the dollar is in the steepest decline it has been since the Nixon administration in the 1970s, with a depreciation of 10% since January of this year. On October 10, 2025, after Donald Trump announced that the United States would impose 100% tariffs on Chinese exports and enforce strict export controls on “any and all critical software” from China, a move meant to counter Beijing’s restrictions on rare earth mineral exports. In response to the announcement, Bitcoin’s price crashed sharply, falling over 20% in a single week after mass liquidations wiped nearly $19 billion from the crypto market. Additionally, in recent weeks, the collapse of non-bank firms such as First Brands Group and Tricolor Holdings has rattled the U.S. financial sector. First Brands filed for bankruptcy with more than $11.6 billion in liabilities and a reported $2.3 billion discrepancy in its invoice-factoring scheme, according to Reuters. At the same time, banks such as Fifth Third Bancorp recorded losses tied to Tricolor’s collapse, including a $178 million hit, highlighting exposure to sub-prime auto-finance and opaque credit markets. These failures are raising alarms about hidden risks in shadow-banking, private-credit and non-depository firms, and have contributed to a sharp drop in U.S. regional bank stocks, with some institutions revealing large loan charge-offs and fraud exposures.

Meanwhile, the repurchase (repo) market is flashing red. U.S. banks borrowed $18.5 billion from the Federal Reserve’s Standing Repo Facility in October, the largest draw-down since the pandemic era, while the benchmark Secured Overnight Financing Rate (SOFR) climbed to 4.42%, signaling pressure in short-term funding markets. These strains echo the pre-2020 sharp spike in repo rates (in mid-September 2019 rates soared from ~2% to above 8%) that preceded the COVID-era market trauma. The confluence of bank credit stresses, shadow-finance failures and repo market tightness suggests that the financial plumbing is under renewed strain, even if no systemic failure has yet occurred it is certainly on the horizon.

The Federal Reserve will soon likely be forced to pause or reverse its quantitative-tightening (QT) program amid its current policy of decreasing interest rates, marking a shift toward easing, due to mounting liquidity pressures and funding strains in the banking system. For example, bank reserves have dropped to approximately $3 trillion, representing under 10% of GDP a level the Fed has previously flagged as risky; however, as we have previously reported in TICP 62 Oligarchy in the U.S.? Only Workers’ Revolution Can Stop Capital’s Onslaught, the escalating U.S. debt increasingly ties the hands of how much more debt the government can take on without an outright default on it’s loans as the debt to GDP ratio continues to grow at an increasing rate amid diminished GDP expectations and growing demand for debt.

A major market crash as we have seen in the past has winners and losers, used by the big bourgeois to further consolidate itself by purchasing out the companies that go bankrupt while it further incentives war as the only long lasting remedy.

As we mention in our 1952 article The New Deal: State Intervention in Defense of Capital, a few years after the 1929 stock market crash, attempts were made to revive the international economic system under the London Economic Conference created by Hoover by way of reducing global tariffs and reviving prices to head off the massive deflation, along with peacefully setting international debts (most of which were owed to the U.S.) after it was recognized that the systems of tariffs established after the stock market crash only deepened the crisis; however, the United States abandoned these attempts under the Democratic President Roosevelt in order to revive its own economy first over and above those of the rest of the world. In order to do so the United States began implementing further tariffs similar to those implemented by Hoover’s ultra protectionist Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, which had led to reciprocal tariffs and a global decline of world trade by 60% at the start of the Great Depression.

Likewise, in 1933, Roosevelt ended the U.S. gold standard, ordering Americans to exchange their gold for paper currency and prohibiting private gold ownership to stop hoarding during the Great Depression. This move allowed the government to expand the money supply, devalue the dollar, and stimulate economic recovery without being constrained by gold reserves. The U.S. wanted to devalue the dollar in the early 1930s to combat the deflation and economic collapse of the Great Depression. By lowering the dollar’s value relative to gold, Roosevelt aimed to raise prices and make American exports more competitive, and reduce the real burden of debt all of which was impossible to do under the rigid gold standard that kept money supply and prices artificially low.

As we mentioned in the article Wall St.’s Trade War is Nothing New in TICP 63 under the Trump administration's unofficial trade and monetary strategy known as the Mar-a-Lago Accord, they intend to execute a monetary and trade strategy with precisely the same outcomes as that utilized first by Roosevelt under the New Deal, later under Nixon when he ended the convertibility of dollars to gold for foreign banks and then later, under Reagan and the Plaza accord, by other means: devalue the dollar while retaining it’s status as world reserve currency in order to increase export competitiveness for U.S. industry & reduce debt burden, change monetary policy on gold so as to enable continued and expanded deficit government spending, utilize tariffs to protect key military production industries while weaponizing them and tying military protection to continued use of U.S. dollar as reserve currency. The end result is higher costs of goods for consumers, declining real wages for workers across the world in the name of economic nationalism and defense of mother countries' industrial might as workers are marched to war at bayonet point whenever it is in the profit interest of Capital.

The AI boom/bust cycle we are in the middle of is an intensive infrastructure arms race that is careening the sector and the national economies of the leading capitalist nations into overproduction. The sheer magnitude of this concentrated spending is staggering: American tech companies are projected to spend $300-400 billion in 2025 alone, with the leading companies dedicating capital expenditures that are reaching 50% of operating income. This scale of investment is required to support data centers that, by 2030, will need an additional $5.2 trillion to provide AI processing. The necessity of this immense capital base ensures that only the top monopoly corporations will be able to operate at that scale to corner and control what remains of that market.

AI data centers have power requirements up to 10 times those of a standard technology rack, such as those run by cloud providers, such as Amazon’s AWS, for example. Since only living labor creates new surplus value, an economy where investment is overwhelmingly dedicated to fixed capital such as GPUs and data center construction will see the ratio of constant capital to variable capital increase and its profit rates will inevitably tend downwards.

Since currently so much of US capital as a whole is financially over-leveraged in this particular industrial sector, the fall or rise of these companies' profits will reverberate across the economy as a whole, due to the sheer size of the financial speculation occurring. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla are 35% of the entire valuation of the S&P 500 and represent seven of the eight largest companies in general.

AI firms like OpenAI have not been able to post profits at all, which types of losses exceed losses seen in other rapid expansion phases like Uber's and of the telco companies during the dot com bubble.

The Poverty of the Bourgeois Economists and the Inevitability of Capitalist Self-Destruction

Recently, the standing president of the leading imperialist world power, Trump, escalated criticism of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. This was accompanied by much hemming and hawing in the press about the “independence of the Fed” being at stake. Rooted in Alexander Hamilton's vision for an independent institution safeguarding against government overreach and echoing Nixon's disastrous precedent, the Federal Reserve’s independence as a central body of the finance capitalists is its best tool available for attempting to head off a capitalist crisis.

This tool is very limited and they is incapable of doing the job that it is tasked with and, at best, can slow down the crisis for a short while by affecting employment and inflation levels. Whether Trump gets his appointees in or not, the crisis is coming, only the timing can be different in one scenario vs the other.

Prices have a tendency to decrease because of capitalism's tendency to overproduce. Money’s exchange value isn’t determined by supply and demand, except in a muddled sort of way, as it’s the expression of the exchange value of commodities in circulation, and as less surplus value goes into each commodity, the value of money decreases. As a correlate to that, increasing wages does not cause inflation but it does decrease the rate of profit even as prices stay the same.

“Stagnation”, or as Marx would have called it, a slowing of the circulation of money, is merely a part of the cycle of accumulation, most acute in the death cycle, where industry comes to a halt in "crises, in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great part of the capital violently lead it back to the point where it is enabled [to go on] fully employing its productive powers without committing suicide". (Grudrisse).

This crisis is ultimately caused by a decreasing ratio between how much living labor is extracted from workers and the sum of the investment on new labor-saving technologies, with an overall decrease in in how much workers are working and are employed and an increase in how much expensive technology is being purchased to replace living labor with dead and manifesting as an overproduction of commodities, which cannot even be purchased by workers exploited more and more for less wages, if they even have work and wages at all. The cataclysmic crisis that follows only temporarily resolves through destruction of capital and workers, which restarts the accumulation cycle and places the ratio by returning the ratio between dead and living labor in the organic composition of capital back to a place that is favorable for business to have rising rates of profit for until the next crisis.

If “stagflation” as it were, were to occur, we could look at the events of the 1970s as a lesson. In the 1970s, between 1965 and 1982 inflation in the US was very high and employment was low. The low profit rates during that period were partially offset by the destruction of the Vietnam war but this was not enough to stop the inflation crisis, as there was also excessive spending on social program initiatives at the time, which were financed by printing large amounts of money. By 1974 inflation was in the double digits year on year.

Instead of recognizing inflation being a result of the declining profit rates,the excessive printing of money was blamed for causing it and drastic measures, such as setting interest rates of more than 21%, were used to slow down lending, which in turn slowed down circulation so much that many businesses were liquidated,precipitating the capitalist crash that was going to happen anyway, leading to high unemployment with slowly decreasing inflation, which caused the destruction of entire neighborhoods and cities. Famous examples are the ruin of the cities like Detroit and Cleveland as well as the New York boroughs of Bronx and Brooklyn, all of which looked like warzones in the late 1970s (and some still do), due to this economic ruin. Many workers’ lives were lost in the process of “balancing the economy.”

While the Fed of today is trying to slow down the crisis, the current administration of the US government is embracing the death drive and preparing for war, so the “politically influenced Fed” is the least of our concern, to the dismay of bourgeois economists.

These same economists explain inflation as always, on the one hand (the classical school), caused by too much money being in circulation and, on the other, as there being too much demand and not enough productive capacity to match that demand (the Keynesians).

In the classical bourgeois school unemployment happens because people are lazy and don't want to work for free or for unlivable wages. In their mind, capitalist crises are but temporary blips where supply doesn't match demand and are quickly corrected by the magic of the market. In the Keynesian view, the unemployment during a crisis is due to "insufficient demand" and the lack of spending is due to a collapse in business or consumer “confidence”. This bourgeois school sees unemployment as involuntary because the market doesn't fix the crisis quickly enough and wages and prices need to change for workers to get jobs. Conflict between the two schools aside, it's easy to see that these are nonsensical propositions from the standpoint of any worker and are a form of apologetics for the capitalist class.

The bureaucrats at the Fed have been reluctant to cut interest rates because it would increase inflation and inflation is already on the rise, with consumer price inflation (CPI) raised to 2.9% year over year in August, which was above the central bankers’ goal of 2% inflation a year. This inflation rate is lower than the average price rise in consumer goods for American workers, so it’s misleading, but it is increasing.

A sharp increase in inflation will be disastrous for workers when unemployment is also on the rise and it may also spook creditors who are currently holding bonds of US debt in expectation of yield in dollars. If the value of the dollar were to sharply drop due to excessive inflation those holders could sell to cut their losses and the instability caused could trigger the crash to happen even earlier than expected. The viewpoint of the current bourgeois camp in power is one of increasing profits in the short term and escalating war and destruction as needed when or before the crisis does hit.

Big Bets on AI, Long and Short

While investment in the AI sector, focused on data centers and infrastructure has surged by nearly 50% since 2019, the rest of US corporate investment is down 7% in that same time period. The boom in datacenter infrastructure production is a productive form of capital that is rented out to companies training AI models, who attempt to turn a profit selling subscriptions to their AI products to companies and individuals, promising full workforce replacement and “general intelligence” any day now. As the old American saying goes, in a gold rush, be the one selling shovels.

The problem with this is that the applications of AI that the customers of these models are paying for have not been anywhere near as productive as they had hoped for and been promised by the propaganda of companies such as OpenAI. The calculation the bourgeois end customers and the executives of their companies were making was that if the quality of the products/services created by AI were good enough for sale without requiring much additional labor to ship, in a way that led to equal or higher productivity while being cheaper than the wages of the workers no longer needed, then AI was a good investment in constant capital.

Historically, for example with the dotcom bubble, after the financial bubble popped and enough companies were liquidated and bought out, the actual productive potential of the technology in question was ultimately harnessed by the surviving generation of companies who succeeded in figuring out how to realize the profits that their dead competition failed at. In the dotcom case it took close to a decade after the bubble popping for that to come to fruition and create many of the monopoly capitalist tech giants of today and it’s probable that this will happen with the companies offering AI hardware subscriptions and models as well, even if the technological innovation does peter off and the models reach a limit in their capabilities that is far from the “general intelligence” the bourgeois want us to salivate over or cower in fear from.

As it stands, the predictions that workers would be replaced in large swaths by these AI services has not come to fruition in any sector, at least based on the limited available data where AI automation was the clear cause of job loss, as reported in bourgeois media. Customer service and call center work has been the hardest hit with low estimates being around 1-4% of jobs lost and higher ones being around 20-30%, the percentages for data entry and clerical are generally lower than call center work and retail and self-checkout numbers are even lower than that, as well as paralegals and truckers, who are barely affected currently. Anecdotally the petit-bourgeois are also affected as they are losing clients for graphics, animation and music work to AI companies offering generative services for that form of media.

Despite the current low actual numbers and the high variability and lack of confidence of these statistics, all the bourgeois management journals are projecting a steady increase in job loss across these and other industries in the coming years. So much so, that planners are considering slower roll-outs of AI agent systems instead of quicker ones, to lower the economic shock of such actions.

It must be noted that there are meaningful breakthroughs that occur every new round of AI product implementation. New medications and scientific discoveries are happening with the assistance of AI models and even some scientific and mathematical problems unsolved for decades are now becoming unlocked through the new form of computational technologies now being perfected. The currently adopted and available round of retail consumer tools in use, however,seem to mostly have the effect of changing the job rather than eliminating it and increasing productivity in only certain parts of the job, rather than tools which are capable of performing the full range of what is required by the job and requiring only some tuning and supervision by the managers or technicians. In workplaces where the entirety of the work is done via a computer the replacement of the workers will be the easiest but this is by no means a simple thing to implement and will likely take years to reach, during which time companies will burn through their reinvestment profits and through the credits they owe interest on, with no guarantee of success.

Full replacement of workers in all sectors is what the capitalists are ultimately aiming for but neither the technology is ready for this, even in fully computerized work,nor are they ignorant of the fact that the speed at which they implement this replacement can have such disastrous impact.

Time will tell exactly how and at what rate the evolution and implementation of this automation technology increases worker productivity, leading to less and less surplus value going into each individual commodity, dropping the profit rate of entire industries as a whole. The data so far shows that the claims of the bourgeois propagandists of AI that in 1-2 years entire industries would not require workers were very far from the truth, even if that’s what they want us to believe in order to keep workers afraid. Finance capital is painfully aware of this data and has been restructuring the assumptions it has been making in the last two years and hedging their bets more against an incoming bubble collapse.

Hedging Their Bets

On the heels of an escalating military conflict against Venezuela comes JPMorgan Chase's "Security and Resilience Initiative,” a $1,5 trillion investment/financing plan that will span a 10 years. The bank will use investments (up to $10 billion for smaller firms) and debt financing as a way to temporarily increase circulation and attempt to kick-start the rest of the remaining productive capital of strategic importance for the nation, with focus on energy (LNG), defense, critical infrastructure, supply chain reshoring, and technology. These sectors are vitally needed for the future war efforts and these investments also act as a hedge against the likely AI bubble failure and overvaluation seen in digital assets.

Finance capital is attempting to safeguard its future by expecting returns in the form of dividends, interest income and capital appreciation from their investments in industries closely tied to a wartime economy, which are seen as much safer bets than AI, which is yet to prove itself capable of return on investment.

Impact on the Class War and the Environment

The data suggests that while employment is strong in AI infrastructure, it is declining across almost every other sector of the economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that close to 400,000 manufacturing jobs are currently unfilled. Those jobs are reported to be largely unfilled because the wages are too low for workers who are able to find higher paying work elsewhere. The recent mass deportations decrease the available pool of workers who would have been forced to do those jobs, as capital finds immigrant workers more useful outside the country, where they can work for even lower wages in one of the countries with subordinate economies to the United States, or funneled into documented immigration through the H2A visa program, which is often little more than a form of slavery that benefits the farming contractors of the USA rather than the cartel coyotes, who also treat these workers like indentured servants, all the while forcing the “native workers” back into lower paying jobs at home.

Compared to the dotcom bubble, the productive portion of AI sector capital is orders of magnitude more expensive to run and build than were the servers for websites of 2001, so the impacts of a financial bubble the size of the AI one popping will be much worse than the stock market crash of that age, sending finance capital reeling to save itself and make the working class foot the bill.

AI overproduction’s need for energy has turned working class neighborhoods into dumping grounds. AI datacenters are consuming 10% of global electricity and in the locations where they operate are making workers’ lives untenable with sharp increases in noise pollution, heat and toxic runoff. Workers in the US and India where AI datacenters are operated are increasingly reporting chronic health issues from the constant hum of servers, the contamination of local water sources, the costs of electricity, the impacts of having to work longer hours to afford living in such a hellscape, and the profits created in the process are funneled back to the tech and oil bourgeoisie. Local and global ecosystems are being destroyed and workers are made ill and die due to the byproducts of their own exploitation. Even if AI does end up being productive and the bubble does not create a stock market crisis, it will then have succeeded in replacing large numbers of workers and the overproduction itself will put the previously higher-paid members of working class on the chopping block to once again bail out the bourgeoisie out of the situation they created.

While some US workers currently have the option of not working lower paying jobs over higher paying ones, with “stagflation”/the next major capitalist crisis likely being tied up in the massive reduction of AI overproduction and paying off the effects of a corresponding financial crash, workers will be pushed more and more towards accepting any work they can find, lower wages, indentured servitude as soldiers in ever increasing imperialist wars, longer working hours and other forms of exploitation and deteriorating living conditions.

The question is of course: How long will we take this abuse? How long will workers remain inactive, unorganized and misled? No one knows for sure but what we do know is that the conditions are getting objectively worse and more ripe for revolution.

Revolution is the Solution

The AI overproduction crisis is driven by the capitalist mode of production’s relentless drive to expand itself to infinity in a world where there are only so many productively employed workers that it can siphon its profits from. The speculative investment in AI infrastructure, the displacement of workers, the environmental degradation caused by data centers, and the coming wars pushed on the world by monopoly cartels are screaming at us every day that capitalism cannot be reformed or voted away, that capitalism is killing us.

The only solution is to end it. The only class capable of doing this is the working class and the Communist Party and its the class unions through which the class exercises its power.. The working class is capable of stopping capitalism in its tracks because it produces everything and can stop doing this, if organized. Once overthrown, capitalism can be transformed to be production that is rational and based on a suitable matching of the needs and abilities of every member of society, where every human works for the benefit of every other human on the planet and this process will bring technology back into harmony with humanity and nature.

We encourage workers who are ready to fight to come in contact with the International Communist Party and to organize at their workplaces, within and without the current weak unions, for class-wide demands and the resurrection of the class unions, in order to set the ground for the general strikes and revolutionary civil wars of the future which will do away with this nonsensical and brutal system once and for all.

The Crushing of PATCO and the Air Traffic Controller Shortage

The ongoing crisis in the aviation industry has, like all other burdens of capitalism, fallen onto the backs of the aviation workers who have struggled bitterly against the bourgeoisie throughout the decades. The aviation unions have at times, really put the screw to the bourgeoisie, utilizing strikes to their advantage, while the companies were facing hardships., Today, the weakness of the class union movement has all workers fighting on the back-foot; submitting to the legalistic appeals of the NLRB or the Railway Labor Act, which the airline workers are categorized under by the bourgeoisie. As the crises of capitalism ripen and tragedies accumulate, without a militant centralized class movement, the workers will bear only more strain.

In the first week of May 2025, a series of critical technological failures at Newark Liberty International Airport brought a long-simmering crisis in U.S. aviation labor to the surface. Malfunctions in the airport’s aging infrastructure, particularly in the systems that manage flight departures and arrivals, resulted in nearly one-fifth of the airport’s air traffic controllers walking off the job. These workers, represented by the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), cited chronic under-staffing and the mental toll of their already stressful jobs as the reason.

Although these workers generally get paid relatively well they, on average, work 10 hour days, 6 days a week under mental duress in exchange for a relatively negligible drop of the total money raked in by the bourgeoisie. Many workers feel traumatized and helpless, as the weight of catastrophe from collapsing capitalist infrastructure seemingly falls upon their shoulders, further exposing the serious cracks that have been developing in the air transport industry for decades and the fragile line of laborers struggling daily to ensure planes take off and land.

Airlines, under pressure to maximize returns on fixed capital investments, continue to push for more flights and faster turnaround times. But airports like Newark are already stretched past safe operational limits. Newark was forced to cap the number of daily flights until at least the end of 2025. United Airlines, by far the dominant carrier at Newark, responsible for roughly two-thirds of its flights, has openly supported reclassifying the airport as a “Level 3” controlled slot facility, which would give the FAA the authority to restrict flights to within infrastructure capacity. This move, however, would eliminate smaller carriers unable to service at least 80% of their designated slots, consolidating United’s market dominance all while presenting itself as a responsible stakeholder.

PATCO Strike

In August 1981, 13,000 Air Traffic Controllers organized through the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on a national strike for overall better pay and conditions. At its start, the workers were able to halt 70% of the daily flights, a huge blow to the capitalists, which responded by declaring the strike “illegal”, giving the workers 48 hours to surrender. The workers defied the warning and continued their strike.

The bourgeoisie prepared for the strike by trying to recruit as many scabs as possible to keep the airports operational, eventually being able to keep about 75% of the scheduled flights going after a few days. The opportunistic leadership in PATCO, having endorsed Reagan during his presidential run, gave quite a bit of credence to the president treating them favorably, which of course proved to be disastrous for the rank-and-file and their fight.

After replacing the workers with scabs and skeleton crews and with no strong class union support from other worker defense organizations, Reagan promptly fired all the striking workers, thus decimating the union which then decertified the following October. It took nearly a decade to bring the number of air traffic controllers back to what it had been, and as made evident by the recent issues, it has never fully recovered.

The Current Situation

The destruction of PATCO emboldened a broader turn toward strikebreaking and union suppression that defined the 1980s and continues to this day. The union that eventually replaced PATCO, NATCA, was formed with an explicit promise to never engage in “illegal” strikes, a promise that functionally disarmed it. Like many post-Reagan unions, NATCA accepted its role as a lackey to capital, operating primarily as a contract negotiator rather than a fighting organization for workers.

Despite many air traffic controllers demanding higher wages to compensate for their grueling work days, the current NATCA leadership has no interest in championing this fight. They have not negotiated pay since 2016 and the boss-linked leadership, instead, has extended the current contract twice, and it's now set to expire in 2029. The NATCA leadership openly aims to collaborate with the bourgeoisie on technical improvements to increase the efficiency of exploitation of the workers instead of their economic defense.

As we have always said, contracts between workers and those who rule them are not worth the paper they're printed on. We can look to the recent action by the bourgeoisie of removing “bargaining rights” of the Transport Security Administration workers organized through the American Federal Government Employees (AFGE) union, which–to the opportunistic leadership that are only interested in collaboration with the bourgeoisie– has rendered any “struggle” inert in their eyes; substituting real worker defense for empty calls for “protests” and legal appeals instead of militant strikes and other forms of direct action.

But the aviation industry workers are not afraid to strike. The Association of Flight Attendants, which was able to win large concessions from United Airlines by threatening a strike with nearly 100% approval by the workers last year, has also endorsed the “general strike” ostensibly being planned for 2028. There have also been numerous strikes by the workers in the defense sectors and aircraft production in the last few years, with yet another Boeing strike on the horizon in Illinois and Missouri.

The recent strikes of 3,000 International Association of Machinists (IAM) members at Pratt & Whitney and 900 UAW workers at Lockheed Martin in May and June caused a brief disruption in military aircraft and weapon production, but the absence of any international character or even national coordination in the strikes makes evident the need for workers to build centralized class unions that unite the shared struggles of the workers that are being unfavorably fought separately and, as we have mentioned numerous times, the opportunistic union leadership continually try to tie the struggles of the workers to the national interests of the bourgeoisie, like Shawn Fain, who tells the workers that their struggle for wages is a fight for an illusory “share” of the war industry. Workers must continue to fight against the nationalistic leadership of the regime union leaders, lest their struggle become yet another example of the proletariat sacrificing its own interests to those of national capital.

Look at the subordination of the transportation workers and the suppression of their economic demands, as seen with the suppression of the Railroad workers’ strike in 2022 under the Biden administration, to see how the struggle for wages and better conditions for transport workers is directly opposed to the interests of the national ruling class, who want the transport of their commodities to continue uninterrupted, and will fabricate, utilize, and abuse any of their laws to ensure this, with the threat of the army and police always implied.

Conclusion

Air transport, just like the previous revolutionary technological advances in the means of transportation, has continued showing the bourgeoisie’s historical tendency towards consolidation in the face of the inevitable economic disaster brought about by the anarchy of production, inter-imperialist pressures and the tendency for the profit rate to fall. Domestic competition gives way to competition between national monopolies on the road towards world war; wages for the workers are immiserated and strikes suppressed; and the world economy convulses, requiring regular state intervention in an attempt to stabilize the collapsing pillars.

The bourgeoisie, desperate to hold onto their share of the social capital, must enter into incumbent alliances to try and force the proletariat into submission, but this results in an ever greater sense of urgency on the part of the proletariat to defend, in its economic struggles, the necessary share of the social capital that it needs, increasingly just to survive. As the overproduction crisis continues to ripen into sharper contradictions, the transportation industry in the US may eventually formally fall into the hands of the state, as it has done in the past during wartime, but a nationalized transportation industry will not save the proletariat from disaster, only focus capital’s onslaught to further align with the interest of the national bourgeoisie against all that threaten it.

This is all reflective of a key contradiction in the nature of the capitalistic means of transportation and production in general: that the productivity of labor and its faculty of creating value stand in opposition. The more efficient the transport, the less value transferred from productive capital to the commodities, as there is less total labor-time required to move the same mass of commodities; the profits dwindle and the proletariat eventually foots the bill in lost wages or blood.

Only through international coordination of class based unions and the rejection of nationalist labor leadership can transportation workers, indeed, all workers, strengthen the ranks of their economic defense as the crisis of capitalism only worsens.

Across the periphery of the global capitalist system, revolt has become the natural response to immiseration as the global overproduction crisis continues to expand the social and class contradictions to a breaking point.

In Madagascar, the spark came from mass demonstrations beginning on 25 September 2025, where students, transport workers, and public-sector unions poured into the streets after weeks of blackouts, fuel shortages, and food inflation. Police repression left dozens injured and several dead, yet the protests only grew. Strikes spread to the ports and public services, paralyzing the economy and forcing President Andry Rajoelina to dissolve his cabinet on 29 September 2025.

What appeared as a local crisis was in truth the eruption of contradictions long imposed by international finance. Years of IMF-supervised austerity and debt restructuring had gutted state investment, privatized utilities, and tied the nation’s economy to the export of raw materials under foreign ownership. The so-called “reforms” demanded by creditors reduced the Malagasy state to a debt-collection agent, squeezing its workers while mining and agribusiness profits flowed abroad.

In Nepal, the revolt took a different form but shared the same cause. On 4 September 2025 the government banned twenty-six social-media platforms, triggering mass protests from 8-13 September. Students and informal workers’ protests erupted in Kathmandu and across other cities. But beneath the anger over censorship lay a deeper material decay within a nation surviving on remittances (about one-third of GDP) with youth unemployment above 20 percent.

Decades of neoliberal adjustment and foreign loans had ensured Nepal remained dependent on imported goods and external credit. The political parties, whether communist-branded, centrist, or royalist differed only in rhetoric; all served the same capitalist logic dictated by the World Bank and international donors. When students and workers took the streets, they were rejecting not merely a government decree but an entire social order built on dependency and the export of human labour as a commodity.

In September, Indonesia witnessed its largest wave of protests in nearly a decade, as worsening economic conditions and elite excesses ignited nationwide unrest. Years of post-pandemic inflation, currency depreciation, and sluggish wage growth had left millions of workers struggling to afford food, fuel, and housing, while unemployment, especially among youth and informal workers, remained high. Discontent deepened when reports surfaced that members of parliament were receiving monthly housing allowances of roughly 50 million rupiah (about US $3 000), vastly exceeding the national minimum wage. This revelation became the catalyst for mass demonstrations across Jakarta, Surabaya, and other major cities. The protest movement, uniting industrial labourers, teachers, gig-economy drivers, and students, demanded wage increases, an end to outsourcing and precarious contracts, stronger labour protections, tax reform, and the abolition of political privileges for elites.

The government of President Prabowo Subianto, backed by Indonesia’s business conglomerates and foreign investors, responded with tear gas, arrests of over 1 000 people, and temporary internet shutdowns, while promising minor reforms such as suspending lawmakers’ perks. These concessions failed to address the broader class contradiction at the revolt’s core, a society where economic growth has enriched a narrow elite while leaving the working class burdened by inflation, insecurity, and state repression.

In Serbia, revolt was instigated by tragedy. On 2 October 2025, the collapse of a railway-station canopy in Novi Sad killed sixteen workers, a disaster that became the symbol of decades of corruption, crony privatization, and infrastructural decay. The working class, even though still fragmented, suddenly found its voice. Transport workers, educators, and pensioners marched beside students and laid-off factory laborers, denouncing the government of Aleksandar Vučić and the foreign contractors who profit from public neglect. Serbia’s economy, tethered to European capital through low-wage manufacturing and extractive finance, has left millions in precarity while a thin elite grows rich on speculative construction and export subsidies. The state answered this awakening with riot police, media censorship, and accusations of “foreign interference.” Yet the slogans of the movement “Justice for the Dead, Bread for the Living” reveal a class awakening that transcends nationalism.

Meanwhile, in Morocco, the Gen Z 212 movement has erupted as one of the most sustained youth uprisings in North Africa since 2011. Beginning in late September 2025, demonstrations spread from Casablanca to Rabat and Tangier, uniting students, precarious workers, and teachers under the call for karama wa ‘amal, “dignity and work.” The material basis is unmistakable: youth unemployment near 30 percent, soaring prices of food and fuel, and a debt burden consuming over a fifth of state expenditure. The Moroccan monarchy, celebrated by Western creditors for its “stability,” responded with the brutality typical of comprador regimes as hundreds were arrested, student unions dissolved, and online organizers hunted by security forces. The protests have drawn in public-sector unions and sections of the transport workforce, transforming generational frustration into embryonic class solidarity. Here again, the face of rebellion is that of a proletariat excluded from the future, confronting a capitalist order that offers only debt, surveillance, and repression in exchange for obedience.

As of October 2025, the movements in Madagascar, Nepal, Serbia, Indonesia and Morocco remain unresolved. In Madagascar, the transitional government continues to face strikes in the energy, transport, and education sectors, while negotiations with unions have faltered under pressure from foreign creditors. In Nepal, the ruling coalition has fractured, the ban on social media has been repealed, yet security forces still detain student organizers, and the cost of living continues to rise. Serbia remains under emergency decrees, and Morocco’s prisons swell with young dissidents. The bourgeois press proclaims a “return to order,” but beneath the surface, the conditions of revolt persist. Each uprising demonstrates that where capital rules through debt, austerity, and dependency, resistance is not a choice it is an inevitability.

What is now required is the organization of the workers under class unions. The International Communist Party calls for a return to the classical Marxist program that sees beyond the illusions of democracy and nationalism toward the abolition of wage labour itself. The struggles in Madagascar, Nepal, Serbia, Indonesia and Morocco are not isolated storms but manifestations of a single global antagonism, capital versus labour. Only through disciplined international organization, beyond borders and parliaments, can the proletariat transform its revolt into revolution and finally abolish the conditions that make revolt necessary.

Indonesia is a transcontinental country between Southeast Asia and Oceania, a geographical area south of China and east of India, which includes eleven sovereign countries: Brunei, Cambodia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), Singapore, Thailand, East Timor, and Vietnam.

It is the largest archipelago nation in the world, consisting of over 17,500 islands, of which just over 2,300 are inhabited. With over 280 million inhabitants, it is the most populous country in the world, preceded by India, China, and the United States and ahead of Pakistan, Nigeria, and Brazil. The island of Java alone, the most populated on the planet and the geographical and economic center of the country, is home to over half the population, with approximately 150 million inhabitants. The large island covers 129 km², the same size as England, which, however, has only 56 million inhabitants.

The population of the archipelago is extremely diverse, with hundreds of ethnic groups and languages spoken. It includes the largest Muslim community in the world.

In the Increasingly Bitter Imperialist Struggle

“Gateway to the East” between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific and with a vast potential consumer market, Indonesia is a coveted target for the major imperialist powers. The United States and China are competing for it through a network of agreements and investments. Despite the increasingly significant weight of Chinese capital, the Indonesian bourgeoisie is, for now, maintaining a balance between the two forces.

The Indonesian president's participation in the military parade for “Victory Day” in Beijing on September 3, which took place when the Indonesian capital was practically under siege, demonstrates a strategic rapprochement with the People's Republic and with imperialist powers alternative to those of the West. In Beijing, the Indonesian president reportedly sought to strengthen bilateral cooperation on economic and security issues. However, the expansion of trade ties with China will not end the current relations with the United States and Russia, the main suppliers of weapons to the large archipelago.

In January 2025, Indonesia was admitted as a full member of BRICS, the first Southeast Asian nation to join the bloc.

At the same time, after almost a decade of negotiations, a free trade agreement was reached with the European Union, known as the EU-Indonesia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), which provides for the elimination of over 98% of customs tariffs on bilateral trade.

In short, the Indonesian ruling class is trying not to align itself with or depend on any of the imperialist powers, so that it can reap the benefits, obviously at the expense of the sweat and blood of the working class.

The Formal and Informal Workforce

The workforce, both salaried and non-salaried, is estimated to number around 150 million. The unemployment rate over the last ten years has been generally stable, averaging 5%, except during Covid-19.

As in other countries in the region, the workforce is divided into two main categories. Informal workers account for about 60% of the total, and are therefore predominant. These include small farmers and artisans, as well as non-permanent ‘day’ or ‘contract’ workers. They are employed for specific tasks or on a temporary, daily, weekly, or monthly basis: construction workers, harvest laborers, transporters, such as motorcycle taxi drivers (ojek).

The predominance of the informal sector has always been a structural feature of the Indonesian economy, reflecting its rural and small business base.

Among the 60-65 million “formal” workers, salaried workers are clearly predominant, generally with regular contracts. About 3% of the workforce is employed in the public sector. Services employ over 45%, a broad category that includes commerce, finance, professional services, administration, and the public sector. Manufacturing accounts for 25-30% of the formal workforce and is the driving force behind Indonesian capitalism. Agriculture, although crucial to the country, accounts for less than 15% of salaried workers with contracts. Finally, 5-7% are employed in construction. The remaining percentage is distributed among mining, transport, and public utilities.

The trade union landscape is highly fragmented, although there are a few major confederations that represent the majority of organized workers. Unlike other countries in the region, their links with political parties are less close and formal and more related to temporary coalitions. The KSPI (Konfederasi Serikat Pekerja Indonesia) is one of the largest confederations, with an estimated 2 million members, mainly in mining and manufacturing. The KSPSI (Konfederasi Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia), one of the oldest confederations, has around 1.5 million members.

However, the vast majority of Indonesian workers, particularly in the huge informal sector, are not members of any union.

Industry and Trade

Indonesian industrial production is not comparable to that of the major global powers. However, its steady growth has made it a leading player among the capitalist economies of Southeast Asia.

Over the past five years, the manufacturing and mining sectors have experienced uneven growth due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but have shown strong resilience: after contracting in 2020, production has returned to growth, driven by domestic demand and foreign investment. Average industrial production growth over the past five years has been around 4.3%.

The industry is based in particular on the extraction and processing of nickel, of which Indonesia is the world's leading producer, but other important sectors include textiles and clothing, which are strongly export-oriented, and other rapidly expanding sectors such as automobiles and electronics, supported by growing foreign investment.

The trade balance has recorded a surplus in recent years, largely due to exports of minerals and agricultural products: coal, palm oil, nickel and derivatives, and natural rubber. Manufactured products include electronic equipment, machinery, textiles, and clothing. Imports include capital goods, industrial machinery, vehicles, electronic equipment, and components; intermediate products such as chemicals and plastics; and consumer goods such as electronics, pharmaceuticals, and food.

China is the largest trading partner for both exports and imports. Major Chinese investments are directed toward infrastructure projects, such as the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway, and the mining sector, particularly nickel.

The United States follows, which is particularly important for exports. Japan purchases energy and mineral products. Singapore is an important hub for trade and investment.

The Indonesian Bourgeois Government and the Needs of Capital

The current government is led by President Prabowo Subianto, who took office on October 20, 2024, succeeding Joko Widodo, an entrepreneur in the furniture sector, who had served two terms. A former defense minister, Prabowo has ties to the army and the family of former “dictator” Suharto, under whom he commanded the special forces. Prabowo is now the leader of the Great Indonesia Movement Party, which is openly nationalist and conservative. But in the last presidential election, he secured a landslide victory by forming a broad parliamentary coalition, the Advanced Indonesia Coalition Plus, which includes almost all of the country's political parties, including the Labor Party, controlling 470 of the 580 parliamentary seats.

Having failed to increase tax revenues, the government has announced a cut of almost 20% in spending. About half of these savings, $20 billion, will be used to add to a newly created sovereign wealth fund, Danantara, an investment vehicle launched by the Indonesian bourgeoisie to raise external financing. With its enormous asset base—about $900 billion—it is the fourth-largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, surpassing Saudi Arabia's PIF and Singapore's Temasek.

During his election campaign, Subianto promised to revive the economy and aim for 8% growth within five years. The goal is to attract investment and make Indonesia the largest economy in Southeast Asia. But the World Bank estimates that the Indonesian economy will grow at around 4.8% until 2027.

In addition, the recent 19% tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Indonesian products have hit key sectors such as electronics, textiles, and agribusiness hard, fueling the reluctance of potential investors.

Growing Proletarianization and Urbanization

In recent decades, Indonesia has seen a steady and significant flow of people from rural to urban areas. Most of these migrants are young people from small farming families who are abandoning the land because the plots, divided among siblings, are too small to support their families. Small farmers today are unable to compete with large-scale agriculture and cope with the costs of fertilizers and seeds. In addition, the prices of agricultural products (rice, coffee, and palm oil) are often volatile, making farmers' incomes precarious.

Furthermore, rural areas, neglected by capitalism, often lack healthcare, basic services, access to education, and, not infrequently, drinking water.

A common dynamic in many countries in the area is therefore to migrate to the large ‘glittering’ metropolises in search of a fixed, albeit low and temporary, salary. The urban population is growing rapidly: in the 1950s, less than 15% of the Indonesian population lived in cities, today more than 50%, and the trend is growing. This reflects the evolution of Indonesia's economic structure from self-sufficient production to mercantilism and the extraction of surplus value based on the sale of labor.

However, these cities offer expensive and precarious housing, shared with other proletarians. Not everyone manages to find formal employment, and many end up working, at best, in the vast informal sector: day laborers, delivery boys, street vendors, a huge mass of workers who, despite living on a wage, have no social protection or job security. Others return to the countryside, perhaps not far from the big cities, where they seek work in the fields as farmhands.

Anger Explodes in the Streets

It is against this backdrop that, for several years now, a diverse interclassist movement, made up of students, unemployed and precarious young people, has begun to oppose government policy. Disillusionment and resentment are brewing among these new generations who, despite economic growth, cannot find stable employment and instinctively understand that the world of capital has only misery, exploitation, and war to offer them.

The wave of protests, led by youth movements such as “Indonesia Gelap” (Dark Indonesia), began a year ago immediately after the new president took office. They complained about soaring taxes, job insecurity, nepotism, and police brutality. The protesters demanded an unspecified increase in wages, as well as protection for indigenous communities and greater transparency on officials' salaries.

In February, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in the capital to protest against the government's new austerity measures, which included severe cuts to the welfare state in the areas of education, health, and public services.

Since August 25, the demonstrations, which were previously held mainly in Jakarta, have spread to all regions of the country, turning into an unprecedented wave. They were triggered by the granting of a bonus of 50 million rupiah ($3,000) to 580 members of parliament to cover, it was said, their rental expenses, a bonus that was difficult to swallow for workers who receive an average salary of 4 million rupiah, or about $250.

In Jakarta, huge demonstrations marched through the city's main thoroughfares. They were attacked by the police with water cannons and tear gas, but also with firearms. Protesters set fire to public buildings, including the parliament building.

On August 28, several trade unions called a general strike. It would be better to say they joined forces: in Indonesia, general strikes involve more than just salaried workers, but also other social classes.

Among the demands of the workers' organizations was the withdrawal of the Omnibus Law on Labor (Job Creation Law), which, approved in 2020, facilitates layoffs and effectively lowers minimum wages. Strikes took place in Jakarta but also in important industrial areas such as Bekasi, Karawang, and Tangerang, where there is a high concentration of factories.

A few days later, Subianto was forced to revoke housing allowances and suspend foreign travel for members of parliament. However, he stated that he would not delay in addressing and punishing those responsible for the unrest.

On August 29, during a demonstration, a 20-year-old delivery rider was hit and killed by a police armored vehicle while at work. The video of the event, which was widely shared on social media, fueled national outrage. Social networks were used as a means of information and organization, with many workers denouncing their poor living and working conditions and calling for strikes and mobilizations. The government did not hesitate to restrict or disable the network.

In the days that followed, a wave of clashes with the police led to the deaths of other protesters. In Makassar, on the island of Sulawesi, an angry crowd set fire to the local parliament, killing three people inside. The parliaments of Pekalongan, in Central Java, and Cirebon, in West Java, were also set on fire and looted. Mobilizations even took place in the famous tourist destination of Bali, where the police headquarters was targeted.

The death toll quickly rose to eight. It is difficult to quantify the number of arrests, but several sources speak of thousands of detentions in Jakarta alone, for a total of over three thousand arrests.

The demonstrations continued for a few more days, then gradually subsided, bringing the country back to an apparent, temporary normality.

Communism as the Only Prospect

The protests are an expression of deep suffering and discontent due to the material conditions of the population. Although the economy continues to grow, workers are experiencing a deterioration in the purchasing power of their wages, while social inequalities are becoming more extreme.

More and more young workers are being super-exploited, deprived of any rights, indispensable pawns to ensure the flexibility and needs of young Indonesian capitalism. One million university graduates and 1.6 million vocational school graduates are unemployed. These young people, who are at the center of the recent demonstrations, have a general distrust of bourgeois politics and the regime's trade unions and an increasingly marked disillusionment with the prospects of capitalist society.

In this scenario, fertile ground for communism and revolution, the working class must come to the fore, present in its formal organizations, explicitly engaged in a disciplined and centralized struggle against its own bourgeoisie. In Indonesia, too, many workers have participated in the uprising, often in an uncoordinated manner, and there have been strikes. But the trade union federations proved unequal to the task, passively following the interclassist movement and failing to call a general strike with heartfelt and shared class demands. In order to impose their defense, the workers will have to take over the leadership of these unions, or organize outside and against them if necessary, in order to wield their only truly effective weapon, the strike.

The workers' movement, freed from opportunist parties and regime unions, will recognize its class program as expressed by the Communist Party. It will then take the leadership of its struggle without compromise into its own hands. It will thus be recognized by all the oppressed, including small farmers and precarious youth, as aiming for a tomorrow of revenge against the increasingly monstrous barbarism of the capitalist regime.

Once again, the French population has taken to the streets, with protests and riots continuing unabated after the end of the summer holidays. From September to early October, three important strike dates have been set: September 10 and 18, and October 2.

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic under Macron's neoliberal regime, France has witnessed a series of political and economic crises. France, while seeking to arm itself in the context that has developed with the war between Russia and Ukraine, is pursuing serious austerity policies to control the growing deficit and debt of the state budget. And, of course, all these austerity measures affect public spending first and foremost: education, health, and transportation.

The La Renaissance political bloc, which pursues these policies, is losing ground in parliament every day, unable to pass laws without resorting to the infamous Article 49.3. Governments are short-lived. After the Front National's victory in the 2024 European Parliament elections, Macron dissolved parliament. After the subsequent elections, he refused to grant the majority party, La France Insoumise (LFI), the authority to form a government, sparking protests. Although it is essential for those in power, and for the capitalists who control them, to pass the budget to protect their profits, they do not have a majority in parliament on their own and are unable to form a coalition. Due to the resulting government crisis, there have been three prime ministers in the last 18 months.

Today, we see a France where the welfare state has been weakened and where attempts to cut state aid and public policies continue through various political maneuvers. Education and health budgets have been drastically reduced, causing teacher and staff shortages, overcrowding, and service disruptions. The transport sector has been privatized, many regional lines are closing, and ticket prices are rising due to competition with other companies.

Anti-immigrant laws and policies are prominent, in response to the demagoguery of the Front National, which claims that the country is being invaded by immigrants; the Minister of the Interior has boasted on social media about the reduction in visas and asylum applications.

The housing problem has persisted for years and is worsening as private construction for profit and rent is demolishing social housing and replacing it with luxury housing, driving poor working-class communities out of the cities.

Yet the rich are not taxed, and tax evaders are forgiven or receive discounts.

The army, police, and gendarmerie are equipped with the latest technology and, together with military companies, demonstrate and sell their goods all over the world. The concentration of companies that privatize, monopolize, and devour everything continues.

A crisis was reached when Minister Bayrou proposed reducing vacation days and increasing austerity measures. At the end of August, workers decided to take to the streets, both through unions and individually. This marked the beginning of the autumn mobilizations. The first move was made by this independent popular movement. Union leaders kept their distance, but in the end, not with all their strength, in the first week of September they announced the first strikes.

First, on September 8, Bayrou resigned after losing a vote of confidence. In the following days, President Macron replaced him with Sébastien Lecornu, former Minister of Defense, close to the National Front.

Two days later, the first “Bloquons-tout” (Let's block everything) mobilization began, inspired by the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement. It is a movement that is organized in neighborhoods and draws on different ideologies, from anarchists to socialists and social democrats, but they claim to be outside the unions and remain non-partisan. They want to adopt “different tactics” from those of the parties and trade unions in order to create a “popular force” capable of exerting pressure on the state: blocking strategic points throughout the country such as roads and highways, junctions, and train and subway stations.

Early in the morning of September 10, trade union or occasional groups began their attempts to block traffic. Small groups moved around, creating short-lived obstructions, while larger groups blocked specific points for longer periods. At the same time, in neighborhoods inhabited by the communities, pickets blocked markets, canteens, and similar public spaces.

The police attempted to repress the movement, with groups playing cat and mouse in the cities. Some gatherings in communities were dispersed with tear gas and sound bombs. The number of arrests and injuries due to police violence was particularly high in Paris, Marseille, and Lyon, exceeding recent precedents. At the end of the day, the various groups in each city decided to meet regularly to continue the movement by setting up action committees, also coordinated with the unions.

The popular movement continued its actions and meetings in October, albeit with less vigor. Neighborhood and class-based groups intersect, communicate, and sometimes coordinate.

All this, of course, has its limits: the confused social base, the lack of organization, and the lack of political direction mean that reformist, populist, and radical illusions prevail over class demands. The individual basis and the assembly mechanism make any decision to take action very slow or even impossible, with everything remaining decentralized and spontaneous.

September 18 continued along these lines. However, it was joined by strikes and pickets organized by the unions, which involved a more unionized and class-conscious crowd. The blockades began in the morning with strikes and workplace occupations and the participation of a growing number of other unions, and turned into demonstrations in the afternoon and united marches.

The police intervened in the same way, with heavy use of pepper spray, sound bombs, and arrests.

While the strike clearly demonstrated the working class's reaction to current conditions, it also highlighted the shortcomings of the trade union movement. The debate over whether to consider the letter sent by the unions to the minister as an ultimatum revealed a rift between the union's rank and file and its leadership. The workers' desire for action clashes with the conciliatory and reformist approach of the leaders, and the movement risks being stifled by the internal dynamics of the union itself. Although the success of the strikes demonstrates how essential working-class organization and demands are, reformism and the transformation of the current organizations in Europe into regime unions pose a serious problem for the class struggle.

At the end of September, when talks with Lecornu proved fruitless, a new strike day was declared for October 2. The union demands, together with the European protests sparked by the Israeli army's seizure of the Sumud flotilla bound for Palestine, succeeded in bringing a significant section of the working class across France onto the streets, albeit with less massive participation than on September 18. The working class nevertheless took to the streets both to defend its rights and to reject imperialist war.

The government, however, has refused to back down and is attempting to violently repress all opposition. To resist oppressive capitalism, it is essential that the working class unite in its own organization, in militant class-based unions. But for their struggle for life and liberation, they need the leadership of the International Communist Party. Without a collective historical and scientific program, the uprisings cannot guarantee that the demands of the working masses will be met.

Even in the current interclass struggle in France, the working masses must prepare to fight against the exploitative order of capital, around their own party, in order to eliminate the capitalist system that oppresses, exploits, divides, excludes, and destroys.

The bourgeoisie knows full well that the proletarian masses do not want war, and the huge demonstrations in Italy in recent weeks against the genocide in Gaza confirm this clearly.

Bourgeois regimes define all their conflicts as “existential” in order to convince workers to accept the risk of sacrificing their own lives, as if their existence depended on the existence of the class regime that oppresses them.

And in fact, this is true: war is an existential struggle for every bourgeoisie. But not because it will perish if defeated by the opposing bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it would only lose a share of its profits, but it would always remain a privileged class, dominant over the working class. It would continue its business, with the privilege of fully enjoying the exploitation of its portion of the world proletariat. War is existential for every bourgeoisie for a very different reason: if it fails to convince and send the proletarians to the front to massacre their class brothers in uniform from another country, it will be suppressed by the proletarian revolution.

The bourgeoisie quickly learned to turn the workers' generous desire for peace to the ends of its war. For this reason, in every country it tries not to appear as the aggressor but as the victim of aggression. War is always waged in the name of peace, endangered by the warmongering adversary. And the enemy is always a worse regime, an anomaly in bourgeois democracy, a madness, a fascism.

That fascism, that war, that madness, are instead part of the natural course of capitalism; indeed, they express its most intimate nature. War matures in the economic underbelly of capitalist society, and fascism is the content of bourgeois regimes, which becomes increasingly apparent as they progressively rush into it.

The regime, the head of state, and the exceptionally insane and evil ideology of the enemy are convenient for all bourgeoisies, because they justify conflict and prepare for war in “defense of peace,” democracy, and the homeland.

These concepts are well expressed by the most popular Italian song in the marches where opportunism still reigns supreme: “One morning I woke up and found the invader...” Defense of the homeland and liberation from fascism make an imperialist war a just war, for which the proletariat can, indeed must, fight and give its life.

The fundamental battlefield between revolutionary communism and opportunism is the trade union movement.

In Italy, the movement against the war in Gaza, which for months had been limited to small demonstrations, has grown remarkably since the end of August. One of the factors behind this sudden growth has been the grassroots unions, in particular the USB, which called a general strike for September 22 together with the CUB, SGB, and ADL Cobas.

The USB dockworkers in Genoa had already engaged in actions against the shipment of weapons and subsequently in a food drive promoted by a Genoese pacifist association, then partly loaded onto sailing boats – on which the national coordinator of USB dockworkers also set sail – which joined others from Spain, Tunisia, and Greece with the aim of bringing aid to Gaza by “breaking the naval blockade.” The food collection was met with enormous participation from the Genoese population, as was the demonstration held on the evening of Saturday, August 30, to see off the boats as they set sail.

At the end of the demonstration, with about 25,000 participants, a USB dockworker announced his union's intention to promote a national general strike. This actually took place at a meeting with 600 participants at the Port Authority Club on the evening of Thursday, September 11, setting the strike for the following Monday, September 22.

Our comrades distributed a flyer specially drafted for the demonstration on August 30, the same one at the meeting on September 11 and at another demonstration on the 17th.

One of our comrades spoke at the assembly of the USB confederal coordination in Genoa, in front of 37 delegates, arguing that the war in Gaza should not be seen as an anomaly in capitalism—a sort of eternal struggle of democracy against fascism, of Good against Evil in secular form—but as a stage in capitalism's march toward world war. He then pointed to the rebirth of a class-based trade union movement and the unity of workers in all countries as the way to stop this catastrophe. In Italy, the movement against the war in Israel must take the form of a struggle by the working class.

When the CGIL realized that the strike promoted by USB, CUB, SGB, and ADL had a high chance of success, it hastily decided to call another strike for the previous working day, Friday, September 19, with the clear aim of weakening, i.e., sabotaging, the strike on the 22nd. This cowardly action backfired, with many members and activists becoming angry with the CGIL leadership and striking on the 22nd.

Our comrades took part in both the demonstrations for the strike on the 19th, with the leaflet already distributed on August 30, and on the 22nd, with a new text.

The strike on the 22nd was a great success, especially due to the success of the demonstrations in over 70 cities (20,000 participants in Genoa, over 50,000 in Rome) but also, in some categories, due to the level of participation: the figure of 11.3% is very positive for schools, where in recent years the most successful strikes, even when called by the CGIL, have not exceeded 7%; at INPS (the Italian social security agency), participation was 47%; among railway workers, it was 30%.

It is extremely significant that this movement of popular indignation, which suddenly exploded, has been channelled into the trade unions of the working class and that young people and the middle classes have instinctively joined in the initiatives promoted by the unions. It is also significant that the strike was organized by the grassroots unions.

It should also be noted that the vast majority of participants in the demonstrations go far beyond the sphere of influence of the Palestinian bourgeois political organizations and beyond the parties to which the leaders of the grassroots unions belong, allowing our party to carry out its propaganda.

It is opportunism that directs these unions and these demonstrations. The party's expected and always claimed task is to fight against opportunism in the trade union movement, to thwart the bourgeois maneuver aimed at diverting the spontaneous, generous but naive pacifism of the workers for the purposes of propaganda for the next imperialist war.

In our interventions, with our leaflets—the only ones at these demonstrations to give workers a clear direction of struggle consistent with revolutionary communism—we have highlighted how the working class is the only social force capable, if directed by the Communist Party through the transmission belt of class-based trade union organizations, of preventing the outbreak of the Third World War, to which capitalism is leading us, or of stopping it if it should begin.

Opportunism seems to assert something similar, but it plays on the ambiguity of its statements and on the naivety of the working masses. We can roughly distinguish two groups of opportunist propaganda in the demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza.

A majority of the leaders of the organizing organizations (but a minority among the demonstrators as the movement has grown) trust in the action of certain bourgeois states, which, they say, are better than those they point to as solely responsible for the war. The conflict in Gaza, they say, is not the result of a clash between imperialisms, in which the Gazans are crushed, but only of the special wickedness of the United States and Israel. A cultural fact, one might say, if not worse: the Americans, the Zionists, the Jews…

These groups end up seeking salvation in the intervention of states, with workers fighting for bourgeois “left-wing” governments, not realizing that this alternation and false opposition is a trap to prevent the proletariat from taking the path of struggle, of offensive, that is, of revolution, remaining instead nailed to the “defense of democracy from fascism.”

Most of the masses who filled the huge demonstrations between late August and early October are not so naive as to not understand how anti-proletarian and militaristic all the states of the world have become. Nevertheless, the illusion remains that only a demonstration of popular opinion can induce the governments of so-called democratic countries to change their policies and stop the war.

This leads to falling in line with the lies of the bourgeois left-wing parties and the parliamentary toy. We remain silent on the fact that all bourgeois states will be led into imperialist war by material forces that they will never want or be able to stop, and that they will do whatever is necessary to convince the proletariat to fight and die. This can already be seen in a party such as the PD, with its contortions on the question of European rearmament.

Bourgeois pacifism does not put an end to war. When the “fascist” Italian government sent a frigate to escort Italian citizens aboard some of the “Flotilla” boats—as Spain and Turkey had done—the representative of the most left-wing party in parliament (Fratoianni of Alleanza Verdi Sinistra), after congratulating the Foreign Minister, said: “Our frigate should violate the blockade and ensure that aid reaches Gaza.” Entering a war zone with warships means entering the war! If the Italian bourgeoisie today were to take the opposite side in the conflict between imperialisms, that is, against Israel and the United States, and had sent a contingent to fight alongside the so-called “Palestinian resistance,” that is, Hamas and the bourgeois states that support it or have supported it, these warmongers disguised as pacifists would be the first to put on their helmets, or rather, they would impose them on the workers!

The possibility of bourgeois Italy changing sides may seem remote today, but let us remember that it did so in two world wars. Italian capitalists have always cultivated an anti-American party, giving it space and political maneuverability. Even sectors of the bourgeois right are known to have this orientation, if only because, as is well known, it was Mussolini who waged the anti-American war, following Hitler's lead. The Italian bourgeoisie has also always cultivated friendships with Palestinian nationalist parties and parts of the Arab world, as well as with the Iranian regime. Former President Cossiga explained how UNIFIL in Lebanon turned a blind eye to allow Hezbollah to arm itself south of the Litani River. The Italian bourgeois regime cultivated its imperialist backyard in the Mediterranean, on its southern shore and further afield, before and after the Second World War. Since 1945, this has taken place within the limits imposed by US imperialism. In view of the third world war, a new about-turn is by no means impossible, in keeping with the honored tradition of our bourgeoisie.

It is up to the Communist Party to prevent the workers' movement from falling for these deceptions and maneuvers. Most workers will never want war, but without the presence and roots of the International Communist Party within the unions, they would easily be disoriented by opportunism, which will justify participation in the conflict with every petty argument.

Only the working class can prevent or stop imperialist war, with its increasingly powerful strike movement. But this will mean revolution, as October 1917 teaches us: the Bolsheviks were the only party in the history of capitalism to stop war.

In Italy, the movement against the war in Gaza has been channeled into the trade unions. This has been one of the factors in its strengthening and has led to a first partial but positive development: from an interclassist opinion movement to working-class action against the war. It was a first step in this direction, but a decisive one, in terms of a national general strike.

The importance of this social alignment against the war lies in two aspects. The first is that workers have been called upon and identified as the subject of the struggle against growing warmongering throughout the world. Of course, only we communists know that only the international revolution of the working class can stop imperialist war, while workers may believe that a peaceful strike is sufficient to achieve this goal. But it is a step in the right direction, and the party finally had the opportunity to explain to the striking workers how war can be confronted.

It was a political strike. Everything is politics, but war is the maximum point of convergence and fusion between the immediate, basic, economic needs and problems of workers, in short, their trade union demands, and a political demand. This is all the more true as war draws nearer.

While all the anti-communists, when it comes to the conflict in Gaza, have argued that there is no need to bother with such a distant problem, the strike has shaken the internationalist instinct of the working class, which is convinced that this is not the case.

The second reason of great importance in this mobilization against the war in Gaza is that it was initiated by grassroots trade unionism  not out of a vain recognition of primogeniture, but in recognition of a chain of social actions and reactions of considerable general and permanent importance. This also confirms the predicted dynamics and the consequent trade union policy of our party, and only our party.

The grassroots unions have gathered the indignation of the workers and their concern about the war, and have managed to respond to it.

The CGIL, on the other hand, had never even considered the possibility of resorting to strike action. Thus, something that had never happened before occurred: the largest union of the regime had to follow in the footsteps of the grassroots unions. First, it tried unsuccessfully to sabotage the strike called by USB, CUB, SGB, and ADL for Monday, September 22. This had been announced in Genoa on Thursday, September 11, during an evening meeting at the Port Authority Club, attended by about 600 workers and broadcast live on the Unione Sindacale di Base web channel.

On September 16, the CGIL decided to call a general strike, but one working day earlier, on the 19th! Moreover, as it did not fall within the notice period imposed by the anti-strike law, wanted by CGIL, CISL, and UIL (Law 146 of 1990), all categories affected by the law were excluded from this “separate and competing” strike! As a result, many CGIL members and delegates were furious with the leadership for clearly dividing and sabotaging the struggle promoted by the grassroots unions, and just as many went on strike on the 22nd instead of the 19th. Teachers were the category that most participated in the strike.

This event, historic for the trade union movement in Italy in recent decades, is bound to mark a strengthening of the grassroots unions, especially the USB, and a weakening of the CGIL. This is also true when looking at the young people who are not yet workers, who filled the demonstrations and who will join unions in the future. Now, in the meantime, they know that there is a union that is more combative than the CGIL.

In response to the slap in the face it received and in an attempt to remedy its shameful conduct towards its rank and file, which was in favor of mobilization, the CGIL decided to call a second general strike, this time together with the USB and other grassroots unions! This too is unprecedented in the Italian trade union movement since the first grassroots unions were formed in 1980.

It has happened—unfortunately rarely due to the well-known sectarianism of the grassroots union leaderships—that they have joined general strikes promoted by the CGIL. A positive example was the general strike on November 29 last year, which most grassroots unions joined. The USB leadership was the only one not to do so and to call a strike on December 13, on its own.

The joint strike between grassroots unions and the CGIL on October 3 is a precedent to be used in future union battles. It must not become an exception linked to the issue of genocide in Gaza. Within the grassroots unions, we must fight to ensure that this path is pursued in future struggles, starting in the coming weeks. Certainly, many workers who are members of the CGIL want to continue in this direction. Putting the CGIL leadership to the test on the terrain of united action will mean opening up the discussion within this union, bringing its structure into conflict with the combative part of its base, and unmasking those leaders of minority areas and factions who are ready to sacrifice crucial decisions for the class-based trade union movement in order to maintain their leadership positions in that union.

Unity in the struggles of the grassroots unions and between them and the CGIL:
     - would strengthen the strikes;
     - would allow grassroots unions, where the CGIL is likely to call for strikes of a few hours, divided by region and territory, to relaunch with longer and more united strikes, exposing the CGIL once again to the risk of finding itself playing catch-up;
     - would bring workers still affiliated with the CGIL into greater contact with militant unionism;
     - it could not fail to call into question trade union unity with the CISL and UIL, the cornerstone of regime trade unionism for over 70 years;
     - to the extent that the workers' struggle is strengthened, it would lead to the split of the CGIL and the birth of a large class-based trade union in Italy, dealing a deadly blow to collaborationist and regime trade unionism.

These are therefore events with potentially important consequences, resulting from the intervention of grassroots unions in the movement against the war and genocide in Gaza. They confirm at least two fundamental trade union policies of the International Communist Party:
     1) In Italy, the class-based union will be reborn outside and against the regime unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL, UGL);
     2) The unity of action of militant trade unionism – in a united class-based trade union front that includes grassroots unions and militant minorities within CGIL – in joint strikes is the best way to accelerate the process of rebirth of the class-based union.

In addition to the above, there are two other important consequences of the intervention of grassroots unions in the movement against the war in Gaza:
     1) Two general strikes took place – with minority participation but which shook the capitalist economy and brought hundreds of thousands of workers onto the streets in over 70 cities – in the space of just 11 days: this has never happened since the end of World War II;
     2) The second mobilization, on October 3, took place in violation of the anti-strike law: CGIL and USB appealed to a reactionary clause of this law, which allows for exceptions in cases of “danger to the constitutional order,” thereby confirming their anti-communism. And the strike went ahead despite the ruling against it by the Guarantee Commission, which obviously did not accept the interpretation of the two union leaders, which was clearly specious. If sanctions are imposed on the unions and workers, what will the CGIL and grassroots unions do? Will they respond with a strike? This is also a dangerous precedent for regime unionism and employers, and a lesson for workers: if you are sufficiently united, in the face of a mass movement, there is no law that can stop the strike!

Excerpts from the Leaflets We Distributed at the Demonstrations on August 30, September 22, October 3, and October 4

Two years of war have caused outrage and anger to grow around the world over the massacre, which has risen to the level of genocide, of the population of the Gaza Strip. More and more people finally feel the need to act collectively against this barbarism and to show that indifference, individualism, and resignation—fueled by capitalism—are not irrevocable.

In Italy, a very important step forward in this direction has been taken by the grassroots unions – with the USB dockworkers of Genoa leading the way – who have called a general strike, elevating a vast movement of opinion to a struggle of the working class.

This is fundamental because the war in Gaza has shown that in capitalism, only the balance of power counts, not opinions, even if expressed by millions of people.

It is not by appealing to institutions and international law that we can hope to put an end to this and other conflicts, because the subjects to whom we appeal, the bourgeois states, are the real instigators of wars: both when they are directly involved and when they act by proxy.

Wars under capitalism are not caused by the evil or madness of this or that head of state—Hitler, Saddam, Putin, Trump, Netanyahu—nor by particularly reactionary ideologies—Nazism, radical Islam, religious Zionism—but always by the enormous capitalist economic interests protected by bourgeois states.

Capitalism needs war to survive the economic crisis of overproduction, which devours it like a cancer, and to keep the working class oppressed, whose living conditions worsen every day due to the effects of the crisis being dumped on its shoulders. This is why conflicts are multiplying, all states are rearming and pushing towards a third world war.

In Gaza and Israel, people are dying not for Zionism or Islamism but for capitalism! Israel is a vassal state of the US, just as Hamas is a vassal state of the regional and world powers that pretend to support the Palestinians—Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and behind them China—only to compete for markets and regional and world domination, in a web of interests in which the proletarians of Palestine and the entire area are crushed. This is true in the Middle East as it is throughout the world.

The feelings that the genocide in Gaza triggers must not prevent us from seeing that this is not a distortion of capitalism but a barbarity that is part of its march towards war. Even the states in Europe have launched their rearmament plan and promise to more than double their military spending to 5% of GDP, taking resources away from health, education, pensions, and wages. Gaza is the future that awaits workers around the world if they do not organize and fight back effectively!

War can only be stopped by a force greater than capitalism. Only the working class in all countries has this force. The strike against war is therefore not only an expression of opinion but above all a concrete act of the working class against it. Faced with the demand for new sacrifices for rearmament and war, the proletariat responds with a strike.

Striking today against the genocide in Gaza and against the war machine advancing throughout the world means fighting in defense of wages, working conditions, and social spending, which all bourgeois parties, both right and left, want to cut. And when workers fight for their own interests as an exploited social class, even if they are unaware of it, they are fighting against war! It is not a question of “convincing” the ruling class, but of bending it with the force of strikes and class struggle. A strike movement against the war that is advancing throughout the world and that must necessarily become international.

The general strike on September 22 was called by the grassroots unions (USB, CUB, SGB, ADL). UIL and CISL have made it clear that they are not interested. The CGIL, which had never declared its intention to resort to a strike against the war in Gaza, hastily proclaimed one for September 19, when it became clear that the one on the 22nd was likely to be successful. This shameless act of sabotage against the grassroots unions' strike confirms that the CGIL is a regime union, tied hand and foot to the ruling class and its political regime, and that a genuine class union can only be reborn outside and against it!

Faced with the success of the strike on the 22nd and the protests of many members, the CGIL leadership tried to remedy the situation with a sensational rectification of its conduct and by calling a general strike on October 3rd together with the grassroots unions! This is an extremely positive development because it strengthens and radicalizes the strike.

In all countries, the working class must fight against regime unionism, which ties the fate of workers to that of the company and national capitalism – which they call “homeland” or “country” – in order to build genuine class unions.

In Germany, the largest trade union confederation, the DGB, supports the rearmament plan. In the US, the largest union in the automotive sector – the UAW – supports the US bourgeoisie's tariff policy. Even in Israel, where for months hundreds of thousands have been taking to the streets every week to protest against the war and numerous reservists have refused to be called up, it will not be possible to stop the war wanted by the Israeli bourgeois regime until the movement rises up in a general struggle of the working class. But to do this, the control of the regime's Histadrut union over the workers must be broken, as it opposed the general strike against the war and the teachers' strike against wage cuts as a result of the war economy.

Against the war in Gaza, against all wars, we must fight within the unions to agitate for an international general strike against imperialist war, pointing the way to international unity of all workers, including Israelis and Palestinians! Only this international solidarity and struggle of the working class will emancipate the Palestinians, like all national minorities, from the infamous, almost century-long oppression to which they are subjected.

It is not only in Gaza that the barbarity of war is evident: even more victims have been caused by the civil war in Syria from 2011 to 2018 and the famine in Sudan. What makes the destruction of Gaza special today is that on one side of the front it is being carried out by a democratic state – the “only democracy in the Middle East,” as it claims – supported by the “greatest democracy in the world,” i.e., the US, by both Democratic and Republican administrations, and other democracies, starting with Germany and Italy. The war in Gaza has shown that democracies carry out massacres and wars just like authoritarian regimes. This is because they are all bourgeois, capitalist regimes: the form of government – democratic, authoritarian, theocratic – has value only insofar as it is more or less useful for maintaining control over the working class.

Striking today against the war in Gaza is the first step in preventing war when it comes to our doorstep in the near future and becomes global. Then we will need a real and strong class-based union capable of organizing strikes that bring national capitalism to its knees for days. This will mean clashing in every country with its own bourgeois state and its repression. Imperialist war between capitalist states can only be stopped by class struggle, that is, by revolution!
     - Against imperialist wars!
     - For class war!
     - For communist revolution!

As of August, 3,200 IAM workers have been out striking at the Boeing manufacturing facility in St. Louis, MO demanding better pay and conditions. This facility primarily produces commodities for what is known as the “defense” industry; meaning, the production of the tools of proletarian slaughter, and part of the larger network of US weapons manufacturing for its role of leading weapons supplier and profiteer of global conflict.

Boeing, plagued with the troubles of crashing profit rates in recent years from the various manifestations of the overproduction crisis and the natural laws of bourgeois economics, has repeatedly pushed its burdens onto the workers, whether it be from large layoffs or major concessions from the workers on their contracts. In 2014, the company removed the false safety-net pension plans for the workers, revealing the fickleness of bourgeois welfare and “company benefits”. These “concessions of the bourgeoisie”, as the social democrats like to frame it, are more accurately concessions of the workers, who have shackled themselves to the abusive slave master who can threaten to pull the plug when the workers get “too out of line.”

In March, Boeing was bestowed a $20 Billion defense contract to produce the newest generation of F-47 fighter jets by the US government to be produced in the St. Louis facility as well as secured $155 million in tax breaks by the city. The Trump administration has gone to certain lengths to not only “protect” Boeing from the ongoing trade war but has also facilitated a $522 billion deal with Qatar, using the US imperialist influence to both bolster the company on the verge of collapse and strengthen US control in the middle east.

With demand increasing, the company will certainly feel pressure from any interruption in production and the workers are right in withholding their labor power to demand higher wages, refusing anything less. Despite local union leadership pretending to praise the solidarity of the workers in the media spotlight, they simultaneously suggested workers approve the company’s contract proposal in July. The opportunist union leaders said in a public statement that workers deserve “a contract reflecting their skill, dedication, and the critical role they play in our nation's defense”.

Workers are already seeing that even as the bourgeoisies move to fanatically rearm themselves in a necessary move to obliterate the surplus of capital that haunts the bourgeois in this period of an ongoing overproduction crisis through war, they are forced into sacrifices even before the bloodshed begins. The proletariat is asked to martyr themselves economically for the “defense of the nation”, when in reality the enemy of the US proletariat is inside its borders; it is the national ruling class, the bourgeoisie. The further the unions integrate themselves into the regime, serving only to facilitate contracts of legal slavery, the weaker the collective power of the proletariat, becoming lackeys for the labor aristocracy and the bourgeoisie.

Scott Mayer, who is Boeing’s chief labor council and also a Trump appointee to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), spoke on the Boeing strike while being reviewed at a recent Senate committee hearing, saying “the concept of fairness” (in the context of a contract) “is an elusive one.” And to this end, this is true. What “fairness” can be negotiated between a slave and master, while simultaneously perpetuating this social relationship?

“...the wage worker has permission to work for his own subsistence—that is, to live, only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also for the latter's co-consumers of surplus value); that the whole capitalist system of production turns on the increase of this gratis labor by extending the working day, or by developing the productivity—that is, increasing the intensity or labor power, etc.; that, consequently, the system of wage labor is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labor develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment…It is as if, among slaves who have at last got behind the secret of slavery and broken out in rebellion, a slave still in thrall to obsolete notions were to inscribe on the program of the rebellion: Slavery must be abolished because the feeding of slaves in the system of slavery cannot exceed a certain low maximum!” (Critique of the Gotha Programme)

The union struggle is in itself as ephemeral as the capitalist system from which it arises. An indefinite ‘democratic’ facilitation of class collaboration between the bourgeoisie and the workers for petty legal and monetary agreements, serves only the bourgeoisie. That is why unions should be understood, not as revolutionary organizations, but “schools of class struggle”, they are the organizations that unite the workers on the grounds of economic interests and reveal the ruthless lengths at which the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie will go to deprive the workers, cutting through the ‘patriotic’ veneer of union nationalism. As the unions and workers strengthen their unification on class grounds and form “class unions” rather than fascistic regime unions, the greater the success of their economic gains, but syndicalism is not enough to free the proletariat. Only a world communist party and the destruction of bourgeois institutions, including eventually the unions themselves, can truly overturn the anarchistic hell of capitalism.

The “anti-war” strikes that have appeared, including the substantial developments in Italy and with the dockworkers of Europe, are positive developments in that the proletariat has recognized a divergence of interests with the bourgeois warmongers and have refused to put targets on themselves in the struggle between nations, choosing instead to unite in coordinated general strikes, but without the leadership of the Communist Party, pushing past the hard limit of trade-union consciousness as described by Lenin, the smashing of the bourgeois state is impossible and war is inevitable.

The war industry is naturally deeply tied to the respective bourgeois state and therefore poses a conflict of interest for the proletariat that, like the eventual proletarian soldiers who, when asked to walk into the crucible of an imperialist war, will be unable to self-organize on the basis of “mutual interest” and turn the the war between nations into a war between classes.

Immigrant workers are fighting back amid a new wave of vicious attacks by the state, targeting both immigrant workers and the broader working class in the United States and internationally. These attacks have taken the form of mass arrests and detentions carried out by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security tasked with enforcing immigration law.

Such agencies and their operations are justified in the name of “national security,” which in reality means protecting the ruling class’s ability to accumulate profit while disciplining and controlling the working class. Historically and today, the capitalist class has used immigration policing and law to meet its labor needs and as a weapon to enforce hyper-exploitation by forcing undocumented immigrants, one of the most oppressed sections of the working class, to live and work in constant fear of deportation and the loss of their livelihoods.

In the face of these attacks, immigrant workers are organizing and fighting back.

The Dairy Workers’ Strike in Wisconsin

On August 12, forty-three workers at W&W Dairy in Monroe, Wisconsin, went on strike in response to new anti-immigrant policies introduced after the company was acquired by the Kansas-based Dairy Farmers of America (DFA). The strikers, nearly all Latino immigrants, demanded severance pay and the payout of accumulated paid time off after being ordered to verify their immigration status through E-Verify, a federal system run by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. E-Verify allows employers to check whether workers are authorized to work in the U.S. by comparing information from their I-9 forms against government records.

W&W Dairy gave its entire workforce until August 30 to provide proof of legal status through E-Verify. Nearly half of the roughly 100 employees quit immediately, but 43 long-serving workers refused, instead demanding three weeks of severance for every year worked. Management rejected their demand and in a move of intimidation threatened to call ICE if they continued their strike. A clear use of the intended purpose of immigration enforcement and the State to enforce higher rates of exploitation for the bosses through the use of fear and threats of deportation and detention.

These workers form a tight-knit, community-based workforce, informally organized outside the restrictive labor laws and state-controlled union frameworks imposed on workers.

The implementation of the E-Verify system in this context represents yet another attack of the boss. It is a means of purging undocumented workers and blackmailing the remaining workforce into submission. It is not about replacing undocumented workers with U.S.-born citizens but about cycling in new waves of immigrant labor, each group more deeply exploited and disciplined than the last.

The very existence of “undocumented” workers is no accident; it is a condition deliberately produced by the bourgeois state. By granting and withdrawing legal status at will, the state creates a precarious labor pool that can be easily exploited. For instance, the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians, Salvadorans, and others in 2017 and the shifting rules around TPS and work permits for Venezuelans and Haitians in recent years show how state decisions manufacture illegality and keep immigrant labor vulnerable.

Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) controls close to one-third of the U.S. milk supply, generating about $20 billion in annual revenue and ranking among the world’s largest dairy corporations. DFA employs over 19,000 people and runs more than 380 facilities across the country, processing milk into cheese, butter, powdered milk, ice cream, and other products. While based in the U.S., DFA operates globally through exports and partnerships, giving it significant influence over both domestic and international dairy markets. Many DFA workers are unionized, including under the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

DFA has refused to meet their severance demands or retain the workers through the ownership transition. Many have been forced to seek new work while caring for their families and facing the violence of the capitalist immigration system.

The Mauser Strike in Chicago

Similar to the dairy workers, immigrant workers organized with the Teamsters in Chicago are also fighting back, through the withholding of their labor, the very lifeblood of the system that keeps anti-social, decaying capitalism afloat.

Since June 9, 2025, more than 100 workers at Mauser Packaging Solutions in Little Village, Chicago, have been on an open-ended strike. The workers, organized under Teamsters Local 705, are demanding workplace safety protections, higher wages, and written guarantees that ICE agents will not be allowed on company property without a signed judicial warrant. They are also demanding advance notice of any I-9 audits; document checks that often lead to the firing or detention of immigrant workers.

The Little Village plant, located in Chicago’s predominantly Latino, Spanish-speaking neighborhood, reconditions used steel drums and industrial containers for resale and reuse. The work is dangerous, involving toxic chemicals and extreme heat. Many workers are Latino immigrants who have endured years of exploitation and intimidation from management. As one worker put it, they are treated by the company “like pack animals.”

Mauser Packaging Solutions, based in Oak Brook, Illinois, is a global corporation employing over 11,000 workers. Formed in 2018 through the consolidation of four major packaging companies, it produces metal and plastic containers used in industries worldwide. Mauser has a long record of anti-worker practices, including using the threat of immigration enforcement in past disputes such as in Seattle to undermine strikes and weaken union power.

In Chicago, the strike has drawn “support” and appearances from Mayor Brandon Johnson, Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Johnson told the workers, “This strike is leading the way to ensure that this country knows that workers run this country.” These politicians, like others in the Democratic Party, ultimately serve the same capitalist system that criminalizes and exploits immigrant workers. While they speak of “worker power” and “solidarity,” they collaborate with Republicans and the ruling class to preserve the capitalist order; a system that keeps workers exploited, disciplined, and ready to be sent to war when the next imperialist conflict demands it.

As the Mauser strike continues, arrests of immigrant workers have taken place across Chicago, including in warehouses and food production plants. It is no coincidence that Mauser refuses to include ICE protections in the contract given that employers rely on the fear generated by state repression to maintain control over immigrant labor.

The federal government has escalated workplace raids and mass detentions, targeting both undocumented and legally present immigrants. These raids have become more violent, including the shooting and killing of an unarmed undocumented person by an ICE agent in Franklin Park, Illinois, in September 2025. Immigration enforcement has become more aggressive nationwide, with coordinated operations in large immigrant centers such as Chicago and Los Angeles.

This escalation follows the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill” by the current administration, which drastically increased funding for ICE and the military. Thus expanding the state’s capacity to detain, repress, and terrorize immigrants and working-class broadly.

The unity of the Mauser workers has been extraordinary. Not a single worker has crossed the picket line, and the vote to reject the company’s most recent offer was 100 percent unanimous. Workers have maintained their picket in a fenced and razor-wired lot near the plant to protect themselves from police and ICE attacks. Despite management threats to shut the facility, the workers remain strong.

Now entering its fourth month, the strike continues. Both sides remain entrenched, with the company escalating its threats and announcing “tentative” plans to close the plant in late November 2025.

Yet their courage stands as an example for the entire working class, showing that only through struggle, unity, and strike action can workers defend themselves against exploitation, repression, and the violence of the capitalist state.

Following the success of multiple immigrant defense resolutions within the Class Struggle Action Network (CSAN) (a class struggle workers coordination of union militants in which we participate), the workers coordination was invited to join a larger trade union united front effort establishing joint work between union militants in many different unions to begin organizing efforts to defend immigrant workers across unions. Party militants along with CSAN members intervened in a strike of Public Schools Employees in Washington.

In Vancouver, Washington, where it is unlawful for public sector workers to strike, support staff workers organized in the Public Schools Employee (PSE) union went on strike, delaying the school district opening, with Evergreen Educators Union (EEA) members who represent the higher paid teachers at the same schools, refusing to cross picket lines across the 38 schools serving 20,000 students in the district joining the strike. At the same time that their strike launched, school janitors in the district, composing a much smaller and isolated bargaining unit, had just settled for a 2 cent raise, stirring conversations among education workers and the janitors to organize for collective strengthening of their struggles through coordination in the future.

Cafeteria workers in the district organized by the teamsters union had a strike authorization vote, and actively walked the line with PSE. In two more districts in Washington education workers went on strike.

Party militants assisted contacts within the The International Association of Machinists (A union of 600,000 active and retired members, covering workers from Boeing and Lockheed Martin to United Airlines and Harley-Davidson, etc), in bringing forward an immigrant solidarity resolution to the unions national conference. A comrade provided material support and participated in picket line activity during September 5 & 6 at the ULP strike of Teamsters Local 492 against Dairy Farmers of America which owns facilities across New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and California representing approximately 1,000 workers. The Party was present on the Albuquerque, New Mexico picket line and wrote a leaflet to distribute. The United For Class Wide Action caucus that has previously been composed primarily of grocery workers from the chain Fred Myers, resumed regular meetings and has come into contact with a larger group of class struggle militants forming in this union across the country.

Party militants continue to push for class struggle initiatives within the Southern Workers Assembly and have taken leadership positions in some of it’s local territorial sections.

The Party in the U.S. conducted a number of interventions. On Labor day comrades intervened at 7 Labor day rallies/picnics/marches in 4 cities and 2 states.

The following leaflet was distributed by the Party to graduate student workers in New Mexico who were engaged in a labor dispute with their employer:

The International Communist Party commends your display of strength for the struggle of better wages, benefits and better working conditions. The necessity of this fight is something endemic to our exploitative mode of production: capitalism. Despite being a public institution, the University still exploits its workers like any other capitalist enterprise, state owned or private. There is no better demonstration of this than the bosses’ clear interest in keeping your wages low and making you work more hours even while inflation rises; in a word, increasing immiseration.

It is only through the power of striking indefinitely that the capitalist class, in this instance UNM admin, is forced to give concessions to the working class. This is why the bourgeois state collaborates with the bosses and actively sabotages your freedom to strike by making it illegal in the public education sector to abandon the no-strike clause in your contract. The bourgeoisie fears the strike and will do anything it can to reduce its power.

Our power to strike does not come from bourgeois “rights” enshrined in their constitutions. It comes from our shared material interest as a class and our will to act. The Government, whether Democrat or Republican, will always take the side of the bosses when push comes to shove, i.e. when the state or the bosses are under serious threat from combative workers. The Democrats have clearly shown this during the 2022 rail strike and through their promotion of class collaboration and submission to the bosses instead of worker combativity. If the Democrats truly had the interests of the working class, they would repeal the Taft-Hartley Act and support the freedom to strike at all times in every sector.

UE has a history of worker militancy that we can draw inspiration from! Despite the changing landscape of United States employment the fact remains - you are a worker. Take inspiration today from workers in the University of Minnesota who got the admin to extend an offer despite their last best and final offer after showing their strength through the strike. Or from the public school teachers at Evergreen, Washington who struck despite it not being legal.

WORKERS! To further your struggle, to extend it for even higher wages and a shorter working day made even more necessary by the rising cost of living and the depressing reality of having to work more than one job, means to UNITE AS A CLASS. Practically, we must work towards aligning contract expiration dates, striking in solidarity and at the same time as other workers, and unifying our trade unions across occupation and country into a genuine CLASS UNION.
     AGAINST SUBORDINATION TO BOURGEOIS PARTIES!!
     AGAINST LIMITATIONS ON STRIKE POWER!!
     AGAINST COLLABORATION WITH THE BOSSES!!
     FOR INTERNATIONAL AND CROSS SECTOR SOLIDARITY!!

Comrades, workers,

Our trade union struggle and the formation of the class union is the essential step in the process of eliminating capitalist exploitation. To that end, the authentic working class communist party is necessary to direct the unions towards revolution and proletarian dictatorship. It is only in this way that capitalist society can be overcome with communist society, one without classes, without wage-labor, and without the state. Only after this necessary and monumental leap forward for the human race can we finally GIVE according to ability and TAKE according to need.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

Workers of Creamland Dairy Factory, we of the International Communist Party, salute you with solidarity for your willingness to fight for your living conditions. Your stand here can inspire workers in Albuquerque to take up the fight to defend our wages and by extension the livelihoods of our families. It is always important to know the history of your struggle to understand what you are fighting for. Back in 2019, in the midst of financial ruin, Dean Foods declared bankruptcy and numerous plants around California, Utah, Minnesota, Colorado and New Mexico were sold to Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) for a total of $433 million in 2020. Similarly, Prairie Foods acquired eight plants for a total of $75 million. The DFA, with the mediation of Dean Foods, then demanded that the Teamsters would abstain from asking for increases in wages and benefits as part of this new acquisition. The Teamster’s National body conceded with no fight to “save the company” (why not the 3,300 workers they represented?). The agreement was presented as a way to preserve jobs, wages, health insurance and pensions and was ratified with an 82% approval. In reality, this was done to make the acquisition more attractive for the vultures of DFA and Prairie farms who would only acquire the assets of Dean Foods under such conditions - that is they would only buy if they were able to deprive you of wages and benefits to increase their profits. The results have spoken for themselves for four years; no significant increases have been won, and in many cases, none have been gained at all. From May 2020 to May 2025 inflation has risen by 25% - to put it more bluntly you have had a pay reduction of 25%. DFA had earnings of $756 million last year and no doubt modest profits.

At the end of the agreement in May - the company responded as expected by delaying, rejecting, and slowing down negotiations. On June 3rd, over a thousand of you and your brothers and sisters approved of a strike action, that is the ULP action. The ULP strike could have been a stepping stone to spread the struggle to all DFA facilities under Teamster’s affiliation for a single agreement using the full force of the 1000 members! However, what has happened instead is that in July, Locals in California: 63, 186, 495, 630 and 683 have reached an agreement. In August, Local 222 in Utah and Local 120 in Minnesota, with Local 120 around 50% voting no, reached an agreement. Even Prairie farms facilities under Teamster’s representation could have joined this struggle. The evident strategy of the bosses, in collusion with union leadership, is divide and conquer. Why weren't all these struggles coordinated with yours? An agreement could have been reached in a few days much like the short strikes of the California and Utah mobilizations. Because of different Wages differentials due to different cost of living? These can easily be discerned in contract language, after all aren’t all contracts slated to have the same expiration dates? Technically without a contract, according to the Teamsters, a work stoppage can happen at any of the 35 facilities. The answer is quite simple: to give concessions smaller than those gained from a coordinated struggle.

For two months, the company was preparing for this strike by mobilizing scabs in the form of temp hires and salaried management from other DFA facilities; as well as to hire company goons in the form of the IPS. Admirably, our class brothers and sisters from other unions have joined the picket lines to show solidarity, but within your local, there have been “members” crossing the picket line delivering products. Where is the solidarity there?

The best and final offer is always a bluff by companies to scare you from waging an actual struggle. Prior to bankruptcy, Dean represented 15% of milk sales from DFA. This acquisition has made them quite the profitable portfolio for their stakeholders (i.e. Money has been gained on your sweat and blood). The $2/hr raise offered is quite meager considering inflation which is trending upwards. At 3%, this is reduced to $1.82/hr in three years. Where Health benefits were paid in full before the acquisition, now workers are forced to pay out of pocket. Drivers for the company are among the lowest paid in the city, with wages around $7/hr lower.

At a bare minimum, wages and benefits should be restored. That's a 25% increase to salary alone and a return to fully covered health insurance. Drivers should be paid at least the going rate at other facilities. As members are already struggling with living expenses, they will only worsen as we head towards a new economic downturn and possibly a crisis.

The threat of losing jobs can be overcome through linking with other unions across the industry and company boundaries in a coordinated struggle to not just strike, but have a powerful enough strike to win. The only way forward, the only way to protect your jobs, to increase your wages in any meaningful way, is to coordinate your future strike efforts with those of your union brothers and sisters in other locals.

The war in Ukraine has been going on for more than three years now, and it is becoming increasingly clear that it is not destined to end with a peace agreement but to escalate into a wider and more lethal conflict.

In recent months, Russia has been reaping the rewards of the complex adaptation of its economy and armed forces to waging a long-term war, with the use of large numbers of soldiers, weapons, and ammunition, at great financial expense.

Its industrial apparatus has managed to convert to war production rather quickly and, according to Western sources, is currently capable of producing enough weapons and ammunition to wage war while maintaining a strong superiority over Ukraine in terms of both the number of soldiers mobilized and the availability of weapons and ammunition.

However, as it is not an industrial power on the scale of China or the United States, these expenses can only be financed by gas and oil exports which, due to sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union, Russia is forced to divert largely to China, India, and Turkey, after its traditional European customers significantly reduced their imports.

In August, the European Union purchased only 8% of Russian hydrocarbons, while China and India purchased 40% and 25% respectively; Turkey, a NATO member, imported 21%. This forced market conversion has led to a decline in oil and gas prices. It is therefore possible that Russia may experience financial problems in the long run.

With regard to arms exports, another source of revenue for Russia, the latest SIPRI report for 2024 recorded a significant decline (-64%). However, Moscow remains in third place with 7.8% of global exports, overtaken by France (9.6%), while the world's leading exporter remains the United States (43%). The demand for weapons for the Ukrainian front and international sanctions make it more difficult for Russia to sell its weapons systems. Looking ahead, however, the production of weapons types tested in war and the increased production capacity of the sector could reverse this trend.

During the recent Zapad 2025 exercises, President Putin stated that Russia had mobilized more than 700,000 soldiers on the Ukrainian front.

Internal stability is threatened by human losses, which are very high on both sides. The exact number is hidden by both states, but it is likely that at least 120,000 Russian soldiers have died and at least three times as many have been wounded. The Russian government is replenishing the ranks of the army mainly with volunteers from the economically poorest regions of the vast country, assuring them good economic conditions and managing not to send conscripts to the front. The Institute for the Study of War (openly aligned with the Ukrainian cause) has revealed that approximately 292,000 volunteers enlisted between the beginning of 2025 and September 15, an average of about 7,900 recruits per week, figures that are in line with data provided by NATO sources.

Conscripts, on the other hand, 160,000 of whom were enlisted in the spring draft, are not being sent to the front. This has prevented an anti-war movement from forming for now. The majority of the population supports the government, thanks in part to the “hysterical” posturing of European states and NATO, which the regime exploits for its propaganda: traditional and orthodox “Holy Mother Russia” attacked by the corrupt and unbelieving West, which, as in 1941, is rearming itself.

Russia's diplomatic relations, severed by European states, have had to be strengthened with China, a much more powerful economic ally. ‘Normal’ diplomatic relations appear to be maintained with the United States of America, while cooperation with India and the BRICS states, as well as with many African states, especially sub-Saharan Africa, also seems to be strengthening.

As far as we know, the Russian proletariat does not yet seem to be heavily affected by the consequences of the war. The employment rate has increased, with arms factories working three shifts, and wages also appear to have risen. However, there has been a noticeable increase in the prices of basic necessities, probably also due to sanctions.

In this situation, the Russian government is in no hurry to reach a ceasefire without achieving its objectives: the acquisition of the four provinces already annexed to Russia by decree, even if it has not yet completely occupied them, and a Ukraine that is not part of NATO and is demilitarized.

Time is on Moscow's side, as it waits for the Ukrainian army to collapse with a change of government in Kiev. The situation on the other side of the front is more complex. This war was provoked by the United States and NATO, which went ‘barking’ at Russia's borders, as even Pope Francis acknowledged some time ago in a colorful but clear manner. But it is being fought by Ukrainian troops, armed, trained, and supplied by Western countries, especially the United States.

After contributing for years, since 2014, to the strengthening and purging of the Ukrainian armed forces, Washington has provided Kiev with most of the cash and weapons aid since the Russian invasion, pushing for a counteroffensive to recapture all territories occupied by Russia, including Crimea.

Now that the United States has achieved its main strategic objective of pitting Russia and the European states against each other, it wants to let them fight each other so that it can profit from military supplies (as in the two previous world wars) and focus its efforts on confronting China, its real global adversary.

Having achieved that first goal of severing the financial and commercial ties of European states with Russia, the United States has damaged the economies of both and forcibly brought Europeans back into Atlantic diplomatic and military discipline. European states are paying the political and social consequences. The breakdown of trade relations with Russia has exacerbated the industrial crisis in Germany and other countries.

The attack, which has so far gone unpunished, on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, inspired by the United States and carried out by a Ukrainian commando unit with the support of NATO countries, probably Britain and Poland, clearly demonstrated Germany's subservience to the United States, while the German economy went into recession. Just recently, Polish Prime Minister Tusk wrote on X: “The problem with Nord Stream 2 is not that it was blown up: the problem is that it was built,” reiterating his solidarity with the United States and against Germany.

The attempt to weaken Moscow by pushing it into open war using the Ukrainian army seems to have failed because the Russian army, after several months of retreats and necessary adjustments, has managed to stop the Ukrainian counteroffensive and go on the offensive: it is currently pressing along the entire front line, and Moscow's armed forces have grown stronger during these years of war.

Ukraine, on the other hand, is on its last legs, both behind the lines and at the front. Ukrainian losses are almost certainly higher in absolute numbers, with a population of 40 million (of which 7-8 million have fled abroad) compared to Russia's 140 million. Under relentless Russian pressure, soldiers are now deserting in large numbers, while the recruitment of new forces is becoming increasingly difficult.

Kiev's financial situation is also dire. “Ukraine spends 31% of its GDP on defense, the highest share in the world,” said the chair of the Ukrainian Parliament's budget committee; “one day of war currently costs Ukraine $172 million,” compared to $140 million a year ago. In mid-September, the defense minister announced that Ukraine will need more than €100 billion to finance its defense in 2026.

The United States has taken note of this situation and, beyond President Trump's fluctuating statements, has been seeking an accommodation with Moscow for months, at Ukraine's expense, of course. They are determined to end financial aid to Ukraine and offload everything onto European countries. US diplomacy first seemed to accept that Donbass and the other territories annexed by the Kremlin would pass to Russia, then President Trump spoke of unlikely “reconquests.” Behind this, of course, lies the struggle to plunder Ukraine's great riches.

However, it will be the Ukrainian government that will pay the price, for whom ceding Donetsk will be tantamount to admitting that eleven years of massacre at the front with hundreds of thousands of deaths have been in vain. This is not just about the fate of the discredited Ukrainian government and Zelensky himself, but about the social stability of Ukraine, where proletarian anger over so many useless sacrifices could turn into revolt, paving the way for the collapse of the state. Proletarians who will understand that they have never had anything to gain from defending national integrity and everything to lose from the defeat of their own country.

The summit between the US and Russia held in Alaska in mid-August confirmed Washington's attitude, which has no interest in clashing directly with Moscow. The world's two major nuclear powers continue to proceed by mutual agreement on various important fronts, from the Middle East to the exploitation of Arctic resources. They will agree on a friendly partition of Ukraine, keeping the Europeans out of the picture.

The bourgeoisies of Europe, which have invested billions of euros in the war, will now also be excluded from the big business of reconstruction. This explains their intransigence towards any peace agreement that violates the “sacred territorial integrity of Ukraine.” They are therefore pushing to continue the war, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, injuries, and mutilations, as well as other immense destruction, at the expense of the Ukrainian proletariat, the Russian proletariat, and even the European proletariat, which will also pay the costs of this war.

Hence the great agitation of the cross-party war party, represented by the top European leaders and the so-called “willing ones,” who every day discover a provocation by Moscow, who fear probable imminent invasions, who press for further sanctions against Russia, who propose to increase military spending to 5% of GDP, who launch a grandiose and unrealistic rearmament plan, and who fan the flames to prevent any agreement, even talking about sending troops to Ukrainian soil.

The latest alarm, after that of Poland, was raised by the small Baltic states which, fearing the loss of free military aid and military support from the United States, are spreading alarmism about alleged incursions by Russian aircraft, drones, etc.

Internationalist solidarity with the proletariat of Ukraine, Russia, Palestine, and the entire Middle East begins with the struggle in one's own country and consists of strenuously defending living and working conditions, rejecting the arms race and the sacrifices it entails, rejecting militaristic and patriotic propaganda, and opposing the preparation for war between states with the preparation for war between classes.

The Many Conflicts in the Region

The carnage carried out on October 7, 2023, by the militias of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — 1,200 civilians killed, including pacifists and immigrant laborers, and 250 kidnapped — opened the new and, to date, bloodiest conflict between the State of Israel and dominant Arab-Palestinian groups, which has been going on for 24 months, with a brief truce between January and March, and which has spread from Gaza to much of the Middle East.

It is difficult to say what the intentions were of the bourgeois parties that control the Gaza Strip – now reduced to a residual part – and of the capitalist states that support them. But it is clear that this massacre – which expressed a desire for genocide identical to that which the Israeli bourgeois regime is carrying out – has for months united Israeli society behind its government, which has thus enjoyed the most favorable conditions for unleashing war on Gaza.

A war which, according to data provided by the Hamas Ministry of Health and confirmed by the Israeli forces, has so far claimed over 67,000 victims, destroyed much of the Strip's building stock – including infrastructure, hospitals, schools, and mosques – and caused a famine which, according to the UN food program, affected around 650,000 Gazan proletarians a month ago.

Of the 2.3 million inhabitants, according to the 2023 census, around 200,000 have managed to leave, a minority, most of whom, according to data repeatedly reported by the Haaretz newspaper, paid around $4,000 to organizations operating in the Egyptian Sinai. These are therefore mainly middle-class families or the wealthy strata of the petty bourgeoisie.

Of the 67,000 Palestinian victims, 46% are under the age of 18, including nearly 1,000 infants, and the ratio of militants to civilians killed is 1 to 5 (according to the Israeli government, 1 to 2). This massacre was predictable, given that the area is one of the most densely populated in the world and has an extremely young population, considering the very high birth rate (1.5 million inhabitants in 2001; 2.3 million in 2023; over 50,000 new births in 2023).

After October 7, pro-Iranian forces in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Syria, Iraq, and Yemen (Houthis) did not launch a determined, coordinated, and simultaneous offensive against Israel. Instead, according to the Iranian regime, they were free to decide for themselves the degree and type of response. This resulted only in the launch of missiles to maintain the pretense of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, but not enough to provoke open war with Israel.

However, this did not prevent Israel from launching a powerful offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon in August 2024, 10 months after the start of the conflict in Gaza, decapitating its leadership, considerably weakening its militias, and pushing them back north of the Litani River. Israel launched a powerful offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon, decapitating its leadership, considerably weakening its militias, and pushing them back north of the Litani River. The defeat was sealed by the truce signed on November 27, which opened up a new balance between the Lebanese bourgeois political forces, with the new government attempting to disarm Hezbollah's militias.

Less than a week after the signing of this truce, Sunni militias belonging to Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) began their advance in Syria, conquering Damascus on December 8, 2024, and deposing the Assads, who had been in power since 1971.

This was a second blow to Iranian imperialism, interrupting the so-called “Shiite corridor,” which allowed for the continuous movement of people, goods, and weapons from Iran to the Mediterranean, passing through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

The fall of the Assads also dealt a blow to Russian imperialism, which now sees its three military bases in Syria at risk: the naval base in Tartus, which it has held since 1971, and the air bases in Hmeimim and Qamishli.

The Russian presence in Syria was in support of the Alawite bourgeoisie—an ethnic minority on which the Assad clan's power was based and which in March was attacked by Sunni militias protected by the new government, who massacred nearly a thousand people in a few days. Recalling the cynicism and Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie, Israel now supports the Russian presence in the three Syrian bases, in an anti-Turkish key and to weaken the new Syrian regime, for the same reason it supports the Kurds in the north east of the Euphrates and the Druze south of Damascus.

The key is the balance of power between the states in the area, which compete for markets and territories, with alliances that vary according to circumstances—i.e., convenience—and dependence on the world's imperial masters, the US, once the USSR—after the counterrevolution in Stalinist guise—and today Russia and China.

After the US's second war with Iraq in 2003 and the resulting devastation of that country, until then an important capitalist power in the area and a direct rival of Iran, the latter has been able to expand its influence over Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen for 20 years. The war in Gaza has detonated many fronts in as many wars, seven in total, with the result of undermining this Iranian imperialist development, in favor of Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel. All bourgeois powers interested in limiting Iranian power but all ready to wage war against each other.

Even Chinese imperialism, the main rival of the US, which makes statements in support of the Palestinian cause and imports 90% of Iran's exported oil, about 15% of its needs, thereby indirectly financing Iran's imperialist projection, which in Gaza takes the form of support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hamas – is at the same time Israel's largest trading partner, with China accounting for 17% of its imports, even more than it buys from the US, which accounts for 11%. Colossal Chinese state-owned companies build and operate highways, power plants, and ports, such as the one in Haifa. Chinese companies specializing in artificial intelligence operate drones to spy on Palestinians in Gaza and provide surveillance, facial recognition, and data collection systems in the West Bank.

The Russian and Iranian response to the setbacks of the first 15 months of the war – from October 2023 to December 2024 – was a “Strategic Cooperation Treaty” between the two countries, signed on January 17 in Moscow.

Meanwhile, Israel continued to take advantage of the conflict that had spread from Gaza to the Middle East, persevering with its strategy of fait accompli: it repeatedly bombed the military structures of what remained of the Syrian Arab Army, Air Force, and Navy to weaken the new regime, and gained ground and villages in the Golan Heights, reaching 40 kilometers from Damascus.

Very few voices of protest were raised by the international diplomatic community regarding the violation of Syria's territorial sovereignty, compared to the chorus of feigned indignation after the much more limited Israeli bombing of Doha in Qatar on September 9.

Syria is and continues to be a prize contested between imperialist powers, which leverage ethnic rivalries among the local bourgeoisie, defined as clans given their family structure: between Turkey in the north and Israel in the south, with Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia interested in investing huge amounts of capital in the country's reconstruction after the United States suspended most of its sanctions. The interests of Turkish imperialism are protected by the new Syrian regime, which represents part of the Sunni bourgeoisie, while Israel, as mentioned, relies on the Syrian Kurds in the northeast and the Druze in the south.

The United States is playing with several pawns in the area to protect the interests of its capitalists: the Israeli pawn, Turkey, which is a member of NATO, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—the so-called petro-monarchies of the Persian Gulf—with which, during Trump's visit last May, agreements worth $600 billion, $243 billion, and $200 billion, respectively, were concluded.

On May 18, the Israeli government began the new operation “Gideon's Chariots” in Gaza, preceded by heavy bombing, which on August 20 became “Gideon's Chariots 2” with the massive entry of troops and ground vehicles; on September 16, they began to penetrate the city of Gaza.

At such an opportune moment, after the significant gains made in those months of war, it was to be expected that the Israeli bourgeois regime would take advantage of the situation to push forward and challenge Iran's regional power. This happened, in the usual agreement with the United States: from June 13 for 12 days, the Israeli air force struck Iranian military infrastructure, including nuclear facilities, and regime figures in the bourgeois neighborhoods of North Tehran. The brief conflict ended with the US bombing of several uranium enrichment facilities. This was followed by a cautious and pre-announced Iranian missile strike on the US military base in Qatar, the largest of that imperialism in the region. While the extent of the damage to facilities dedicated to military and civilian nuclear development is unknown, the damage to other facilities was certainly extensive.

But the brief war also showed how a small country like Israel, with a population of only 10 million – including 2 million Arab-Israelis who do not serve in the military – has great difficulty sustaining a conflict of greater length and intensity. In several cases, Iranian missiles overcame the sophisticated, powerful, and expensive interception system, causing damage and casualties, including among the Arab population.

This highlights how, in the context of the third imperialist world war, towards which capitalism is marching decisively, the destruction of Israel is by no means impossible, and how it is foolish for the working class of this country to rely on the military successes of its own national bourgeoisie. The only salvation lies in solidarity and international proletarian revolution, rejecting imperialist politics and war, first and foremost in one's own country, beyond the two pillars of Hercules that open the way to communist revolution: THE ENEMY IS IN OUR COUNTRY and WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE.

The brief war between Israel and Iran also showed the real value of the strategic agreement signed in January between Moscow and Tehran. Russia was unable to do anything to support Iran, confirming the difficulties linked to the war in Ukraine, which absorbs most of its resources.

A further test of this “strategic cooperation” was the agreement signed on August 8 between the United States, Armenia, and Azerbaijan for the 43-kilometer-long Zangezur corridor, which runs along the border between Iran and Armenia, connecting Azerbaijan to its enclave of Nakhchivan, and from there to Turkey. The agreement provides for the transfer of de facto sovereignty over the corridor, in Armenian territory, to the United States. Iran thus remains isolated from Armenia, and therefore from Russia, which again did nothing to oppose it. Iran now shares its northern border west of the Caspian Sea only with Azerbaijan, whose Turkish-speaking minority is a thorn in the side of the bourgeois regime in Tehran. This was a further gain for Turkish and US imperialism, at the expense of Iranian and Russian imperialism.

Prior to this agreement, in July, new inter-ethnic violence erupted in Syria, following that between Alawites and Sunnis in March, this time between Bedouins and Druze in the southern governorate of Suwayda, where the Druze minority is concentrated. This confirmed the fragility of the new Syrian regime and its inability to prevent clashes between the bourgeois clans of different ethnic groups. This had two effects: the Kurds in the northeast slowed down the process of integrating their militias into the new Syrian army, and Israel, under the pretext of protecting the Druze, bombed the Syrian headquarters in Damascus, a target very close to the presidential palace – as a warning to the new regime and to Turkey – and moved closer to Damascus with its troops stationed in the south.

The final element in this picture is the clash between Israel and the Houthis, who are constantly launching missiles at Israel, one of which on Wednesday, September 24, broke through the anti-aircraft shield, hitting Eilat and injuring several civilians. In response, Israel has repeatedly bombed Yemeni infrastructure controlled by the Houthis and institutional and political buildings. On August 30, virtually the entire Houthi government was eliminated in a bombing that killed 12 ministers and senior officials, including the prime minister and the ministers of industry, foreign affairs, and justice.

War and Class Struggle

As necessary as it is to understand the plots and maneuvers of imperialism in the struggle for the division of world markets, Marxism frames this dynamic within historical development, that is, the struggle between classes, on the political and social planes, which, since the opening words of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto of December 1847, has been “the engine of history.”

All capitalist states attack each other. Alliances are always between brigands, as this report also makes clear. “International law” is a fiction, a cover for the real fact that only the balance of power between the powers counts. “National sovereignty” is another sham, since weak bourgeois states are pawns of the stronger ones. These fictions hold up as long as the capitalist economic structure does not enter into crisis, as is its destiny, accelerating and exacerbating economic, political, and military competition, rising to military confrontation, which has never ceased, often with proxy wars, and, as this process advances, becoming open war between states, up to and including world war.

But all bourgeois states are first attacked at their base, internally, by economic and social crises. The wage-earning class is driven to struggle not by communist propaganda but by the worsening of its living conditions, the result of the advancing crisis of overproduction in world capitalism. If for capitalist states the principle of “national sovereignty” is a farce because the strong dominate the weak, for workers in all countries – both strong and weak – it is a farce because everywhere only Capital dominates and dictates.

The class struggle, which never ceases, is reignited and radicalized by the economic crisis, and in itself—implicitly—tends to endanger this social and political order in every state. A danger for the bourgeoisie; a goal for the proletariat that becomes explicit—declared and consciously pursued—only where the connection between the working class and the International Communist Party is strengthened.

Against this internal threat, the bourgeoisie has a supreme weapon: war. Against revolution: war. For every bourgeois state, it is easier to control the proletarian masses subjected to military discipline, in the army and in society, torn apart by the massacres of soldiers and civilians that imperialist war entails – useful for diverting them against a fake external enemy, to replace the supposed ideological interest of the Fatherland with that of the working class – than it is to control them in peacetime with ordinary police forces.

But a proletariat in revolt cannot be controlled in any way. The working class in Italy went on mass strike in 1943, even under German occupation and fascism. Police forces and repression are useless when society is in turmoil.

In the brief 12-day war between Israel and Iran, the Netanyahu government stated that one of its objectives was to bring down the Ayatollah regime. The result was the opposite: the external threat rallied moderate opposition around the regime and allowed the arrest of its most vocal opponents. Israel thus increased the stability of the Iranian regime. The same mechanism was seen on October 7, 2023: Hamas gave Netanyahu and the other executioners in his government the most welcome gift. Through war, bourgeois regimes help each other: they spill the blood of the proletariat to prevent their revolt.

In Israel, too, the partial military victory over Iran consolidated the internal front, which, after the first few months of unity following the carnage of October 7, had broken down, with increasingly large demonstrations every Saturday in Tel Aviv and other cities.

But the beneficial effect for the Israeli government and regime was short-lived. In July, demonstrations against the war in Gaza grew. The majority of participants were demanding the return of the hostages still held by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) – both living and dead. A truce was necessary for this return.

But a minority of this movement denounced the ongoing massacre in Gaza. Since July, they have taken to the streets with photos of tortured Palestinian children, in defiance of the police ban and breaking a taboo in Israeli society. These demonstrations have grown stronger.

Then there is the front of reservists, who in growing numbers (25%, they say) are refusing to be called up to fight in the Strip or the West Bank. It appears that around 40% of reservists returning from service encounter difficulties at work and economic hardship, often due to dismissal. The war, which has been going on for 24 months, is affecting the Israeli capitalist economy, worsening conditions for workers. It is an incipient crisis, but one that has been going on for some time, as evidenced by the teachers' strike against wage cuts imposed to meet the costs of the war, which the regime's Histadrut union boycotted.

In Israel, the anti-war movement maintains an interclassist and nationalist character in its participation and intentions. For August 17, it called on both workers and companies to “stop everything” for one day. Histadrut did not declare a strike, but only asked employers not to retaliate against strikers. It called for a strike last year, on September 1, 2024, but did not offer the slightest resistance to the court order that, after a few hours, ordered a return to work.

By not calling on workers to strike both against the war and in defense of their living conditions, explaining how these two aspects are two sides of the same coin, the anti-war movement is failing to address the crucial issue, namely the control of the regime's Histadrut union over the working class in Israel. Until a strong faction is formed within the unions that imposes the merging of the workers' defensive struggle with the struggle against the war, in solidarity with the exploited in other countries, the anti-war movement will not rise to the level of an effective working-class struggle capable of bringing Israel's capitalist economy to its knees and hindering the imperialist policy of that bourgeois regime, a vassal of US imperialism.

The Palestinian “Resistance”

Since its foundation, the State of Israel has imposed a hateful and intolerable regime of discrimination against Palestinians, enshrined in the 2018 law that defined it as a “Jewish state.” The Arab-Palestinian proletariat, despite enjoying citizenship and equal civil and political rights—except for the right to serve in the army, unlike the Druze and Bedouins—are the most exploited section of the working class in Israel, excluded for years from the regime's Histadrut union, and are thus subjected to double oppression, both class and ethnic.

In the West Bank, occupied by the Kingdom of Transjordan since 1948 and then by Israel in 1967, following the Six-Day War, the situation is worse, with outright apartheid under a strict military occupation regime. This fierce persecution has reached the point of extermination in Gaza.

But this “leap” in barbarism did not occur because of the characteristics of Zionist ideology, but because the unresolved Palestinian national question is now part of a world that has everywhere embraced capitalism, which has been in its final imperialist phase for over a century and is now marching towards World War III. In this context, the conflicts between imperialisms, between regional and world powers, are becoming increasingly bitter, and ethnic issues are being used in an increasingly cynical way to protect the interests of bourgeois states.

For decades, Palestine has not been the Algeria or Vietnam of the 1950s and 1960s, backward societies in a world with regions that were just emerging into modernity and the infamies of capitalism. In the decades immediately following the end of the Second Imperialist World War, some national bourgeoisies were still revolutionary, with the possibility of capitalist economic expansion and a relatively stable balance between the imperialist powers.

Today, Gaza and the West Bank are fully capitalist societies, with a bourgeoisie that is now reactionary, anti-proletarian, corrupt, and sold out to the regional and global bourgeoisie, inextricably intertwined with the dense network of capitalist and military interests in the area.

In the West, the prevailing narrative in the peace movement is that what is happening in Gaza is not a war but mere extermination. It is true, however, that extermination, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are instruments of imperialist war. In this interpretation, on the one hand there is a state, special in its ferocity, and on the other a “whole and united people” who “resist,” with or without weapons. This would be a unique case, not a stage in capitalism's march toward a third imperialist world war. There is almost no mention of the parties that dominated and continue to dominate Gaza, its society, or their ties to the imperialist powers.

As always, opportunism tries to wriggle like an eel, jumping from one justification to another so as not to be pinned down to the real social facts.

In Gaza, the population, especially the proletariat, which—as always in peace and war—suffers more than other social classes, is desperately trying to survive. Is “resistance” “survival”? Of course not, for its supporters! “Resistance” should be some kind of political action by the masses, peaceful or armed. But neither the “people” in general nor the proletariat in particular in Gaza are armed. Hamas has always been careful not to give weapons to the proletarian masses because these masses would use them against that reactionary and anti-proletarian party.

In fact, the only peaceful mass demonstrations in 24 months of war have been against Hamas – “Hamas barra barra!”, meaning “Hamas out, out!”, was shouted between March and April this year – for peace, that is, for surrender. The “resistance” of the proletariat in Gaza has been against Hamas. It has been courageous and healthy class defeatism.

The approximately 20,000 Hamas militiamen are a separate body, better paid and opposed to the proletariat, like any police force in any capitalist regime. On several occasions in the years before this latest war, they repressed protests and persecuted political and trade union opponents. It was Hamas that abolished May Day.

With the advance of the Israeli army and its weakening, armed clashes began between the dominant bourgeois families in the Strip, who for years had endorsed or suffered its rule and who are now beginning to come out into the open in view of the new balance of power that may emerge.

Confirmation of the class division in Gazan society and of how the bourgeoisie profits from the proletariat even in the desperate situation in which it finds itself today is provided by the statement made on October 5 by Sheikh Ihsan Ibrahim Ashour, Mufti of the province of Khan Yunis: "In the name of God... To my dear brothers, the landowners in the displacement areas... To those who govern the country... Some greedy landowners in the displacement areas have taken advantage of the displaced people, renting them plots of land to pitch their tents at exorbitant prices, which have emptied their already empty pockets and tormented their already afflicted souls... This phenomenon has increased in these difficult days... Is their behavior any different from that of exploitative farmers, exaggerated monopolistic traders, usurers, and brigands who sow chaos on earth, criminals, and swindlers? (https://t.me/hamza20300/381465).

The Islamic priest naturally appeals to the bourgeois authorities and the good hearts of wealthy families, but he must give vent to the anger of the proletariat, of course.

A few days earlier, on September 29, part of the Tabarin Bedouin clan organized a demonstration in the center of the Strip with about 50 armed men against the killing by Hamas of one of their members, an official responsible for the security of food convoys entering the Strip through the Kisufim crossing, just north of Khan Yunis (https://t.me/hamza20300/379573).

In Gaza, therefore, it is the militias of the bourgeois parties and clans that exploit and oppress the proletariat that are armed, some of which do not disdain dealing with Israel, as Hamas itself has done for years.

In Gaza, there is no united people fighting against the foreign occupier, but rather a proletariat oppressed by its own bourgeoisie and by the Israeli bourgeoisie, who wage war on behalf of the various regional and global bourgeoisies at the expense of the proletariat, both of whom are interested in and complicit in their massacre and extermination. As is well known, a large part of the bourgeoisie of Gaza lives abroad and from there decides what the local militias should do.

Even in the West Bank, despite witnessing the greatest martyrdom of the Palestinian population since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, there has been no reaction from the “popular masses” in support of the resistance, nothing reminiscent of either the first or the smaller second Intifada. Western supporters of the phantom “Palestinian resistance” pretend to ignore this historical fact of enormous importance. How can this be explained? Israeli repression? Certainly, but it was also extremely violent in 1987 and 2000! The conflict between Fatah and Hamas? Certainly, but Fatah is deeply discredited in the West Bank.

The decisive factor is that the proletariat in the West Bank, as in Gaza, no longer trusts national liberation to defend them, even though they recognize that they are still an oppressed nationality, because they understand that the oppression they suffer from the Palestinian bourgeoisie is no better than that from the Israeli bourgeoisie. The class question now transcends the national question.

They lack an international communist party that would give them the perspective of social struggle, of class struggle, in alliance with the proletariat of the entire area, including that of Israel, each primarily against its own bourgeoisie. This is the only path to the social emancipation of the Palestinians and the end of national oppression.

Outside of this perspective, the Palestinian proletariat is an increasingly useless overpopulation for capitalism, as its economic crisis advances and the third imperialist world war approaches. No one wants them: not Egypt, which has closed the Gaza Strip since 1980 more than Israel has, which, before October 7, at least allowed 15,000 Gazan proletarians a day to enter to be exploited; not even there do the other Arab countries want them; where they have historically been present as refugees for four generations, in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, they are discriminated against in a similar and even worse way than Arab-Palestinians who are citizens of Israel!

Their condition increasingly resembles, paradoxically, that of the Jews in Central Europe in the 1930s and during World War II: all states knew, but it suited everyone to have the National Socialist Party do the “dirty work” and persecute the Jews, because it was useful for stabilizing German capitalism on a social level, that is, for hindering the world revolution in preparation for war. Once that greatest massacre known to history – so far – was over and the genocide of the Jews had been consummated, the victorious bourgeois states speculated on the tragedy, presenting themselves as saviors and, above all, presenting this holocaust of the world proletariat as a just war, rather than an imperialist one on both sides.

What is happening in Gaza, therefore, is not the extermination of a people who are resisting against a state, but a war between two chains of capitalist powers in which the Gazans are being exterminated. The asymmetry of military forces and victims must not deceive us, and the atrocious barbarity must not blind us. Hamas has been negotiating with Israel for months, along with all the powers in the area. For months, they have been deciding that the war must continue, and with it the extermination.

Now the bourgeois states most known for their support of Hamas, such as Qatar and Turkey, seem to have reached an agreement, at the behest of US imperialism, and are urging Hamas to accept the truce.

Iran remains excluded and is the victim of this agreement. Evidently, the US has promised to give Qatar and Turkey important morsels of profit, starting with Syria, in exchange for abandoning Hamas, or bringing it into line, with a view to a further attack and downsizing of Iranian imperialism in the near future, which is welcomed by all these bourgeois gangs.

The latest plan to “rebuild” the Gaza Strip, packaged as Donald Trump’s 21-point peace framework, reveals the naked logic of modern imperialism: war and reconstruction are two sides of the same process of capitalist accumulation. Announced in September 2025, the plan combines a three-phase cease-fire with a sweeping redevelopment scheme projected at $100 billion in private investment and $20–30 billion in state-backed financing. Trump described it as “the biggest rebuilding project in world history,” while leaked prospectuses outlined returns of 300 to 400 percent over ten years for investors. The project would be managed through an international “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump himself, with participation from the U.S., Israel, Egypt, and select Gulf monarchies. Early financial outlines referenced 50 million tons of debris removal, construction of two deep-water ports, a special economic zone, three industrial parks, a coastal airport, and over 250,000 new housing units. Behind the diplomatic language lies a colossal commercial project: the transformation of Gaza from a devastated enclave into a profit-bearing territory for global finance capital. The language of “peace” and “stability” serves only to mask the fundamental reality: capital is preparing to profit from the destruction it helped create.

This is the essential pattern of imperial capitalism in its senile stage. War clears the ground, literally and financially, for new cycles of accumulation. Once the machinery of destruction has done its work, the same class that armed and financed it steps forward as “rebuilders,” issuing tenders, loans, and concessions to private monopolies. In Gaza’s case, those monopolies orbit the Trump–Kushner nexus. The leaked Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation (GREAT) Trust document listed nearly thirty corporations including Tesla, BlackRock, Bechtel, Siemens, and TSMC as “potential partners” in the new enclave, though many later disavowed involvement. The plan’s internal valuation treats Gaza’s coastline, estimated at 40 km of beachfront, as “prime redevelopment property” worth between $150 and $200 billion in long-term capital gains. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and former senior adviser, acts as the informal broker, coordinating with Israeli and Gulf investors through his firm Affinity Partners, which itself manages $3 billion in Saudi capital. Months before the cease-fire, he had already described Gaza’s waterfront as “very valuable real estate,” suggesting population “relocation” and “cleanup” to make redevelopment feasible. The merger of diplomacy, capital, and class interest is not coincidence but the normal operation of imperialism: state power opens new spaces for private enrichment, and private capital in turn sustains the geopolitical order that makes such enrichment possible. The displacement of millions becomes an opportunity for speculation; the ruins become collateral for new investment.

The cease-fire now being implemented, 20 hostages exchanged for roughly 1,950 Palestinian prisoners, partial IDF redeployments, and the daily entry of 400 to 600 humanitarian aid trucks, is only the first act. The second act, already in motion, is the auction of Gaza’s future. Consultancy models from Boston Consulting Group and other firms estimate initial infrastructure tenders of $15 to $20 billion for debris removal, port construction, and electrical-grid rebuilding, with foreign firms expected to capture 70 to 80 percent of contracts. Public-private development zones, designed to attract venture-capital and energy-sector investment, are projected to yield annual profits exceeding $8 to $10 billion by 2035. Reports mention blue-chip firms and construction conglomerates as “potential partners,” though most deny formal commitment. The truth is simpler: whether or not these names appear on contracts, the entire capitalist world-system benefits from the cycle. Reconstruction spending fuels global demand, generates new credit instruments, and sustains the rentier elites of the imperial core. Gaza’s rebuilding, like Iraq’s before it, is not a humanitarian necessity but a mechanism for restoring profit rates in a saturated global economy. Every dollar of aid becomes an investment, every act of charity a financial instrument. What is presented as “peace” is merely the continuation of war by other means, war for markets, war for profit, war for the survival of a decaying capitalist order.

The daily, distressing images of two years of war in Gaza, and the evidence that the ‘solutions’ being put forward by the various bourgeois states are orientated to suit their militarist circles, have led some to seek an immediate remedy in the sabotage of the arms industry.

“Palestine Action”, a group formed over five years ago got going in July 2020 when it broke into and spray-painted the interior of the offices of the offices of the Israeli weapons manufacturers Elbit Systems in London, and since then they have consistently used direct action of various sorts, sometimes in collaboration with environmentalist and animal rights groups, against a number of other weapons manufacturers and those associated with them.

But as Israel’s response to the armed incursion of Hamas and associated groups into Israel, in October 2023, became increasingly disproportionate, the group became heavily involved in pro-Palestinian and anti-war demonstrations. In June this year it entered the RAF Brize Norton base and damaged two refuelling planes by spraying red paint into their engines. Its stated intent was to prevent genocide and the crimes of British bourgeoisie “which continues to send military cargo, fly spy planes over Gaza and refuel US and Israeli fighter jets".

The British government then resorted to the Terrorism Act 2000 to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist group, making it an offence to be a member of the organization, to fundraise for it, to wear or display items arousing reasonable suspicion of membership, or if someone invites support or “expresses an opinion or belief supportive of Palestine Action”. The government has certainly not been slow to apply it, and it continues to arrest all those who infringe even the most innocuous clauses of this draconian anti-terrorist legislation. After the numerous and growing demonstrations in support of Palestine Action the number of arrests is now in the thousands; which attracted even more demonstrators, with many attending simply to vent their indignation about the lie being given to the myth of free speech and democracy. Many of the demonstrators certainly didn’t correspond to the typical image of the angry young anarchist, and the diverse demographics seem to indicate that pensioners, the middle classes and white collar workers are increasingly feeling the ground shifting under their feet as the crisis deepens and widens.

The government certainly wants to stifle protests but it is also keen to brainwash “public opinion” with a campaign of disinformation, by conflating antisemitism with antizionism and also with opposition to the lebensraum policy of the Israeli state, as the latter blatantly seeks to annex neighbouring territories.

On October 5 the new Home Secretary Sheban Mahmood announced plans to enable the police to impose restrictions on the duration of “repeat protests” or ban them outright.

But the ideology that informs these pacifist groups concentrates merely on the technical side of war and ignores its economic and social base. For them it is ‘the people’ oppressed by ‘the system’ rather than it being the working class oppressed by capitalism. And in the capitalist system it is not just the arms industry that carries out a crucial role.

In this restricted vision, the social considerations are ignored and national ones given priority: support for “Palestine against Israel”, with words or with arms? And, later, off to the national recruiting offices of one’s own country in the name of an imaginary justice in the future.

The real force that will overthrow capitalism, and along with it the arms industry, resides in the working class. But part of the process of unleashing that force depends on working people throughout the world increasingly coming to realize that all wars are wars against THEM; that in peace and war they must continue the battle to defend and improve wages and conditions, and that the enemy is always at home, in the ruling class, on both sides of the battle lines.

In October, the Party held a series of online public meetings, one in English regarding the political and economic situation in the United States and another in Italian regarding the situation in Gaza. Both meetings were a success featuring numerous attendees from throughout the word. We plan to begin regularly hosting these public online meetings. These meetings aim to broadcast Party doctrine and revolutionary perspectives to audiences globally, providing communist analysis of societal problems while capturing leadership over growing discontent to direct it toward revolutionary goals.

Since our last general meeting, two new videos have been added to our Youtube channel including, Lenin the organic centralist part one in English, and the leaflet Israel-Iran: Evidence of World War in Spanish. We are finishing the recording of Lenin the organic centralist part 2 in english within the next few weeks, and it will be available on the channel in the next month. We now have a total of 274 subscribers to the channel, 20 videos uploaded and 3944 total views.

A monthly mail order subscription is now available for TICP through CL-Publishers.

The North American section of the Party will now commence with regular printing and distribution of our Spanish language press. Write to our email if you would like to obtain some.

Already published in this paper are three report summaries from the September meeting. Other Reports will be published in a subsequent issue:
     - The war in Gaza is not a national war but an imperialist class war (Published above)
     - Pacifism in the United Kingdom (Published above)
     - An endless massacre to divide up Ukraine's riches (Published above)
     - Report on Indonesia (Published above).

In the clash between oil cartels for control of the market, we still find all the typical characteristics of the era of imperialism, repeatedly emphasized by our current and summarized during World War I, in 1916, by Lenin.

Global demand for oil continues to grow steadily, driven by emerging capitalist economies (young blood for capital accumulation), such as China and India, while supply has fluctuated due to geopolitical factors (sanctions on Russia, conflicts in the Middle East) and technological factors (shale extraction in North America).

On the market, alongside countries with high-consumption economies that are largely dependent on imports, others have high reserves but relatively modest economic activity, unable to consume all their oil. Countries with high consumption and low production are China, India, and Europe.

In capitalism, technology advances not to “save the planet” but so that monopolies can obtain superprofits from the slavery of millions of people.

Currently, with demand showing no signs of recovery, we are witnessing a structural oversupply, similar to that during the 2014-16 crisis. Production now tends to exceed demand. This has had its most obvious origin in the cultivation of shale in North America (fracking), the entry into the market of Guyana's production, and the changes undertaken by OPEC+, which has announced its intention to break with its policy of production cuts.

Global refining capacity has increased, but profit margins have declined in 2024. Stocks remain relatively high: the United States, Europe, and China have accumulated them, taking advantage of low prices. Venezuela has the largest reserves in the world; Saudi Arabia and Russia have enough for 50-60 years; the United States for 20-30 years.

Price volatility responds to capitalist crises and wars, reflecting market anarchy and inter-imperialist conflict. Market speculation is triggered by specific announcements and sanctions: the US is imposing severe sanctions on Iran and Venezuela and announcing secondary tariffs for buyers of Venezuelan, Iranian, and Russian oil. The US government had decreed Chevron's exit from Venezuela, but Chevron did not comply in order not to cede ground to competing cartels (China).

The US government pressured the Saudis to increase supply and reduce prices, making it easier for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. But the drop in prices below $65 is forcing US fracking companies to cut investments and close marginal wells. Shale companies are already heavily indebted. There is tension between the oil lobby and large consumers (IT, airlines, Amazon, Tesla).

Inter-bourgeois contradictions in the US are intensifying and projecting themselves onto the international stage.

Although monopolies occasionally make agreements with each other, the struggle and competition are not abating but intensifying in new forms. We have seen this in the history of OPEC and more recently in OPEC+. In 2023, Saudi Arabia (an ally of the United States) and Russia (one of the BRICS countries) agreed on production cuts, but they compete on Asian markets.

Today, if we update the list of the “seven sisters” in the West, we find large companies that dominate the global oil business, both state-owned and private giants.

In general terms, the big oil companies are associated with the various imperialist powers and are defended by the diplomacy and weapons of their states.

OPEC, which supplies 40% of world production and regulates prices by limiting production.

However, the United States, with 18% of global production, mainly from shale, acts as a counterweight, weakening the cartel. But the release of large quantities of North American oil onto the market contributes to overproduction and falling prices

War follows the economy. The rearmament of states is also financed by oil revenues. Capitalism turns oil into blood and blood into profits. War is inevitable as long as monopolies exist.

The interests of the states and corporations that control oil reserves and production are intertwined with those that depend on them for supply: although in conflict, both depend on each other, closely linked by the accumulation of profit.

The preference of some states for the nationalization of their reserves, extraction, refining, and marketing still responds to a capitalist model, which continues and does not emancipate itself from subjugation to national and international monopolies through financial, commercial, and technological mechanisms.

Areas of influence and control are already being established. The United States occupies 90% of the eastern oil fields (Deir ez-Zor) in Syria, while in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, five US aircraft carriers patrol the routes where 20% of the world's oil flows.

The conflict between Israel and Iran last June triggered an initial surge in oil prices. However, they quickly returned to previous levels once a ceasefire was announced and the absence of serious supply disruptions was confirmed.

The United States maintains bases in the Middle East to control the oil fields. In Africa, China extracts 10% of the continent's oil (Nigeria, Angola), competing with the French (Total) and British (BP). In Latin America, nationalizations in Mexico (Pemex) and Venezuela's struggle for the Essequibo territory clash with Exxon's interests.

With the weakening of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, the new Syrian government, more aligned with the United States and Turkey, and recent agreements between the United States and Saudi Arabia, the major Western oil companies (ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell) are strengthening their control over the regional market, while Russia and China see their influence and access to new projects limited, despite maintaining their positions in Iran and Iraq. The correlation of forces favors the United States and its Gulf allies, reducing the capacity of Russia and China.

But today, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Ethiopia, Indonesia) control 43% of world oil production and NATO (United States, Canada, Norway) 25%, partly thanks to fracking technology. But this division of the world is constantly changing.

The inter-imperialist clash thus shows different oil-rich theaters of operation, until the economic and commercial dispute escalates into general war.

In the Middle East, global tensions are expressed in the opposition between Iran and the United States/Israel. Saudi Arabia, a key ally of the United States, competes with Iran for regional hegemony. The “12-day war” does not put an end to this confrontation.

In the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey is challenging Greece, Cyprus, Israel, and Egypt over gas fields. NATO is divided (the United States supports Greece, but Turkey is a member).

Instability in Iraq and Syria: the presence of US, Russian, Turkish, and Iranian troops creates friction. Jihadist groups could be used as proxies.

In Libya, Russia, through the Wagner Group and Haftar, opposes Turkey/US/EU, which support the Tripoli government, for control of Africa's largest oil and gas fields.

In the Sahel and the Gulf of Guinea, France (and the EU) is losing influence to Russia (Wagner mercenaries) and China. Jihadist attacks could be a pretext for foreign intervention.

In Mozambique, rich in natural gas, armed conflicts are underway for control of the mega-gas fields in Cabo Delgado (TotalEnergies, Exxon, China).

In Eastern Europe, Russian gas is at stake. In Ukraine, as an extension of the current conflict, NATO could intervene directly. Poland and the Baltic states are hot borders.

Energy corridors pass through Azerbaijan, which is in conflict with Armenia. Turkey and Russia are vying for influence in the Caucasus. The TAP is crucial for Europe.

In Latin America, the United States is resisting China and Russia. In Venezuela, Russia and China have strategic investments in partnership with PDVSA. There is offshore oil in Essequibo, hence the tensions between Venezuela and Guyana, supported by ExxonMobil and the United States.

In the South China Sea, China is opposed by the United States, the Philippines, and Vietnam over shipping routes and gas fields. A Chinese naval blockade would affect 60% of the world's energy trade. In Taiwan, in the event of an invasion by China, the United States could intervene by disrupting chip and energy supply chains.

The dynamics of inter-imperialist contradictions over control of the oil business only confirm the positions of communists: monopoly domination, fusion of banks and industry; endless local wars.

On the other hand, monopolies create the basis of communist society, an enormous advance in the socialization of production and technical innovation. But in the capitalist regime, social production increasingly opposes private appropriation based on capital, wage labor, and exchange value.

Opportunists try to deceive the workers' movement with their calls for the defense of the national economy, sovereign control of oil fields and trade, and the demagogic utopia of multipolarity, dreaming of a capitalism in which cartels and monopolies compete peacefully with each other. Perhaps in an “ecological” way, “respectful of the planet.” In this way, they seek to mask their preparations for a new violent partition of the world.

The world proletariat, under the leadership of the International Communist Party, will be able to reject these deceptions and open the way to history. Through its class struggle, it will transform its defensive economic struggles into a political struggle for power: a new war of the workers against dying world capital.

(Chapters presented at the general meeting in May 2025)

6. The Communist Party of Italy and the Profintern

The PCI fully agreed with and applied the resolutions of the First Congress of the Profintern on Proletarian Unity and the United Front from below. Indeed, it anticipated them, having already reached those conclusions. An article of exemplary clarity appeared in Il Comunista on October 28, 1921, entitled “The United Front”:

"The Communist Party supports (...) the need for ‘proletarian unity’ and the proposal for a proletarian ‘united front’ for action against the economic and political offensive of the ruling class. This attitude, perfectly consistent with the principles and methods of the Party and the Communist International, is not always clearly understood (...) It is a gross misunderstanding to confuse the formula of trade union unification and the united front with that of a bloc of proletarian parties, or of the leadership of the action of the masses (...) by committees arising from a compromise between various parties and political currents".

The lack of clarity, which later became ambiguity and then outright betrayal, present in the Communist International on this issue, had already manifested itself in January 1921 with the famous “open letter” from the VKPD (Vereinigte Kommunistische Partei Deutschland, United Communist Party of Germany), on the initiative of Levi and with the support of Radek, sent to trade union organizations and all German “workers' parties.”

Even earlier, in May 1920, the Executive Committee of the International, responding to a letter from the Independent Labour Party, had responded favorably to the possibility raised by the latter of remaining within the Labour Party.

The same ambiguity became more evident in the Executive Committee's Theses on the United Front of December 18, 1921, where in point 20 we read: “While launching the slogan of the united front of the workers and allowing agreements between individual sections of the Communist International with the parties and associations of the Second International and the Two-and-a-Half International, it is clear that the Communist International cannot refuse to conclude agreements of this kind on an international scale. The Executive Committee of the Communist International made a proposal to the Amsterdam International in relation to relief action for the famine in Russia. It repeated this proposal in relation to the white terror and persecution of Spanish and Yugoslav workers".

Such errors and ambiguities were not yet betrayal, motivated by the illusion of being able to reverse the ebb of the workers' movement through maneuvers between parties. The counter-revolution would later turn them into principles and tools to justify its interclassist and gradualist ideology. Communism would remain a beautiful red dress covering a monstrous body, hiding the reality of capitalism and counter-revolution from the world proletariat.

7. The Profintern between the 1st and 2nd Congresses

Meanwhile, the Trade Union International in Amsterdam continued its line of class collaboration and a fierce anti-communist campaign, both by expelling individuals and groups from the unions and by splitting the unions whenever the proletariat took a decisive stand on class issues.

Between February and April 1922, the following meetings were held: in Moscow, the enlarged Central Council of the Profintern; in Berlin, the Conference of the Three Political Internationals; in Rome, the Congress of the Amsterdam International.

The enlarged Central Council of the Profintern, between February and March 1922, was attended by delegations from over twenty countries, as well as delegates from the Far East as guests. The Norwegian Workers' Party, having declared its acceptance of the 21 conditions of Moscow, without a congress or split, had joined the Third International en bloc. On the contrary, the Norwegian Trade Union Confederation remained in the Yellow International, despite the overwhelming majority of proletarians feeling solidarity with the Red International in Moscow. It was a strange position, reminiscent of that of Italy in 1919/20.

The Norwegian trade union leaders had proposed to the two Internationals, the Red and the Yellow, a joint action against the capitalist offensive. The first resolution of the Profintern Central Council was inspired by the Norwegian initiative, considered an attempt, at the international level, at a united front of the proletariat, in line with “the steps taken by the ISR Executive Office, which had already, on several occasions, invited the Amsterdam Steering Committee to take joint action on certain current issues, without, however, these requests being understood and accepted.” Despite this, the Profintern declared its willingness to participate in a joint conference of the two Internationals and entrusted the Norwegians with the task of drawing up a basic plan for joint action.

The second resolution concerned the unity of the proletarian front in response to the capitalist offensive. The Profintern set itself the goal of “acting in concert with all workers' organizations, whatever their political opinions” in order to achieve “a united front in the defense of the economic interests of the working class,” for objectives that could be shared by all: the struggle against wage cuts, against the extension of the working day, against the intensification of the exploitation of women and children, etc. But even these objective elements of struggle met with energetic opposition from Amsterdam, which refused to support anything that could compromise capitalism's emergence from the crisis.

The third resolution concerned “The Work of the Amsterdam Split.” One of the effects of the attitude of Amsterdam and the national confederations affiliated to it, aimed at the total subjugation of the proletariat to the needs of capitalism, was the abandonment of the trade unions by millions of exasperated workers. On the contrary, the Profintern encouraged the proletariat to join and remain in the trade unions, and to fight tirelessly for their transformation into revolutionary organizations.

The fourth resolution examined the relationship between the ISR and the anarcho-syndicalists. It specified that the ISR united anarcho-syndicalist, communist, and politically neutral workers under its banner and warned that the formation of an anarcho-syndicalist international would in fact be an attack on proletarian unity.

The fifth resolution referred to the “International Propaganda Committees.” They were entrusted with the task of “doing everything in their power to safeguard the organizational unity of the international federations and to admit all trade union organizations without exception.”

The sixth and final resolution concerned “the relations of the Executive Committee.” All measures taken by the EC for the proletarian united front were approved; the need for a central organ of the ISR, an indispensable weapon of organization and propaganda, was recognized; intensified activity among the proletarian masses of the Far East and the energetic defense of the interests of working-class youth were proposed.

The ambiguities regarding the attitude towards the Amsterdam International, and consequently regarding the slogan of the “united front,” are absent in the exemplary “Resolution of the First Plenum on the tasks of communists in trade unions” of March 4, 1922.

However, in the same month of March 1922, in contrast to what had just been decided, there is a “Contribution of the Presidium of the Executive to the draft program of the Communist Party of Italy,” where in point 4, on the united front, we read: “It is the duty of a communist party to attempt to undertake the struggle for the common interests of the proletariat in collaboration with other workers' parties, in order to compel the latter to join the united front.”