For the Struggle of the Working Class Against the Bourgeoisie for Higher Wages and Pensions and Better Living Conditions!

The following leaflet was written for distribution by the Venezuelan section of the Party

In the early hours of January 3, 2026, the US launched a military attack on various facilities in and around the Venezuelan capital, resulting in the capture and removal of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.

This military aggression was carried out under the “justification” of combating drug trafficking. For many decades, the US never took military action against Colombia or Mexico to capture any of the drug lords. The US’s fight against drug trafficking is very accommodating and selective. And with this narrative, they once again mocked what bourgeois legality calls “international law”, making it clear that “law” is imposed by those who have the power to do so.

But it is clear that US imperialism is carrying out a series of operations as part of its confrontation with Chinese imperialism, particularly focused on trying to preserve its control and influence in the American continent, which, in addition to being a market for its products, represents an important source of raw materials, with Venezuela being a key player due to its vast oil and gas reserves and its deposits of gold, diamonds, and various minerals of strategic value. This was confirmed hours later at a press conference, where Trump openly and explicitly stated that the United States will “govern” and administer Venezuela on a temporary basis until an “appropriate transition” is achieved and, in this context, the US will take control of the oil infrastructure to “fix it”, as it considers it “totally ruined” after years of Chavista management.

Trump announced that major US oil companies (referring to them as “the largest in the world”) will enter Venezuela to invest billions of dollars in repairing wells and refineries, reviving large-scale production to “generate money for the country” and managing exports, noting that the US will sell “large quantities” of Venezuelan crude oil to other nations.

Trump assured that the military intervention and subsequent administration “will not cost U.S. taxpayers a penny”. According to him, the expenses will be reimbursed with the “money that comes out of the ground” (oil revenues), using the resource to cover the costs of the operation and reconstruction. He clarified that the total oil embargo on Venezuela remains in force and under strict control of his administration, ensuring that oil will not be allowed to benefit the previous government structure.

Following Maduro’s capture, the U.S. government is now communicating and negotiating with a new interlocutor (Delsy Rodríguez, the vice president, who now assumes the office of president) and addressing issues related to control of the oil business and a possible transition to a new government. It remains to be seen how Chinese imperialism, which has been exporting capital to the region and will need to protect its interests, will react.

Venezuelan workers, who survive on starvation wages and pensions, or are harassed by unemployment and informal work, must understand that this is a clash between two capitalist states and governments. Workers in Venezuela and around the world cannot mobilize to support imperialist action, defend the Chavista government, or support any of the options for government change that bourgeois democracy may present to them. This is a fight between the enemies of workers, between those who exploit wage labor. The only real way out is the resumption of the class struggle by workers in Venezuela and around the world, putting forward their main economic demands.

In Venezuela and in all countries, let us bring the struggles together in an indefinite general strike without minimum services.

From different countries, the only possible solidarity must be class solidarity, solidarity with the Venezuelan working class and its struggles. Calls for “solidarity with Venezuela” or “solidarity with the Venezuelan government” are nothing more than reactionary calls to defend capitalism, exploitation, and the bourgeoisie.

The following article was written in December 2025 by the Venezuelan section prior to the U.S. intervention in Venezuela in January of this year.

Without even keeping up appearances, the Venezuelan bourgeois government, through its Minister of Labor and President Maduro himself, called for a “Union Constituent Assembly” and a Workers’ Congress to be held in December. The convocation aims to reform the Bolivarian Socialist Workers’ Central (CBST), which is the most recent example of “yellow unionism” that has developed from the highest levels of government.

Such is the cynicism of these representatives of the bourgeoisie that they have declared that yellow and employer unions must be eliminated (!). So far, they have stated that unions must adapt to current circumstances and to the government’s plans and policies, that they must organize entrepreneurs (a figure promoted by the government so that sectors of workers take on the role of small business owners) and “comuneros” (workers who are part of government-promoted communes and who do not necessarily work as salaried employees but as small entrepreneurs in small-scale projects). They also want unions to be aligned with the defense of the homeland and the territory and to organize workers’ militias for this purpose. The government has also emphasized the role of unions in ensuring the operational continuity of companies and supporting the smooth functioning of the national economy.

It remains to be seen to what extent the government will achieve significant progress with this political move, which also seeks to put it in the best position to curb or manage a possible social uprising, arising not from the schemes of opponents or “conspirators” or “terrorists”, but from the spontaneous reaction of the masses burdened by low wages, unemployment, and poverty.

Huntington Ingalls Industries, the primary shipbuilder for the U.S., has been awarded a new naval contract tied to the Trump administration’s push to expand the surface fleet, a move unfolding amid rising tensions in the Western Hemisphere. Liberal commentators have rushed to dismiss the project as inefficient or obsolete, debating whether a modern “battleship” fits contemporary military doctrine and framing the development as another irrational vanity project by Trump, whose policies are always framed as ever the exception from the normal state of things. Capital’s response has been more enlightening as Huntington Ingalls’ share price rose following the announcement, signaling investor confidence that this is not spectacle but a durable commitment of the state. As Washington escalates pressure on Caracas, naval expansion serves as a material assertion of dominance in the Caribbean and Atlantic regions central to U.S. imperial reach.

The contract also points to a broader economic need for U.S. capital in terms of the absorption of industrial overcapacity, particularly in steel. Large surface combatants require vast quantities of specialized steel plate and components, and naval procurement provides a stable, state-guaranteed outlet for an industry facing volatile demand, foreign competition, and recurring crises. Rebuilding the fleet thus functions as industrial policy by other means, channeling public funds into domestic steel production and shipyard employment while binding suppliers into long-term defense contracts. The proposed vessels are slated to host experimental weapons systems, including electromagnetic railguns and directed-energy weapons, integrating heavy steel construction with advanced electronics and power systems. Whether these technologies mature is secondary; their development sustains military industrial expansion critical for the continued accumulation of U.S. capital increasingly starving itself as the overproduction crisis intensifies.

Imperialism does not arm itself because weapons are aesthetically pleasing despite the ramblings of whichever bourgeois happens to be president at the time; it arms itself because capital requires secure trade routes, disciplined regions, and reliable industrial demand. In the context of tensions with Venezuela and broader competition over maritime control, naval rearmament ensures that economic pressure can be applied by force, while simultaneously providing an outlet for steel and shipbuilding capital in search of guaranteed markets. The rise in Huntington Ingalls’ stock, the clustering of shipbuilding initiatives, and the linkage between naval expansion and industrial revival all point to the same conclusion: this program is not an anachronism, but a symptom of an imperial system shoring up both its geopolitical reach and its industrial base, indifferent to liberal skepticism and unmoved by moral critique.

The rise of McDonald’s and other low-wage service industries occurred during the so-called “deindustrialization” of the United States in the 1970s-2000s. This process was advanced by globally dominant U.S. capital, which relocated production abroad to access cheaper labor, weaker regulations, and higher rates of exploitation, while simultaneously undercutting the bargaining power and wages of U.S. workers at home. As factories closed from the 1970s onward, capitalism did not replace industrial employment with work that could offer equally stable wages; instead, it expanded sectors requiring minimal fixed capital, rapid labor turnover, and strict managerial control. Franchised service industries like McDonald’s flourished under these conditions by absorbing displaced workers into precarious, low-paid service jobs. Now a similar phenomena occurs across the United States as the capitalist crisis and its associated social crisis continues to plunge the world into complete depravity.

Today, as the tech sector contracts (one of the last to give hope for a stable “middle class”) and speculative industries shed labor, the same dynamic reappears in a more degraded form. Capital once again fails to generate socially productive employment and instead proliferates marginal, informal, and semi-illicit sectors, among them massage parlors. Just as fast food expanded in the wake of factory flight, massage parlors grow in the ruins of collapsing tech and service booms, as predictable outcomes of capitalist crisis, where across the United States the social rot only intensifies by the day.

Across the United States there has been a rapid proliferation of these so-called massage parlors. These businesses increasingly occupy vacant storefronts in declining strip malls, marked by blacked-out windows and neon signs advertising “exotic” services. While this growth might superficially suggest an expansion in demand for massage therapy, the reality is far more brutal. Many of these locations function as thinly veiled brothels trafficking trapped immigrant women, forming part of an organized system of sexual exploitation through which tens of thousands of immigrant women are trafficked each year. Anti-trafficking researchers estimate that between 7,500 and 9,000 illicit massage businesses are currently operating nationwide, making them one of the largest sources of human-trafficking complaints in the country. Closely linked to online advertising for commercial sexual services, this industry is estimated to generate between $2.5 and $2.8 billion annually.

Recent investigations illustrate the speed and scale of this expansion. A 2024 investigation in Portland, Oregon found that illicit massage parlors there had multiplied from an estimated 36 locations in 2019 to at least 114 by 2024. These operations now vastly outnumber fast-food chains in many areas, relying on easily replicable, low-capital models that allow them to evade detection while rapidly relocating workers.

Estimates suggest that between 15,000 and 50,000 women and children are forced into sexual slavery in the United States each year, though academic and government figures may be far lower due to chronic underreporting and the clandestine nature of the trade. By comparison, during the territorial peak of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the number of women and girls abducted and sold into slavery was estimated by researchers to have been up to 7,000. This was considered a primary justification for renewed U.S. intervention in the area. While ISIS sold women in shackles in slave markets, in the United States the same commodity is pilfered only in vastly expanded numbers behind glowing screens and neon signs.

The immigration policies of the bourgeois state play a central role in sustaining this system. Rather than protecting vulnerable populations, these policies produce a vast pool of undocumented and isolated women who can be trafficked from site to site with minimal resistance. Stripped of legal status and access to collective defense, immigrant women are rendered hyper-exploitable. While bourgeois politicians posture over elite scandals and moral outrage, the everyday reality is that tens of thousands of proletarian women are subjected to systematic sexual slavery within the belly of U.S. imperialism. The spectacle of scandal serves to obscure the material conditions that capitalism reproduces daily.

This explosion of sexual exploitation must be understood within the deepening social crisis of U.S. capitalism. Economic decline has intensified unemployment and pushed workers into increasingly precarious and degrading forms of labor. Capital’s demand for expanded exploitation of women has often been masked in the language of bourgeois feminism, celebrating “working women” while concealing the compulsion to sell labor-power under worsening conditions. The breakdown of the traditional family, while historically progressive in dissolving archaic patriarchal social forms, has not liberated women under capitalism nor has it destroyed the patriarchy. Instead, women’s bodies are increasingly commodified, consumed as objects of sexual gratification and turning intimacy into a commodity which can be pilfered to create an endless number of socially cripled addicts paralleling the way opioids and fentanyl ravage working-class communities.

Whether sold directly to an employer or mediated through platforms that disguise exploitation as petit-bourgeosis bodily autonomy, proletarian women are driven into informal sex work, including online sexual content production, as wages stagnate and social reproduction collapses. Sex and reproduction become sites of intensified capital accumulation, even as the bourgeoisie promotes reactionary ideologies of masculinity that fetishize domination, wealth, and control. These ideologies are but byproducts of a system that reduces all human relations to exchange. Only the abolition of capitalist social relations, and with them wage labor itself, can end the conditions that make sexual slavery a structural feature rather than a moral exception.

The resurgence of open antisemitism within sectors of the American right is inseparable from the current crisis of U.S. imperialism and the growing popular opposition to the genocide in Gaza. As outrage expands, particularly among younger workers and segments of the petty bourgeoisie over Washington’s unconditional support for Israel, reactionary demagogues have moved quickly to intercept and redirect this anger. Figures such as Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson posture as “anti-establishment” critics, but in practice they transform class anger and anti-war sentiment into antisemitic conspiracies that leave the foundations of capitalism and U.S. imperial power intact.

This follows a well established pattern within bourgeois politics. Rather than identifying capitalism as the force responsible for war, exploitation, and mass death, these ideologues substitute myths of “Jewish power”, and shadowy global elites as the cause of the social decay. By framing Israel’s role as the outcome of ethnic or religious influence rather than strategic necessity, they obscure the fact that U.S. imperialism requires Israel as a permanent military, intelligence, and political outpost in the Middle East. Washington will not abandon its client state; at most, it may seek to restrain or discipline Israel in order to curb its own independent imperial ambitions, a contradiction we have previously analyzed in the U.S.–Israeli alliance.

The Republican Party has repeatedly served as an institutional laboratory for this maneuver, combining isolationist rhetoric with uninterrupted imperial practice. So-called isolationism has never in practice opposed U.S. imperial aggression. The current wave is sharpened by the war in Gaza. Widespread revulsion at mass slaughter has opened a political vacuum that revolutionary communism has not yet filled. Into this vacuum step reactionaries who claim to oppose war while recycling the oldest lies of capitalist ideology. For communists, the task is neither to defend liberal hypocrisy nor to tolerate reactionary antisemitism masquerading as modern anti-imperialism. Antisemitism, like all racial ideology, diverts class antagonism away from capital and toward imagined enemies. Its revival within the American right signals only capitals further decay, one more symptom of a system that can reproduce itself only through division of the proletarian, mystification of reality, and war.

Nationalist ideologies, converging throughout the world, are vigorously propagated, aimed at inducing peoples to prepare for mutual carnage.

In their manifestation in Israel, these nationalist delusions openly draw on racism, Jewish supremacism, and messianism with biblical references.

The thesis of collective responsibility of the Palestinian population is put forward, which would justify an equally collective punishment. Israeli President Herzog, in the Huffpost newspaper on October 13, 2023, stated that “The entire Palestinian nation is responsible. The rhetoric that civilians are unaware and uninvolved is absolutely untrue: they could have risen up”. Likud MP Tally Gotliv proposed dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza: perhaps she was confident that the atomic bomb would behave like the biblical angel of death on Passover, sparing the Jews and striking only their enemies. An Israeli rabbi declared that Palestinian children are future terrorists, so there is no need to have scruples if they are killed. Words that bring to mind Zyklon B...

The statement made in Haaretz on September 6, 2023, by Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad, has a different meaning: “A territory where two people are judged according to two legal systems is a state of apartheid”.

The supposed “subhuman” condition of Palestinians in relation to the superior Jewish race is constructed, imposed, and maintained by the State of Israel, which, for example, has had no qualms about supporting, financing, and arming Hamas for about 40 years, with the aim of keeping the Palestinian proletariat subjugated to imperialism and preventing any possibility, however unlikely under the current conditions, of their national affirmation.

It is certainly useful for the Israeli bourgeoisie, and for the North American imperialism of which it is a vassal, to keep the Palestinian proletariat divided between Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, and even more so from the Israeli Jewish proletariat.

Among the Palestinians, things are no different. In the 1980s, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah proclaimed that Jews were “sons or brothers of monkeys and pigs”. Thirty years later, the advisor on religious affairs to the president of the Palestinian National Authority called them “humanoids”.

We communists have never underestimated the importance of religions and ideologies, but we know that at their core, what ultimately determines historical events are the relations of production, the class relations. All the aberrations mentioned are only a means used by the Israeli bourgeoisie to pursue its goals, namely the strengthening of its state, which is also useful to the imperialism of which it is a vassal and whose interests it safeguards in the Middle East.

Even among Muslims, the centuries-old rivalry between Sunnis and Shiites is still important, but this does not detract from the fact that in practice it is used according to the interests of the various bourgeoisies.

Capitalists rekindle or dampen ideological and religious disputes to hide their true interests and their true enemies. The umpteenth example is Syria, where a Syrian offshoot of Al Qaeda, which has changed its name several times over the years, has come to power. Hatred of the American “Satan” and the Israeli “Satan” has not prevented this group from receiving weapons and funding from them, either directly or through Turkey, Qatar, and others. Bourgeois alliances come and go, as do terrorism labels.

The Syrian Assad regime, as bloody as all bourgeois regimes and states, was an ally of Russian imperialism: for this reason, the United States, together with its European and Middle Eastern servants, did everything possible to bring it down, ultimately succeeding. To this end, they also made use of their former enemies, Al Qaeda, now returned as good allies and on the path to tolerance, if not yet democracy. Alawites, Christians, and Kurds have already had the opportunity to experience this “tolerance”, distributed with bullets. The interests of the Sunni Syrian bourgeoisie, represented by the current regime, have therefore led Osama bin Laden’s grandchildren to establish good relations with US imperialism and to seek them with Israel.

The Palestinians, forced to survive in a sort of separate and formally independent cantons, as were the South African Bantustans, are being offered the creation of their own independent state. Even if these cantons are not annexed by Israel and this state ends up with a new puppet government in place of the old PNA, the conditions of the Palestinians will not change.

The Palestinian state, like Greater Israel, is just a mirage that the Palestinian and Israeli bourgeoisies use to maintain their rule, diverting the healthy and instinctive hatred that proletarians feel towards war and capitalist society against their class brothers in the other nation. There is no national solution for either the Palestinians or the Jews of Israel. The only solution is the united struggle of the Jewish and Palestinian proletariat against their respective bourgeoisies and their respective states or semi-states, for the communist revolution.

To those who consider themselves less “utopian” than us, it is easy to respond by showing where all the solutions devised by the policies of the bourgeoisie and opportunists have led.

The October 2025 revisions to the H-2A visa program quietly alter how agricultural wages are set. The Department of Labor has abandoned the Farm Labor Survey, which was designed to reflect farm-specific wage conditions, and replaced it with the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, a dataset drawn primarily from non-agricultural employers. At the same time, the program now establishes multiple wage tiers linked to job classifications and skill levels, fragmenting what had previously been a single wage minimum. Farm employers are also permitted to deduct the cost of employer-provided housing from the wages of H-2A workers, an option explicitly denied when it comes to domestic workers, even where housing is similarly provided.

The consequences do not stop with H-2A workers themselves. Migrant labor, bound by visa restrictions and employer dependence, functions as a disciplinary lever against the broader agricultural workforce. Its presence exerts downward pressure on wages and weakens workers’ability to resist deteriorating conditions. Rather than investing in mechanization or transforming production, capital relies on the continued availability of cheaper, more constrained labor.

None of this should be understood as accidental, poorly designed, or the result of partisan confusion. These policies are coherent expressions of capital in deepening crisis which must put downward pressure on wages in order to maintain profitability. A defense of wages and conditions must emerge through renewed class struggle unions which reject divisions between native and migrant labor.

The talons of capitalism reach far and wide, digging deep into the minds of every government of which are all bourgeoisie and willing to sell all their countrymen for a sliver. The current vicious attacks of US imperialism on the immigrant working class to extract even cheaper labor in inconceivably crueler ways are done with assistance from the Puerto Rican government, where they provided the information of 6,000 people who have state-issued drivers licenses to ICE in July 2025 due to a supportive immigrant law from 2013. This has led to the kidnappings of 500 workers in Puerto Rico, 75% of them being Dominican. Historically, the Dominican and Puerto Rican communities have been close and share cultural roots all the way back to pre-European contact times. This was an abhorrent trap set by the government of Puerto Rico: attacking the workers to serve the interests of their colonial bosses on a silver, blood stained platter.

Puerto Rico is neither a US state nor an independent nation, its status allows the Puerto Rican bourgeoisie to most ruthlessly exploit the Puerto Rican proletarian even though they themselves are more directly tied to the big bourgeoisie in the United States, they enjoy their subsidiary status and elect pro-Trump governors for themselves. The minimal access to wealth and resources the working class of Puerto Rico has is being siphoned into the pockets of both the Puerto Rican bourgeoisie and those in the United States. Neither Gonzalez nor any Puerto Rican governmental representative who supports this is gaining more than the illusion of having a spot in the American elite and a fraction of the capital they robbed from the workers. Gonzalez, dropping any false pretense of Puerto Rican national liberationism also green-lighted a US military takeover of the island as the United States war machine continuously targets Venezuela after detaining President Maduro on January 3rd 2026, and now potentially Mexico and Colombia. In turn, American workers suffer from increased taxes (indirectly a reduction in wages) to fund this in times where one sudden expense will lead to homelessness which keeps us jailed in wage slavery and forces us to fund the suffering of our fellow working class members.

The International Communist Party rejects this escalating attack on all workers as we have watched over and over throughout the decades how treacherous bourgeois pigs of colonizer and colonized countries collaboratively exploit, plunder, and pillage beyond all borders which they created to trap us in this cycle. We urge all workers everywhere, whether in the heart of the empire or in the depths of its colonies, to take your rage of seeing this long-lasting injustice to organize and strike back. We need to recognize that no bourgeoisie of any nation acts in the interest of “their people” and extend our hands beyond these falsified borders for our liberation through building the class union of the working world!

On November 15th, an immigration enforcement operation began in Charlotte, North Carolina. Nicknamed “Operation Charlotte’s Web", it was one of the many recent operations around the U.S., but the first to occur in the southeast, with up to 200 Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents deployed to the city, under the pretext of protecting the city from “violent criminal illegal aliens”. According to an article released by the Department of Homeland Security, Charlotte is a “Sanctuary City”, where the local government has limited the cooperation between its local law enforcement and Federal immigration agents.

In 2006, Mecklenburg county, where Charlotte is located, initiated a 287(g) agreement, which allows local officers to be deputized in order to carry out certain immigration enforcement duties. This agreement was discontinued in 2018, and this combined with the fact of Charlotte’s primarily democratic voter base is likely the reason why it was chosen for the sweep.

The effects of the operation were shown almost immediately; businesses that employed undocumented workers were forced to temporarily close down, as workers called out of work for fear of being detained. Schools reported that during the week of the operation, attendance was down 20%. The bourgeois media decried the pressure that the enforcement put on the city’s petty bourgeois, priests and ministers called for Charlotte residents to “choose love over hate”, and Latino youths took to the street to vent their frustrations with marches and chants. On November 20th, Sheriff Gary McFadden announced that the operations were over, but that ICE “will continue to operate in Mecklenburg County as they always have". Activists also reported that a convoy of federal vehicles was spotted earlier heading south towards Atlanta.

According to Homeland Security, 370 undocumented people had been arrested during the 5 days of the operation. An article posted on their website displays photos of “The worst of the worst”. Some of the horrifying crimes committed by these individuals against the American people include “petty theft” and “failure to appear in court”. As convincing as this facade might be, it was not for the sake of “law and order” that CBP were deployed to the city, nor was it for the purpose of protecting American jobs. One might wonder how the detainment of 370 undocumented workers could affect the labor market in a city with an undocumented population nearing 100,000.

The true purpose of the operation is revealed in the testimony of a worker interviewed after it was over: "They’re waiting for us to go outside, so they can hunt us like a cat hunts a mouse”. Undocumented workers are scared, afraid to leave their houses for fear of being snatched up and thrown into a detention center, but when economic necessity forces them to return to work, they will be all the more willing to take what they can get: Low pay, long hours, and whatever other abuses the whims of the bosses subject them to. Any instinct to fight back, to stand up to the bosses has likely been terrified out of them.

The short duration of Operation Charlotte’s Web compared to similar deployments in other parts of the country might lead one to believe the resistance offered up by the city’s leftist coalitions were successful. Maybe the agents felt guilty after hearing a sermon about how Jesus was an immigrant, or maybe lacking the mayor’s support, they just didn’t have the confidence to continue on with their kidnappings.The truth is that they left because their mission was completed, and they were simply moving on to terrorize the residents of other cities.

We are eagerly awaiting and, in fact, are working towards the formation of the Class Union that, under the leadership of the International Communist Party, will finally be able to offer genuine resistance to these attacks on immigrant workers, and attacks on workers’ standard of living in general.

The bourgeois media report daily on the massacres in Gaza and Ukraine, describing them as national, racial, and religious conflicts, which we Marxists instead define as imperialist, for the strategic control of territories and resources by enormous economic interests guaranteed by states.

In many countries, large masses have mobilized against the extermination in Gaza. Here, the major imperialist bourgeoisies have agreed to a semblance of a truce, which, however, claims victims every day, with the Israeli army on one side and Hamas on the other undisturbed in killing Palestinians.

On the conflict in Sudan, however, they remain silent.

The country became independent in December 1956 with the withdrawal of British and Egyptian forces that had occupied it since 1898, the date of the historic battle of Omdurman, which marked the end of the Mahdist revolt led by Sudanese rebels (nicknamed “dervishes”), followers of Muhammad Ahmad (the “Mahdi”).

The Republic of Sudan was immediately threatened by rivalries between the northern and southern provinces. Marked differences in social development and racial antagonisms divide the populations of the northern provinces, composed of Arabs and Nubians of the Muslim religion, from those of the south, who are black and live mainly in Equatoria and Upper Nile. Since then, a series of coups d’état has changed the leadership, but has not solved any problems, least of all that of the three southern provinces.

From Programma Comunista no. 19 of 1971, we read: "The Umma Party, representing the interests of landowners in the south, and the Unionist Party, representing the interests of the bourgeoisie in the north, have alternated in government, serving in turn the interests of imperialist powers that were soon reduced to three: the United States, Germany, and the USSR. In May 1969, with the rise to power of Gaafar Muhammad an-Numeiry and Awadallah, it seemed that the balance would finally tip in favor of the USSR; the breakdown of relations with the United States and Germany, accused of instigating southern separatism, the rapprochement with Nasser’s UAR, and the diplomatic and commercial relations established with the countries of the Moscow area and with China seemed to confirm this reversal. Mahjub’s Sudanese Communist Party itself supported Numeiry, albeit ‘critically’, and the diplomatic frenzy led the President of the new Republic, Awdallah, to say that ‘our socialism is specifically Sudanese and it is on the basis of our own traditions that we will build the new Sudan’, while Numeiry professed to be ‘a moderate socialist who believes in Arab nationalism’. Soon, however, the inconsistency not only of yet another ‘national path to socialism’ but of the very ‘path’ to the country’s economic and social development was revealed in all its harshness, with the political incapacity of the Sudanese bourgeoisie and the failure of Moscow’s foreign policy. The famous ‘mines’ exploded repeatedly.

In fact, Sudan would have a future of instability. Various wars followed, causing death, famine, and destruction. What is known as the second civil war, from 1983 to 2005, caused about 1.9 million deaths and over 4 million refugees.

After further conflicts, we arrive at the period between January 9 and 15, 2011, when a referendum was held in South Sudan on secession from the North and the creation of an independent state. The consultation was already part of the 2005 Naivasha Agreement between the Khartoum government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M). A simultaneous referendum was held in the province of Abyei to choose whether to be part of South Sudan or remain in Sudan. Nevertheless, the region remained disputed and effectively subject to joint control.

On February 7, 2011, Sudanese President Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir, formalizing the results of the referendum, proclaimed the birth of the State of South Sudan, which thus became the 54th African state. On July 9, after a trial period, South Sudan’s independence was proclaimed and immediately recognized by the Khartoum government.

But the new small state quickly plunged back into war, fought between 2013 and 2018 between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and those linked to Vice President Riek Machar, which caused at least 400,000 deaths and forced 4 million inhabitants, out of a population of just over 12 million, to flee their homes.

What is being fought in Sudan today is a proxy war, with regional imperialist bourgeoisies competing for the resources of a country rich in gold and raw materials.

Egypt and Eritrea support General Al-Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and his government based in Port Sudan, while Ethiopia, in conflict with Egypt over the GERD dam, supports Hemedti (RSF), Burhan’s former deputy in the previous military junta, together with the Central African Republic and Chad.

The United Arab Emirates, which is one of the largest importers of gold from the mines of Darfur, sends weapons, via the Central African Republic and Chad, to the RSF forces, which have been given economic and military support, including training and logistical support. In return, they have been involved in operations against Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Iran, on the other hand, a supporter of the Houthis, in order to counter Emirati influence and expand its presence in the Red Sea region, supplies drones to the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by al-Burhan.

Saudi Arabia, competing with the Emirates for hegemony over the Red Sea, officially acts as a mediator between the contenders, but in reality maintains close relations with the SAF, partly in gratitude for the support received from Sudanese mercenaries in the war against the Houthi rebels.

Russia is also very active on the ground. In 2017, it managed to reach an agreement for the construction of a naval base on the Sudanese coast of the Red Sea, but this has encountered several obstacles over the years and, as we write, we learn from the Russian ambassador in Khartoum, Andrei Chernovol, that its construction has been suspended due to the deterioration of internal security in Sudan.

China is also involved. According to various sources, it has invested $3 billion in oil fields and pipelines that transport crude oil from northern Sudan to Port Sudan, becoming a leading trading partner for Sudan.

Finally, the United States, while declaring itself neutral, aims to counter the growing Russian, Chinese, and Iranian influence in the region.

In short, it is a web of bourgeois interests in which none of the major world powers are missing, except for a now powerless Europe, without any economic or military strength to show in this conflict.

On September 12, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States announced a plan to end the conflict, providing for a three-month truce followed by a ceasefire and a political transition process.

But on October 26, with the conquest of the city of El-Fasher, the RSF regained control of the entire western region of Darfur, also maintaining control over large areas of the south of the country, while the Sudanese army controls the northern, eastern, and central regions along the Nile and the Red Sea. The RSF continued its massacres, killing hundreds of civilians, proving once again that scores are settled with the force of arms and not with useless pieces of paper in the form of improbable ‘roadmaps’, and always at the expense of the poor proletariat.

On April 22, the ISPI website stated: ’The war in Sudan has generated a humanitarian crisis that immediately proved to be extremely serious. Of a population that exceeded 45 million before the war began, 30 million are identified by the United Nations as in need of humanitarian assistance and nearly 25 million are exposed to high levels of food insecurity, while famine has been confirmed in some areas of Darfur and the Nuba Mountains. 12.6 million people have been forcibly displaced by the conflict: of these, 3.8 million have sought refuge in neighboring countries, mainly Egypt (1.5 million), South Sudan (1 million, mostly South Sudanese forced to return to the country from which they had previously fled) and Chad (over 770,000).

On October 21, Avvenire published a utopian appeal from the Comboni missionaries working there: “Italy must take civilians away from the hell of Darfur”. "In the city of El Fasher, besieged for 18 months, 260,000 people are at risk of starvation. Supplies of animal feed distributed to the population have also run out. El Fasher is the capital of hell. Half of them, 130,000, are children (...) A veil of silence has fallen over a civil conflict ignored by the media and the international community, which has caused the greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet with 14 million displaced persons and refugees and 26 million people starving".

This is how capitalism treats the proletariat of the world: it exploits them in their work or condemns them to death!

The wicked war for the division of Sudan’s rich underground resources has caused hundreds of thousands of victims and the worst atrocities over the years. We wrote about this in 2019 in issue 396 of our newspaper. "The pro-government Janjawid militias were engaged in fighting the separatism of the animist and Christian populations of the Darfur region, supported by the United States and Israel. RSF terrorism was used to try to stop a movement that had upset the old political balance in the country and had already led to the removal from power last April of President Omar al-Bashir, who was linked to the Muslim Brotherhood but also had good relations with Russia and China".

The capitalist mode of production now has nothing to offer the proletariat and the dispossessed of the world but suffering and death, in an attempt to survive its own self-destruction. The only salvation is its annihilation through proletarian revolution.

We wrote this in 1929 in the conclusions of “Elements of Marxist Economics”, ten years before World War II, and we read it today as World War III is being prepared.

“Capitalist accumulation in America, beginning with the Civil War of 1861, which produced enormous public debt, taxes, and the birth of the most vile financial aristocracy, reached dizzying heights through the World War and the period that followed. The United States, saturated with proletarians and threatened by massive unemployment, began to reject Asian and European immigrants. Inevitably forced to dump huge masses of products abroad, and perhaps tomorrow, for reasons of domestic policy, part of the plethoric industrial reserve army that is forming there, having arrived too late in the division of colonial rule, they will certainly attempt to colonize Europe itself, breaking down its productive apparatus and thus provoking a new and greater conflict”.

The Unions in the Age of Imperialism and the Future Reemergence of the Class Union

Across history, the relationship between trade unions and the bourgeois state has passed through successive phases corresponding to the historically developed phase of capital. At first prohibited outright, then tolerated, the established unions were eventually subordinated once capitalism entered its imperialist phase. In this final phase which predominates today, most of the existing unions are no longer merely pressured from outside by the bourgeois state. They are structurally integrated into the state and into the management of production through a combination of legal regulation, material concessions, and the systematic corruption of leadership. This works to shift the existing unions function from defending workers against capital to negotiating for capital the terms in which labor is sold. Instead of class defensive organs, such unions merely become the human relations firm for the boss.

This degeneration is not due to mistaken leadership or individual betrayal. It flows from the centralization of the forces of the bourgeois class in its State, which is the political content of fascism, the true political nature of capitalism in its imperialist phase ("Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State". - Mussolini). As long as unions remain confined within bourgeois legality which sets the terms of struggle, to follow a collaborationist union line, they will subordinate workers’ interests to those of Capital.

Yet this historical degeneration is not irreversible in principle, nor does it negate the necessity of unions as defensive organs of the proletariat. Class unions, properly understood, are not permanent institutions carried intact across epochs. They reappear on a general scale only when objective conditions force the working class back into open, large-scale conflict.

When crisis sharpens exploitation, destroys reformist buffers, and renders collaboration untenable, workers are driven to recreate organs of immediate defense, often outside, against, or in rupture with the existing union apparatus. These organs typically arise directly from struggle itself, not from organizational blueprints. They are marked by mass participation, militant strike action, demands around wages and conditions, and hostility to state mediation. As capitalist contradictions intensify and growing sections of the proletariat are compelled onto the terrain of struggle simply to secure their means of existence, legality, arbitration, and social peace lose their material foundation. Only under such conditions can defensive organizations assume a genuinely class character and the resurgence of class unions on a wide scale become possible.

The failure of unions today to respond forcefully to the ongoing decline in workers’ wages and conditions is rooted less in the absence of pressure than in the continued ability of capitalism to stabilize a slow and steady deterioration without provoking sharper economic cataclysm. Since 2020, real wages have moved unevenly, emergency state intervention after the pandemic temporarily propped up incomes, while labor shortages allowed workers to demand nominally higher wages, but the inflation surge of 2021-2022 quickly erased those gains as housing, food, energy, and healthcare costs rose faster than wages. More recent modest real-wage improvements have not reversed cumulative losses, and living standards remain precarious. Yet this decline has been partially cushioned by monetary policy, residual savings, credit expansion, and until recently expanded social programs. These mechanisms function as indirect wages, allowing unions to manage discontent through contracts and negotiations rather than confrontation. As long as deterioration remains gradual and mediated, workers integrated into the regime unions and the political frameworks of the bourgeois are structurally incapable of breaking with passivity or mobilizing class-wide resistance.

What is the Class Union?

The re-emergence of class unions will not take the same form as the stable, industry-bound, legally recognized unions familiar today. Depending on how struggle unfolds in each national context, class unions may arise either through the reconquest of existing unions by workers united behind an insurgent class program overthrowing legalist reformist leaderships, or through the creation of entirely new organs outside and against the established apparatus.

When capitalism enters a phase of acute crisis and legality ceases to regulate class conflict, new proletarian defensive organs tend to arise as fluid, interconnected networks rather than fixed institutions. In such moments, class organization may take the form of workers’ assemblies, strike committees, inter-factory councils, and territorial bodies, linking workplaces, sectors, and regions without regard for juridical boundaries. These organs coordinate strikes, mutual defense, and material support across the class, functioning as a network of struggle that converges and consolidates only later, if conditions permit. This is not a regression to “disorganization,” but a higher form of proletarian association corresponding to the breakdown of contracts, legal representation, and industry segmentation.

Such networked class organs do not replace the revolutionary party, nor can they substitute for political organization. Their strength lies in their mass character and immediacy; their weakness in their instability and susceptibility to confusion once the immediate pressure eases. This is why the role of the party is indispensable, not to build unions by decree or to substitute itself for mass organs, but to provide programmatic continuity, to oppose any return to legal subordination and class collaboration, and to link economic struggle to the broader revolutionary movement while advocating for these emergent networks to grow into centralized and well organized international bodies of proletarian defense. Without the party, newly formed class unions risk oscillation, degeneration, or reabsorption once the balance of forces shifts.

Furthermore, only with the active participation of the party in the trade union movement, through its fellow workers, is it possible to wage a consistent, determined, and effective struggle within the existing unions, capable of accelerating the process of rebirth of the class-based unions.

The National Character of Union Integration

In Italy, due to the strength of the labor and communist movement after World War I, the bourgeoisie first had to destroy the class-based unions and replace them with state unions, known as “corporations.” This was done through fascism. But the democratic republic that emerged after fascism inherited the political content of fascism, namely the subjugation of the interests of the working class to those of national capitalism.

The CGIL, reborn in 1944, was formally free, but its subjugation to national capitalism – that is, its nature as a “regime union” – was guaranteed by its leadership by the Stalinized Communist Party (since 1926).

In other countries, due to the weaker strength of the labor and communist movement, existing unions became “regime unions” without the need for their destruction, as happened in Italy and also in Germany. (The part about CCNL and the organizational structure is not completely correct. We could have a talk about it. Anyway the problem is not an organizational issue, but a political one).

In Germany, union integration is achieved through a highly disciplined legal framework centered on Sozialpartnerschaft (social partnership). The Tarifvertragsgesetz (Collective Agreements Act) gives legally binding force to sectoral agreements negotiated by unions and employers’ associations on a national scale. Strikes are lawful only in support of collective bargaining and only after contracts expire. Political strikes and national general strikes are illegal. At the workplace level, the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz (Works Constitution Act) mandates Betriebsräte (works councils), which are legally required to cooperate with management in the “interest of the enterprise.” Unions thus bargain at the sector level, while works councils administer labor discipline at the firm level.

In France, union density is low, but preserved through state-managed representativity. The Labor Code (Code du travail) defines which unions are “representative” and allows the state to extend collective agreements signed by a minority of workers to entire sectors. The state plays a central role through national negotiations and legislative intervention, as seen in repeated pension reforms. General strikes are legal. Yet they are largely ritualized by the unions’ opportunistic leaderships, functioning as pressure mechanisms within negotiations.

In the United Kingdom, a mix of historical practices and later legal changes gradually drew unions into the orbit of the state. Early national and industry-wide bargaining encouraged unions to focus on maintaining stability within their sectors rather than acting independently against employers. After World War II, especially in the public sector, unions became involved in centralized wage talks with the government, further tying them to state decision-making. From the 1980s onward, strict labor laws, requiring strike ballots, banning secondary action, and allowing courts to penalize unions, forced unions to control their own members in order to avoid legal and financial consequences. Together, these developments turned unions into regulated participants in state-managed labor relations, limiting their ability to act freely and reinforcing their role as mediators rather than independent vehicles of worker struggle.

Outside Western Europe, the integration is more overt. In China, unions are direct organs of the party-state, and independent organization is illegal. In Russia, formal pluralism masks effective state supervision and repression. In all cases, unions persist as institutions precisely because they no longer function as organs of class struggle.

Union Integration in the U.S.

The United States followed a different path. There is no constitutional recognition of unions, no mandated representation, and no sectoral bargaining imposed by law. Instead, union integration occurred through the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and its enforcement body, the National Labor Relations Board. This framework did not impose compulsory unionism in a corporatist sense; it conditioned union survival on legality. Certification granted exclusive representation rights only in exchange for strict compliance with procedural rules, arbitration mechanisms, and the suppression of generalized strike action.

This system was completed after the Second World War through the convergence of law, repression, and prosperity. The NLRB regime fixed unions within procedural limits and tied their existence to state recognition. The Red Scare eliminated militants and expelled communists from the unions. At the same time, imperialist super-profits and postwar reconstruction allowed capital to raise wages, stabilize employment, and expand social programs just enough to dull the hunger that drives mass class struggle. Collaboration did not appear as capitulation but as common sense.

Established unions, already moving toward reformism before the war, were completed as organs of bourgeois order in this period. Bound to contracts, integrated as appendages to the Democratic Party, and dependent on legality for their survival, they became mediators between labor and capital, managers of labor peace, and electoral machines. This integration was not imposed mechanically; it was embraced by union bosses who sold a bill of opportunism and class collaboration as the most effective path towards improvements in workers standards of living contra the hard fights promised by real class struggle. Militants in unions who refused this path, such as the IWW, which rejected state recognition and opposed the first world war, were crushed through raids, blacklists, and outright muder. The lesson was legality meant survival; independence meant persecution and death.

The NLRB did not outright abolish the possibility of class unions; it made that possibility socially costly and improbable in a moment of capital’s reconstruction. Operating outside the legal order remained possible, but only under conditions of desperation no longer present in the postwar period. The belly was filled, and the fist unclenched. The absence of class unions today reflects not merely bad leadership or mistaken tactics, but a historical balance of forces in which legality, repression, and material concessions dissolved proletarian independence. Defensive class organs reappear only when legality fails and collaboration no longer feeds. Yet even such conditions are insufficient without revolutionary leadership. Without the party, struggle remains episodic and defensive, easily reabsorbed once immediate pressures recede.

The Party and the Unions

It would be a fatal error to conclude that activity within existing unions in the United States should be abandoned in principle. Precisely because these organizations remain, despite their degeneration,one of the few spaces where workers are assembled as workers, they cannot be ignored. This intervention takes the form of building united fronts of class and combative forces: rank-and-file caucuses, oppositional groupings, and militant minorities resisting arbitration, no-strike clauses, and subordination to the political parties of the bosses while pushing for the extension of strikes, their unification above companies, categories, and territories, with the goal of achieving the capacity to deploy a general strike.

In certain moments, such forces may even temporarily capture leadership positions, not to administer labor peace, but to strengthen the workers’ struggle. The Communist Party fights within the labor and trade union movement to ensure that these achievements in terms of organizing the workers’ struggle become as strong and stable as possible.

The party can choose which unions to intervene in where there are multiple trade union organizations in a given category, sector, region, or company, and it does so according to the criterion of how amenable they are to the party’s trade union agenda. Where this is not possible, the party instructs workers to join the only existing union and fights within it to spread its trade union agenda.

The recent weakening and political attack on the NLRB by the bourgeois itself has already begun to erode the stability of the legal regime, opening space for broader, coordinated action that partially escapes regulatory control. Such moments signal not the revival of legal unionism, but its exhaustion.

The direction remains to push workers toward rejecting the framework of class collaboration and, where conditions permit, to forge new class unions rooted in direct struggle. But such organs cannot be created out of thin air. They will arise only through the convergence of mass action and revolutionary leadership. Until then, work within the unions remains a necessary, if constrained, front of the class struggle, and the preparation for its future rupture.

With the Trump administration at the helm of the bourgeois state in the United States, unleashing a wave of repression on immigrant workers and the working class broadly, Labor Notes, a labor organization that promotes union reform and union democracy while also promoting increased use of strike action and new organizing drives, has published what it presents as its contribution to the “debate and discussion” of how the working class and U.S. labor movement can respond, in a series of articles entitled “How Can Unions Defend Worker Power Under Trump 2.0?”. Labor Notes frames the question this way: “authoritarian consolidation of power is testing unions. What can unions do to survive in the second Trump presidency? What tactics and strategies can help organize more new members and best survive an all-out assault on labor and other rights?”

The answers presented in this series of articles follow familiar paths of opportunism, long familiar to the Party, which are often sold to the working class as solutions to its increasingly desperate situation. These include embracing electoralism and the supposed need to defend democracy in the face of “authoritarianism” and “Trumpism”.

As the overtly fascistic side of capital, embodied in the Trump administration and the MAGA movement within the Republican Party, working hand-in-hand with its “democratic” companions, takes its turn managing capitalism in the United States, it brings with it the increased centralization of state power and the economy, overt bigoted nationalism, a quickened disintegration of the middle class and petite bourgeois in favor of mega-conglomerates of capital, and intensified state repression against the working class, especially immigrants. In response, the labor left grows disquieted and revisits the call made by UAW (United Auto Workers) leadership and President Shawn Fain for a general strike in 2028, through aligning labor contract expirations around May 2028. This call came on the heels of the 2023 United Auto Workers strike, which inspired the U.S. labor movement with its “rolling strike” against the three major automakers: Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Stellantis.

This call is shrouded in ambiguity and raises serious questions, since the UAW has not committed significant resources to organizing it, including establishing a central body to coordinate the effort, instead seeming to rely on other unions to answer the call spontaneously. As May 2028 approaches, the plan of action remains ambiguous and commitment half-hearted. Still, a limited but substantial number of unions have signed onto the call to align contract expiration dates for a mass strike on and around May 1, 2028, including the American Federation of Teachers. For that reason, it is important to examine this initiative closely.

As we enter 2026 with only a small minority of unions having actually lined up their contracts, any potential general strike is likely to be lackluster. Moreover, UAW leadership has framed the strike as necessary to “defend democracy”, sabotaging it from the outset by anchoring it in opportunist, cross-class collaboration. This opportunism must be opposed by all class-unionist forces to keep any general strike on a combative class basis, so it can truly defend the working class and land a real blow against the capitalist class.

Labor Notes: Selling Workers on the Futile Defense of Democracy and an Electoralist Path

In this recent series, and in other pieces published by Labor Notes, the problems faced by the working class are offered some practical solutions, like increased unity of action across unions. However, the series falters as the problems facing the working class are framed as “corporate greed”, “the billionaire takeover”, “creeping authoritarianism”, and “Trumpism”. The solution? Let’s fight for more democracy! How do we get there? By placing workers’ hopes in bourgeois social-democrat politicians (e.g. the Mamdanies and AOCs), activism (e.g. the unforceable petitions), and interclassist organizations (e.g. single issue coalitions).

As one Labor Notes article puts it: “To every major American institution, one question will be posed over and over in a friendly but pointed manner: which side are you on, the people or the autocrats?” This obscures the class nature of the workers’ struggle. Workers are told it is the ambiguous “people” vs “autocrats”, rather than the clear, materially grounded enemy of the working class: the capitalist class, the class that has the exclusive authority of the companies, industries, and banks, which exploits the value created by the working-class. To identify the enemy of the working class as anything other than the capitalist class is to weaken the struggle by misdirecting and confusing it.

Simply put, democracy is nothing but the governing form of the capitalist class’s dictatorship in times of “peace”, a game of parliament which is favorable to interests of the capitalists whose economic privileges allow it to always direct it in its favor, when capitalism can afford to exist without the iron fist of fascism.

And the democracy we are being called to fight for is itself fascistic. The capitalist class continually requires the centralization of state power and the economy to reign in the antagonisms of its “sacred order” including the incorporation of unions into the state, so that society can be managed as a single unit with minimal resistance from the working class and the petite bourgeois, in order to manage crises and keep accumulation going. This is highlighted by our Party: “after World War II: the “democratic” states defeated the “fascist” ones, but fascism defeated democracy, and all countries became, some quickly, other slowly, more “fascistic”.

Under this democratic-fascist state, leaning from time to time to more or less into its democratic veneer, working-class exploitation continues, and the imprisonment and violence against immigrants remains the same. In the “oh so wonderful time!” of the Obama administration, often held up as the peak of U.S. democracy, 3.1 million deportations took place, an astounding historical number. Surpassing the 2 million of the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s under the Republican presidency of Hoover. Under Obama, immigrants deported during these supposed times of “peace and democracy” suffered at the hands of the state’s immigrant-policing apparatus and its prisons, just as they have suffered under times of “fascism”.

As the Party makes clear: “The real fight against fascism is the fight against democracy, the fight for the reconstitution of the proletarian class movement, with its class program and its class organization, the communist party. For many, this takes too long: “Fascism is coming, let’s quickly unite all men of good will to fight it, now,” they say. But in reality, such people are nothing other than defenders of capitalism.”

It must be asked: how shall the working class obtain this supposed defense against “authoritarianism”? Labor Notes highlights the utility of a general strike, which will be further discussed in this article. Alongside the general strike, support for the Democratic Party, presented as the “defenders of the working class,” is urged, as well as the working class’s subordination to its appendages, including No Kings and the 50501 movement.

In addition to backing traditional Democrats, Labor Notes, the labor left, and opportunists of all flavors and persuasions have ecstatically celebrated recent electoral victories by social democrats, touting them as working-class saviors, including so-called “movement mayors” like Mamdani in New York and Johnson in Chicago, who spoke at the 2024 Labor Notes conference. The Party wrote that the endorsement of such politicians by the labor left and others “underscores the delusional outlook of social democrats who view the bourgeois state as a neutral arbitrator between labor and capital”...“Mr. Mamdani is a part of a larger trend within the Democratic Party to return to [a] social democratic phase. The goal is to rejuvenate dependence on the holy bourgeois state and faith in the name of its lord, profit; to prepare for sacrifice on the futuristic battlefields of tomorrow.” For Labor Notes to promote such a view, and to sell the working class on the path of electoralism, weakens the struggle and delays the class’s return to combativity by selling it a dead-end path of putting workers’ faith in the ruling class Democratic Party and their social-democrat faction.

We are then told “of the many good reasons why [we] shouldn’t give up hope, the first is that popular resistance is growing, as seen in the recent Indivisible-initiated No Kings day protests”. And what should the working class do? “Our best bet might be to launch a concerted organizing campaign culminating in a “No Kings, No Business As Usual” day of action.”

Underscoring the falsity of this statement is the fact that Indivisible’s No Kings actions have not impeded the Trump administration’s and the capitalist class’s attacks on the working class in the slightest, from the arrests of immigrants to the slashing of social spending.

This quote also makes it clear that elements of the labor left seek to chain the working class to a popular-front project that absorbs class combativity into inter-class politics aimed at stabilizing the bourgeois state, subordinating workers’ demands, and diverting struggle away from class unionism and the power of the general strike.

As we stated, “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-bourgeois capitalism from oligarchy, 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.” And from the Party’s intervention at the No Kings protests, we declared “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.”

General Strikes and May Day 2028

We must expose the opportunist currents shaping calls for a general strike in the United States, including the May Day 2028 initiative promoted by UAW leader Shawn Fain, which urges unions to align contract expiration dates around May 1, 2028 in order to stage a mass strike within the legal framework that constrains workers in the U.S. The demands tied to this effort remain unclear and scattered, ranging from Medicare for All (i.e. universal healthcare) and “protecting democratic institutions” to a shorter work week, retirement security, and other claimed improvements to workers’ lives.

While the Party supports and leads growing unity of action, coordination among working-class organizations, and generalized strike action, it is imperative that such action be pursued on a class-unionist basis and not remain on opportunist and collaborationist terrain by those who seek to preserve labor peace in order to maintain the ruling class’s regime of profit accumulation. Such opportunist and collaborationist elements must be opposed and overcome by all class-combative forces, and those class-combative forces must be united.

It is important to highlight that Shawn Fain and UAW leadership are fervent supporters and servants of the ruling class’s Democratic Party, which has committed innumerable attacks and violence against the working class, from facilitating deportations of immigrant workers to working with collaborationist union leadership to prevent worker strike action and force concessions to the capitalist class onto workers. For example, during the potential 2022 railroad workers strike, the strike was ended before it even began by Congressional intervention led by the Democratic Party and the collaboration of union leaders.

At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Shawn Fain spoke, claiming “This election comes down to one question. Which side are you on? On one side we have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who have stood shoulder to shoulder with the working class...For us in the labor movement, it’s really simple. Kamala Harris is one of us.” One of us? Once again, opportunism seeks to obscure clear class lines to confuse and misdirect the struggle of the working class.

Independent, combative working-class organization and action are necessary for a general strike to become a real, damaging blow against the ruling class. But in a democratic-fascistic state, truly independent worker action is only tolerated up to the point where it threatens profit accumulation and risks breaking the grip of opportunist forces inside the class. One only needs to remember the 2023 UAW “Stand Up” Strike that was limited to a few plants, avoiding the full mobilization of workers despite their willingness! For that reason, an opportunist leadership like Shawn Fain and the UAW would likely derail any genuine move toward generalized action the moment it begins to pose a real threat to the ruling class.

Objectively, such a mass, generalized strike, which has served as a critical weapon in the struggle of the working class in the United States and beyond, is difficult to achieve at this point through the tactic of aligning contract expiration dates. First, it relies on labor law and the state, designed to restrain class combativity and maintain labor peace. Second, most workers don’t have contracts to align in the first place. Third, labor contracts renew every few years and, at this point, most labor contracts are going to expire past this date, weakening a potential strike around May 2028 due to the limited section of unions and workers committed to striking then.

In addition, 90% of workers in the United States remain unorganized, leaving many workers without the ability to take collective action. It is important, as Labor Notes has done, to encourage unorganized workers to organize, though in most cases within an overly legalistic context relying on bourgeois state guarantees that, at the end of the day, corral workers to certain confines of action, aiming toward a false labor peace asserted by the state, union leadership, and the ruling class. Organizing unorganized sections of workers on a class-unionist, class basis will prove critical to the success of wide, coordinated strike action and a return to class combativity, organizing work that is often neglected and under-resourced within the established unions.

It is also critical that a general strike remains that: a strike. As noted in one of the Labor Notes articles: “the most powerful tactic for expressing…broad anti-authoritarian alliance is a broad-based general strike – sometimes called a civic shutdown – that includes not only workers, but also supportive local governments, churches, media institutions, professional associations, and even some businesses.” Setting aside the problems with selling workers the necessity to defend democracy, it is increasingly apparent that the labor left often views a general strike as something to take place outside of the working class, involving interclassist organizations, including community and activist groups and churches, and local governments, which only serve to water down the power, class combativity, and content of such a strike. This further disconnects the working class from its combative footing by muddying the very definition of what a strike is.

A strike is one of the greatest weapons the working class has against the bourgeoisie because it stops the lifeblood that keeps capitalism and the bourgeoisie alive: the value workers’ labor creates. This is where the power of a strike lies. And in particular, a general strike is when workers, across a multitude of unions and industries, “collectively withhold their labor-power in order to overwhelm the bourgeois repressive apparatus and force concessions by paralyzing the reproductive cycle of capital”. To create confusion about this is to sabotage and weaken a strike by involving futile elements such as activist organizations and churches, tactics (including consumeristic tactics like boycotts), and demands foreign to class combativity due to their separation from the material basis of wage earners as a class.

Leading such a strike into opportunist demands, such as the strengthening of democratic institutions, the implementation of particular social services, and “taxing the rich”, ultimately weakens the strike and its coercive power on the capitalist class. It does so by demanding reforms that reinforce the role of the bourgeois state, reforms historically used to pacify the working class by temporarily granting a slight reprieve from the misery of capitalism. Historically, this happened, for example, in the New Deal, which came on the heels of heightened strike activity and proletarian combativity, granting programs such as Social Security and legal guarantees to unions in order to pacify and control the working class.

Demands for increased wages and the shortening of the working week without lowered wages should be foregrounded because winning these demands hurts the ruling class where it hurts the most: their profits, by claiming a larger piece of the pie and depriving the capitalist class of large amounts of the working class’s labor time. In addition to this, demands for increased wages and the shortening of the working week unite the working class across the board. Positively, demands such as a 32 hour work week are in the mix of discussion connected to the effort to organize a general strike on May Day 2028, which would certainly be a class-combative demand for the U.S. working class and internationally to take on.

The Only Way Forward Is Class Struggle

In conclusion, the labor left, including Labor Notes, works to corral the most combative sections of the working class back into the collaborationist union line and agenda. This echoes a well-known lesson from the international working-class struggle and its Party: the treachery of the social democrats in the wake of the great post–World War I revolutionary wave, and the fact that they have often proven to be among our greatest enemies. They posture as militants and trade in radical slogans, only to act as a poisonous force by selling the working class labor peace, incrementalism, and the defense of the nation and democracy.

In the face of capitalism’s continued disintegration and increased recourse to state repression and the centralization of state power, furthering the liquidation of the middle class, the labor left seeks to sell the working class on the need to defend democracy by poisoning its struggle with electoralism and activism. By extension, it weakens one of the working class’s greatest weapons, the general strike, by imposing opportunist demands, promoting consumeristic tactics, and drawing in non-working-class elements, dragging the strike onto a non-class basis. Such opportunism must be opposed and overcome by combative working-class forces, forces that must ultimately unite to support the return to class combativity among the working class.

While only the future will tell what becomes of the May Day 2028 general strike initiative, one thing is certain: if the working class is to defend its conditions with generalized strike action against the attacks of the capitalist class, it must fight for such strike action to be on a classist basis, including in its tactics and demands. The hard work of building coordination on ever larger scales must also be undertaken, as the objective conditions for such class-combative action mature. This includes the necessity for all workers to organize their workplaces and to bring together worker organizations to coordinate collective power to increase their economic leverage and power to coerce the capitalist class into meeting demands for increased wages and the shortening of the working week without a decrease in wages.

As was put forth in the Party’s leaflet, “No Kings” demonstrations: The Necessary Direction of Struggle: Class Unionism:

“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 sides of the same coin, one way or another this capitalist system 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!”

The Starbucks Workers United (SWU) union went out on an “open ended” unfair labor practice (ULP) strike on November 13th. Reported to have started with 40 cities and 65 stores. The strategy centered around the “Red Cup Day” promotion which is a busy time for the company. The strike, the union said, is a protest for better contracts, pay and staffing. The SWU union itself was originally organized by Workers United which is an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The SEIU, a business service union, presents itself as an organizer led union member “inclusive” style union. In reality it’s no different than other collaborative boss linked business service unions. Where the leadership and paid staff keep the union members uninformed from big picture things such as strikes and negotiations to not even knowing the union representative assigned to their shop floor. They push electoralism and legalities on the union members as solutions to their immediate economic and working conditions.

This is the crux of the matter in which the class faces the established unions in the United States. Everything is funneled through the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Through long drawn out grievance processes where hundreds of cases have not been addressed. As seen with cases against Starbucks, where workers are continuing to fight for a contract. Part of the demands of the strike is that these grievances be addressed. While the overwhelming yes strike vote by itself is touted as a great victory by the SWU who present it as a vague threat (“Pay up or Else”) the bosses laugh and continue the abuse of workers calling their bluff knowing full well SWU does not intend to effectively mobilize the strike union wide much less from picket line to picket line. Their constant fumbling of the negotiations with Starbucks has given them incentive to keep their dealing under wraps behind closed bargaining in contrast to open bargaining that allows workers to sit in. These unions count on keeping union militancy at a low ceiling, siphoning workers’ energy, to maintain a status quo of horrible contracts with leadership keeping their posts and from time to time giving themselves raises for their hard work. Misdirecting workers is quite tiring afterall!

When conditions continue to worsen as a result, SWU funnels rising workers’ anger and militancy towards the Democratic Party (i.e. the electoral game) sometimes coupled with ULP strikes. Our current has always noted these business unions’ function is to channel militancy into the legal process and misdirect their potential strike strength of mobilizing as many workers as possible in an effective manner towards the Democratic Party.

These ULP strikes, when they do happen, require giving the bosses a warning in advance that a strike action is going to take place and most of the time with an end date in mind, often a single day or a week. Often, the workers aren’t taught how to even form a picket line, much less are provided with materials needed for the picket. This current strike by the Starbucks workers, led by the SWU, is being called an indefinite economic ULP strike with the union stating that it will strike until the company comes to the negotiating table in “good faith”. Meanwhile the workers, especially the genuine militant ones are suppressed and kept in the dark by union staff and interns that are seeking to become union paid staff. They conspire against workers organizing against putting no strike clauses in the contracts which effectively puts in legal writing the workers aren’t allowed to go on strike during the duration of the contract which is typically between 3 and 4 years. All in favor of “keeping labor peace”.

We as party militants must continue to agitate and organize the most militant workers open to the positions of class unionism. Forming class union caucuses and committees. Coalescing these workers into fighting bodies equipped with the understanding that we must build the class union. Pushing back against the strategies of the business union leaders in collaboration with the bosses and robbing them of the peace of mind they can pilfer our livelihoods. We must push back against these ideas of allowing managers into the unions or having any say in the activities of the union. We must go out on indefinite strikes and bring the bosses to their knees uniting workers on class demands of high wages and a reduced working day.

The North American union working group continues monthly meetings every third Friday.

The Class Struggle Action Network (CSAN), a class unionist workers coordination in the United States, which our union fraction participates in, continues to organize immigrant defense efforts in the various unions with the newest efforts including work within Oregon Federation of Nurse and Health Practitioners (OFNHP), the Brick layers union and The United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry (UA). The effort by class militants within the established unions is aimed at organizing workers to take independent action and presenting this line to the workers at meetings wherever they are open and able, promoting tangible actions in conjunction with other unions, in-person demonstrations, and strike action when possible.

The grassroots union in Turkey, Birtek-Sen, contacted the network requesting solidarity efforts with ŞIK MAKAS/Cross jeans workers who have been waging a struggle against unpaid wages, and dismissals (see the following article on this topic).

A CSAN member and Party sympathizer continues to organize in opposition to opportunist leadership within the Starbucks Workers United union (SBWU). Through CSAN. party members are continuing to support them in establishing a class unionist structure within the SBWU, outside and in opposition to the official union leadership organizing workers on a class unionist line. Workers in this local continue to meet outside of formal union meetings to enable them to take independent action. Despite their unofficial status, these meetings are building a base of workers at several store locations along class lines who are firmly in control of those locals. The effort has cultivated over the last year a number of worker leaders who are vocally critical of SBWU wrecker leadership. At the previous meeting, SBWU leadership sent a union official to attempt to disrupt and shut down the meeting in a similar way last year during a CSAN online event promoting opposition to the acceptance of a no-strike clause from the SBWU. Despite this, the group plans to meet again this month.

Party comrades intervened at the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) convention in Chicago in November, attended by 1,500-2,000 teamsters. The intervention aimed to distribute party and CSAN materials, strengthen ties with the Teamsters Mobilize (TM) (a rank and file caucus advancing class unionist demands within the Teamsters), and engage workers with critical perspectives on class unionism and against the International’s Union President Sean O’Brien, who has aligned with the ruling bourgeois Party and their anti-immigrant stance, in addition to his continual sabotage of teamster strikes, including the last minute tentative agreement during the 2023 UPS negotiations that would have mobilized 300,000 workers. Comrades participated in TM preparation meetings where we put forward our class unionist program and positions.

A protest action organized outside the convention drew 35-40 participants at its peak but proved largely ineffective at disrupting O’Brien, who entered through the front in an unmarked car with bodyguards. Comrades made themselves useful with logistics while distributing materials. When O’Brien gave his speech, several dissident TDU members walked out, with comrades there to greet them. Leafleting continued despite TDU calling police to stop both TM and comrades from distributing materials. In total, approximately 590 leaflets were distributed across the convention, plus 250 leaflets passed to a Chicago teamster who committed to distributing them at a UPS hub employing thousands of workers in that area.

The intervention produced several meaningful connections. Additional contacts were made with airport workers who expressed agitation about their conditions as the prolonged government shut downs further exacerbated poor working conditions and lack of pay. Teamsters Mobilize aligns closely with CSAN principles, and comrades are continuing to work with the contacts made in the caucus to advance joint work. Widespread sentiment within the convention, reflected alignment with O’Brien, in which TDU once again endorsed for president again, he will get re-elected and continue leveraging the union presidency possibly for future political positions such as the US labor secretary.

Party members continue work to establish a class-based union opposition in the United Food and Commercial (UFCW) union caucus, despite attempts by some Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members to divert action toward electoralism. The nascent national caucus has grown to 31 workers in the communication channel, with the majority being worker-leaders within various locals nationally already struggling for class-based demands.

The caucus is incorporating labor history study into meetings and reviewing bylaws and history of locals and the international, trying to piece together information for better understanding of the union and mapping out their direction. Members of the caucus are critical of their locals seeking connections with the Democratic party.

Comrades continue to intervene within the Southern Workers Assembly. At a recent "Workers School" event which a comrade was able to attend, there was a noticeable difference in tone from speeches given at the summer summit. There was less talk about "Trumpism" and more emphasis on independence from the two capitalist parties, somewhat ironic given their recent decision to collaborate with the "No Kings Day" movement. Reports from a couple of the assemblies, which had a large presence at the "No Kings Day" demonstrations, seemed to be more focused on drawing workers who might have been at the demonstration into the assemblies, rather than attending for the sake of the demonstration itself. While there’s still much to struggle against in the SWA, it appears to be moving in a more positive direction.

At an SWA delegate meeting, comrades raised criticisms about the decision to join the “No Kings Day” protests that couldn’t be refuted by promoters of the action. At the following Richmond Workers Assembly (RWA) meeting, these criticisms were brought up and the RWA coordinating committee unanimously decided not to endorse or join the “No Kings Day” protest despite the SWA’s call to do so. Instead, RWA released a statement to members explaining why they saw these class collaborationist protests led by the Democratic Party as dead ends.

A Party comrade attended a panel and award ceremony hosted by the Debs Foundation in Terre Haute, Indiana which awarded Bernie Sanders the grand honor. The comrade attended a panel titled "Class War and How we Fight Back" with Sara Nelson (International President of Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO), Dr. Lisa Phillips (Professor of History at Indiana State University and Secretary of the Eugene V. Debs Foundation), and Mark Dimonstein (President of American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO). The panel was disappointing but predictable: criticisms of the administration for defunding and deregulating different industries and various "pro-labor" platitudes about higher wages, healthcare as a human right, and labor as defense against fascism. Sara Nelson mentioned capitalism/capitalists only to reinforce that some are bad or greedy, with nothing said about the relationship between labor and capital in a serious sense. On the question of how to fight back, nothing substantive was offered beyond general statements of acting in solidarity. Nothing someone could take back to their workplace or personal life.

A Party member intervened with a specially made leaflet at a University picket demonstration in Albuquerque. He made some contacts and is working with possible contacts inside the AFT Teacher’s Union, the Albuquerque Public Schools Union, to coordinate struggles.

A comrade attended a Tech Workers Coalition meeting in Portland, meeting unorganized and union workers. Permission was given to leave CSAN pamphlets there which were well received. Generally everyone was tired of layoffs and tech being used for war and "evil" generally. The comrade met with a worker currently on strike and joined their Signal chat and will try to attend some weekend meetings to continue making inroads with that group of workers.

Massive cuts from the federal government have led to municipal districts across the country to cut budgets, reduce staffing and are forcing low to no wage increases. The organization of state and district budgets creates static funding pools that can only be altered through state and federal level legislative interventions in the capitalist state. The boss-linked leadership National Education Association (NEA) which represents teachers across the country, have done absolutely nothing to organize the union to respond in any meaningful way against the cuts and attacks. Thus union locals find themselves scrambling to get scraps and to avoid massive reductions in quality of life while leadership presents working out government district level budget short falls, as a common interest with workers who must shoulder the burden in the interest of preserving job cuts via accepting real wage cuts.

The mass movement against genocide and war in Gaza, from late August to early October, accelerated the process that our party has predicted and advocated since the late 1970s: the decline of collaborationist and regime-friendly trade unionism and the rebirth of the class-based trade union movement outside and against it.

The CGIL confirmed its nature as a regime trade union by refusing to bring the struggle against war to the trade union level, something that grassroots trade unionism, in particular the USB, wanted and was able to do.

The CGIL leadership reacted disproportionately to the USB’s success in channeling the interclassist movement against the war into a general strike, elevating it to the level of a working-class struggle.

First, it tried to sabotage the grassroots’ unionism general strike on Monday, September 22, by calling a competing strike for Friday, September 19, one working day earlier! Faced with the dismay and anger of a significant portion of its members – with the epicenter among school workers, who struck in large numbers on September 22 with the grassroots unions – the CGIL national leadership rushed to take cover and, on a proposal launched in Genoa by the local leaders of USB and CGIL, agreed to call a unified general strike with all the grassroots unions for October 3. A press conference was even held in the Chamber of Deputies in the presence of the leaders of USB and CGIL.

Overall, the strike on October 3 was successful considering that it was a political strike against the war, at a time of serious political and trade union backwardness among the working class. It had good participation in some sectors, such as in education, the INPS (National Social Security Institute), and maritime or naval logistics, but low participation in the manufacturing and the more strictly defined blue-collar sectors. Huge crowds participated in the marches, including unorganized workers and even non-workers,led mostly by the working-class trade unions.

It is important to repeat and note some striking facts of the general strikes of September 22 and October 3:
     1) For the first time since the Second World War, two general strikes, both successful, took place within a span of only 11 days; this proved that it is not at all impossible to conduct a general strike lasting longer than the standard 24 hours, if there are trade unions willing to call on workers to do so;
     2) For the first time, Italy’s largest regime-aligned trade union found itself having to follow the initiative of the grassroots unions;
     3) It was grassroots trade unionism, not regime-aligned trade unionism, not the CISL and UIL, obviously, but not even the CGIL, that knew how and wanted to interact with, support, strengthen, and direct the anti-war movement through the strike;
     4) On October 3, a general strike was held for the first time outside the anti-strike laws (146/19990 and 83/2000, supported by CGIL, CISL, and UIL and voted by PCI and DS), demonstrating once again that if the trade unions are willing, those laws can be opposed by the the strength of struggle;
     5) The convergence of the various trade unions in the same strike, similar to what occurred in France in recent years, has a multiplier effect on the participation of the strike and subsequently its strength. As the strike gains strength, the mass of workers tend to move towards more combative methods, demands, and trade unionism, i.e., it strengthens class-based unionism and weakens collaborationist and regime-friendly unionism.

After October 3:

Class-based unionism pushes for unity of action held back and restrained by the opportunism of the regime unions and its leaders and factions

After the mobilization of October 3rd and 4th peaked, the movement against the war in Gaza ebbed.

The USB leadership correctly set out to channel, as far as possible, the energies that had been expressed as antiwar sentiment more strictly into the trade union struggle, continuing to highlight the war issue within unions, first and foremost by promoting action against the new budget law, which is geared towards rearmament, a position maintained and agitated for since the beginning of the war in Ukraine behind the slogan:

“Lower your weapons, raise your wages!”

But this correct trade union line and aim is being hampered by the USB leadership’s desire, identical to that of the CGIL, to backtrack on the October 3 united strike, relegating it as an exceptional case, not to be repeated.

After the government presented the budget law on October 17, on the 21st the CUB – initially alone – notified the Guarantee Commission for a general strike proclamation on November 28. But two days later, on October 23, the CUB wrote a letter, made public, to all the grassroots unions including the CGIL, clarifying that it had ‘set’ the date in order not to incur the restrictions imposed by the anti-strike laws and to make the day of strike action available to all unions, calling for the widest possible union convergence. It also pointed out the need for a follow up of the September 22 and October 3 strikes, as well as noting, now more than ever, that a unified response was of the utmost importance in view of the initiation of sanctioning procedures by the Guarantee Commission against the unions that had promoted the October 3 strike outside the limits of the anti-strike laws.

On the same day, October 23, the USB National Executive took the decision to strike on November 28, without, however, making any proposal for unified action with the CGIL. This decision was then validated at the national assembly of USB delegates on November 1, held in Rome at the Teatro Italia, where several USB leaders spoke out against the possibility of a new joint strike with the CGIL.

This was despite the initiative not only of the CUB but also of the Cobas Confederation, which on October 29 had published a statement with a very clear title: “Let’s do as we did on October 3! Cobas appeals to CGIL and grassroots unions for a joint strike on November 28 against the Finance Bill”.

On the same day, October 29, an internal USB appeal was also published – “For a winning union tactic” – which argued the importance of proposing a united strike to the CGIL leadership as a way to gain more influence over the combative part of the CGIL base – those who had appreciated the united strike or who had struck with the grassroots unions on September 22 – presenting it in opposition to CGIL leadership, even if, as expected, it rejected the proposal. Our comrades collaborated in the drafting of the appeal, which we reproduce below, as well as in its dissemination at the assembly at the Teatro Italia.

The correctness of this union tactic was confirmed by the publication of a similar appeal on October 31, on the initiative of CGIL activists, entitled “Appeal for a united strike by all unions”, which gathered hundreds of signatures from that union and dozens from the grassroots unions.

On November 6th, in support of a new strike along the lines of the one conducted on October 3rd, the GKN factory collective in Florence, most of whose workers are members of the CGIL, took a stand, writing: “Declaration on the need for a new October 3 and on the upcoming general strike on November 28”.

But on the same day, during the meeting in Florence, the CGIL’s National General Assembly confirmed its decision – which had already been circulating since the end of October – to call a general strike for December 12.

The obvious observation that this was a coordinated delay of the strike, given that the budget law approval process would be near its end by the time of the mobilization making it irrelevant: the important thing was not to strike with the grassroots unions!

It should also be noted that last year the situation was reversed: it was the USB leadership that called a general strike – on its own – for December 12, so as not to strike with the CGIL on November 29, as well as with all the other grassroots unions that had previously set that day for a general strike.

It should also be noted that last year only a small group of grassroots unions – Confederazione Cobas, Adl Cobas, and Sial Cobas – explicitly expressed their desire to “do as in France”, that is, to strike together with the CGIL, while the CUB limited itself to setting a date on which it knew it would most likely converge, due to the limits imposed by anti-strike laws, but without explicitly declaring that it aspired for this result. This year, however, the Cub leadership had explicitly taken this approach, another positive effect of the strikes on September 22 and October 3.

At the CGIL general assembly on November 6, three members of the minority group called “Le Radici del sindacato” (The Roots of the Union) presented an alternative agenda that concluded by stating: “The CGIL General Assembly considers it essential to call a general strike for next Friday, November 28, 2025”. This was a clear position, but one that was not shared even within that minority group, given that six of its delegates voted for the majority document, limiting themselves to presenting a contribution entitled “Uniting the struggles for peace, democracy, and social justice” which, despite its title, was careful not to address the issue of a united strike: uniting the struggles but without saying to strike together! This internal division within the “Le Radici del Sindacato” area reflects the cold fusion that took place at the 19th CGIL congress between the opposition area “Riconquistiamo tutto” (Let’s Take Back Everything) and the more moderate “Democrazia e Lavoro” (Democracy and Work), which at the previous congress had not presented an alternative document to that of the majority.

The other minority group, called “Le Giornate di Marzo” (The Days of March), with its sole representative at the General Assembly, not to be outdone in opportunism with the former members of “Democrazia e Lavoro”, presented a voting statement in which it specified that it would abstain on the issue of a general strike, whether united or separate, because "the issue... is not the date... A ritual strike added to another ritual strike called by other trade unions does not change the substance’. As if, in order to carry out a ‘non-ritual’ strike, it was not useful, indeed essential, for the trade unions to converge, as well as to do so in good time!

Still on the subject of hypocritical ‘verbal’ tributes to the unity of the workers’ struggle, in order to better deny it in practice, Sinistra Sindacale, the magazine of the ‘left’ wing of the CGIL trade union, called Lavoro e Società, which supports the majority, was quick to clarify in its October 27 issue in a front-page article entitled ‘Let’s work for unity’: ’Often unique gatherings [those of October 3; ed.], even among trade unionists who are profoundly different from each other, have not ushered in a new era of trade union unity between the CGIL and grassroots trade unionism. Those who, even within our own ranks, raise the specter of convergence between such different trade union histories have not seen what happened in those days in important parts of Italian society (and beyond), around an issue that is as dramatic as it is still unresolved".

Opposition to the CGIL’s unity of action with the grassroots unions was also expressed at the General Assembly of Filt Liguria on November 3 by the regional secretary of Filt CGIL Liguria, from the PD secretary’s faction, the national organizational secretary of Filt CGIL, the secretary of Filt CGIL La Spezia, and the most ‘left-wing’ party in parliament, Alleanza Verdi Sinistra (AVS). The national organizational secretary of Filt CGIL spoke out not only against new joint actions with grassroots unions but also against the decision of October 3, thereby criticizing both the leadership of the CGIL Labor Chamber in Genoa, which had proposed the joint general strike, together with the local leadership of USB, and the national confederal leadership of CGIL.

This criticism marks the start of maneuvering for the next CGIL congress, the twentieth, to be held next year. Criticism of the work of the current confederal secretariat, headed by Landini, has been levelled not only by the leadership of the Filt, but also by that of the Flai (Agroindustry), the Slc (Communications), the Spi (Pensioners) and the confederal secretariat of Emilia Romagna.

On December 11, 2025, Bulgaria’s minority government, led by Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov, collapsed due to mass protests sparked by the proposed 2026 budget which included a two-percentage-point increase in pension insurance contributions and much larger rise in the dividend tax from 5% to 10%. These protests, the largest since the 1990s, saw over 150,000 people in more than 20 cities demonstrating against years of economic hardship, including significant inflation and energy cost increases. The demonstrators protested against the planned budget for the coming year, as well as against the bourgeois “mafia”, and demanded the resignation of the widely hated government. Although the government resigned following these protests, this change is merely replacing and reshuffling the composition of which the bourgeois “mafia” clique’s political operators will control the official levers of state power to ensure a smooth entry of Bulgaria into the Eurozone and deepening ties to the US/EU imperialist bloc.

A Quick Sketch of the History of Class Struggle In Bulgaria

The current economic crisis is deeply rooted in a long history of industrial decline, class struggle and the transition from a state capitalist model to a market economy, which was ensured to happen by former secret police and criminal bourgeois elites. These more recent events and most recent strikes and protests are part of a long line of class struggle in Bulgaria, the history of which was initially tightly intertwined with the history of the genuine Bulgarian communists of the early 20th century.

The Narrow Socialists spearheaded the 1904 Pernik miners’ strike, where workers fought a month-long battle against 12-hour shifts and harsh discipline, successfully securing higher wages and the right to form the General Workers’ Trade Union despite military intervention. The Narrows were involved in organizing the 1893 print workers’ strike and the 1899 Sliven textile walkouts, eventually leading the massive 1906 railway strike that paralyzed grain exports for 43 days. The 1919 national general strike saw the Bulgarian Communist Party coordinate over 40,000 workers in a month-long blockade of the rail, mail, and telegraph systems that eventually required the government to declare martial law and deploy the military to crush the movement.

The Narrows were largely liquidated in the 20s and “popular front” “communism” and Stalinism took over, closely following what was happening world wide in the Comintern but this did not stop workers from fighting for their own survival, although now without anything resembling a class party. The 1936 Great Tobacco Strike mobilized 30,000 workers who, supported by underground logistical networks and secret presses of the now degraded communist party, successfully paralyzed the nation’s primary export industry to demand better pay and labor conditions despite intense state surveillance. In May 1953, thousands of women workers at the Ivan Karadjov warehouse in Plovdiv seized the facility to demand job security and better conditions, forcing a retreat of the initial militia response with stones until the state opened fire, killing at least three strikers. In the 1980s, workers in Ruse initiated "silent strikes" by reporting to factories while refusing to operate machinery to protest chronic chlorine poisoning from a Romanian chemical plant across the Danube, a movement that evolved into the first mass street demonstrations in stalinist Bulgaria where thousands, including mothers with strollers, wore gas masks to demand environmental safety and government accountability.

When the eastern bloc finally collapsed under the pressure of its own overproduction crisis in 1989, a new era began. After the 1989 coup, the secret police (DS) elite rebranded as reformers to maintain class dominance, using a government decree to privatize state assets into the hands of a new "mafia" class of former agents and athletes. They formed groups like Multigroup to drain industrial giants like the Neftochim refinery and Balkan Airlines by selling at a massive discount and also overinflating the input costs, thus transferring the government’s capital into their own private capital. Alongside this mafia privatization scheme, in 1991 an agreement on Maintaining Social Peace was signed, which integrated the dissident Podkrepa and the state-controlled KNSB unions into the government apparatus as regime unions to preserve bourgeois order.

Despite this, during the 1990 "Hungry Winter", miners in Maritsa Iztok, who were unionized under the regime unions, launched wildcat strikes in an attempt to gain back wages in the face of hyperinflation and empty shelves. Because their strike could have successfully shut down the national energy grid, which was heavily dependent on coal and had no stockpiles as an alternative, combined with massive street protests, the Lukanov government was forced to resign. By 1997, a second crisis saw even higher, 2,000% inflation which led to the collapse of any savings the shrinking middle-classes had at that point. These conditions led transport workers at the Port of Varna to lead spontaneous blockades and storm parliament to topple the Videnov regime. This was the final step towards full privatization that the bourgeois mafia had paved the way for. This instability allowed the IMF to enforce structural adjustment programs that privatized 50% of national property by 1999 and handed 98% of the banking sector to foreign entities like UniCredit, who extracted additional surplus value through high-interest retail loans.

The transition to the EU in 2007 further entrenched these conditions by creating a pool of cheap labor for Western capital through a 10% flat tax and legal restrictions on guest worker movement and wages. Bulgarians were emigrating in mass but could not get the same pay as other EU workers did. In 2007, 110,000 educators engaged in a six-week strike against monthly wages of $320, demanding a 100% pay hike and increased GDP spending on education. While they secured a 46% increase, many criticized the regime unions for settling with what was effectively a real wage decrease. Meanwhile, in the Bulgarian countryside, "grain barons" used legal loopholes to seize 80% of arable land and capture EU subsidies, further squeezing the rural working class and also small farmers.

By 2017, workers from Piccadilly supermarkets and Max Telecom had started bypassing official unions to organize autonomous blockades against wage theft, successfully forcing parliament to reform the Labor Code. Despite the rise of "reformist" parties like We Continue the Change (PP) in 2021, the underlying economic system remains unchanged, as new fangled reformists (new mafia bourgeois oligarchs) like Delyan Peevski maintain control over the courts and security agencies while regime unions continue to funnel worker anger into safe, legal avenues.

Another effect of the capitalist crisis of the 90’s was a forced exodus of workers to wealthier nations due to economic hardship. This emigration reduced the reserve army of labor in Bulgaria, while guaranteeing low wage labor becoming more available in Western nations, which greatly benefited global and Bulgarian capital by providing the west with cheap labor and maintaining social peace and lowering worker discontent in Bulgaria. By late 2025, this population decline, resulting from emigration and low birth rates due to unfavorable material conditions for workers to raise families, has led to labor shortages across all industries in Bulgaria, draining both the "brain" and "muscle" of its workforce on multiple occasions.

As can be seen in Table 1, despite positive pressure on wages that a small population and thus reserve army of labor creates, the real wages of the bottom 75% of the country still haven’t quite recovered since the great economic crisis of the 90s. The fact that the bourgeois and the remaining middle classes are doing comparatively much better has escalated worker’s discontent

Note: Absolute wage/income is fixed to 2023 BGN and is estimated and calculated based on data on averages and distributions of real wages from “Real Wage Base (CSI)” and “World Inequality Database (WID) - Bulgaria”. The relation to wages is much closer at the bottom and middle than at the top 10%, where we see income from capital included, to the extent it’s reported.

Note: Data on population from National Population Data (NSI)

As of 2023, Bulgaria is still recognized as the poorest nation in the EU based on GDP per capita. This is reflected in the poverty rate, with approximately 22% of Bulgarian citizens living below the poverty line, earning €257 or less per month. In 2024, 30.3% of the population was at risk of social exclusion, the highest percentage in the EU, which includes those facing income poverty, severe material deprivation, or low employment rates. While economic growth between 2015 and 2020 improved living standards compared to the rough transition years of the 1990s and reduced the worst forms of poverty to 4.5%, income inequality kept increasing, and the at-risk-of-poverty rate reached 22.1% in 2020. In Q2 2025, the nationwide house price index in Bulgaria increased by 15.51%.

Events Since 2020 That Led to the Current Strike and Protest Wave

While much smaller in comparison to the 1990s hyperinflation, the current inflationary surge stemmed from energy dependency and global supply shocks, beginning with a natural gas price increase in 2021. After Russia’s Gazprom ceased direct gas exports in April 2022, Bulgaria was compelled to procure gas through intermediaries at inflated prices. This, along with the EU’s 2023 oil embargo, led to household gas prices rising by 144% and district heating by 40%. Simultaneously, a capitalist housing bubble emerged as local elites invested savings in real estate to avoid currency devaluation, causing property prices in cities like Sofia and Varna to nearly double by late 2025. While the international and local bourgeoisie are getting even richer, workers face a 15.3% peak in annual inflation by late 2022 and while inflation slowed a bit by late 2025, the proletariat still experienced a decline in real purchasing power due to food cost surges of 24.9% and massive utility hikes, leading to workers once again being unable to pay their heating bills. In January 2025, the national minimum wage was raised to BGN 1,077, but 400,000 people still struggle to survive on this amount.

In the background of all this economic turmoil and struggle between the different classes in Bulgaria the bourgeois government has been dissolved and regrouped seven times now in the last 4 years, which has also meant the organizing of seven costly elections in the same time.

On January 16, 2025, a minority coalition of GERB, BSP, and ITN took power with shadow support from the much hated by the students and workers Delyan Peevski. By the time they raised the proposal for the very unpopular budget, massive protests were already taking over the streets. At the same time refinery workers at Lukoil Neftohim in Burgas, organized under the regime union Podkrepa, threatened a total shutdown to demand a 30% wage increase and legal protections against asset stripping as the state moved toward nationalization. While the Zhelyazkov government granted a 24 month job guarantee and a bonus, they rejected the pay hike and domestic price caps, leaving workers to face inflation with nothing but a job guarantee while the refinery owners hid $2.4 billion in profits abroad. Simultaneously, railway and energy workers bypassed official leadership to form independent base union cells, utilizing work to rule tactics and safety reporting to paralyze freight and coal deliveries. These autonomous cells successfully organized Trakia Highway blockades and sustained their struggle through decentralized donations after the state froze their bank accounts to stop their resistance against infrastructure privatization.

At the same time, the bourgeois “grain barons” we mentioned earlier, under cartel National Grain Producers Association, launched an employer strike using industrial machinery for 85 blockades to secure €76 million in EU aid for the owning class of grain barons. They negotiated with the regime unions for pay increases to machine operator workers in the grain production industry and paid stipends for unorganized workers to man the blockades and strike for the employers, in order to extract concessions and protections for their own dying industry in the face of very cheap Ukrainian grain being flooded in by western and Ukrainian capital. While these wealthy landholders protected their 10% flat tax and subsidies, the machine workers got a 20% wage increase against a 39.5% cumulative inflation rate.

In 2026, Bulgaria’s bourgeois remains entrenched despite rotating cabinets, deepening the nation’s interdependence with the US/EU imperialist bloc. While arms manufacturers reap record profits from the Ukrainian conflict, the working class remains fragmented and leaderless and misled by regime unions, to the low extent to which it is even organized.

What Needs to be Done

Though the instinct for independent unionism and militant struggle persists, these spontaneous strikes and street protests lack a revolutionary party to forge them into a conscious political force. A real living revolutionary working class is one that is organized under class-unions that reject electoral battles to promote an indefinite general strike without minimum services and that is tightly linked to its party, whose message it transmits to the class through its words and deeds. Bulgarian workers can get inspiration from their own local history and from the history of the international working class as a whole and while there is a long road ahead, we encourage all Bulgarians who wish to fight for communism to get in touch with us and organize!

For the Class Union! For The Indefinite Strike! Against all Wars that Pit Worker Against Worker! For Communism!

The massive demonstrations that took place in Mexico on November 15th of last year, presented by most media outlets and social networks as a spontaneous reaction of “Generation Z” and “the citizenry” against the corruption and violence of the current government, mask a much deeper political dynamic: the acute clash between different sectors of the Mexican bourgeoisie and the parties and movements that represent them, over control of the state apparatus and the distribution of power. We communists distance ourselves from the dominant narrative in our analysis of these situations, focusing instead on the conflict from the perspective of class struggle, the only lens capable of fully interpreting political crises in a capitalist society.

Originally organized by a movement called Generation Z Mexico, which called for protests and marches across the country in response to growing economic insecurity, state corruption, and the assassination of Uruapan Mayor Carlos Manzo. Despite initial claims that it was exclusively a youth movement, it became clear that many older generations also mobilized, including right-wing conservative factions of the bourgeoisie such as the PRI, the PAN, and even elements of the Sinarquista movement (which had Nazi leanings). The bourgeois press has provided only a superficial understanding of the causes that triggered these events and the mass mobilization that brought different strata of class society into the fray, resulting in 140 injuries (100 of whom were police officers) and numerous arrests.

This interclass mass explosion is itself a consequence of the continuous deterioration of economic conditions for both workers and the petty bourgeoisie facing proletarianization. All of this is compounded by the problem of drug trafficking (a business that profits the bourgeoisie and finances all the groups that alternately control the government), which is nothing more than a symptom of capitalist production in a country subservient to US imperialism and shrouded in a mystifying fog by the bourgeois establishment.

Background: Inter-Bourgeois Conflict for Control of the Government

The current political context in Mexico, with the Morena party in government, is characterized by the rise to power of a faction of the bourgeoisie that espouses a nationalist, sovereignist, and “leftist” discourse (summarized in the so-called Fourth Transformation or 4T), gaining support among voters because of corruption and the social effects of the neoliberal policies of previous governments (PRI, PAN). The traditional bourgeois establishment, represented by the parties that are now in opposition (PAN, PRI, PRD, Movimiento Ciudadano) and their associated business elites, was displaced from direct control of the State, but retains immense economic power.

The rejection of the security policy (“Hugs, not bullets”) and the current government’s handling of violence and corruption are the rhetorical fuel used by this displaced bourgeoisie to frame their bourgeois -democratic opposition. The assassination of a mayor who called for a “tough on crime” approach was used as a catalyst for outrage, opportunistically exploited to mobilize a segment of the population. However, both the ruling and opposition factions, despite their discursive differences, are staunch defenders of capitalism and guarantors of the business interests of national and transnational corporations, basing their accumulation on the exploitation of wage labor in Mexico.

The Situation of the Proletariat: Low Wages and High Unemployment

While the press focuses on the political infighting among elites, the real situation of the working class and oppressed sectors remains unresolved. Despite increases in the minimum wage, the cost of living and inflation steadily erode purchasing power. Average wages remain low, job insecurity and informality persist as structural realities, labor rights enshrined in bourgeois legislation, as well as pensions, are subject to attacks and regressive reforms.

The fundamental demands of the proletariat are not the focus of the protests that dominate newspaper headlines and social media posts. Most of the labor unions and federations in Mexico, historically tied to the interests of the state and under the control of various political parties with representation in parliament, maintain a position of subservience to employers and a demobilization of workers. The silence or support of these unions for the current government demonstrates the lack of a distinct voice and identity for the working class in the face of conflict between bourgeois sectors and the challenge of building an independent, proletarian class movement, freed from the bourgeois polarization that currently places them in the false dilemma of supporting either the government or the opposition, both of whom are bourgeois.

Despite the government’s much-touted policy of nominal wage increases, the purchasing power of the working class remains a central struggle. Since López Obrador (AMLO) took office as president of Mexico, his promises to raise wages above the cost of the Basic Food Basket (CBI) through a gradual program have not been fulfilled. While the wage increases were presented in the media as the highest in over three decades, the reality is that they fall far short of the CBI. For example, when AMLO assumed the presidency in December 2018, he announced an increase in the daily minimum wage from $88.36 pesos to $102.68 pesos, and to $176.72 pesos in the border region between Mexico and the United States. But in reality, the wage increase was fought against by all employers, who denied and delayed raises for workers or withheld money from other items, such as the Christmas bonus in some cases. The entire wage policy implemented by López Obrador was agreed upon with the business sector, represented by COPARMEX. And Claudia Sheinbaum has maintained this policy of nominal increases that are clearly lagging behind the Basic Income Guarantee (CBI). In fact, the Obrador administration abandoned the use of the CBI as a reference for wage adjustments and adopted the poverty line monitored by the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL) as the benchmark, a decision also reached with the business sector.

For an urban household of four not to be considered income-poor, it would need a total income of approximately 18,259.84 Mexican pesos per month. A single minimum wage covers roughly half of a family’s needs. These figures clearly demonstrate the hypocrisy of the Mexican bourgeois government, which claims its wage policy is based on “significant and constant increases”, “a living wage”, “breaking the myth that wage increases increase unemployment and fuel inflation”, and “a historic recovery of purchasing power”. But the wage policy of the current administration has remained in concert with the business sector and has remained aligned with the needs of exploiting wage labor and stimulating the market to facilitate the circulation of goods, thus increasing the domestic demand that the bourgeoisie requires.

The differences with the administrations of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto correspond to the growth of transnational investments. Mexico has reached record figures for foreign investment. A historic high was reported in 2024, and by the third quarter of 2025, the figure exceeded $40 billion, a 15% increase compared to the previous year. This is the result of the nearshoring phenomenon, a relocation strategy whereby companies move part of their production, manufacturing, or services to countries geographically close to their main market. In the Mexican context, this refers primarily to companies from the United States (and to a lesser extent, Canada) that have moved their production operations, traditionally located in distant markets such as Asia (specifically China), to Mexican territory. President Sheinbaum has emphasized that nearshoring “is an opportunity that must be seized with a development focus, ensuring that the new companies that establish themselves offer quality jobs and decent wages”. But the truth is that, just as in the past, companies that have established themselves in Mexico continue to rely on various cost-cutting measures, with low wages being the primary factor. On the other hand, in the northern municipalities, closer to the U.S. border, the Sheinbaum administration, always in consultation with the business sector and continuing the policies initiated by President Obrador, implemented more significant wage increases, not for reasons of “social justice”, but with the aim of closing the gap with the municipalities and counties on the U.S. side of the border and ensuring a readily available workforce for companies based in northern Mexico.

Sheinbaum’s bourgeois government speaks of a "historic reduction in multidimensional poverty and a significant increase in the coverage of the basic food basket", but statistics say otherwise, and the government itself has contradicted itself by implementing social programs to support people living in poverty—programs that would be practically unnecessary if wages were sufficient to cover all the needs of a working family. In fact, the "achievements" the government touts regarding poverty reduction cannot be attributed solely to wage policies but are also strongly linked to so-called "welfare programs", which include government cash transfers through pensions for senior citizens, women aged 60-64 (primarily Indigenous), and children and adults (up to age 64) with disabilities, as well as children of single parents (up to age 3). A lot of populism, a lot of propaganda, and very little impact on the real situation of working families.

However, informality and precarious employment is a structural phenomenon affecting a significant portion of the working population. This is the biggest obstacle in the Mexican government’s wage policy, since the wages pompously announced in the media only apply to a small segment of the working population, leaving the unemployed, the underemployed (those who need and are available to work more hours than their current job allows), and informal workers out of reach. Thus, in addition to the minimum wage being extremely low and insufficient to cover the cost of basic necessities, it only applies to a maximum of approximately 35% of wage earners.

Let’s see how the rest of the universe of Mexican workers is composed, and this has to do with the statistics of unemployment, underemployment and informality.

The statistical figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) show a labor market with a low open unemployment rate, but the true magnitude of unemployment is hidden behind underemployment and informality.

The national unemployment rate has remained relatively low, fluctuating between 2.5% and 3.0% in 2025. However, the rate showed a slight upward trend in the second half of 2025. Most notably, more than half of Mexican workers (33.1 million people) remain in the informal sector, without access to social security or benefits—a figure that remains “very high” and represents a structural characteristic of the Mexican economy. The informality rate is slightly higher for women. Furthermore, approximately 3.7 million people are underemployed.

Young people are the most vulnerable age group in the Mexican labor market. Those aged 15 to 29 experience significantly higher unemployment rates than the national average, reaching approximately 7.1%, almost double the overall rate. Lack of prior experience remains a major obstacle for those seeking their first job. Eight out of ten young people report difficulty finding work, often due to a lack of experience required by employers or unsatisfactory wages. This is reflected in the high proportion of unemployed individuals concentrated in the 15-24 age range, representing around 33% of all unemployed people in Mexico, demonstrating a high concentration of this problem within this demographic group of workers. Nearly seven out of ten young people (67%) who are employed work in the informal sector, a level 12 percentage points higher than the national average. This implies a lack of access to social security, benefits, and job stability. Data from 2024 indicated that, even among university graduates, only 30.7% found jobs that matched their qualifications, highlighting a disconnect between the education system and the demands of the labor market. In addition, there are the so-called "NEETs" (Not in Education, Employment, or Training), a group of young workers who are neither studying nor working, numbering approximately 4.8 million. Young women represent a much larger proportion of this NEET category, due to gender factors such as caregiving responsibilities at home.

The growth of the young working population, which constantly enters the labor market, is significant, and the vast majority are headed straight for the tragedy and frustration of unemployment, underemployment, and informal work, in a labor market that exploits them and pays them with hunger and unmet needs. This segment of wage earners, young people between the ages of 15 and 29, is what they call “Generation Z”. But this “Generation Z” is nothing more than the youngest stratum of the wage-earning class, burdened by low wages, precarious employment, and job insecurity, without union organizations to channel their frustration and discontent, and subject to manipulation by the bourgeois and opportunistic factions that are currently vying for control of the government. It is true that throughout the world, youth represents a social stratum that gives an exceptional boost in any social conflict, but the observation of the behavior of this social stratum should not be seen from a multi-class and generic perspective, but from a class perspective, visualizing working youth, proletarian youth, youth as part of the working class and its struggles.

The current demagogue, President Claudia Sheinbaum, has announced that she will continue and integrate the "Youth Building the Future" program into the Constitution, adding more beneficiaries to offer job training; but it is clear that this is just a distraction that will not solve the situation of hidden unemployment (underemployment and informality) that afflicts the Mexican working class in general and youth in particular.

It is therefore pointless to talk about the figures presented by the government and organizations such as the National Minimum Wage Commission (CONASAMI) in relation to the “reduction of poverty”.

In Mexico, there is not, nor will there ever be, a salary that allows workers to meet all their needs, and there will not be enough formal, stable, and healthy jobs for everyone of working age. This situation will not change as long as Mexico and the world remain subject to the capitalist system. In fact, to be even more emphatic, workers will not liberate themselves (or society as a whole) unless they demand the elimination of the exploitation of wage labor, which is the foundation of current society and the accumulation of wealth by a minority: the bourgeoisie, the capitalists.

Migration and Drug Trafficking: Economic Spaces that Also Exploit Workers

Migration has historically offered a safety valve for Latin American workers seeking higher wages and benefits, and for the Mexican bourgeois state, which now has to contend with a smaller pool of unemployed workers; it also benefits from remittances, which constituted 3.6% of Mexico’s GDP in 2024. Those who cannot migrate or find work with sufficient wages turn to the cartels as a lumpenproletariat and go on to exploit, for the most part, their former class brethren (the proletariat) and the petty bourgeoisie. Cartels like the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) have extended their operations beyond illicit drug dealing, kidnapping, extortion, and human trafficking. Over the past few decades, these “businessmen” have carved their way into more acceptable forms of capital accumulation, such as the oil and agricultural industries.

The recent assassination of Carlos Manzo, the mayor of Uruapan in the state of Michoacán, exemplifies the brutal response that characterizes the cartels’ dealings with their opponents. In fact, in 2024 alone, more than 30 candidates were murdered during the election campaign, the highest level of violence since 2018. Manzo, elected in 2024, had adopted a hardline stance against the cartels, impacting the local agricultural bourgeoisie, which has a strong presence in Michoacán and is subject to cartel control over agricultural products. This comes on top of increased competition from large agricultural corporations, both foreign and domestic, following the elimination of state subsidies under AMLO (Andrés Manuel López Obrador), which included low-interest loans for farmers, free fertilizer, and cash transfers that benefited small producers with less than 10 hectares. SEGALMEX, an agency under AMLO’s administration, also pretended to help producers by buying corn above market prices, but it has been shown to have operated as a vehicle for corruption, benefiting bureaucratic managers who embezzle money with the few companies colluding to win contracts. In fact, the agricultural sector demanded that the Mexican government guarantee the price of corn, wheat, and sorghum in 2023, under AMLO, in response to falling international prices that forced them to sell at a loss. In other words, they were asking for a subsidy for a low-yield capital firm. However, this has been an ongoing trend that began with the 1994 NAFTA agreement, which eliminated tariffs on cheap U.S. agricultural imports that utilize more productive methods thanks to their capital.

A few days earlier, a representative of these agricultural companies, who also intended to launch a defense against the cartels, was murdered. Sheinbaum ’s federal government was being pressured, even by the mayor, to provide an adequate response, as he had requested bodyguards before his assassination. However, the Sheinbaum administration continues its predecessor’s "hugs and kisses" strategy, combined with a military response to address the situation. The United States has been involved in the "fight" against the cartel since the establishment of the Mérida Initiative in 2007 under the Bush administration, which has included $3.5 billion in US government aid to bolster Mexican security forces through the purchase of military equipment. During Felipe Calderón’s six-year term, the highest homicide rate occurred under this more militarized approach.

However, despite the occasional televised raids, cartel activity shows no signs of slowing down. But as many Mexicans know, the links between the bourgeoisie and its representatives with the cartels have been a mainstay of Mexican politics since at least the 1970s. Thus, the violence perpetrated by the cartels affects all levels of society, with the most brutal violence occurring between rival cartels and spilling over into the working class and segments of the petty bourgeoisie.

Historically, the bourgeoisie under Vicente Fox’s PAN administration attempted to deal with these appendages of capitalist society by trying to violently suppress the cartels. However, this proved futile, as for every cartel head cut off, more sprang up in its place, like a hydra. The reason for this lies not in the cartel’s immediate organizational structure, or in its "head", so to speak, but in the economic and social foundations of class society that fuel its development. This development is fostered by the lucrative illicit drug market so beloved by Americans, which finds an abundant supply of labor among impoverished workers. If the cartels cannot avoid emulating the dealings of capitalists, it is because they are founded on the same premises of this class society: markets, profits, and wage labor.

Inter-Bourgeois Confrontation

The mobilizations of November 15th became a scene of direct confrontation between bourgeois factions.

Bourgeois opposition parties exploited the protests, seeking to capitalize on social discontent to flex their political muscle. Their discourse focused on defending “democratic institutions” (which are supposedly threatened by the current government) and denouncing government ineffectiveness in the face of violence and corruption. Their real objective is to weaken the current administration and regain control of the state in the next elections.

The government (the bourgeoisie and opportunists in power) responded by dismissing the protest as a movement orchestrated by its opponents, the “conservatives” and “neoliberals” who had lost their privileges. The government downplays the magnitude and underlying causes of the discontent, reinforcing its narrative of a binary confrontation between a “good” people and a “corrupt” oligarchy, while continuing to implement policies that support large corporations and key infrastructure projects for its faction. Through media outlets at its disposal, it promotes the discourse of the threat of a “color revolution” or a coup d’état supported by the United States. It is in their interest and advantage to present these events as an attack by the conservative bloc of the bourgeoisie, represented by the PRI and the PAN, which are currently small and insignificant political actors, as the face of this mobilization.

Within the context of the inter-bourgeois clash, the narrative of a threatening US military intervention has been promoted, an intervention supposedly aimed at installing a US-backed government in Mexico. But it is necessary to investigate: why would US intervention in Mexico be necessary at this stage? Capital on both sides of the border is already so economically intertwined that it cannot do without the other. Mexico is already capitulating to US demands (such as increasing border control with Guatemala to support the reduction of Latin American immigration), and at this moment, the best course for Latin American capitalism is to don the mask of left-wing populism in order to harness the energies of the proletariat for the benefit of capital. MORENA represents the best state of affairs for capital at this time, even if it means that a section of the bourgeoisie opposes them. Furthermore, while it might be beneficial to certain sectors of capital that would profit from the mining and oil industries, it would come at the cost of potential social instability in a country crucial to the production of intermediate goods that supply US industries, particularly the automotive sector. In other words, US finance capital already has Mexico under its thumb. Recent US threats to Latin American countries, including Colombia and Mexico, following the attack on Venezuela, serve to intimidate the Latin American bourgeoisies into aligning themselves with US imperialism against China. Moreover, it cannot be denied that in the future, the US will use the pretext of fighting drug trafficking to assist the Mexican bourgeoisie against the Mexican proletariat if it is unable to do so on its own.

These street protests and the dominant media campaign created a smokescreen to once again confuse the workers, who have historically been kept from understanding their true demands and their true enemies. The real social problems that plague the Mexican working class, subjected to high rates of exploitation of wage labor that swell the coffers of large capitalist corporations, remain invisible this time, hidden behind demands against corruption and criminal violence (which, incidentally, have their origins in capitalism) and behind the multi-class figures of "the people", "citizens", or "Generation Z".

Even without realizing it, the masses took to the streets fueled by the pent-up rage of decades of low wages and unemployment, by unmet needs that their salaries couldn’t cover, while a small elite of business owners, politicians, and mobsters lived in abundance, luxury, and impunity. And it was this discontentment of the exploited working class—not of "the people”, "citizens", "Generation Z", or "influencers"—that various politicians seized upon to instigate mobilizations, using slogans that masked the underlying problems of Mexican workers.

The Evolution of the Current Situation

The situation is trending toward increasing polarization in the Mexican political landscape. The clash between the elites intensifies as elections approach. Demonstrations like those of November 15th will be repeated, serving as a barometer of the state of the bourgeois dispute and as a mechanism of pressure and destabilization. It is a chess game where the pieces are the working class and those segments of the population whose living conditions have deteriorated, mobilized under slogans that reflect the economic and political interests of their true promoters: the capitalists and their connections to imperialism. The main factor to watch is whether the working class manages to overcome its disorganization, political confusion, and subordination to burst onto the scene with its own class demands, free from the control of the bourgeois factions that are driving the current political polarization.

The workers who attended these demonstrations responded with their class hatred against the existing conditions, despite Sheinbaum ’s calls for peace. Once again, it became clear that the bourgeois state offers no meaningful solutions to their economic and social problems, despite the leadership of the left-wing populism of the MORENA 4T movement. Slogans like “PRI, PAN, MORENA, it’s all the same shit” expressed this sentiment. However, lacking an independent workers’ movement and its international communist party, the mobilization remained open to the interclass interests of the bourgeoisie and detached from its own class interests. Like other spontaneous demonstrations in the past, this one failed to strengthen the workers’ movement. In response to these events, the Sheinbaum administration arrested suspects associated with the murder of Mayor Carlos Manzo as a way to appease the masses. She has offered scapegoats to quell discontent without actually putting pressure on the drug cartels, but, more importantly, without addressing the clamor hidden by the media and social networks: the need for a significant increase in wages and stable jobs for the vast mass of unemployed and those working in the informal sector. However, these stratagems can only appease the masses for a time, as many workers are growing restless about the worsening economic situation while global capitalism hurtles toward its next crisis.

In a resumption of the class struggle in Mexico, with a multiplication, coordination, and integration of mobilizations and strikes, the labor movement must form a broad and participatory United Class-Based Trade Union Front, with a local, regional, and national presence, integrating formal and informal workers, both employed and unemployed, from the public and private sectors, and workers of all nationalities and genders, promoting unity of action and raising the following as its main demands:

A significant and general increase in wages and pensions. It is not enough for the increase to exceed the inflation rate; it must be an amount that allows working families to meet all their needs.
     - Payment of full wages to unemployed workers.
     - Reduction of working hours and retirement age. In education: reduction of the number of students per teacher and per classroom. In healthcare: reduction of the number of patients per nurse and per ward. All these measures would free up jobs.
     - Against overtime work.
     - All should have hygienic and safe working conditions
     - For services that free women from the constraints of the family economy.

None of these will be definitive solutions, and the working class must constantly fight for these and other demands, until it takes its struggles to a higher level, to the level of revolutionary struggle, against the bourgeoisie and capitalism, for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Communism.

Debunking “Generation Z” and Reaffirming the Relevance of the Class Struggle

The label “Generation Z” has become a media and sociological catchphrase used globally to explain social uprisings in different parts of the world (Chile, Hong Kong, Lebanon, etc.). This generational explanation is a way of obscuring the true cause of these social and political crises. By reducing the protests to an age-related or cultural phenomenon, the existence of material contradictions is denied, and the historical engine of social change — the class struggle— is obscured. And in capitalism, this class struggle is summarized as the confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

In Mexico, as in the rest of the world, political crises and mass demonstrations are expressions of irresolvable contradictions within the capitalist system. Even when the proletariat does not appear on the scene with a clearly defined class profile, and its actions are dominated by political confusion, disorganization, division, and subordination to multi-class, petty-bourgeois, or bourgeois-democratic movements, the fundamental interpretation should not be distorted.

All political crises that arise in capitalist society, without exception, must be interpreted from the perspective of class struggle: the conflict between the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production) and the proletariat (those who sell their labor power), or, more clearly, the conflict between the defenders of preserving capitalism (which includes opportunists who speak of democratic socialism, the Fourth Transformation, 21st-Century Socialism, etc.) and the defenders of communist social transformation, the seizure of power, and the establishment of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The November 15th protests in Mexico are no exception; they are, in essence, another chapter in the clash of bourgeois factions that use the discontent of the wage-earning and oppressed masses as a weapon in their struggle for control of the bourgeois state, leaving the structure of exploitation of the working class intact.

The Mexican working class, like that throughout the world, must find its own path, outside the control of the bourgeoisie and opportunism, towards the struggle for demands, outside of parliamentarism, organized in true class unions that promote the general strike, paving the way for revolutionary action, which can only be carried out to its ultimate consequences by the international communist party.

Key indicators at the end of the third quarter and the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2025, framed by the recent legislative victory of La Libertad Avanza (LLA), confirm and deepen the brutal transfer of surplus value from wage labor to capital that has characterized the political orientation of the current government, which, with a plan different from that of the previous Peronists (or Kirchnerists), has managed the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Stagnant inflation, devoured wages, and an increase in precarious or informal employment (hidden unemployment)

After the announced inflationary “stabilization”, workers have been left with a consolidated loss of purchasing power of their wages, while the “decline” in unemployment is masked by an alarming rise in informality.

Inflation has been slowing down and is estimated to close at 30% in 2025. But the fall in real wages has not stopped. The Minimum Living Wage (SMVM) has been frozen at 322,200 Argentine pesos since August 2025, prolonging its stagnation. Inflationary “stability” (around 2% per month) confirms the cumulative loss of purchasing power of wages. The unemployment rate has remained around 7.6%, but this figure hides the real magnitude of Argentine unemployment. This reality is better understood when we observe that the rate of informal employment rose to 43.2%, which means that the nominal decline in the unemployment rate hides greater precariousness and a brutal decline in the quality of employment.

Debt, Austerity, and Imperialist “Aid”

Fiscal austerity has been deepened to achieve primary surplus targets (estimated at 1.5% of GDP by the end of the year). Notable in this area are:

- Massive budget cuts: The government has continued to adjust the budget, concentrating cuts on pensions, subsidies and, critically, public works and decentralized agencies, which translates into a contraction of essential services and job losses.

- Layoffs in the Public Sector: The chainsaw has been relentless. More than 57,621 public sector jobs were eliminated through August 2025, concentrated in decentralized agencies and state-owned companies. The most notable cases are Correo Argentino and the former news agency Télam (where the cut exceeded 80% of the staff).

- US Support and Fresh Dollars: In the run-up to the elections, the government secured a promise of financial aid from the US, which materialized in the purchase of Argentine pesos and a currency exchange worth $20 billion. Although these funds do not go directly to social spending, their effectiveness is essentially political and financial, as they seek to stabilize the exchange rate and send a signal of support for Milei’s government to the markets and the IMF.

The 2025 Elections and the Truce-Betrayal Sustained by the Trade Unions

The elections of October 26, 2025, consolidated the ruling party’s parliamentary power. The ruling coalition and its allies (LLA + PRO) won in 15 provinces and obtained more than 40% of the votes nationwide, winning a significant number of seats in the Chamber of Deputies (64 out of 127 up for grabs) and a significant number in the Senate (13 out of 24 up for grabs). This result is interpreted as a blank check to deepen structural reforms, including the dreaded labor reform (rejected by the CGT in the media) and privatizations, confirming that the bourgeoisie has managed to validate its austerity plan at the polls.

Meanwhile, the General Workers’ Confederation (CGT) and other unions have maintained their dual policy of “protest and negotiation,” avoiding calling a major general strike. Although they have declared their rejection of the labor reform, mobilizations have been sporadic, prioritizing conciliatory political dialogue with the government.

Labor unrest was concentrated in the private sector, with examples such as Acindar, Vicentin, and General Motors (GM), facing job losses and declining purchasing power.

A report released in the media reported a general decline in conflict involving strikes, but an increase in direct actions without strikes (mobilizations and occupations), which shows the existence of pockets of resistance to the conciliatory policy of the trade union federations. However, these direct actions, which are outside the control of the trade union federations, are isolated and lack centralized leadership.

The electoral victory of the governing coalition only confirms that in Argentina the workers’ movement remains trapped in the cycle of capitalist crisis – debt – austerity – political control of the unions by opportunistic factions. Once again, it has been confirmed that, despite its denunciations of government policies, the parliamentary left has shown itself to be a tacit accomplice to the austerity it supposedly rejects and has limited the workers’ struggle by promoting participation in parliamentary elections and everything provided for in bourgeois democracy from within the unions. The “left”, with influence in the unions and which opposes the leadership of the trade union federations, has ended up being an opposition ‘controlled’ by the bourgeoisie, insofar as, even with its proclamation of “socialism,” it only offers workers the false bourgeois democratic solution.

The working class faces a more complex scenario, with the government strengthened by votes and support from the US and with treacherous trade union federations. Facing this situation requires more than ever:
     - The urgent construction of a United Class Trade Union Front, with broad participation from the working class, which promotes a break with the truce-betrayal of the trade union federations.
     - The convergence of grassroots struggles, outside the control of the trade union federations, orienting the unity of action towards an indefinite general strike that paralyzes the country and is a tool of direct confrontation to defeat the bourgeois austerity plan.
     - Total distancing from parliamentary illusions, focusing the struggle on defeating the bourgeois plan and the non-negotiable defense of wages.
     - Resurgence of true class unions that mobilize and unite workers for their demands, without conciliation with the bosses.

An uprising without revolutionary orientation, without workers’ demands, and marked by reformist aspirations for improvements within capitalism

The National Strike in Ecuador, which revived the mass protests of 2019 and 2022, lasted for approximately 31 days, beginning in September 2025. The strike was called by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and the United Workers’ Front (FUT) against the decision of Daniel Noboa’s government to eliminate the diesel subsidy. The measure, which caused a sharp rise in fuel prices, particularly affected transportation, agricultural production, and rural areas, where a large part of the indigenous and peasant population resides. Mobilization and the closure of access roads in different regions were the main forms of protest.

On Wednesday, October 22, CONAIE announced the end of the national strike, the clearing of roads, and the withdrawal of its supporters to their territories. The government maintained its policy of dismantling the fuel subsidy, acting decisively in repressing the protests, taking advantage of the state of emergency decree initially approved to deal with criminal groups involved in drug trafficking. The government, in its narrative, has promoted the opinion that social protest is linked to the activity of transnational criminal groups, describing the protest actions as acts of “terrorism”. The entire police, military, and judicial apparatus in capitalism is designed to repress the working class and any oppressed social stratum, and this will not change within the framework of bourgeois democracy, even if governments change, including a hypothetical government supported by CONAIE.

CONAIE leader Marlon Vargas said the decision was “difficult but necessary” and was made hours after President Noboa threatened a “stronger decision” to “open all avenues”. The main reason was the need to “protect his people” in the face of intensifying government repression.

The mobilization left a tragic toll of three community members dead and hundreds injured (figures vary between 200 and 300), in addition to more than 200 detained.

The government decided to increase the price of diesel from $1.80 to $2.80. With this decision to eliminate the diesel subsidy, the government seeks to reduce the fiscal deficit and fulfill commitments to organizations such as the IMF. This measure triggered the protests, as the rise in fuel prices directly impacts transportation costs and, therefore, the price of basic goods, but also impacts the costs of various economic activities carried out by farmers and merchants (many of whom are of indigenous origin) and even those engaged in “artisanal” and illegal mining.

Based on its multi-class approach, CONAIE (and workers’ organizations such as FUT, which joined the movement) focused its list of demands on:

Repeal of Decree 126 (elimination of the diesel subsidy), defense of public health and education, and rejection of neoliberal policies.

Demanding attention and reparations for the victims of repression, the release of detained protesters, and an end to the criminalization of social protest.

Rejection of new mining and oil concessions and their environmental impact on the Amazon (which also has a significant impact on Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela).

Neither the FUT nor CONAIE demanded a wage increase. The Unified Basic Wage (SBU) has remained low ($460 in 2024), which contrasts with the high cost of the Basic Family Basket, which far exceeds the minimum income. The situation is aggravated by unemployment and growing informal employment, which makes jobs precarious, and the difficulty of accessing formal employment.

The CONAIE strikes, which the FUT has always joined, have been dominated by a multi-class approach that practically ignores the demands of workers. We cannot continue to repeat uprisings without revolutionary orientation, without workers’ demands, and restricted to reformist demands for improvements to bourgeois democracy within capitalism. These strikes have essentially served as escape valves for social pressure, facilitating the continued domination of the capitalists, who extract surplus value and profits from all their businesses (including the drug trade) by exploiting wage labor.

A new path is being proposed for future struggles

The only way to advance in the conquest of socio-economic demands (despite their short-lived duration) and to confront the root cause of the evils suffered by the working class and the oppressed in general (capitalism) is through class struggle. In Ecuador and throughout the world, it is necessary that the struggles for different demands be placed within the framework of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Regardless of ethnic origin (Mestizo, Montubio, Indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian, White, or other), workers must join genuine class-based unions that embrace the strike as their main form of struggle and reject electoralism and the pursuit of seats in parliament. Grassroots organization should aim to establish workers’ assemblies and committees in different localities, integrating workers from different trades and branches of economic activity, without excluding any ethnicity or nationality, including the unemployed and day laborers, “self-employed” or informal workers.

It is important that the movement unite around a list of demands, which should include:
     - Demand for a significant increase in wages, pensions, and retirement benefits.
     - Rejection of lower wages (for equal work) for ethnic minorities. Equal work, equal pay, regardless of gender and ethnicity.
     - Demand for compensation payments for the unemployed.
     - Opposition to overtime work.
     - A working week of 30 hours or less.
     - Health and safety at work.
     - Opposition to the repression of workers’ struggles.

A key factor in the movement in Ecuador taking a revolutionary course is the integration of the most advanced fighters as militants of the International Communist Party, to give the local movement a communist focus and an international projection.

In December 2025, workers at the Şık Makas textile factory in Turkey called on workers’ organizations abroad to participate in a week of international solidarity after months of unpaid wages, mass layoffs without compensation, and sustained pressure to accept employer-aligned union representation. Their struggle developed through prolonged resistance to stolen wages, repression by the bourgeois state, and attempts by established unions to shut down independent organizing. Rejecting state mediation and corporatist unionism, the workers organized from below through collective assemblies, walkouts, and pickets, maintaining direct control over their struggle and coordinating with independent class-struggle unions such as BİRTEK-SEN (United Textile, Weaving and Knitting Workers’ Union of Turkey).

Because the conflict was embedded in global garment supply chains, workers abroad responded by organizing coordinated informational pickets outside distributors connected to the Sik Makas textile factory beyond Turkey’s borders in an effort to demonstrate solidarity with the struggle of Turkish workers as a show of proletarian internationalism, even if such tactics in of themselves can not directly mass greater leverage against the employer, they can raise workers spirits and will to struggle.

The International Week of Solidarity with Şık Makas workers (December 13–21, 2025) marked a small moment of solidarity between organized class unionist forces, as militants of the International Communist Party, working within the Class Struggle Action Network, coordinated solidarity actions alongside BİRTEK-SEN. These efforts led to actions in four Turkish cities, four U.S. cities, and one Canadian city, raised 21,517.54 Turkish lira for the strike, established links with Italian textile workers in SUDD COBBAS, and demonstrated in practice the necessity of international working-class action beyond national and corporatist limits.

Turkish State Control and Worker Rebellion

The history of Turkish unionism demonstrates a consistent pattern of state domination over working-class organizations, interrupted periodically by explosive rank-and-file rebellions that break through legal constraints. In the midst of a deepening economic and social crisis, contradiction between the working class’ need for genuine defensive organizations clash with the capitalist state’s imperative to contain and neutralize working-class militancy.

The 1960s and 1970s saw remarkable rank-and-file workers’ rebellions, most notably the June 15-16 revolt in 1970 involving hundreds of thousands of workers around Istanbul fighting against the capitalist state’s attempts to subordinate the union movement to its power by outlawing the Confederation of Revolutionary Workers’ Unions (DİSK), the main confederation of base unions in Turkey at the time and consolidating the organized workers into the already existing confederation of regime unions, the Confederation of Turkish Workers’ Unions (Türk-İş).

Following the 1980 military coup when DİSK was finally outlawed, the Turkish state restructured labor relations to eliminate any remnants of independent working-class organization. The subsequent legal framework created a system where officially recognized unions function as appendages of capitalist state control, their leadership integrated into mechanisms of social pacification. Strikes were severely restricted, collective bargaining circumscribed by state arbitration, and union recognition made contingent on demonstrating "peaceful" relations with employers and state authorities.

This collaborationist structure resembles what occurred in Italy under fascism and what exists in various forms throughout the capitalist world, such as in the US with the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Following the 1980 coup in Turkey, Türk-İş has continued to be the largest labor confederation, operating firmly within this framework of class collaboration, its leadership maintaining close ties to both capitalist state apparatus and employer associations. As for DİSK, refounded in 1992, while still a confederation of base unions including several that are quite combative, it translates its name as “Progressive” rather than “Revolutionary” nowadays and often limits itself to symbolic actions.

When workers have attempted to use official union structures to defend their interests, they invariably find themselves betrayed. The Şık Makas textile workers who were members of Öz İplik-İş, the regime-controlled textile union belonging to Confederation of Real Turkish Unions (Hak-İş) which directly aligns with the ruling party and Islamist bourgeois politics. For roughly a year Şık Makas workers were consistently paid late. When workers finally said “enough” and stopped work to demand their unpaid wages, they were met with threats and insults from the employer and Öz İplik-İş, who sided with management over workers.

When workers resigned from this collaborationist union and joined the combative union BİRTEK-SEN, Öz İplik-İş handed over their names to the employer. What followed was predictable: mass terminations, with more than a thousand workers fired.

Repressive legal architecture cannot eliminate the antagonisms between capital and labor. When exploitation intensifies beyond tolerable limits, when wages disappear entirely, when workers face destitution, the class struggle erupts regardless of legal prohibitions.

BİRTEK-SEN: A Class Union in Formation

In 2020 textile worker uprisings spread across 35 factories in southeastern Turkey. Workers organized strikes, workplace occupations, and confrontations with police outside official union structures. Workers won concrete victories at facilities including Artemis, Şireci, and Marbit despite, or rather, because of, their willingness to break through legal constraints.

BİRTEK-SEN emerged in 2022 from these struggles, formed by union militants who recognized that genuine working-class defense requires organization independent from both state control and employer collaboration. The union’s formation is precisely the process true communists have long identified that when material conditions deteriorate sufficiently and existing organizations prove themselves enemies of workers interests, workers will create new structures capable of actual struggle.

Since its formation, BİRTEK-SEN led the Özak Textile struggle in Urfa in November 2024 and the strike wave at the Başpınar Organized Industrial Zone in Antep in February 2025, (reported in TCP no. 56 and TICP no. 63). In these struggles the union sharpened the piercing strength of the workers by generalizing the strikes across factories rather than leaving workers isolated or relying on pressuring the companies with lawsuits. During the Başpınar strike wave, capital’s thugs cracked down on workers, arresting and imprisoning chairman Mehmet Türkmen on charges of "violating freedom of labour" and "incitement to commit a crime" for supporting the textile worker struggles. Still, both the Özak struggle and the Başpınar strike wave pressed forward and won on major demands.

Additionally, BİRTEK-SEN has made concentrated efforts to organize Syrian immigrant workers facing super-exploitation in Turkish textile factories regardless of their documentation outside of their official membership, and has mobilized to support struggles across sectors such as the native and immigrant foundry workers’ strike in Gaziantep in January 2023 (reported in TCP no 51).

BİRTEK-SEN has consistently supported the most combative worker actions. When over 1,000 Şık Makas workers were fired for leaving Öz İplik-İş and joining BİRTEK-SEN, the union organized workplace occupations and reached out internationally for solidarity rather than retreating to legalistic appeals. Now, Öz İplik-İş is labeling the union as a terrorist organization.

BİRTEK-SEN has not yet achieved the full program of class unionism, but its emergence marks the maturation of genuine working-class defense organizations born of the increasingly worse material conditions of capitalist exploitation.

The Şık Makas Struggle

At the Şık Makas factory in Tokat, producing clothing for Zara, H&M, Mango, Levi’s, and other international brands, over 2,200 textile workers have been kept at wages below Turkey’s official poverty line. Starting in August 2024, hundreds stopped receiving wages entirely. Workers were forced to resign or were dismissed without severance, facing evictions, debt, children pulled from school, and severe psychological distress while global fashion corporations continued profiting from the factory’s production.

When workers stopped work over unpaid wages in October, Öz İplik-İş immediately sided with management, pressured workers back to work, and helped justify mass firings by spreading false accusations of violence. Hundreds of workers subsequently left the regime union and joined BİRTEK-SEN, recognizing that their official union functioned as an instrument of their exploitation rather than their defense.

The Şık Makas workers’ struggle encapsulates the broader crisis facing the working class globally with the intensification of exploitation within global supply chains, collaborationist unions betraying workers at every turn, and the necessity of organizing outside official structures to wage genuine struggle. Like their class brothers and sisters in many other countries outside the West, Şık Makas workers produce products sold in stores throughout North America and Europe, their exploitation being directly connected to the profits extracted from retail workers in those regions – all serving the same multinational corporations’ accumulation drive.

International Coordination

Upon receiving BİRTEK-SEN’s call, ICP militants within CSAN organized coordinated responses. Actions in Turkey including Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Tokat, and in the US in Oregon, Illinois, North Carolina, and New Mexico as well as in Canada.

The working class confronts the same enemies across borders. When Zara and H&M exploit Turkish textile workers through their supply chains, they implement the same profit-maximization strategies driving exploitation throughout their global operations. Workers in different countries fighting the same corporations must coordinate their struggles.

Cross-sector coordination strengthens working-class power. The campaign called on workers throughout the supply chain production, logistics, retail to recognize their common interest in supporting the Şık Makas workers’ struggle in Turkey. While practical limitations prevented full realization of this coordination, it is an important step in the direction that workers must take if their organization is to take on the attributes of a struggle capable of defending itself against the interconnected global capitalist agenda.

The Party’s Task

We are not in a revolutionary situation. The working class remains largely atomized. Yet capitalism’s contradictions continue producing explosions of struggle. Communist militants must participate in these struggles and work toward their maximum development.

BİRTEK-SEN’s emergence represents an objective process driven by material conditions. When exploitation intensifies beyond tolerable limits and existing organizations prove collaborationist, workers create new structures. Communists do not "create" these developments, but must recognize their significance and work within them.

What makes BİRTEK-SEN significant is its break from collaborationist unionism. Its formation outside legal structures, organization of exploited immigrant workers, and rejection of collaboration emerge not from revolutionary ideology but from practical necessities workers face under intensified exploitation.

This is how class unions emerge, not from declarations but from material conditions making collaboration impossible and independent struggle necessary. Textile workers facing wage theft and mass firings have no recourse within official structures. They must organize outside the legal apparatus or accept absolute exploitation.

Supporting such developments means participating in struggles, clarifying their broader significance, and building international connections. We prefigure necessary organizational frameworks anticipating sharper confrontations to come. As crisis deepens and inter-imperialist tensions escalate, ruling-class assaults on working-class standards will intensify, producing explosive responses. The existence of embryonic class unions and practical international coordination experience will prove invaluable.

The road to revolution remains long and difficult. Yet even in periods of working-class retreat, the fundamental antagonism continues producing struggles pointing toward revolutionary conclusions. BİRTEK-SEN’s emergence, Turkish textile uprisings, and Şık Makas international solidarity demonstrate that class struggle continues even when the revolutionary party remains small and the working class atomized.

Our task is steadfastness in this work, participating in every genuine working-class struggle, clarifying revolutionary implications, and building organizational frameworks that will prove necessary when conditions sharpen toward revolutionary confrontation.

The Şık Makas solidarity campaign demonstrated that international working-class coordination remains possible even in difficult periods. Workers across multiple countries organized coordinated actions to support Turkish textile workers’ struggle against multinational corporations. They raised money, built practical connections between workers in different countries, and applied pressure on the corporations profiting from exploitation. This work represents a small but significant step toward the international working-class organization that the struggle against capitalism requires.

Solidarity with Şık Makas Workers!

For Combative Class Unions!

Workers of the World, Unite!

The following speech was given by a Party militant in Portland, Oregon during the December actions in solidarity with the Sik Makas Workers.

We are here in solidarity with the struggle of the Şık Makas workers in Tokat, Turkey, organized into the combative, independent Turkish textile workers union BİRTEK-SEN, the United Textile, Weaving and Knitting Workers’ Union of Turkey.

The Class Struggle Action Network is an organization fighting for a renewed, combative labor movement, organizing around the principles of class unionism. This is a necessary way of struggling if we are going to face and win against the challenges we meet as the working class. We are a network of rank and file workers who start from a simple idea: society is divided between the bosses who profit from our labor and the working class whose lives are squeezed for those profits. There is no real “common interest” between workers and bosses, and our power comes from organizing together to defend our living standards, not from collaboration with the boss or the state. CSAN fights for class struggle unionism instead of business unionism, meaning unions that are independent from ruling class political parties. Whether it is the Democrats or the Republicans, we reject both ruling class parties because they only represent and impose the interests of the ruling class on us. We need action rooted in the shop floor, willing to strike, and committed to uniting workers across trades, sectors, and borders instead of competing or being divided by racism, sexism, nationalism, or any other form of oppression.

We believe unions should be fighting organs of the working class, not lobbying machines or extensions of the HR department. That means putting economic demands front and center, fighting for higher wages, fighting against tiers that divide us, fighting for the lowest paid workers, rejecting “no strike” clauses, and rebuilding real, strong strike power and solidarity that refuses to cross picket lines. CSAN is committed to organizing the unorganized, strengthening combative forces inside existing unions, and working toward a united class union front that can coordinate struggle and build toward mass, united worker action against the bosses and this rotten capitalist system, based in the insatiable drive for profit at the cost of humanity.

From stagnant wages to being overworked, all at the behest of the boss and the capitalist ruling class profiting off our labor, we are under attack. They attack us on many fronts as workers, from rising prices to the policing and detention of immigrants. In capitalism’s desperate quest for profit, needed to keep this dying system afloat, the capitalist class attacks immigrant workers in the U.S. and beyond. These attacks aim to control and maintain a highly exploited section of the working class, composed largely of immigrants, in addition to disciplining the working class broadly.

When we begin to think about immigration and immigrant workers, we truly see the international nature of the working class, the capitalist economy, and the importance of internationalism in the class struggle. Immigrant workers are forced to move away from where the consequences of capitalism are felt the most intensely, including poverty, war, and environmental degradation that forces the movement and displacement of hundreds of millions of people from their countries of origin. Workers are forced to leave where they are born in order to seek access to higher wages, improved/safer living and working conditions. When they arrive they are often pitted against native-born workers, told that we are each other’s enemies and that we must fight each other for jobs and wages. These are lies from the boss and the ruling class.

If we are to win a better life and be strong in this struggle, we must reject all nationalism and be in connection and organization with our fellow workers across the world and across borders. In particular because the capitalists already do this. They exploit us and profit from us within an international supply chain in which the boss is highly organized.

This importance of internationalism brings me to the particular reason we are here today in front of this Zara store. Textile workers in Turkey produce clothes for Zara and other companies including H&M, Mango, Levi’s, GAP, New Look, and Bestseller.

These workers, in particular those who produce clothing for these companies at the Şık Makas factory located in Tokat, Turkey, are in a fierce struggle against their boss and the Turkish state.

Şık Makas, also called Cross Jeans, is a factory in Tokat where thousands of garment workers have been kept at bare minimum wages that do not even meet the official State designated line to be able to feed oneself and family, let alone meet the cost of living. For over a year, wages were paid late. Then, starting in August 2025, hundreds of workers stopped receiving wages altogether. More than 2,200 workers have been forced to resign or were dismissed over the last year and a half, many without severance or any of the legal entitlements they are owed. When workers stopped work over unpaid wages on October 6, the official employer and state aligned union sided with the boss, pressured them back to work, and then helped justify mass firings by spreading false accusations of “violence” from the striking workers.

Out of this crisis, workers turned to BİRTEK-SEN, an independent, combative textile workers union. Hundreds left the regime union and joined BİRTEK-SEN because of wage theft, threats, and the union’s open collaboration with management. This situation and the employer’s actions have brought destitution to these workers: evictions, families going into debt, children pulled from school, and workers pushed into severe psychological distress, all while global brands like H&M, Zara, Mango, Levi’s and Bestseller continue to profit from the factory’s production.

We are here to demand that these unpaid wages of the Şık Makas workers be paid. We are here in solidarity with our fellow workers from one side of the world to the other. We are here to stand together as the working class.

Pay Şık Makas workers! Pay Şık Makas workers! Pay them! Pay them! Pay them! Pay them!

Pay them their wages!

This situation is not unique to Turkey, but reflects the reality of millions of textile and garment workers who are paid minuscule wages, most commonly in countries like China, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. These factories operate under contracts dictated by international brands based in the United States and European countries such as the UK and Spain.

These same corporations that exploit workers in Turkey’s factories and beyond exploit workers everywhere, including retail workers in the United States and Europe. We face the same enemy, and we must fight together.

The working class is connected internationally through the global capitalist supply chain, from the workers in Turkey who produce the clothes to the retail workers in the United States and Europe who sell them. This gives the working class the power to coerce the bosses on an international level to meet our demands. Without us, the workers, there is no profit to be had. Therefore organized worker power and international solidarity can force these brands and bosses to pay what they owe.

Solidarity with the Sik Makas Workers! Solidarity with Birtek Sen! Workers of the world, unite!

As the deepening economic crisis began to hurt the bourgeoisie and class struggles achieved more gains in the past few years than earlier, the bourgeois class began to take a harsher approach against class struggles. However, despite all this, the working class continues to fight, keeping the flame of struggle alive.

New Developments in Old Struggles

Following a strike lasting nearly three months involving 240 workers at Gübertaş, organized by the Petrol-İş union (Petroleum and Chemical Workers Union - Türk-İş), negotiations began on September 19. However, the negotiations ended without result because the employer, almost mockingly, increased its initial offer by only 3 percent in response to the workers’ 95% demand, proposing a 33% wage increase. It should be noted that the consumer price index rose by 3 percent in September compared to the previous month, meaning that the 3 percent increase they proposed would only allow workers to maintain their purchasing power from the previous month, that is according to official statistics. Of course, the workers decided to continue their strike against the employer’s offer. Although the employer, with all his bourgeois generosity, proposed a 38 percent raise in the following days, the workers rejected this offer as well because they wanted a humane life.

Harb-İş (Armament Workers Union - Türk-İş) signed a new collective agreement in September, but unfortunately, the wage increases, which were among the most important gains, did not exceed the figures specified in the KÇP (Public Framework Agreement Protocol). In our previous issue, we mentioned how inadequate the figures given in the KÇP were and how Harb-İş member workers were one of the groups that felt the bourgeoisie’s pressure most heavily due to the field they worked in.

The struggle of TPI Compozit workers, organized by Petrol-İş, which began with a strike involving 2,300 workers on May 13, 2025, is now in a state of uncertainty due to recent developments. As we briefly mentioned in our previous issue, the American company filed for bankruptcy while the strike was ongoing. Of course, this bankruptcy decision was approved by the court, and the company was transferred to a Dubai-based company called XCS. However, as TPI Compozit continued to lay off workers during the strike, Petrol-İş announced that a lawsuit should be filed. But it stated that this lawsuit would not be pursued by the union and that the workers should file individual lawsuits. The workers responded to this situation with two powerful questions: “Why did we pay union dues?” and “Where are you, the union, in this process?” For now, TPI workers are pursuing a strategy of expanding their struggle to gain public support.

After the local elections in Şavşat, the contracts of 30 workers were not renewed by the former administration. The workers who were not rehired filed a lawsuit against the municipality. In one of the lawsuits, although the plaintiff was ordered to be reinstated, the worker was not rehired. Upon this, the workers began their resistance and set up a “municipal workers’ solidarity and action tent” in the district. The workers’ resistance has been going on for several months.

New Struggles

Fifty-seven Omsa Metal workers, organized in Birleşik Metal-İş (United Metal Workers’ Union - DİSK), began a protest when they were dismissed without compensation during collective bargaining negotiations. After protesting at the factory gates for 69 days, the workers moved their protest inside the factory on the 69th day and began a sit-in. On the same day, negotiations between employers and union leaders resulted in a decision to pay the dismissed workers their unpaid severance pay and an additional severance payment.

Around 80 workers employed at the Mert Akışkan Güç Factory, organized under Birleşik Metal-İş, decided to go on strike after failing to reach an agreement in collective bargaining negotiations. The employers, who did not accept the union’s demand for a 40% wage increase, were given until September 26 to reach an agreement. An agreement was reached with the employers before the strike began on September 26, and a collective bargaining agreement was signed.

In Kayseri, around 2,000 Yataş workers organized under Öz İplik-İş (Textile Workers’ Real Union - Hak-İş) went on strike. The work stoppage, which began in August with workers in the sofa department, spread to all departments. The workers, who demanded at least a 40% raise, decided to strike if their demands were not met. Negotiations with the union resulted in a 22% raise. The Yataş management, which had previously stated that it supported the workers and that they could consider changing unions, fired 14 workers who joined DİSK. The DİSK Textile Union marched to the factory gates with the 14 dismissed workers. While the dismissed workers’ struggle continued, the Öz İpliş-İş statement included items such as “distributing holiday candy and cologne during religious holidays”, openly mocking the workers.

Tens of thousands of agricultural workers, working 8-10 hours a day under the scorching sun in the provinces of Adana, Mersin, and Hatay in Çukurova, where nearly 250,000 seasonal agricultural workers are employed, rebelled against their daily wages of 900 liras. The Precarious Workers’ Association tried to contact employer representatives for 30-40 days, but when they failed to get results, they decided to go on strike. After a strike lasting about 9 days, an agreement was reached with the bosses, and workers will be paid 1,200 lira until the new year and 1,500 lira after the new year.

Workers at Ege University Hospital, organized under Sağlık-İş (Health Workers Union - Türk-İş), staged a five-day work stoppage when the promise to pay back wages by October 8 was not kept. After the fifth day, an agreement was reached following talks between the university administration and the union, and the workers returned to work. An agreement was reached between the union and the university to pay the back payments by November 15. Workers reacted to the union’s acceptance of such a late payment, but there was no return to industrial action.

260 workers employed by solar panel manufacturer Smart Solar, who are members of Birleşik Metal-İş, went on strike on October 22 demanding a 50 percent pay increase after receiving only a 6 percent raise. The workers, who are continuing their strike, showed their determination in a post, saying, “You wanted a production record, we achieved it. You asked for overtime, we stayed. You threatened that if we went on strike, the factory would close, but we didn’t give in. You didn’t pay the education assistance payments, you didn’t care. We are not afraid, the strike is our celebration”.

A work stoppage erupted at the Şık Makas factory in Tokat, where 1,700 workers are employed, after months of unpaid wages. The workers had grievances not only about unpaid wages but also about the mobbing they suffered, being forced to resign, and even when wages were paid, they were paid in installments. In September alone, more than a thousand workers were forced to leave their jobs because they couldn’t get their wages. However, the Tokat Governor’s Office banned the workers’ demonstration. The state went beyond crushing the workers’ legitimate demands and mobilized funds for the employer. Incentives exceeding 20 billion lira, tax breaks that amounted to the employer not paying taxes at all; all these stories will surely sound familiar. They also tried to fool the workers by opening a new factory in Egypt and telling them they were “downsizing”, without mentioning that the minimum wage they would pay in Egypt was almost a quarter of what it was in Turkey.

As if all this weren’t enough, by stating that the union they belong to is Öz-İplik İş, it is not difficult to understand how workers could be subjected to these conditions. Workers were forced to sign an agreement that would prevent them from receiving compensation during a process in which Öz-İplik İş acted as a mediator. It also mobbed workers who were members of BİRTEK-SEN to join them. They said that despite the dismissal of 2,000 workers in the last two years, the union had done nothing except collect dues from a group of workers who were already earning the minimum wage. However, the workers receive the support they cannot get from Öz-İplik İş from BİRTEK-SEN. Over 800 workers have transferred to BİRTEK-SEN. The struggle of Şık Makas workers is an important indicator that the militant BİRTEK-SEN has begun to move beyond being a local union in the Antep-Urfa region and become an influential union nationwide.

Municipal Workers’ Struggles

Approximately 1,800 Buca Municipality (Izmir) workers organized under Genel-İş (DİSK) began a protest in front of the municipal building after not receiving their salaries for three months and their food cards and collective agreement differences for six months. On September 15, the municipality threatened to fire the workers with a message stating, “Your assignment at Buca Municipality has been terminated as of September 15, 2025”. Unfazed by the municipality’s threats, the Buca workers continued their protest, and as a result, it was decided in union negotiations that the two unpaid salaries and the eight days’ wages unpaid during the protest would be paid. When the salaries promised to be paid on October 2 were not paid, the workers called for another walkout.

Approximately 2,400 workers at Şişli Municipality (Istanbul), organized by Genel-İş, began a walkout when management failed to pay overtime and bonuses, eliminated weekend holidays, and on top of that, did not pay their salaries on time. Unable to achieve results from the walkouts that began on September 16, the workers staged a protest in front of the Cevahir Shopping Mall on October 14.

Workers at Maltepe Municipality (Istanbul), where around 2,000 workers organized by Genel-İş are employed, held a press conference when the articles signed in the collective bargaining agreement were not implemented. Stating that mobbing and pressure against workers had increased, the workers said, “The pressure has now turned into unfair dismissals. We are not fighting for those who have committed shameful crimes, but for those who have been dismissed without cause”. Unable to achieve results from the press conference, the workers staged a protest in front of the municipality building.

1,800 Karşıyaka Municipality (Izmir) workers, organized under Genel-İş, went on strike when they did not receive their wages. The workers returned to work after promises were made by the municipality, but when the municipality failed to keep its word, they went on strike again. The protests, which began on September 22, lasted three days, and on the third day, an agreement was signed with the municipality. Seventy percent of the September salary will be paid on September 30, and the remaining 30 percent will be paid on October 10. The salary for October will be paid in full between October 15 and 30. For striking workers employed by Kent AŞ, a company affiliated with the municipality, a capital increase will be made in October by a council decision, and payments will be planned after that.

Over the past several months, and intensifying in December 2025, Iran has seen a widening wave of labor strikes and protests driven by worsening economic conditions. Inflation remains above 40 percent, with food and housing costs rising even faster, while wages, especially for contract and informal workers, have failed to keep pace. Sanctions, currency depreciation, fuel shortages, and repeated cuts to public spending have sharply reduced real incomes. Large sections of the working class now face delayed wage payments, insecure contracts, unsafe working conditions, and declining access to social services, creating a situation of persistent economic pressure rather than a single crisis event.

The most significant recent actions have occurred in the oil, gas, and mining sectors, which remain central to Iran’s economy. In early December, thousands of contract workers at the South Pars gas complex in Asaluyeh protested across multiple refineries, with work stoppages and coordinated demonstrations involving workers from different subcontractors. Around the same period, workers at the North Drilling Company halted operations on several onshore and offshore rigs. These actions followed earlier strikes in mining, including walkouts at the Zarshuran gold mine, as well as protests by steelworkers in Hamadan and industrial workers in Fars Province. While exact participation figures are difficult to verify due to media controls, reports consistently indicate multi-site coordination.

Workers’ demands have been relatively consistent across sectors. They include wage increases indexed to inflation, regular and timely payment of wages, improved safety standards. In oil and gas, contract workers have also demanded standardized work schedules, limits on arbitrary dismissals, and an end to exploitative subcontracting systems that divide the workforce. Retirees and public-sector workers protesting alongside industrial laborers have emphasized pension payments, healthcare access, and protection against further cuts.

In Iran, independent unions are illegal and formal collective bargaining does not exist. There are no recognized opportunist labor parties or legal strike frameworks. Instead, coordination occurs through informal worker councils, online networks, and semi-clandestine labor organizations, such as associations of contract oil workers and independent labor activists. These bodies do not function as political parties and generally avoid explicit ideological programs, focusing instead on economic demands. The state treats such coordination as a security threat, responding with surveillance, arrests, intimidation, and pressure on workers to return to work.

Despite the absence of legal recognition, these worker organizations increasingly function as de facto class unions albeit immature and absent a formal centralized organizational apparatus, precisely because their illegality forces them to operate beyond narrow workplace or craft boundaries. In the absence of formal collective bargaining, coordination has generalized across sites and sectors through informal councils, strike committees, and shared communication networks. Oil and gas workers, miners, steelworkers, transport workers, retirees, and public-sector employees have repeatedly acted in parallel, sometimes explicitly referencing one another’s struggles. While these organizations remain immature and lack centralized leadership or a coherent union program, their form already reflects a class-wide orientation rather than the fragmented, enterprise-bound unionism typical of legal labor regimes. This development is not ideological but material: repression and subcontracting have stripped workers of legal channels, compelling them to organize on a broader, more solidaristic basis.

Strikes and protests in Iran have also grown in frequency and scale over recent years, indicating a rising level of militancy despite harsh repression. Since at least 2021, repeated waves of contract-worker strikes in oil and petrochemicals, miners’ walkouts, teachers’ protests, and retirees’ demonstrations have shown persistence rather than episodic unrest. The state has responded with arrests, surveillance, dismissals, and the deployment of security forces at strike sites, treating labor action as a threat to national security rather than an economic dispute. In several recent cases, including at South Pars and major mining operations, security forces have attempted to block gatherings, pressure workers individually, and intimidate organizers. These confrontations underline the central contradiction: while no revolutionary party or unified leadership has yet emerged, the working class is increasingly compelled into open confrontation with the state simply to defend its conditions of existence. The movement remains fragmented and vulnerable, but its trajectory points toward greater militancy and wider generalization as economic pressures deepen and repression hardens.

In December 2025, two developments in Nigeria unfolded almost simultaneously. The United States carried out direct military airstrikes against Islamic State–linked forces in the northwest, while the primary Nigerian trade union confederation announced nationwide protests and threatened a general strike in response to worsening living conditions. These events do not express opposing forces. They are two moments of the same process within the crisis of capitalism, where the mechanisms of imperialism and the national unions conspire together to contain and corral a potentially powerful working class movement.

On December 25–26, U.S. forces launched missile strikes against militant targets in Sokoto State, acting in coordination with the Nigerian government. The operation was publicly described as counterterrorism, and its justification framed as an operation to defend Christians. It has now become a typical casus beli for the U.S. capitalist to justify foreign intervention on grounds of defending religious minorities and whites. Yet the dominant imperialism intervenes where instability threatens strategic interests, not to resolve the social causes of violence but to regulate it. As is well known, the receding power of France in the area has led to the expansion of Russian influence and similar forces also threaten Nigeria who remains firmly tied to U.S. dominated finance capital. Nigeria, like many of the former colonial, sub-imperialisms within global capitalism has a population exposed to both insurgent violence and foreign military force without either offering a way out of misery.

The persistence of armed groups in northern Nigeria is the result of decades of rural impoverishment, unemployment, land dispossession, and state decay producing conditions in which violence becomes a livelihood and a means of survival. Military force, domestic or foreign, does not resolve these conditions. It manages their symptoms while reproducing their causes.

At the same time, workers across Nigeria face falling real wages, inflation, insecurity, and the collapse of public services. In response, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) called for protests and threatened strike action, declaring a “National Day of Protest and Mourning”. The grievances invoked are real. Workers are killed or kidnapped on their way to work. They cannot reproduce their labour power under present conditions. Their anger is justified and the masses of workers faced with deepening economic crisis are moved to mass action; however, the established unions, masquerading as leaders instead as ever act as the saboteurs of the movement, containing and corralling in the Nigerian proletarian just as they do across the world.

The NLC and its allied unions do not organize workers as an independent class force. They organize discontent in order to contain it. Protest days, fixed-term strikes, and rapid suspensions in exchange for negotiations are not means of struggle but methods of regulation. They allow pressure to be released without threatening the continuity of capitalist production or the authority of the state.

In Nigeria as elsewhere, the unions are legally recognized, financially dependent on dues-checkoff, and integrated into state-managed bargaining systems. Their function is to mediate between labour and capital, not to abolish that relation. When they threaten escalation, it is to strengthen their position at the negotiating table, not to place power in the hands of the workers themselves.

The events of 2024 illustrate this clearly. During the general strike over the cost-of-living crisis, production and infrastructure were briefly disrupted. The objective conditions for broader struggle existed. Yet the strike was quickly suspended once negotiations began, and workers were sent back with concessions that did not restore lost living standards. The state regained stability; capital resumed accumulation. The workers’ conditions remained essentially unchanged.

Thus, while workers move toward struggle under the pressure of material necessity, the unions redirect that movement back into the framework of the bourgeois state. Even when the unions denounce insecurity, they appeal to the same state that invites imperialist intervention and enforces austerity. They ask that capitalism function better, not that it be confronted.

For Nigerian workers, the problem is not simply bad policy or corrupt leadership in the unions. It is the impossibility of life under a mode of production that reduces human labour to a cost and entire regions to strategic zones to be sacrificed or slaughtered. As long as workers remain organized within regime unions, their struggles will be limited to demands compatible with the survival of capital.

Workers must organize themselves in class unions, independent of the bourgeois state and hostile to all forms of class collaboration. Such organizations cannot be instruments of negotiation but organs of struggle. They must reject nationalism, siding with this or that imperialist intrigue, and the illusion that reforms can resolve a crisis rooted in capitalist production itself.

This task cannot be accomplished through spontaneity alone. It requires political clarity and continuity with the historical communist movement. The lessons defended by the International Communist Party, that of the rejection of all alliances with bourgeois power remain indispensable.

The working class is today threatened by the war preparations of the world centers of capital, a new massacre desired and planned in order to avert the international uprising of the proletarians, aroused to defend their lives from the effects of the precipitating crisis of the present economic regime sacrificed to profit.

We do not know whether the working class, after a century of counter-revolution, will have time to rebuild its economic organs and connect with its revolutionary Marxist party, and thus have the strength to prevent the outbreak of world war. Even if it does not succeed, it will voice its opposition to rearmament, militarism, and nationalism, declaring that war is a bourgeois, capitalist affair and that wage earners are only forced into it by the power of different states. Under these conditions, it will be possible, in the course of the war, to transform it into international proletarian fraternization and revolutionary civil war for communism.

We dedicate our currently minuscule party forces to this great, crucial result.

* * *

As previously agreed and at the request of the center, we held our periodic general meeting, via teleconference, on September 27 and 28, with broad representation from all our sections.

We reassure those who do not know us that the party no longer holds congress-type meetings, where individuals or groups debate opposing interpretations of doctrine or reveal its corrections or updates.

The Communist Party is an electrical conductor, necessarily isolated from the bourgeois environment to avoid dispersion, but in contact with the living working class, whose function is to transmit the high potential of communist passion and science from a great past to the spontaneous and inevitable international revolutionary assault of the future, which will free the world from the mountain of dung that the dying bourgeois class is horribly accumulating.

We first listened to reports on the life of the sections and the results of our various activities. An update was given on the printed publications that have been added to our library and on the growth and improved structure of the website. The comrades involved gave a comprehensive report on the work of propaganda and proselytism in various fields and through various channels, and on its results. The financial situation was presented. We gave the necessary space to report on new or in-depth studies and on the trade union activity we carry out in the countries where we are present.

We then moved on to listening to reports on various topics of study:
     - The Agrarian Question
     - Iran in the party’s study
     - Trade union activity of the NA Section (published in TICP 66)
     - The social situation in Venezuela
     - Recent events involving the Turkish bourgeoisie
     - From the Tsarist Okhrana to Bourgeois Electronic Espionage
     - The International of Red Trade Unions
     - German Capitalism - Strength and Fragility
     - Report of the Editorial Staff of the Party’s Printed Periodicals
     - Origin of the Party Work Indexes and their Subsequent Improvement

The Transition to Capitalism

At this meeting, the presentation of the chapter Capitalism and Agriculture continued. We examined an important aspect of the transition from the domestic economy of the feudal mode of production and primitive communism to the capitalist form. Kautsky, in The Agrarian Question, emphasizes how quickly this transition takes place: “Capitalist industry has such superiority that it quickly eliminates domestic peasant industry intended for personal consumption, and only the capitalist system of communications, with its railways, post office, and newspapers, brings the ideas and products of the city to the remotest corners of the countryside and subjects the entire rural population, not just those living near the cities, to this process”.

With the inexorable advance of the capitalist mode of production, the peasant sees the old mode of production rapidly and violently dissolving: the need for money, which he previously needed for “superfluous” items, now becomes vitally important. He cannot run his farm, he can no longer live without money.

The feudal lords, princes, and state power also have an increasing need for money. This leads to the transformation of the farmer’s payments in kind into payments in cash. As a result, the products of the land are transformed into commodities to be brought to market. These are no longer the products of his backward industry, for which he could easily find a buyer, but of urban industry. The farmer became a mere cultivator. The independence, security, and comfort of the peasant’s existence as it had been known until then disappeared.

Kautsky: "The farmer now depends on the market, which he found even more capricious and uncertain than the weather. He could defend himself to a certain extent against the vagaries of the weather (...) But he has no means of preventing prices from falling and selling unsold grain. What had previously been a blessing for him, namely a good harvest, now became a calamity! (...) The further away the markets for which the farmer produces become, the more impossible it is for him to sell directly to the consumer, the more he needs an intermediary. Between the consumer and the producer stands the merchant, who knows the market... dominates it... and uses it to exploit the farmer.

"The grain and livestock merchant is soon joined by the usurer, when he is not identified with him. In bad years, the farmer’s income is not sufficient; he has no choice but to resort to credit, to mortgage his land (...) What bad harvests, iron and fire could not do before, crises in the grain and livestock markets can now do. These crises not only cause temporary hardship for the farmer, but also alienate him from his sources of life—the land—separating him from them forever and turning him into a proletarian".

The more the farmer becomes dependent on the market, the greater the surplus of means of subsistence he must produce and sell, and the greater the amount of land he needs in proportion to the size of his family. But since he cannot extend his cultivated land at will, he is forced to reduce his overly large family, as he cannot feed it; he therefore sends the surplus labor away from the family home, sending them to work for others as laborers, soldiers, or urban proletarians, or to create a new home. The peasant family is thus reduced as much as possible.

As agriculture requires more labor at certain times of the year, two or three times more than in winter, where previously the members of the family compensated for this by working at home during the crop rest periods, they are now insufficient and external wage laborers are hired for certain periods. They cost less than a family member for the whole year. Over time, even the members of the family unit become wage earners for the head of the family, and the farm property, the family inheritance, becomes the property of the head of the family.

The ancient peasant family community is thus replaced by large farms with their army of wage-earning workers who, under the orders of the owner, work the fields, tend the livestock, and put his harvest in the barns.

The class antagonism between the exploited and the exploiters quickly penetrated the countryside and the peasant family itself, destroying the ancient harmony and commonality of interests.

This whole process had been developing since the Middle Ages, but it was only with the capitalist mode of production that it underwent an extraordinary acceleration to the point of regulating the conditions of the rural population.

The capitalist economy draws small peasant farms into the commercial vortex, and “the more agriculture becomes capitalist, the more it develops the qualitative difference between the techniques of small-scale and large-scale production”.

“This qualitative difference”, Lenin reiterates, “did not exist in pre-capitalist agriculture”.

Continuing, we have outlined the part concerning the capitalist mode of production in agriculture. We have read passages from The Condition of the Working Class in England by the young Engels, which outlines the emergence of the capitalist mode of production in agriculture and the imposition of its inexorable law of the exploitation of man by man and of the land on the altar of profit.

Federico thus introduces the chapter “The Agricultural Proletariat”: "The abandoned fields were aggregated into large leases, with small farmers overwhelmed by the overwhelming competition of large farms. Instead of remaining landowners or tenants, they were forced to give up their farms and enter the service of large landowners as farm workers. For a time, this situation, although it marked a deterioration in their conditions, was bearable. The spread of industry counterbalanced the increase in population. But when industrial progress began to slow down, and continuous improvements in machinery made it impossible for industry to absorb all the surplus working population from the agricultural districts, from that moment on, the misery that had hitherto been confined to the industrial districts, and even there only from time to time, appeared in the rural districts as well".

Engels continues this important chapter: "The workers are almost all day laborers and are employed by the landlords when they need them, and therefore often have no work for weeks, especially in winter. In the patriarchal state, where the peasants and their families lived on the farm and their children grew up there, where day laborers were the exception rather than the rule, there were more workers on each property than were strictly necessary. It was therefore in the tenant farmer’s interest to dissolve this state of affairs, to drive the farmer off the farm and turn him into a day laborer. This happened more or less generally at the end of the twentieth year of this century [the nineteenth century], and as a result, the latent surplus population was dissolved and wages fell. From that moment on, agricultural districts became the main seat of permanent pauperism, as factory districts were of the other kind, and poor laws were the first measure that public authorities could conceive of against the growing impoverishment of agricultural communities.

"The continuous expansion of large-scale farming, the introduction of threshing machines and other machinery in agriculture, and the widespread employment of women and children in the fields, which is so common that its consequences were recently examined by a special official commission, left a large number of workers unemployed. The industrial system was created by large-scale economics, with the dissolution of the patriarchal state and the introduction of machines, steam power, and the labor of women and children, and it pushed the most extreme and stable part of the working class into the revolutionary movement. The longer agriculture had proved its stability, the heavier the burden fell on the worker, and the more violent the disorganization of the old social bond became.

The report went on to explain how, with the inexorable advance of the capitalist mode of production, agricultural proletarians in England, and even more so in Ireland, became miserable, hungry, and destitute, and how the peasants’ struggles against the landowners developed, often involving arson and murder.

In the 1950s, the economy and politics revolved around the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), through which the nascent Iranian bourgeoisie, in a still semi-feudal and predominantly agricultural society, sought autonomy from British and US capitalism, with the support or approval of the other imperialist power that emerged victorious from the Second World War: the USSR.

Even in those years and in those backward economic conditions, although the development of autonomous capitalism could have been a progressive factor and a source of development for the working class, the local bourgeoisie and its political parties were subordinate to the support and decisions of one power or another.

On the one hand, the monarchy feared a British reaction and the economic consequences of the nationalization of the AIOC, while on the other, a large part of Iranian society, the small landowning, industrial, and commercial bourgeoisie, hoped to receive a share of the oil revenues.

Nationalism also spread among the poor classes, who identified the enemy as the ‘foreigner’. They protested against the monarchy in support of Mohammad Mossadeq’s nationalist party, which, together with the Shiite clergy of Ayatollah Kashani, was in favor of nationalization and closer to the interests of the nascent local bourgeoisie.

Mossadeq, with the support of Kashani’s clergy and also strengthened by the support of the Tudeh, the Iranian Stalinist party, was elected Prime Minister in 1951, the year in which the nationalization of the company was approved by parliament almost unanimously.

The enthusiasm was soon dampened, both because Iranian capitalism lacked adequate capital, means of transport, and technical knowledge, and because of the harsh reaction not only of the United Kingdom but also of the United States, which feared the expansion of the USSR in the Middle East.

This led to the ‘Abadan crisis (1951-1954)’, an economic war of attrition in which the British halted Iranian oil production, which was moved to countries such as Saudi Arabia, lowered prices, banned the export of essential consumer goods (including sugar and iron) to Iran, and froze Iran’s current accounts in British banks.

Ayatollah Kashani turned his back on Mossadeq, under the pretext of the government’s reluctance to transform Iran into an Islamic state. The US intervened alongside Britain, at the price that the AIOC would be joined by the major US oil companies.

In 1953, a bloody coup d’état, organized by the US and supported by monarchist forces and the clergy, brought the Shah back to his homeland, a puppet of Western capitalist interests.

Despite Mossadeq’s fall, Iran nevertheless maintained nationalization, and in 1954 exports resumed but by the so-called “Iran Consortium” led by British Petroleum, Gulf Oil, Shell, Esso, Mobil, Texaco, and Chevron. In the following years, Enrico Mattei also tried with AGIP to participate in the banquet, but was excluded.

In fact, American imperialism won, obtaining 40% of the product.

Some data on society at the time are provided by a short article taken from Programma Comunista in 1958: "Of the 300,000 workers in industry, the highest-paid Iranian worker (3,000 rials per month, 24,000 Italian lire) spends up to 75% on food, 20% on housing, and the rest on clothing, hygiene, education, and miscellaneous items... An elite group of landowners, who supported the return of the Shah to the throne, represent 0.1% of the population and own 56% of arable land. 2% of the rural population owns between 6 and 20 hectares of land, 13.6% between 1 and 6 hectares, and 22% less than one hectare. Then there are the agricultural laborers, who make up 60% of the rural population, a mass of dispossessed people who earn enough to feed themselves with a cup of tea, a flatbread, and a glass of curdled milk. And, last but not least: 100,000 civil servants and employees, out of a population of about 18 million, spread over a territory as vast as five and a half Italies.

An article we wrote in September 1953, a few weeks after the coup d’état, describes the situation.

“Out of a population of just over 19 million people, almost 15 million are engaged in agriculture, still mummified in feudal molds. The vast expanse of steppe land means that sheep farming is widespread, and much of the population is still nomadic. To find a historical phase of the same level in European history, we have to go back millennia... ”.

“All the ‘semi-colonial’ countries of the world are today troubled by the parallel and contradictory pressures of a confused movement of emancipation of the indigenous bourgeoisie and the impossibility for the latter to keep pace, on its own, with the technical level and economic demands of the industrial apparatus inherited from the colonizing bourgeoisie or violently wrested from it... ”

"It was the realization of the national bourgeoisie’s dream of eliminating all foreign interference and participation in the management and profits of Iran’s only, ultra-modern, and powerful industrial complex that united the disparate and contradictory forces of contemporary Persian society behind the old minister. The landowners expected the increased state revenues to lead to the abandonment of land reform projects; the commercial and industrial classes counted on enjoying the undivided fruits of the oil industry and those industries linked to it; the proletariat vented its unrest, discontent, and instinct for revolt as a cruelly exploited class in the struggle against ‘the foreigner’... ".

“The bloc around Mossadeq collapsed as soon as the immediate phase of nationalization was over... The antagonisms of interest between landowners and merchants-industrialists resurfaced... ”

“Political success was not followed by economic improvement, not only for the poor populations of Persia, but also for the privileged classes and the state bureaucracy... ”

"A bourgeois revolution that does not produce money has no reason to exist. Mossadeq’s revolution proved to be a bad deal from the outset. Sooner or later, the anti-British coalition, which at the time of the expulsion of the British from Abadan ranged from the Court to the Tudeh, centred on Mossadeq’s party, was bound to break up badly, as happens with unfortunate commercial companies... »

«Those who truly felt the defeat, in their flesh and in their illusions, were the local and international proletariat who, under the nefarious influence of Stalinism, truly believed, and still believes that the global power structure of imperialism can be undermined on the periphery, with actions that, even if they resemble revolutionary methods of struggle, take place in the absence of a concomitant battle against the European and American centers of imperialism…

"Undoubtedly, we are not at the final act of the drama: the West, and England in particular, may score a point in their favor in the Shah’s coup d’état, but the crisis in Persia is not resolved for this reason, just as the crisis in all semi-colonial and colonial countries is not resolved, but rather is in its early stages. Abrupt reversals, increasingly chaotic situations, antagonisms, and counter-reactions remain possible, leaving the door open to new crises, new twists, and new emergency solutions, dominated, however, by the same problem, by the same disproportion between the forces of the native bourgeoisie and the gigantic capital investments, the very high degree of technical specialization, and the ability to compete on the world market, which the large industrial complexes based on the exploitation of indigenous raw materials presuppose.

"The national bourgeoisie of these countries cannot, in the long run, avoid throwing itself back into the arms of foreign capital: it is not the bourgeoisie, but the indigenous working class that is the victim of the convulsions caused by the industrialization of semi-colonial countries. The task of the Marxist party is therefore a difficult one. We openly fight the humanitarian lies of the capitalist colonizers, but precisely because we aim to denounce the oppression and exploitation of people of color, we cannot sympathize with the emerging indigenous bourgeoisies who aim to inherit the role of the white oppressor.

“The national struggles and revolts in the colonies are of particular interest to us because, in conditions of instability in the world’s imperialist centers and revolutionary recovery, the national-popular uprisings in backward countries will converge, albeit with specific objectives, in the operation to strangle the white imperialist centers led by the metropolitan proletariat... ”

“But the oppressed masses of Persia still have a revolutionary task to perform. The moment will come”.

See TICP 66 for report summation

The regime’s unions keep workers in a state of paralysis. The government and the parties that support it mobilize workers only to subject them to their media campaigns and their bourgeois-democratic and patriotic slogans. In general, the current unions in Venezuela offer no space for penetration, as they are very limited by their observance of the law and opportunistic political control.

Between July 2024 and July 2025, the Venezuelan state held successive elections to distract workers from their demands and to prevent those very demands from developing into a political crisis. This process was accompanied by repression and, despite the obvious discontent of workers (both employed and unemployed), in the absence of militant unions and under the influence of a diverse range of left-wing and right-wing parties, both of which spread legalistic, nationalist, patriotic, and electoral democratic rhetoric, no significant struggles have arisen. Few would be surprised if the pressure on workers and oppressed social strata were to result in a futile anarchic revolt.

Chavismo has gained control of all public powers, the parliament, and regional and local governments, and is trying to maintain the political initiative in the streets.

The right-wing opposition, both those who openly declare themselves in favor of US intervention and those who have joined the government in calling for the defense of sovereignty and the homeland, are unable to establish themselves as an alternative government, while promoting propaganda initiatives to deceive the masses, as Chavismo is doing.

The US military deployment in the Caribbean has become an opportunity for the bourgeoisie to fuel patriotism, calling on workers to enlist in the militias. This propaganda fails to penetrate the broad masses (which does not mean that they have a “revolutionary consciousness”, as some opportunists claim), but, this cynical and demagogic invocation of “armed struggle” opens the door to the militarization of society, aimed not at repelling foreign invasion, but containing the potential emergence of a class uprising, which would truly be a threat to the capitalist system in general, and in particular to the plans for acquisitions and profitable investments for transnational capital.

With the slogan “Long live the armed struggle!”, the ruling party (PSUV) calls for the formation of militias and the preparation of a guerrilla movement based on the communes. It even refers to the Vietnamese experience. In this way, it is mobilizing its social base, evoking revolutionary language and inviting them to take on the role of a “vanguard”, which means maintaining internal peace between the classes which is the negation of class struggle. The external enemy is feared when the real class enemies are within, namely the bourgeoisie, the landowners, and their parties. The expected result will be the strengthening of the military-police apparatus (and the militias) against the working class.

Opposition to this bourgeois tactic in Venezuela is the primary responsibility of the revolutionary party, which does not shirk its duties despite the unfavorable conditions.

Chavismo also takes the initiative by promoting from above and imposing a “Trade Union Constituent Assembly” and a “Peasant Congress” for the political and organizational subordination of trade unions and peasant organizations to the dictates of the government. Among the peasants, through the Ministry of Agriculture, it has promoted the establishment of the “Ezequiel Zamora National Peasant Union”, on which it has imposed the objective of “production and defense of sovereignty”, that is, to divert them from confronting the landowners and integrate them into the militias, subject to the government’s guidelines. In the case of the labor movement, the “Trade Union Constituent Assembly” is moving in the same direction, ensuring the submission of workers to the national economy, guaranteeing the operational continuity of businesses, and placing the words “defense of the homeland and sovereignty” above basic class demands.

It remains to be seen to what extent this tactic will achieve its objectives, both in the event of a military invasion by the United States, and without one.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Latin America, some governments are trying to take advantage of this situation to return to promoting their hypocritical “anti-imperialism”, such as Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Brazil, always with the aim of exposing their “leftist” image and fueling their electoral support.

Throughout Latin America, the regime’s unions and opportunistic parties of the right and left are sinking into the quagmire of parliamentarianism, legalism, and the defense of the Constitution, the homeland, and the national economy.

In Brazil, the trade union movement and the parties that influence it have integrated themselves into Lula’s government “to curb the advance of the right” (as if Lula’s government favored the working class). In Argentina, the trade union movement mobilizes workers, but because it is forced to do so by the pressure of discontent, it tries to divert them toward bourgeois democratic solutions, in isolated actions and without offering space for debate in the grassroots assemblies. In Colombia, Chile, and Bolivia, the trade union federations, with minor differences, align themselves with the government in power and its political initiatives. And so it is throughout the continent.

Of course, the deterioration in the material living conditions of the working class, resulting from the anti-crisis policies of the bourgeoisie, is pushing wage earners in the region to fight against the bosses for jobs and better working conditions. Each of the measures adopted by governments to curb the class struggle has an increasingly short duration and impact. In this context, the role of the International Communist Party in providing the workers’ movement with a revolutionary leadership, enabling it to break with the factors that today paralyze and disorient it, takes on particular importance.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is at war with the main Kemalist social-democratic opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP). Dozens of CHP mayors of cities and districts have been jailed on corruption charges. The judiciary has ordered the replacement of the current CHP leadership, both in Istanbul and at the central level, from the very popular party president Özgür Özel to the previous one, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who has raised no objections to the judicial moves.

The CHP has easily mobilized its cadres and grassroots supporters in periodic mass demonstrations across the country and in various districts of Istanbul against the imprisonment of its mayors. Therefore, the outcome of the maneuver to reshape the CHP leadership is uncertain. Moreover, with every judicial move against the CHP, the Turkish economy sinks deeper into the abyss.

The municipality of Ankara has also been the subject of an anti-corruption investigation. With Istanbul Mayor and CHP presidential candidate Ekrem İmamoğlu in prison, CHP Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavaş, who has fascist roots, had become the favorite for the opposition’s presidential candidacy. Although the investigation has not yet reached Yavaş, the AKP would certainly welcome his arrest, as the most popular opposition candidates would not be able to run against Erdoğan under such conditions. That said, Yavaş’s possible arrest could provoke an even stronger reaction than Imamoğlu’s arrest, mobilizing not only the CHP base but also that of the dissident fascist parties Good Party (İYİP) and Victory Party (ZP).

Meanwhile, the so-called “peace process” with the Kurds continues. A “National Commission for Solidarity, Brotherhood, and Democracy” has been set up by members of the Turkish Grand National Assembly, and PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, currently in prison, continues to play an active role. After years of collaboration with the CHP and the Turkish left, the Kurdish nationalist DEM party finds itself in a difficult position: on the one hand, it is pushed by its base to express solidarity with the CHP, while on the other, it is forced by Öcalan, who is reportedly working on reorganizing the DEM party, changing its leadership and name to include the word “Turkey”, to conform as much as possible to the government and the ruling coalition. Öcalan, whose main concern seems to be securing his release from prison, has gone so far as to advise the CHP to withdraw from the streets.

Last but not least, there is discord within the ruling coalition, the People’s Alliance. Just as AKP leader and President Erdoğan seeks to ease the pressure he is under from Turkish society in general over the genocide in Palestine by cozying up to Trump, his coalition partner Devlet Bahçeli, president of the traditional fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP, which is now more explicit in its support for the “peace process” than the AKP itself, given Bahçeli’s role in it) has called for an unlikely alliance between Turkey, Russia, and China. In turn, CHP leader Özgür Özel has not hesitated to attack Erdoğan on the Palestinian issue and his friendly relations with Donald Trump, and is organizing a demonstration in support of Palestine.

The municipal strike in Izmir, which saw the participation of 23,000 workers, organized by Genel-İş, a member of the DİSK grassroots trade union confederation, was the last major strike to take place in Turkey. Viciously attacked by the bourgeois opposition led by the CHP, which controls the municipality of Izmir, the strike was defeated and followed by mass layoffs. Class struggles continued with less intensity after this defeat.

The modern bourgeois state uses pervasive electronic surveillance, archives of data and algorithms that accelerate information gathering that previously required the intervention of many agents. An obvious goal is to maintain the efficiency of the state in defending the interests of the bourgeoisie, though another goal of this widespread surveillance is, ultimately, to intimidate workers and deter them from action. It is inevitable that communists and union organizers, in order not to compromise their work, will be forced, and already are in many countries, to take corresponding defensive measures.

The communists will take advantage of bourgeois legality as long as and wherever possible, and will work openly to spread their program and contribute to union organization. We know, however, that as the class struggle intensifies, it will be necessary to adopt defensive attitudes everywhere, both of the party and of the class. When the balance of power in society is reversed in favor of the revolution, the communists and the working class will have to know how to use the same weapons of the capitalist state and turn them against it for the suppression of the power of the bourgeois class.

Victor Serge, in his 1926 pamphlet, "What Everyone Should Know About State Repression", details the methods of the Okhrana secret police of the Tsarist regime in Russia and the countermeasures of the Communists. The Okhrana was the Tsarist political police for the control of trade unions and Bolsheviks, as well as other "enemies of the state", such as anarchists and Socialist Revolutionaries of the time. But it was also used to keep tabs on the Empire’s own officials.

The Okhrana was established in 1881. On March 13 of that year Tsar Alexander II was killed in an attack by populists. The police operated scientifically, systematically collecting data and observations useful to their objectives. They recruited talented and erudite men who understood the theory and history of revolutionary movements, and infiltrated subversive groups undercover to monitor, inform, maintain detailed personnel files, and plot manipulations and provocations. The Okhrana also conducted external surveillance by shadowing and intercepting correspondence. Highly paid agents meticulously recorded their observations and cross-referenced the reports in dossiers on various profiles.

Police Chief Zubatov extended surveillance throughout Russia and from 1911 in Europe, listening in on the telephone conversations of even government ministers. The “secret service”, especially after 1905, did not immediately dismantle the revolutionary organizations that had just been discovered. Instead, they let the movement develop, infiltrated provocateurs into it, to liquidate them later by beheading them at their peak.

Obviously, all this was not enough to prevent the October Revolution in 1917. In the Okhrana headquarters in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks found a secret archive containing 35,000 names of provocateurs and a copy of a “Directive on Intelligence Services Secrets”, an “ABC of Provocation”, which shows how psychological manipulation, economic coercion, profiling and the exploitation of personal vulnerabilities were used to coerce revolutionaries of weak character, the disillusioned, the destitute, the exiled, especially prisoners, and how the secret police maintained their cover through arrests and releases orchestrated to make them credible.

Serge witnessed the defeat of the Okhrana and its agents and how the revolution, still successful, was "invincible" against such methods. All the hacking and decoding of correspondence, and the maneuvers to counter revolutionary tactics - similar to today’s forensic analysis, biometrics, and automatic data processing - ultimately proved powerless to stem the discontent of exploited workers, starving peasants, and soldiers during the Great War, and failed to decapitate the Bolsheviks, despite arrests and exiles.

The strength of revolutionary propaganda comes from the party’s message that enters in tune with widespread worker complaints, and possesses intrinsic resistance if rooted in their lived experience, which cannot be easily broken by violence, deception and coercion; the terror instilled by political police is nothing compared to the terror of poverty, hunger and the horrors of imperialist war.

Of course there will always be infiltrators, corrupt people, traitors in the party and in the unions. But working-class organizations will learn to defend themselves. Within the party, the best defense is to apply correct communist practices in all aspects of its life: centralization, discipline, discretion, close, correct relationships. and fraternity among comrades, banning all pretensions, improvisation, and personalism. External provocation, often presented behind an ostentatious assertion of doctrinal orthodoxy, must be countered not by trials or by giving in to a climate of suspicion, but by sound party work, known and clear to all.

Serge imparts good advice. Communicate only what is necessary: "The inattention of revolutionaries has always been the best aid to the police", and warns against foolish affectations: "The greatest virtue of a revolutionary is simplicity and contempt for all posturing, including ’revolutionary’ and especially ’conspiratorial’ ones".

But in the pre-revolutionary era, finally, Serge writes, the party defends itself for the large number of new enthusiastic acolytes who suddenly offer themselves up for its orders, in a great mass unknown to any police register, paper or electronic.

In fact, if not formally in their lying democracies, the communist party is already illegal and their codes and constitutions already have the rules that prohibit it. They establish criminal laws that currently, in a minority of the world’s countries, the bourgeoisie still does not believe the courts should enforce. More than judicial illegality, economic illegality is legally in force for the party: communists would never be granted access to the mass media, which cost millions and are tightly controlled by capitalist lodges.

The threat of legal persecution is therefore always pending, and the party knows that this awaits them as soon as the class struggle progresses and shows signs of emancipating itself from the shackles of political and trade union opportunism. Moreover, strict adherence to the law already hinders the activity of revolutionaries and trade unions. Due to the restrictions on the right to strike, imposed in all democracies, for a workers’ union to fight successfully, it is already forced to take actions that the law considers illegal. In Serge’s time, as today, trade union movements had to deal not only with official law enforcement agencies. In Italy during the Fascist era, the Chambers of Labor were burned down by fascist squadristi, protected by the police. In the United States, private agencies, such as the Pinkertons, proliferated, employing informants, provocateurs, and even armed agents to undermine workers’ organizations.

This does not mean that in a workers’ union, where “rights” have been taken away or never granted, you find it necessary to reclaim them and fight for them. The demand from workers to gather, organize, and demonstrate will clash with the capitalist power structure and even more so for the party. For example, propaganda within the armed forces, which is illegal everywhere, is supported by the party and deemed necessary. While the Italian Socialist Party, in keeping with its progressive, legalistic and parliamentary doctrine, was caught off guard by the attack of the gangs, then of the fascist government, the Communist Party of Italy already had its own efficient clandestine network.

Modern intelligence services have significantly evolved in the surveillance and infiltration tactics pioneered by the Okhrana, using digitalization of all aspects of life. Informants are now as physical as they are digital, while Psychological operations, including the dissemination of disinformation, are carried out by structured organizations. Physical surveillance is combined with cell phone tracking and call recording; online connections, searches, social media browsing and activity, and banking transactions are tracked. A dense network of cameras covers every intersection in cities and the countryside.

Some international companies have created software, which they use to collect data and sell to states. It has been widely demonstrated that governments have used the infamous Pegasus "spyware" to hack cell phones and monitor journalists, lawyers, political opponents, activists, and various groups and trade unions.

In short, even in the richest and most “free” nations on the planet, technically everything is ready for the instant imposition of martial law and the suspension of so-called civil liberties, and the recourse to the classic “low-tech” methods of kidnapping, beatings, rape and torture, just like in Serge’s time.

A comrade from the United States recalls when the workers at Homestead in 1892 went on illegal strike and faced bullets, and the Pinkerton bombs: they didn’t worry about illegality and clandestinity then because they fought in the open and en masse, gaining the support of many citizens. He recalled the postmen’s strike of 1970, who were even denied the right to strike: they didn’t retreat against the deployment of the National Guard and the state of national emergency declared by President Nixon. They paralyzed the national postal service until they achieved, not yet the right to strike, but collective bargaining and wage increases.

Around the world, police and the military repress proletarian strikes and uprisings by arresting, imprisoning, or deporting. Yet the struggle persists; illegal strikes can achieve results, even while the movement also faces heavily armed police forces. Where unions have been disbanded, new ones emerge, even more weakened but combative.

The party’s defense also lies in the awakening of the class instinct, in bonds of solidarity, in the mass revolt of workers and their spontaneous activity. Moreover, this will be fostered by the party’s conscious leadership. This social dynamic, under favorable conditions, will culminate in insurrection and civil war against imperialist war and against the state.

Capitalism is destroying itself. Despite all its sophisticated surveillance apparatus and the brutality of its wars and prisons, it cannot escape the historical inevitability of class conflict. The same technologies developed under capitalism to maximize profit, and which today enable dictatorial control over the working class, also create the conditions for its collapse and violent dissolution. All the world’s secret police forces will suffer the same fate as the Okhrana, despite their "scientific" nature and cowardly provocations, powerless against the forces of social revolution and the rising international tide of the proletariat.

On 20 April 1922 the Congress of the yellow International Trade Unions of Amsterdam began in Rome, warmly welcomed by the CGL and the Socialist Party, and with contempt by the PCdI.

On November 21, the Second Congress of the Profintern began its work. If the delegates were fewer than at the First Congress, this does not mean that the influence of the Profintern had decreased. Lozovsky, secretary of the Profintern, said that the proletarians who joined or were influenced by the ISR were between 12 and 15 million; a figure similar to that of Amsterdam, with the difference that a third of the latter’s members sympathized with Moscow, while in the Profintern no one sympathized with Amsterdam.

The main problem to be addressed was the organic relationship between the Comintern and Profintern, rejected by the anarcho-syndicalist component. To avoid further splits, the Profintern abolished the article in the Statute that subordinated the trade union International to the political International. The Italian Left had opposed this position, which emerged at the concurrent Fourth Congress of the CI: at this Congress, while advancing valid positions on many issues, and after having labeled the Social Democrats and the Amsterdam International traitors, agreements with it were nevertheless sought. The Italian Left immediately disagreed, rightly arguing that the Amsterdam International was not a trade union organization, but a political one, at the service of the bourgeoisie.

The attempts to reach an agreement with Amsterdam were followed by the United Fronts with the supposedly workers’ parties, up to the Workers’ Governments, and then workers and peasants themselves. The attempt to win the working masses over to one’s side by any means was due more to desperation than anything else, but it was unfortunately foreseeable, and foreseen by us, that, especially with the end of the ascendant moment of the revolution, the unnatural united front with the union leaders and reformist politicians could only lead to the abandonment of classist and communist positions.

Such ambiguities, and worse, are also present in the “Theses of the Fourth Congress on the tactics of the Comintern”, dated December 5, 1922: «The Communists are even prepared to negotiate with the traitorous leaders of the Social Democrats and with those of Amsterdam (…) The true success of the United Front comes “from below” (…) However, the communists cannot give up negotiating (…) even with the leaders of the opposing parties».

At the opening of the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, in June 1924, the delegates, in the name of the United Front and proletarian unity, unexpectedly found themselves faced with the proposal to dissolve the Profintern and join Amsterdam. There was still talk of treason by the Amsterdam leaders, but at the same time giving emphasis on the emergence of a left-wing current within it. It was stated that the international unity of the trade union movement "would be re-established by convening a World Congress to which all unions affiliated with either the Amsterdam International or the Red International of Trade Unions would be represented. represented on a proportional basis".

The new trade union approach expressed in the Fifth Congress of the IC was re-proposed at the Third Congress of the Profintern, which opened on 8 July 1924, with the manifest disagreement of the Italian Left, which in the Theses presented in Lyon in 1926, at the point 8, writes: «The Amsterdam International office was to be considered and treated not as an organism of the proletarian masses but as a counter-revolutionary political organ of the League of Nations (…) However, the usefulness of a united front tactic on a global basis with all the trade union bodies, including those adhering to Amsterdam, cannot be excluded».

The merger between the two Internationals was rejected by Amsterdam. But in April 1925 Representatives of the Russian and British trade unions met in London, forming an "Anglo-Russian Committee". Its creation was presented by Zinoviev as proof of the correctness of the United Front tactic.

Stalin declared in July 1926: "If the reactionary trade unions are willing to form with the revolutionary trade unions of our country a coalition against the counter-revolutionary imperialists of their country, why should this bloc not be approved? It was easy for Trotsky to reply that "if the reactionary unions were capable of fighting against their imperialists they would not be reactionary".

In 1926 the General Council of the British Trade Unions was forced by proletarian pressure, following the coal mine lockout, to call a strike. The strike was soon sabotaged by union bosses, but the International and the Profintern nevertheless continued to participate in the Committee. As late as April 1927, the Russian delegates of this committee, who had already recognized the General Council of the British Trade Unions as "the sole representative and spokesman of the trade union movement in England", pledged "not to diminish the authority" of the leaders. trade unionists and to "not concern themselves with the internal affairs of the English unions".

The “Appeal of the Executive Committees of the IC and the ISR to all sections and all workers”, of May 9, 1926, reiterates this attitude, condemned by us, on the British workers’ struggle: "The Executive Committees of the IC and the ISR urge all sections to make every effort to ensure unity of action. To this end, meetings with representatives of other parties and organizations are recommended".

In the “Theses of the Seventh Plenum on trustification, rationalization and “Tasks of Communists in the Trade Unions”, dated the 16th of December 1926, at points 10, 12 and 13 we read: «10. (…) The failure of the general strike and the united front of the Amsterdam International with the General Council for the sabotage of the strike of the miners has resulted in the consolidation of the top organisation of the Amsterdam International (…) The General Council is now promoting exactly the same policy as the Amsterdam International, and in this sense it can safely be said that the failure of the general strike has been advantageous for the Amsterdam International to the same extent that the turn to the right of the trade union apparatus in any country is advantageous for those who defend the interests of the reactionary European bureaucracy and bourgeoisie (…) «12. The crisis of the Anglo-Russian Committee has provided a pretext for our adversaries to talk about the failure of unity and the united front tactic (…) «13. Starting from the consistent application of the united front tactic, the CC of the VKP(b) and the Presidium of the Communist International have spoken out against the tactic of dissolving the Anglo-Russian Committee (…)». The alliance with the Amsterdam International is then reaffirmed, and the consequent defense of the indefensible Anglo Russian Committee.

The German economy rests on foundations that have been consolidated over the course of a century and a half. Since the proclamation of the Empire in 1871, the country has experienced accelerated industrialization, transforming it into Europe’s leading manufacturing power. Chemicals, machinery, steel, electricity, and then the automobile industry were the driving forces behind a growth that, even before the First World War, had led Germany to surpass France and the United Kingdom in several fields.

Industrial concentration, the intertwining of large banks and large companies, the scientific research applied to production built that “organized capitalism” that has remained a distinctive feature to this day.

An organised urban proletariat arose alongside the development of Germany’s productive forces with the expansion of the wage-system, and the movement for social democracy eventually became the great worker’s party. The Weimar Republic inherited an urbanized country marked by profound regional inequalities and a serious economic crisis.

The Hitler regime abolished civil and trade union liberties and tried to incorporate the workers in the “popular community” subordinating them to the company and the State. After the catastrophe of wartime destruction, the two Germanies that emerged were forced to follow different paths: in the West, a coordinated capitalism with welfare, codetermination, and a rising middle class; in the East, a planned economy that guaranteed employment and favored workers and peasants.

The Federal Republic is a state divided into sixteen Länder, with a parliamentary system that combines direct representation and the powers of the regional governments. The Bundestag and the Bundesrat embody this dual level, while the Federal Chancellor concentrates executive functions, and the President performs guarantor duties. To prevent the proliferation of political parties that characterized the Weimar Republic, the 1949 Constitution, by setting the electoral threshold at 5%, favored the formation of coalition governments.

West Germany saw its production system relaunched, the “miracle economy" of the 50s and 60s. The basis of that success was the same: a strong sector in manufacturing, a high-quality workforce, networks of specialized small and medium-sized businesses, and connections to foreign markets. Even today, despite globalization and digitalization having transformed landscapes and supply chains, the Mittelstand constitutes the backbone of the German model: hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized companies, often family-run, producing high-tech components and machinery for the global market.

From the Bismarckian model of welfare and social insurance to the modern system Germany’s dual school-worker system has created a mechanism that trains generations of skilled workers and integrates their training directly into production processes. This system has guaranteed capital a disciplined and trained workforce, which translates into high profits and strong business competitiveness.

The reunification of 1990 involved the absorption of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) was forced into the Western economic system, with privatizations, factory closures, and massive migration to the West. This left social and political scars that are still visible: higher unemployment rates, lower wages.

Germany has always been a strongly export-oriented economy: first with Weltpolitik and German colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century, then with commercial expansion in the post-war period, up to the current interdependence with China and with the markets in Asia. About half of Germany’s GDP depends on exports. This means that every international crisis, drop in foreign demand, or geopolitical shock has repercussions on the productive system. Recent examples—the 2008 financial crisis, the disruptions to value chains during the pandemic, the surge in energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting disruption of energy supplies from Russia—show just how vulnerable German growth is.

Today, the automotive sector, a symbol of "Made in Germany", is undergoing a momentous transformation: the transition to electric vehicles and competition from Chinese manufacturers like BYD threaten its supremacy and employment. German capital is suffering from declining profitability in mature sectors and is struggling to find new outlets for an accelerated cycle of accumulation.

Social discipline, made of hierarchy and collaboration, has allowed decades of stability, thanks in part to codetermination and union bargaining. But the utopian bourgeois ideologies and structures that ensured social peace and continuity have turned into rigidity when it comes to rapid innovation, investment in new technologies, or reorienting the energy system. This dialectic between strength and fragility constitutes one of today’s most powerful contradictions.

For decades two major parties have polarised political life: the CDU/CSU of center-right and the Social Democratic SPD, with the liberals of the FDP holding the balance. Over the last twenty years, however, this balance has weakened. The SPD has gradually lost building consensus among industrial workers and urban pensioners; the CDU/CSU.

It maintains its lead but without a solid majority; the Greens have won over the young, and educated electorate of the cities; Die Linke, heir to the PDS in the East, represents weaker groups and militant sectors but has remained a minority.

In the February 2025 elections, the nationalist AfD, Alternative for Germany, jumped to 152 seats, becoming the second largest party. The CDU/CSU represents the conservative middle classes and rural businesses; the SPD represents a remnant of the working-class and public sector; the Greens represent the urban and cosmopolitan middle classes; Die Linke represents the working-class segments of the East; the AfD young men from the outskirts, small business owners and insecure workers, with a strong anti-immigration demagogy. The electoral bases of the parties are increasingly less identifiable with classes and increasingly with inter-class alliances between segments of different classes. The traditional terrain of political representation of labor has shattered, leaving room for both right and left wing populisms and growing abstentionism.

Today, the working class is seeing its wages and stability eroded by digitalization and offshoring. The lower middle class is still numerous but shrinking. Marginalized groups, the unemployed, poor pensioners, immigrants, and ethnic minorities struggle to access education and stable employment. Since the 1990s, and explosively in 2015 with the refugee crisis, Germany has welcomed millions of people. This has helped slow the aging process of the population and fill jobs, but it has also generated tensions over competition for housing, services, and wages. Incidents of far-right violence have increased along with its political representation. A distinctive element of the German model was the role of trade unions and co-determination. Since the post-war period, workers have been able to elect factory councils and having representatives on the supervisory boards of companies with a certain number of employees, especially in strategic sectors such as the steel industry, has ensured decades of social peace, relatively high wages, ongoing training, and quality production. "Participation" has not eliminated class conflict, but has institutionalized it, under the illusion of making it compatible with capitalist accumulation.

Today, the fragmentation of work, the increase in precarious employment, and the decline in traditional industrial employment are reducing bargaining power. In the new technological and service sectors, unionization rates are much lower and employment relationships are more individualized. Traditional worker representation is in crisis. Traditional parties and unions are no longer able to represent the lower classes or address the economic crisis. Capitalists are looking to rearmament as a solution. The Rheinmetall Group, one of the most important arms manufacturers, continues to grow. In the first nine months of 2025, its turnover increased by 20%, reaching 7.5 billion euros (in 2024 it was 6.6 billion); growth in the military sector alone was 28%. This does not only concern Germany though, but all of advanced capitalism in the world. Germany is therefore a crucial laboratory for understanding the present and future of class struggles.

Although a very serious, complex and demanding historical situation remains for us despite our minimal resources, we can boast of the regularity and rapid pace we have managed to maintain, even in the publishing field. This serene efficiency is based not on the exceptional intellectual or moral abilities of our members, but essentially on the way our group feels and works, free from the miseries of personalistic intellectualism and the impatience of voluntarism and politicking.

Thanks to the generous work of all our comrades, old and young, we can boast the regular publication of six substantial printed organs, in four languages. They are all worthy of continuing today in the tradition of the centuries-old Marxist school and of providing continuity to the party’s historical assessments, managing to promptly address many of the difficult issues that the situation presents to us.

A great factor in the strength of the Party is the relationship of centralization within the international organization. Where new requests and additions converge from many sides and comrades can continuously defend and confirm the historical red thread of communism. This factor facilitates internal growth on the levels of self-awareness and extension in its numerous functions, attentions and interventions.

Let’s not go so far as to aspire to be a single international editorial board, which would only stifle the party’s capabilities and energy. The party is the same everywhere; each local group fully expresses the party’s voice in a given context. If, due to war or repression, connections between the sections and the center are severed, the party groups will continue to know, understand, and speak to the class, even in the absence of central directives. Nevertheless, the power of close coordination between the different sections is evident, and will allow us in the future to grow the editorial offices of our periodicals.

If newspapers are the "collective organizers" of the party for the comrades who receive, read, and distribute them, they are also the same for those who write them, for the transmission of information and contributions from the periphery to their editorial offices, where those newspapers are designed and built. It is an arsenal where a warship is launched at regular intervals. It is a trench in which communists find refuge and from which they can attack. Our well-connected editorial teams are both a product and an important factor in the development of an effective international party. Because the newspaper is much more than the sum of the articles published there, which obviously we don’t sign, because they are the result of a collective effort that the editorial staff is called upon to carry out, of selection, reworking, adaptation, titling, etc.

Since 1957 the party had given itself “Programme Communiste”, in French, the international language at the time, with an editorial office in Marseille, France, which in 1973 was 60 issues have already been released. Having lost "Programme" in the 1973 split, in 1979, given the growing number of reports submitted to general meetings, which could no longer be included in "Il Partito", it was possible to resume publication of a dedicated magazine, a biannual one we gave the peremptory name "Comunismo”.

Issue 99 of this magazine was published last July, respecting its periodicity for half a century. Issue 2 of “Communism”, which has sold 150 copies, is now in print and already on the website. The intention is to once again showcase the party with its own international magazine, this time in English, which will feature the most important of our doctrinal and historical studies. There will be a corresponding edition of the magazine also in Italian, the continuation of “Communism”, and when possible in other languages, if not in print then on the website. The content is of interest to the world communist movement, and even the examination of local events and situations transcends the occasional to reach general considerations and conclusions.

Already in the English and Italian editions these reports are gradually coinciding, while waiting to conclude the series already begun on “Communism”. We showed our comrades a proposed summary and convergence plan for the next issues. An international magazine is now necessary because our English language International Communist Party covers mainly national issues, as our newspapers have always done, for Italy, Venezuela, and Turkey. In the eight tightly packed pages of the latest issue, half of the headlines comment on events in the United States and half on international affairs: this seems like a fair balance to us.

Since its establishment in the post-war period, and at least since 1952, the study activity of the party, in search of its roots in doctrine and historical battle, took place in the form of oral communications in periodic general meetings. Of these, 62 were counted up to 1973 and after this meeting 153.

The General Meetings are not deliberative assemblies but working meetings (not there being nothing left to decide). The results of this faithful tracing of the foundations of revolutionary communism and their application to the investigation of the events of the class struggle was subsequently reproduced in the party press.

These works, although intended to be as faithful as possible to orthodox Marxist theory and the tradition of left communism, were never intended to be definitive or exhaustive, but rather awaited further study and completion by our future investigations and the lessons of history. All this hard work, aimed at restoring the foundations of the party’s activity, has always been framed within a joint, comprehensive, preventive plan, known to all, deemed logical and necessary, which set objectives, methods, and timeframes for implementation.

Certain comrades volunteered and were tasked with implementing it. It is certainly not a perfect machine, nor is its results entirely predictable. But we tried to avoid entrusting it to the initiative and contingent preferences of individual comrades, who might end up presenting unexpected reports. This impersonal continuation of work inserted into a flow has made the phase of the so-called preventive control on the documents, of which the whole party already knows the precedents, the themes, the arguments in advance. In this multi-handed activity, individual speakers pass, the work of the party remains, which impersonally accumulates and passes on.

Today, therefore, after a century and three-quarters of Marxism and three-quarters of a century of the current organization, our school has produced a monumental body of literature, an entire library, on the most diverse topics: from the theory of history, to economic science, to the theory of knowledge, to the facts of ancient and current history, to the critical conscience of our communist movement. This material does not emerge from an Academy, but is produced by generations of proletarian fighters, driven by the demands of the struggle, often subjected to bourgeois persecution, starting with Karl Marx, who was so destitute he could barely support his family.

Our works should be considered "on the edge of time", as a whole, identifying the threads that bind the parts of that unified body of thought. It is known that "without a revolutionary theory, revolution is impossible". We don’t need a party of scholars, but a party of wisdom. Our movement must be able to draw on our knowledge, self-awareness, and guidance for action. In the 1950s, precisely in order to master the boundless material that was rapidly accumulating from general meeting to meeting and in the press, the then young comrade Livio, from Naples, was charged to establish, and subsequently maintain, an Index of Party Work. This included three tools:- an Index of General Meetings, in chronological order, which listed the Reports;- An Index of the Press which, for each issue of “Programma”, page by page, it reported all the titles, the main ones of which indicated the Topic;- A Subject Index, with reference to the General Meetings in which they were were addressed.

The Periodic Update Pages of these documents (transcribed meticulously by hand, as electronics did not yet exist) were then transferred onto matrices, reproduced on a mimeograph machine and distributed to comrades at each General Meeting. Livio then continued this careful reading, taking note and consideration of the contents, and transcribing the titles, moving from the numbers of “Programma” to those of “Il Party” and “Communism”. Finally, since 1999, when, thanks to the knowledge and technical tests of a comrade from Paris, we were able to inaugurate the party’s Internet site. Ezio took charge, after having learned to use the computer, of digitizing the many hundreds of pages of the Indexes from Livio’s tiny handwriting. What we have today comes from this previous loving and meticulous work. What do we have today instead?

1. - A General Index of the site’s pages, in order of insertion (international-communist-party.org/Address.htm). This, obviously, is updated almost daily. 2. - The Language Indexes of the new entries. Here the new writings and texts of different archives are listed separately. 3. - The Newspaper Index: for each issue we publish, all the titles and subtitles, with the subject next to them. 4. - We also have the Indexes by Subject, currently 24 (international communist-party.org/Indices/IIndices.htm) The growth and improved structure of each of them reflects the amount of work the party can devote to the corresponding topic.

As a Note on the Page states: "The purpose of this tool is to facilitate the task of those who approach our doctrine. It certainly should not be considered exhaustive of the rich Marxist literature: the use of comrades will always suggest additions and improvements to the structure.

Research into our knowledge is now greatly facilitated by the tools of computer scientists. This does not take away the difficulty of learning: as Engels recalled, "the Marxism is a science and, like all sciences, it must be studied". We will not create a scholastic, immutable and lifeless, but a school, where the field of study is continually deepened and expanded by study itself, faced with the infinite evolution of the natural, material, and social world. A learning that spans past modes of production and up to the Revolution and Communism