Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor has been trumpeted by the reformist left across the United States as a major event and a “political earthquake.” By securing the nomination, he has become the presumptive victor in the November 2025 election. Yet despite the apparent naivety of the opportunists, the victory is merely another managed adjustment within the bourgeois order. Against the spent figure of Andrew Cuomo, representing the decaying edifice of the neo-liberal old guard within the Democratic Party, Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, drapped himself in the rhetoric of a “political revolution,” (a term used by opportunists to clarify they merely intend to sell a revolution in words and presentation, not in actual deeds) promising rent freezes, state-run grocery stores, free childcare, and fare-free buses. But it goes without saying that this campaign was no independent eruption of proletarian power; it was a carefully orchestrated electoral operation run through the Democratic Party’s machinery, designed to capture a post within the capitalist state. It points to the developing program of the Democratic Party to once again take on a social democratic veneer to restore the capitalist state amid the rising economic contradictions in an attempt to retain its domination over the working-class masses and the unions. The program of Mamdani and all democratic “socialist” opportunists is to sell false hope in order to divert the real economic grievances of the working class into the parliamentary pen, their instinctual class anxieties safely dissipated in ballots and municipal procedure.

Even before taking office, Mamdani has displayed the opportunist’s reflex to kiss the ass of the ruling class and show his supplication to his new potential employers, meeting with Wall Street executives and real estate magnates to “allay their concerns” and seek “partnership,” assuring them, “The core of my politics is not just sincerity, but also a desire for partnership.” Such words betray the truth of these class collaborationists black dealings with the capitalist class, who will never accept meaningful confiscatory taxation except on the coattails of a real class struggle that threatens their class power through a contest coercive forces. Absent such a movement, the only path to fund Mamdani’s billions in promised social spending will be through taxes on the working and middle classes, disguised as “shared sacrifice” but functioning as the same old regressive levies. Here lies the real function of his administration for capital: to serve as a pressure valve, releasing proletarian anger through controlled reforms that preserve the stability of the bourgeois city, ensuring that the pipes of capitalism are patched without the foundations ever being touched.

Capital’s Crises and the Return of New-Deal Democrat Opportunism

In the archetypal financial capital of the world known as New York City, homelessness runs rampant reaching the highest level since the Great Depression with 105,373 people living in shelters and more than 200,000 living in “doubled up homes”, where they are forced into cramping themselves in the homes of others due to the inability to afford housing. From 1996 to 2017, 1.1 million units of affordable housing were lost and the cost of living has skyrocketed with consumer goods reaching astronomical prices. It is the classic tale of two cities, with racial and class segregation being painstakingly obvious across its five boroughs that divides the bourgeois corporate mega towers of Wall St. and the proletarian slums. No surprise then that only one third of New Yorkers think their quality of life is excellent or good along with one in four rating it as poor. As the saying goes, New York, I loathe you, and you’re selling me out!

This, of course, is all happening while the bourgeoisie continues their accumulative death spiral and blood-thirst for profit, resulting without fail in death and destruction,and will culminate in the next inter-imperialist war, which is certainly soon to come. With Mr. Mamdani, securing the Democratic Party nomination for New York mayor, we observe a trend not too dissimilar from FDR and the social democratic New Deal which emerged in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash.

At that time, American leftism manifested itself in the first phase of the New Deal, which meant financial reform and mass public works projects in an attempt to resuscitate the economy and centralize it in preparation for the second great inter-imperialist war. Of course, we Marxists were not surprised that the fundamental crisis in profitability was not in fact fixed by “sound policy” but by the war. 1934 saw a great strike wave that shook the bourgeoisie to its core and, fearful of an assertive proletariat, made the bourgeoisie pacify their class enemy by penetrating their unions and integrating them into the Democratic Party, in exchange for immediate state-sanctioned gains and legal methods of solving labor disputes. As a result, the unions were forcibly subordinated to the bourgeois state to elicit their compliance with imperialist slaughter, while in the following decades, New Deal reforms, designed to cow-tow the proletarian into the arms of the capitalist state, were slowly chipped away at over time.

Mr. Mamdani is a part of a larger trend within the Democratic Party to return to this 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. He has so far succeeded in mobilizing New York (and especially its younger population) into falling for his false alternative to the despicable conditions of today by achieving the most primary votes ever recorded. As the economic contradictions of capital sharpen, opportunism swoops in to sell its democratic pie-in-in the sky gospel and reformist snake oil. This trend is not without its resistance from the Democratic old guard, real estate titans, and investment firms (again, the New Deal had opposition within the Democratic Party) but so far enough of the party has been bitten by the “socialist” bug to allow Mr. Mamdani to slip right into government. If he truly posed a threat to bourgeois power, he simply would be denied power.

Let’s see now what ingredients make up the brew of “socialism” that Mr. Mamdani and his crew of rapscallions have conjured up.

Of all the creatures and caricatures to emerge from the opportunist swamp, reformist “socialism” is an old devil that the communist workers movement, i.e. “the real movement to abolish the present state of things”, has long since demolished with the advent of the Third International over a century ago. Yet, here we are again. Mr. Mamdani and co. carry on the democratic and anti-Marxist tradition of hyper-activism and worker pacification by clinging to the illusion that the bourgeois state can be reformed to serve proletarian ends, an illusion exposed decisively after the heroic defeat of the Paris Commune.

“Socialism means to me a commitment to dignity. A state [sic!] that provides whatever is necessary for its people to live a dignified life,” says Mamdani. This “dignified” life has the same whiffs as typical bourgeois society mired in wage-labor. To name a few of these “socialist” policies they include higher top corporate and income tax rates, public market alternatives to private enterprise, decreasing fines and increasing funding for small businesses, and a $30 minimum wage. Already heading towards total financial ruin in the world economy, maintaining these benefits (assuming they can even get passed in the first place) is a dubious assumption and it relies totally on the bourgeois state apparatus that will certainly put the stability of capital first. It underscores the delusional outlook of social democrats who view the bourgeois state as a neutral arbitrator between labor and capital, and that merely by capturing democratic reforms, can be made absent of a real class struggle.

Suffice it to say, this is opportunist social democracy, not socialism which of course, was never the goal in the first place. Where do we find the class basis for this left-wing program? The democratic petty-bourgeoisie, i.e. small to middling enterprise owners, the labor aristocracy, and other “professionals”. With their vacillating allegiance and instability, they have allied with the bourgeoisie through the Democratic Party and have managed to capture the support of some sections of the proletariat. This is reflected in the voting patterns where Mr. Mamdani won the most in middle class neighborhoods and income levels as well as with the sellout regime unions that continue to endorse Democrats and keep workers under the bourgeois spell.

What we have here is a reformist program found not only among Mr. Mamdani, but also other democratic socialists (nice rebrand!) across the country who have managed limited electoral success by caucusing with the Democratic Party and being endorsed by an organization called the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA come from a “proud” historical line traced from the social democratic remnants of the Socialist Party of America from a split in the 1970s over electoral support for the Democrats and aligning with students. These putrid creatures that have managed to come out of the manhole are bourgeois in program (these philistines request a “second constitutional convention”!) and in action with their advocacy for meager reforms and worker action that never breaks from the logic of capital or the bounds of legality.

The working class is constantly fed parliamentary and democratic fetish ideology that directs their anger into channels deemed acceptable by our bourgeois masters. Democratic socialists and business/reformist unionists allied with the Democratic Party actively damage the workers movement and are its misleaders.

Sewer Socialism: Opportunism’s Dead-End Drainage Ditch

Over the past decade, and increasingly over the last several years, the United States has seen a steady and measurable increase in the number of social democrats, primarily with the opportunist workers party, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), winning municipal and state offices. As the capitalist crisis worsens these hucksters are crawling out of the leftist swamp popping up out of manholes in cities across the country to spin their noxious democratic delusions of a restored middle class living harmoniously within capitalism, while pacifying the proletariat into accepting higher taxes on itself to maintain the municipal arteries of capitalist accumulation.

At the state level, New York has emerged as a center, with figures like Julia Salazar, Jabari Brisport, Zohran Mamdani, and five Assembly members forming a cohesive “Socialists in Office” bloc in the government for several years ahead of Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy. Minnesota has seated socialists such as Omar Fateh and Zaynab Mohamed in the Senate, while Pennsylvania has elected Nikil Saval to the Senate and Elizabeth Fiedler and Rick Krajewski to the House. Wisconsin’s 2022 elections brought Ryan Clancy and Darrin Madison into the State Assembly, reviving the first Socialist Caucus since 1931. Other recent socialists in local office include Erika Uyterhoeven in Massachusetts and David Morales in Rhode Island. At the municipal level, Chicago elected six democratic socialists to its city council in 2019, Minneapolis has four DSA-backed members. Portland, Oregon’s 2024 reforms expanded the council to twelve members and brought in four social democrats Mitch Green, Sameer Kanal, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Angelita Morillo.

In cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Portland, socialist-led initiatives for expanded public transit, affordable housing, and homelessness services have been financed primarily through increases in property taxes, sales taxes, or other regressive levies that fall most heavily on the working class. Rather than expropriating capital or shifting the tax burden decisively onto the capitalist class, these programs have been implemented within the existing municipal budgetary framework, which is designed to safeguard bond ratings, appease business interests, and preserve private property relations. The result has been the apparent paradox of “progressive” councils raising costs for workers in order to maintain and expand services that ultimately stabilize the very urban capitalist order they claim to oppose, proving that without a break from the logic of capitalist governance, electoral socialism becomes another steward of the same state apparatus.

The pursuit of municipal or local elections, which is the primary activity of the DSA, simply provides workers with false hope. Historically, the aroma of “sewer socialism” emerged in the context of the Milwaukee local government being dominated by the Socialist Party of America in the 1920s and 1930s. In their complete abandonment of revolution in the name of “realism” or “constructivism” (hallmark slogans of opportunism) they pursued leftist progressive policy that led them to boast about their successful reforms of their sewer system. Opportunism, having abandoned the barricades, found its true calling beneath the streets. At least the proletariat enjoys modern drainage, a historic victory for the class!

Not one inch of ground or leverage was gained from these efforts and if anything, the bourgeois state was reinforced. “Socialists” won municipal elections in some cities during the 1930s. A “socialist” mayor continued to rule over Milwaukee until 1960. The founder of the DSA and his posse accepted their duty to the fatherland in assisting the Kennedy and Johnson administration in the War on Poverty and Great Society programs. And to top that off, Mr. Mamdani will not even be New York’s first DSA mayor; that was David Dinkins in the 1990s. Now during the revival of this trend of social democratic officials in city councils, house representatives, and congress people that really began almost a decade ago, we can say that the result is invariably the preservation of the capitalist system.

Allow us to now cast the searing light of Marxism upon these vampiric parasites who drain the revolutionary lifeblood of the proletariat. Lenin, typical of a prudent dialectician, knew that Marxists struggle both for reforms and against reformists. In Marxism and Reformism (1913) he states, “The liberal bourgeoisie grant reforms with one hand, and with the other always take them back, reduce them to nought, use them to enslave the workers, to divide them into separate groups and perpetuate wage-slavery. For that reason reformism, even when quite sincere, in practice becomes a weapon by means of which the bourgeoisie corrupt and weaken the workers. The experience of all countries shows that the workers who put their trust in the reformists are always fooled.”

He continues, “Understanding that where capitalism continued to exist reforms cannot be either enduring or far-reaching, the workers fight for better conditions and use them to intensify the fight against wage-slavery. The reformists try to divide and deceive the workers, to divert them from the class struggle by petty concessions. But the workers, having seen through the falsity of reformism, utilise reforms to develop and broaden their class struggle. The stronger reformist influence is among the workers the weaker they are, the greater their dependence on the bourgeoisie, and the easier it is for the bourgeoisie to nullify reforms by various subterfuges. The more independent the working-class movement, the deeper and broader its aims, and the freer it is from reformist narrowness the easier it is for the workers to retain and utilise improvements.” [The italics are ours -ed.]

Lenin is clear as day: pursue reforms so long as they heighten the class struggle and push the proletariat further towards the fight for communism. Does depending upon the bourgeoisie through electoralism and means of Sisyphean pressure campaigns push the workers further? No. The development of proletarian consciousness led by its class party, that utilizes its greatest weapon of the strike and detaches from bourgeois “allies” to force concessions, does. It is for this reason we do not support raising the minimum wage; wage increases need to be won from below, not granted from above. It must result in greater solidarity, knowledge, and progress of proletarian emancipation, i.e. the revival of class unionism and the reconnection to the class party. Workers have no interest in managing the capitalist economy or electing “its” candidates that opportunistically deceive them into thinking that influencing the bourgeois state machine builds worker power or provides long term gains. The proletariat does not become revolutionary through slow moral persuasion or electoral accumulation, but through rupture – through crises, war, and confrontation.

We repeat here a short passage from our Theses on Parliamentarianism (1920): “6. Possibilities of propaganda, agitation and criticism could be offered by participation in elections and in parliamentary activity during that period when, in the international proletarian movement, the conquest of power did not seem to be a possibility in the very near future, and when it was not yet a question of direct preparation for the realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat. On the other hand in a country where the bourgeois revolution is in course of progress and is creating new institutions, Communist intervention in the representative organs can offer the possibility of wielding an influence on the development of events in order to make the revolution end in victory for the proletariat.”

To further conclude:

“8. The electoral conquest of local governmental bodies entails the same inconveniences as parliamentarism but to an even greater degree. It cannot be accepted as a means of action against bourgeois power for two reasons: 1) these local bodies have no real power but are subjected to the state machine, and 2) although the assertion of the principle of local autonomy can cause some embarrassment for the ruling bourgeoisie, such a method would have the result of providing it with a base of operations in its struggle against the establishment of proletarian power and is contrary to the communist principle of centralised action” (Theses of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction, 1920).

These are the tasks and views of our Party, cleanly severed from opportunism.

“Tonight was Assemblyman Mamdani’s night, and he put together a great campaign, and he touched young people and he inspired them and moved them and got them to come out and vote,” states Mamdani’s opponent and known sexual predator Andrew Cuomo. From left to right, the democratic virus infects all who submit to capital. To all comrades, and especially the youth, we once again say: throw out your ballot!

As the decrepit bourgeois mode of production continues its decay, the apparent mad emperor at the helm of U.S. imperialism continues to do the work of increasing the centralization of the bourgeois state while setting the groundwork for more theatrical battles in defense of democracy in the upcoming election cycles. Amid growing dissent and divides within the Republican Party around the administration’s 180 degree shift in position on the Epstein files, the split with billionaire Elon Musk and the increasing unpopularity of the Big Beautiful Bill that millions of workers are now beginning to see the material impact, the Republicans in Texas have advanced measures for premature redistricting of voting maps to gerrymander the state to give five additional seats to Republicans in Congress in a desperate attempt to hold on to the federal legislature in the 2026 election, which it is expected they will lose without drastic measures being taken. Likewise, to distract from the current political turmoil within the Republican ranks, Trump has flung around more dramatic accusations, threatened to prosecute Obama for high treason, and raised $200 million dollars for a Versailles style grand ballroom to be added to the White House while millions are cut from SNAP and Medicaid. All this and more, alongside the reorganization of the Smithsonian Institute to remove any historical facts that the president deems out of line with his version of history and innumerous other decadencies while drumming up renewed militaristic actions against Venezuela.

The most recent shenanigans include the calling of federal troops to occupy Washington D.C. after the infamous twenty something most well known by his virtual avatar, “Mr. Big Balls”, who was hired under Musk’s DOGE, was beaten by two proletarian youth on the streets of the country’s capital city. This comes among other simmering tensions with the administration around such important issues such as threatening the city’s Mayor with the withhold funding if the city does not rename a square named after the Black Lives Matter movement. While Karoline Levitt croaks on television that the homeless will be rounded up, locked up and prosecuted if they do not go to shelters, there are not enough shelters in existence. As has happened in Los Angeles and Portland during his last presidency, the troops will be called in as an apparent show of strength but nothing will change and it will only further expose the weakness of the current bourgeois order; yet a victory will be declared and the troops recalled and it won’t change the fact that for all the blustering of the bourgeois military strength, it can’t do anything at all to resolve the contradictions of the social crisis. The streets of D.C. won’t get “cleaned up.”

Meanwhile in Texas, 50 Democratic state legislature members have fled the state mainly to Illinois, New York and Massachusetts, to deny the quorum needed to pass the Republicans’ proposed new congressional maps, which could help the GOP gain up to five additional seats in the midterms. The move led to the call by the Texas governor for their arrest and activation of the FBI to prosecute and return the democrats to Texas. Illinois’ Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker said his administration is “going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them,” amid Abbott’s demand for their extradition. After announcing a National Guard deployment to Washington, D.C., Trump publicly threatened to deploy the Guard to Chicago as well; Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson pushed back, arguing the president lacks authority to send soldiers into the city. Meanwhile California and New York Democrats have threatened their own redistricting plans with the New York Governor stating: “This is a war. We are at war. That’s why the gloves are off. And I say, ‘Bring it on!’. The Democratic governor of California makes similar rhetoric, consistently pointing to the state’s economic power as the 5th largest economy the world over and its ability to leverage its strength against the federal government amid posturing for a potential future presidential run. The question remains open as to how the respective Democratic governors would attempt to leverage their state’s police or national guard forces against further government intervention and it remains unlikely that they would put up any real fight. In the end the Texas Democrats all returned to the state and the vote was passed anyways despite all the tough talk and the illusory opposition of the Democrats was exposed yet again for what it is: merely the left hand, the velvet glove of capital.

Yet, for the proletariat, it would ultimately be a very good thing if the U.S. bourgeoisie, the world’s preeminent imperialist power, descended into an actual civil war amongst itself, for such a situation would create a power vacuum for the proletarian to regroup its forces. Of course in this squabble, like all others, the proletariat must raise the banner of proletarian defeatism and organize itself under its international communist party.

Yet, in this current stage it still remains merely rhetoric and the theatrics of pro-democracy and anti-fascism as the Democratic Party plan and organize themselves in hopes for an eventual ascent and return to power. As the proletariat is beaten down from continuing attacks on their quality of life, from the recent government funding bill to the increases from the tariffs, the stage is set for a return of the messianic democratics to do their dirty work of pulling the proletariat into their future political campaigns aimed at maintaining, and repairing the bourgeois democratic state and preparing it for its next fascistic phase.

Epstein’s financial empire, which involved legal and illegal finance, as well as a large network for recruiting and pimping out girls both under and of age connected many high-ranking members of the bourgeoisie, kept their political puppets in line and assisted the operations of their secret police. The intricate web of dirty deeds that this intelligence asset was involved with, made him rich and allowed him and his friends to engage in paedophilia, financial crimes and most likely enabled Epstein to hold video footage of their crimes over their heads as a form of blackmail – a way of cashing in favors from the political and financial elite of the bourgeois world for the needs of his controllers in US and Israeli intelligence, which ultimately served the needs of the international monopoly and finance capital of the US imperialist bloc.

The recent exposure of Jeffrey Epstein and the alleged cover-up of both his death and the extent of his crimes by the current political arm of the bourgeois, is a nail in the coffin of the belief that the current bourgeois administration of the US is somehow going to address the crimes of the “elites”; putting forth the reality that the current president is just another bourgeois “elite” afraid of the truth coming out and who is trying to doctor the evidence and testimonies to the advantage of the particular party of capital that he represents.

It’s likely that we never will find out the full extent of the depravity and specifics of these clandestine operations, but we don’t actually need to know them to say that the sexual exploitation and amorality of the Epstein scandal are a symptom of the profound depraved nature of the rule of capital and such activity can only be rooted out through a radical, revolutionary break from this system of exploitation.

Epstein’s criminal enterprise’s finances were obscured through trust structures and offshore accounts, facilitated by major financial institutions like JPMorgan, Chase, and Deutsche Bank; whose pursuit of lucrative clients let them turn a blind eye to his activities, similarly to how they do for drug dealers, intelligence agencies and other shady clients.

Epstein’s involvement in blackmail and intelligence manipulation, by using compromising information gained as a sideline from the exploitation of victims, likely served as a mechanism for maintaining control and silencing potential dissent within the ranks of the bourgeoisie and finance capital. Such tactics are well known tools utilized by the ruling class to secure its positions and manipulate political forces.

Secret police and covert paramilitary agencies, like the CIA and Mossad, are instruments of the ruling capitalist class of the US imperialist bloc that are employed to maintain power and serve the economic interests of the large monopoly cartels and large financial capital hedge firms that rule the parts of world capital controlled by these blocs.

Such intelligence agencies of course work outside the law and, at the level at which they operate, there is little difference between organized crime and their activities; the two often work together. The protection of the Taliban, or the creation of Hamas by Israeli intelligence, which was initially intended to weaken the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Iran Contra affair, the use of Mafia to take over and further corrupt already weakened unions within the United States, and the use of sexual blackmail by J Edgar Hoover – these are just some examples of this phenomena and there are countless more. These secret police and paramilitary agencies don’t limit themselves to drug dealing and murder and have no problem using prostitution, including of children, as means to achieve their goals.

Epstein’s death in federal custody was suspicious to say the least. He was found unresponsive in his cell on August 10, 2019, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York City, with a strip of bedsheet wrapped around his neck, tied to his bunk. While we won’t know for sure, it is reasonable to assume that a deliberate cover-up of a murder could have occurred.

The prioritization of profit over humanity, the reduction of human life to being something to exploit leads to ready commodification of individuals and is one of the pre-conditions to the existence of the capitalist mode of production. Without violently subjugating the pre-capitalist populations of the world to this brutal form of life; without genocide, slavery and sexual trafficking, capitalism simply couldn’t exist.

After seeing how the courts gave preferential treatment to this child abuser and let him run free for decades, and after seeing how they likely covered up his murder in a frankly incompetent manner, even the most deluded worker must now admit: that bourgeois justice is vile poison,that the rule of law is little more than a confidence trick meant to obscure the criminal dictatorial control of capital.

These predatory sex criminals with their inflated sense of entitlement, are protected by their money, their position and their power within the ruling strata of the capitalist system. It is a system now totally incapable of even giving a semblance of observing the most basic decencies towards the class it exploits; a system prepared not only to sexually exploit children but, as the current situation in Gaza shows, to starve them to death with impunity, to deprive them of the most basic necessities, to shoot them and blow off their limbs whilst simultaneously killing their parents and carers; not until this system has been rooted up, root and branch, will the horrors end.

Capitalism is in its death throes, and the sleeping giant, the international proletariat, has to wake up, and realise that getting rid of this system; a system that permits those ‘at the top’ to do whatever they want, whenever they want, and at whatever expense to the toiling and vulnerable population, can only be accomplished by revolutionary means. Because an end to the devious and disgusting activities of Epstein and his elite clientele, clearly unable to control themselves let alone the lives of billions of working and pauperized people, will clearly not come about by introducing reforms to an unreformable system.

Only through proletarian revolution, do we have any chance of putting this sick animal out of its misery.

Today in the midst of the escalating inter-imperialist rivalry across the globe, the United States and it’s rival imperialist powers are quickly working to militarize space as a new frontier in the future inter-imperialist war. As the state struggles to disguise these efforts, counter-intelligence elements within the pentagon have found strange bed fellows in the tinfoil hat wearing “UFO Community”. It’s a bird, its a plane, its martians! In recent years, official elements within the bourgeois state have increasingly publicly entertained, promoted and encouraged some of the most fantastic stories regarding UFOs and secretive government programs "reverse engineering" alien technology, backed by a chorus of online conspiracy hucksters and social media grifters. Within a mystique of democratic transparency and UFO “disclosure” there is only the same old cold war tactics to mystify new weapons systems amid a renewed race to militarize space.

The United States military has carved space into two big areas, a military branch to build and operate the infrastructure (the U.S. Space Force) and a warfighting command to plan and fight with it (U.S. Space Command). Around them sit the Space Development Agency (fast, cheap networks of low-orbit satellites), the Missile Defense Agency (sensors that spot hypersonic and ballistic threats from space), DARPA (high-risk, high-payoff experiments), and the intelligence agencies space arms (notably the National Reconnaissance Office and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) that fly and exploit spy satellites. Over the last decade, money has followed the mission. The Space Force’s budget roughly doubled from the first $15.4 B request for 2021 to about $29.4 B requested for 2025; U.S. Space Command’s request jumped from about $84 M in 2020 to $249 M 2021. SDA exploded from a seedling $125 M 2020 into a multibillion-dollar program $4.5 B in 2024. MDA’s account climbed from roughly $8.5 B 2015 to a $10.4 B request 2025. DARPA’s budget rose from $2.9 B 2015 to$4.1 B today.

The Pentagon’s “Project Mayhem" is a U.S. Air Force program focused on developing a hypersonic, air-breathing, multi-mission aircraft capable of both strike and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. The program, led by as the System Design Agent (SDA), aims to create an unmanned, reusable hypersonic drone platform., according to a 2023 Defense Department budget document. Similarly, patents filed by Salvatore Pais, an employee of the U.S. Space Force, include designs for an "inertial mass reduction vehicle" that could theoretically mimic the physics-defying maneuvers of many alleged UAPs. According to the 2020 article by defense industry journal The War Zone, “despite the patents sounding extremely far-fetched, official documents show that the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise personally attested to the and their importance to in appeals with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Meanwhile, the scientists and physicists we have talked to have made it clear that they find the claims largely absurd and not grounded in scientific fact.”

As reported in a 2021 Forbes article, experimental technologies like the EmDrive have been long under development by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) which could mimic many of the maneuvers of the 2004 tic-tac UAP video leaked by the military. Researcher of the University of Plymouth, was awarded a DARPA grant in 2018 to study Quantized inertia, and has also noted the similarities between the reports and the drive he is working on. The technology to seemingly generate thrust from a closed system. The results have allegedly been repeated at independent labs around the world including and researchers at. While current versions only produce miniscule amounts of thrust, comparable to ion drives used on satellites and space probes, it is said that a version based on superconductors could drive a.

Amid the largest escalation in the militarization in space in world history, the military and it’s intelligence agencies turn to conspiracy theories to mystify the build up and throw off their imperialist rivals. Today a slew of staged and controlled “leaks” from military agencies alongside official legitimation have worked to fan the spread of the UFO myth alongside a web of online and social media hucksters. Surveys show a significant rise in UFO belief, with a 2023 Pew Research study finding that 65% of Americans now believe UFOs are real (up from 45% in 2019), while a 2022 Gallup poll revealed that 41% of U.S. adults attribute UFO sightings to extraterrestrial life, the highest percentage in decades.

A sharp increase that is the result of a controlled campaign of disinformation by the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who declassified three now-famous UAP videos captured by Navy pilots, the 2004 "Tic Tac", 2015 "Gimbal”, and 2015 "Go Fast" footage, originally “leaked” in 2017 by To The Stars Academy (an organization with U.S. military intelligence ties) and later officially confirmed by the Pentagon in 2020. On August 4, of that year the Pentagon announced the establishment of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). This was followed by the establishment of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office AARO in 2022 to investigate "unidentified aerial phenomena" or "unidentified anomalous phenomena". On May 17, 2022, the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation held the first open UAP hearing in more than 50 years. In 2023, the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee heard from AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick on the office’s mission and oversight, and the House Oversight Committee held a high-profile hearing with witnesses David Grusch, Ryan Graves, and David Fravor where Grusch alleged crash-retrieval programs and “nonhuman biologics,”.

Amid the democratic theater where the government wishes to appear to be coming clean about aerial phenomena it claims it simply cannot identify, and insider whistle blowers scream they have personally seen the aliens, the government maintains a shroud of obscurantism about what exactly it is doing in space and with its advanced weapon systems programs. After AARO’s 2024 report said it found no verified evidence of extraterrestrial technology, fresh details emerged in June 2025 when a Wall Street Journal investigation, drawing on the Pentagon’s own review files and interviews, reported that U.S. officers had, often actually seeded UFO rumors during the Cold War to shield classified programs, including a retired Air Force colonel’s admission that he handed a Nevada bar owner doctored “saucer” photos in the 1980s to deflect attention from stealth tests near Area 51. Following coverage summarized additional episodes attributed to that same Pentagon inquiry, such as fake “alien unit” briefings and a famous 1967 “UFO-caused” missile incident later explained as an unannounced electromagnetic-pulse test.

Beyond the recent Wall St. Journal article, other long declassified CIA documents have previously revealed that between 50-90% of UFO reports in the 1950s and 60s were actually sightings of the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes. The government further encouraged this confusion with the Air Force Project Blue Book where officers were instructed to dismiss sightings as "natural phenomena" while secretly documenting them for further testing purposes. This deception continued with the 1953 Robertson Panel, where CIA and military officials explicitly recommended using UFO stories as a "protective cover story" for advanced aircraft testing.

The strategy extended to psychological operations when Lockheed’s A-12 Oxcart, a precursor to the SR-71, began test flights in 1962, the CIA staged UFO sightings near Area 51 to explain sonic booms and unusual radar returns. Similarly, the 1964 Socorro UFO incident, where a civilian reported seeing an egg-shaped craft with "alien" occupants, matched descriptions of early lunar lander tests and was later revealed to have UFO myths intentionally spread around the incident by the military. Even the famous Roswell incident has been found to be disinformation with former counterintelligence officer lieutenant colonel Phillip Corso admitting later in life that the military deliberately seeded alien theories to obscure recovered Soviet technology.

As surveillance satellites, experimental drones and rockets of all sorts are sent off into space and more and more money is poured into experimental and advanced weapons systems programs, the bourgeois in Washington once again seed the stories of little green men to try to divert the proletarian’s gaze away from the real story. As similar conspiracy theories are spread by the bourgeois across society be it from the QANON or tales of Lizard aliens controlling the governments of the world, the real explanation for all such “unexplained phenomena”, despite the bourgeois’ constant spreading of lunatic non-sense is much simpler, capitalism, it’s crisis and the mounting inter-imperialist rivalry.

Conformism is not simply an external submission to the conditions imposed by capital. It is the deeper process by which the exploited class adopts capitalist “common sense” as its own. It accepts the wage system, private property, and bourgeois legality as inevitable. This moral and ideological alignment leads to passivity, reformism, and the neutralisation of what would be more generalized class feelings in many situations, had the proletariat retained its fighting defensive organs, and if it was connected to it’s Party. The existing economy continues to generalize conformism and thus the proletariat comes to police itself, reproducing the norms that maintain its domination, a slave to capital disconnected from a full understanding of its historical self diluted by individualism.

The bourgeois state is more than a repressive machine of law, police, and army. It is a totalitarian apparatus, embedded in every social relation, that organises collective life to ensure the reproduction of capital. It operates continually, so long as the economy remains stable, producing and enforcing the norms of bourgeois society. Education, media, legal codes, and the culture industry all work to form individuals who think, desire, and act according to the needs of capital.

This totalitarianism extends beyond political power to the constitution of subjectivity. It shapes not only what people do, but what they want, what they imagine possible, and how they measure value in their own lives.

The state’s ideological apparatus instils in the proletariat aspirations that bind it to the system:
     Youth are encouraged to pursue careers and consumerist lifestyles instead of collective struggle.
     Patriarchal family forms are reinforced as natural, fitting the needs of labour reproduction.
     Political engagement is reframed as symbolic, individualistic acts within the system, not collective revolutionary action.

Even gestures of apparent resistance can be absorbed, reinterpreted, and commodified, leaving the underlying capitalist logic untouched.

For the revolutionary movement, it is essential to reject culturalism – the illusion that emancipation can be achieved through cultural expression, identity politics, or symbolic recognition. Culturalism detaches the critique of ideology from the critique of the economic structure, treating oppression as a matter of “culture” rather than as a function of class society.

This deviation ultimately harmonises with the aims of the bourgeois state. By framing struggles in purely cultural or identity terms, it allows the totalitarian apparatus to accommodate superficial changes in symbols, representation, or language, while the real foundations of exploitation remain intact. The ruling class can grant cultural concessions without touching the wage system, the exploitation of labour, or the dictatorship of capital.

The fight against conformism cannot be reduced to a contest over cultural forms. The target is the material and political power of the bourgeoisie, and the psychic and ideological conditions it reproduces in the proletariat.

The revolutionary party’s work is in part to arm the proletariat with the ability to recognise and reject the norms and desires shaped by capital and instilled within it it is to “forget” the conditioning of capitalist society, to present to the class its historic and invariant revolutionary doctrine and prepare it for the final struggle. This requires not only economic and political organisation, but also the constant exposure of how the state works to infect and neutralize proletarian subjectivity. Such a project demands theoretical clarity and organisational firmness.

Capitalist crises arise inevitably from the system’s own laws, as the drive for profit and competition compels renewed expansion of production while workers’ suppressed wages limit the market’s ability to absorb commodities. This results in overproduction, not of goods beyond human need but of goods that cannot be profitably sold, manifesting as idle capacity, layoffs, investment into unproductive military sectors and the subsequent destruction of productive forces to renew the cycle.

In the U.S. today, civilian industrial utilization remains below its long-term average, inflation persists despite stagnant output, and rising debt at every level substitutes for real productive investment, with resources funneled into speculation, militarism, while basic industries shed jobs. Such conditions reveal a structural crisis, deepening day by day.

Current Industrial Production Rates

In July 2025, U.S. industrial production declined by 0.1% month-over-month, following a revised 0.4% gain in June, leaving overall output just 1.4% above its level a year ago according to the Federal Reserve, G.17 Report. Crucially, capacity utilization, the share of the economy’s potential output actually being used fell to 77.5%, which stands 2.1 percentage points below the long-run average stretching from 1972 to 2024. In manufacturing specifically, utilization slid to 76.8%, reflecting idle plants, unused capital, and reduced labor demand even as sectors like aerospace and defense are expanding.

Durable goods rose 0.3%, led by strong gains in electrical equipment, aerospace, furniture, and industries linked to military expansion and technological infrastructure. However, primary metals, machinery, and notably motor vehicles & parts fell, with the latter down 0.3% in July following a steep -2.6% drop in June. Nondurable goods slipped 0.4%, pulling back in areas such as food, paper, and chemicals. The mining sector dropped 0.4%, and utilities declined 0.2%, signaling contraction in basic materials and energy production.

In contrast, sectors aligned with military and high-technology investment remain robust. Investments in the semiconductor industry have exceeded $500 billion since the 2022 CHIPS Act, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. Defense and space manufacturing output reached $145.69 billion (2017 dollars, annualized) in June, while Lockheed Martin plans production of over 600 PAC-3 MSE missiles in 2025, nearly double recent years. Thus, capitalism channels resources into unproductive weaponized and technocratic sectors while allowing broad civilian production to atrophy, capital accumulation through militarization and high-tech precision, while the living conditions of the proletarian remain under a tight squeeze by capital.

Layoffs Across the United States & Rising Homelessness

In 2025, U.S. employers have announced more than 800,000 layoffs, up 75% from the same period in 2024, hitting both the private and public sectors. Major corporations driving these cuts include Intel (over 5,000 jobs, mainly in its Foundry division), UPS (20,000 positions), Microsoft (around 15,000 combined across two rounds), Oracle (188 Bay Area roles plus other global cuts), and numerous other tech firms such as Amazon, Meta, Google, HPE, NetApp, and Scale AI, often citing automation, AI integration, and restructuring as causes. The public sector has also seen deep reductions, with the federal civilian workforce down by about 260,000 jobs, including significant cuts at the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, IRS, and other agencies.

Despite these mass layoffs, the official unemployment rate in July 2025 stood at 4.2%, with roughly 7.2 million Americans unemployed. Long-term unemployment, however, rose to 1.8 million, or nearly one-quarter of the total jobless population. Job creation has slowed, with nonfarm payrolls adding only 73,000 positions in July and previous months revised downward. The labor force participation rate dipped to 62.2%, and the employment-to-population ratio edged down to 59.6%, reflecting both hidden underemployment and worker withdrawal from the labor market. This contrast between headline stability and underlying weakness suggests a labor market under growing strain, where job losses in key sectors are masked by modest gains elsewhere.

As such, the pauperization of the masses continues to advance. In 2024, the U.S. experienced a record-high surge in homelessness, with approximately 771,480 people counted on a single night, an increase of about 18% from 2023. This translated to roughly 23 individuals per 10,000 people, the highest rate ever recorded. The 18% year-over-year rise was accompanied by even larger jumps among certain demographics. Family homelessness rose nearly 40%, while the number of children under 18 experiencing homelessness increased by 33%, totaling nearly 150,000 youths

This worsening crisis stems largely from a scarcity of affordable housing, rising rents, the rollback of pandemic-era housing assistance, and external shocks such as natural disasters and increased migration. Although some areas, such as veterans’ homelessness, saw modest declines, the overall trajectory remains sharply upward, particularly affecting families and children.

The Persistent Inflation

The latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production are sharpening with inflation rates beginning to rise once again. In July 2025, the Producer Price Index (PPI) surged by 0.9% in a single month, the sharpest rise since June 2022, pushing the annual rate to 3.3%. The core PPI, excluding food and energy, advanced 3.7% over the same period. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) climbed 0.2% month-over-month and 2.7% year-over-year, with shelter costs up 3.7% and medical care costs up 3.5%. The Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Price Index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure, stands at 2.9%, well above its own stated 2% “price stability” target.

Yet this inflationary persistence is coupled with slowing production and rising unemployment. These figures point to a classic bourgeois dilemma. The ruling class must either tolerate rising unemployment to discipline inflation, which could disrupt markets by putting downward pressure on consumption and lead to more political and social instability, or cut interest rates to temporarily stimulate demand, risking the re-acceleration of prices.

The specter haunting the U.S. economy – what bourgeois economics call stagflation – is an enduring element of the overproduction crisis. The capitalist press treats this as a “policy puzzle.” We insist it is the predictable result of the law of value operating under conditions of mature imperialism. Meanwhile, news headlines continue to talk of the drama between Trump and the Federal Reserve Chair he appointed during his first term. Trump’ calling Powell “grossly incompetent”, a “moron”, and threatened lawsuits in a political maneuver to force rate cuts that might deliver a short-term boost to financial markets and bolster his electoral position. The Federal Reserve, for its part, defends higher rates in the name of “credibility” and “price stability,” meaning the defense of the value of money capital at the expense of the working class. Both positions serve the same end of the preservation of capitalist relations of production and the subordination of human need to the dictates of profit.

The productive apparatus is underutilized, debt mounts at every level, and the very tools of bourgeois economic management, monetarily tightening or loosening, can only redistribute the pain between classes and sectors, never resolving the underlying contradiction. This is not a temporary “misalignment” of policy. It is a crisis of the capitalist mode of production itself, which can only be overcome by abolishing the wage system, expropriating the capitalist class, and reorganizing production under the dictatorship of the proletariat to serve social need.

Since 1945, the United States has led in the total number of passengers carried by air as well as total fatalities by plane crash globally. In the last few years particularly, a string of crashes and mid-air malfunctions of Boeing produced aircraft has driven public confidence in air travel downward, decreasing from 71% of Americans who say it’s “very or somewhat safe” down to 64% (The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research). In addition to this, American Airlines, despite boasting “record revenue” in its second quarter, saw an 18.5% loss in pre-tax profits compared to the second quarter of 2024, United Airlines saw a 28% decline, and Delta at a 10% loss. These economic cracks, mixed with the loss in consumer safety confidence, have been even further pushed to the limit with the ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers- currently, the industry is about 3,000 air traffic controllers short of what the Federal Aviation Administration recommends as safe and efficient.

These various problems in the air transport industry seemingly speak to the ongoing general overproduction crisis in capital and the bourgeoisie’s inability to overcome the inevitable. Transportation systems have historically evolved in direct correlation to the needs of production, lowering the necessary time for the metamorphosis of commodities in the circuit of capital. Filling a special role in the circulation of commodities, this industry also requires the employment of productive capital to build the infrastructure (railways, ships, planes, etc.) and the exploitation of labor-power to operate and maintain them, and therefore also to extract surplus value, which is transferred to the commodities they carry and is integral to the expansion of capital. Thus, the capitalist means of transportation cannot be separated from the capitalist mode of production and the crises thereof.

From Novelty to Monopoly: History of the Airlines

Among the first commodities to be moved by aircraft, were bombs used to strategically attack soldiers from the skies in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911, thus beginning the enduring alliance of the bourgeoisie invested in the air industry with those in warmongering. A new dimension of bourgeois terror from above had arrived, that would continue advancing from the simple dropping of grenades to the eventual delivery of the atomic bombs onto the Japanese. By 1924, what had taken the previous revolutionary form of transportation, the steam engine locomotive, 72 hours to accomplish, the aircraft could now transport in under 30 hours, less than half of the time. Although it could not yet be widely utilized for commercial use without government subsidies, air travel had plainly reduced the socially necessary time for the circulation of goods by an astounding amount. It would take a few more decades of refinement from a scientific novelty into a sophisticated, complex modern machine, enabling the bourgeoisie to utilize aircraft to accelerate the circulation of commodities – by bringing distant markets to the consumer, or bringing consumers to distant markets.

In the years prior to the 1930s, the American air industry, outside of military conflict, was largely limited to government-subsidized mail delivery. Technological limitations and a lack of infrastructure made commercial passenger travel unprofitable and unreliable. Facing the crisis of the Great Depression in the late 20s, in what later became known as the “Air Mail Scandal,” Hoover’s government orchestrated a series of secretive meetings with large airlines, effectively excluding smaller, independent carriers from federal contracts. The goal was to force the smaller companies to merge and concentrate and paved the way for the formation of a few powerful companies: United Airlines, American Airlines, and Trans World Airlines. These early monopolies would eventually go on to dominate American aviation.

Eventually in 1934, Roosevelt attempted to mobilize the Army Air Corps to take over the delivery of mail, before soon reverting back to privatization after a string of pilot deaths from haphazard planning and ensuing public outcry. In the end, consolidation had served its purpose, and now breaking up major trusts like United Aircraft and Transport Corporation (which included major companies such as Boeing, Northrop Aircraft Corporation, Pratt & Whitney) into smaller companies to encourage competition was on the bourgeoisie’s agenda, as well as altering the nature of the industry to embrace passenger travel over mail, which had become less profitable. It would take the offloading of thousands of surplus Douglas DC-3s left over from the second great imperialist war into the markets, that were converted back into commercial passenger planes, that the bourgeoisie would have their first profitable commercial airline independent of government subsidy.

The post-war period for the airlines were heavily regulated through the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) in conjunction with the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which acted as a government controlled cartel, fixing fare prices relatively high and obstructing the cut-throat competition of the free market. CAB regularly granted waivers from US antitrust laws, allowing capital to consolidate where it found it necessary, and while there was a tidy profit to be made with this relationship, the capitalists ached to loosen the regulatory collar and expand the markets and their profits and soon they were compelled by crisis to reorganize themselves yet again.

The oil crisis of 1970 and the ensuing financial chaos led to the then largest bankruptcy in US history with the collapse of the Penn Central Transportation Company, which had borrowed extensively in unsecured corporate debt to offset its plunging profits, only to find itself unable to borrow anymore from the spooked banks. This unprecedented financial crisis in the rail transportation industry, and the fear that the airlines would follow suit, pushed the bourgeoisie under Carter to release the shackles of regulation on the airline fares and routes and promote competition among them, passing the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978, which lowered the prices of fares and led to a small emergence of competitive airlines. Of course, as monopoly and competition dialectically condition one another, competition naturally concentrated back into monopoly and these smaller airlines would eventually fade away or be absorbed into the larger airliners in due time.

Thus as of 2015, we see major mergers between airlines through the various crises of the 2000s, resulted in 80% of the domestic market controlled by just four companies: American, Southwest, United, and Delta, which naturally have the four largest investment companies – BlackRock, Vanguard, PRIMECAP, and State Street – as their largest shareholders.

Boeing, Airbus, and Rising Chinese Competition

When colossal monopolistic forces of capital collide, the violent competitive struggle for domination presents to the bourgeois the maxim: “adapt or die”, even if this means risking the future of society for the short term profits for today. In the “duopolistic” struggle between Boeing and Airbus, this maxim has already materialized numerous tragedies, but with the growing imperialist pressure from emerging Chinese aircraft production market, we will likely see American finance capital force its sub-imperialist periphery into subordination and further consolidate against the Chinese bourgeoisie.

Boeing’s domination of the global aerospace industry was cemented in 1997 when it acquired McDonnell Douglas, forming the largest aerospace manufacturer in the world. Boeing has long operated as a monopolistic force in the global aircraft production market, with only one serious international competitor, Airbus, founded by the governments of Germany, France, and the UK in 1970. For decades, Boeing had exclusive deals with the largest airlines in the US, which were the largest in the world, until Airbus began cutting into the US market with sweetened deals to Northwest Airlines in the 80s.

The two companies, while sharing in mutual control over the market, are nonetheless subject to the bitter struggle embedded in competition and the need to continuously offset the costs of their personal enterprise in order to prevail over the other. When Airbus announced the upgrades to its A320 aircraft with New Engine Options, which effectively lowered the necessary average amount of fuel required for a trip, while increasing the amount of passengers able to be transported, therefore increasing profits. Boeing was forced to respond, poorly retrofitting a similar system into their 373-800 to create the 373-800 MAX in an effort to match the economic gains of the A320neo.

In order to compensate for the altered aerodynamics caused by the placement of larger engines, Boeing implemented the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS). This software was designed to automatically push the nose of the aircraft down under certain conditions to avoid stalls. Pilots were not trained on this feature, nor were redundant safeguards in the case of malfunction seriously considered; it was only a matter of time before the world witnessed two tragic disasters. On October 29, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed into the Java Sea, killing 189 passengers and on March 10, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed, killing 157 people. Both incidents were linked directly to MCAS malfunctions.

In July of this year, a 787 Dreamliner plane operated by Air India, crashed in Ahmedabad killing 242 people. The cause of the crash is still under investigation, but while the 787 Dreamliner has a clean history of safety, Boeing certainly does not. Confidence in the company, and of air travel under capital’s control, is declining.

To Boeing, a company that holds essentially a monopoly on global plane production and is so interwoven into the US government (approximately 32% of their revenue is from government contracts), which in turn profits from the death of proletarians abroad from imperialist wars; a few crashed planes are only a smudge on the balance sheet, and more importantly are merely future orders for planes that need to be replaced. Much like the other transportation modes such as the railways and ships, the bourgeoisie use insurances to cover the costs of the inevitable disasters from their desperate turnover of capital in the quickest manner. We certainly must remember that the railroad capitalist finds it cheaper to pay the bill of a disaster yet to come rather than properly staff their train lines or replace the crumbling fixed capital and infrastructure of the railways (like the Norfolk Southern train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio in 2023), or much less, increase pay for the few workers who are now doing the job that used to be performed by many. In a system where profit reigns, such risks are deemed acceptable so long as capital turnover remains uninterrupted.

But Boeing cannot avoid the woes of overproduction. The US airlines are struggling with consistent domestic consumer demand, showing a 0.1% decline despite a 2.2% increase in capacity as of August 1st, causing the airlines to revise and reduce their planned orders. China, which currently makes up 10% of Boeing’s current backlog, amid the ongoing trade war with the US, has lifted their temporary ban on Boeing purchases, potentially improving the company’s overall delivery projections in the coming years, but the rapidly expanding airline industry in China will prove to be a future problem for Boeing.

Already being the second largest aviation industry in the world, China is set to overtake the US market by 2043 according to Airbus’s own 2024 forecasts. In an effort to challenge Boeing and Airbus on the battlefield of the global market, China has begun pushing its spheres of imperialist influence into purchasing its domestically produced aircrafts by the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) and investing in airports in South Asia and Africa through its Belt and Road Initiative; simultaneously building up its domestic production, imperialist ties with the bourgeoisie in underdeveloped countries, and improving the trade networks for its e-commerce markets(such as Alibaba).

While China has yet to position themselves ahead of Boeing and Airbus, as they are still largely reliant on foreign tech (like electricity systems and landing gear from Honeywell, engines from CFM Leap, flight control and fuel systems from Parker Aerospace, etc.) for production of their rival C919 jet, their emerging influence on the world market and the competing interests of the imperialist blocs are certain to continue bringing the knives of the warring bourgeoisies closer to each other’s throats.

The Crisis Within

Despite the numerous convenient alibis of the bourgeoisie, the overproduction crisis and the tendential fall in the rate of profit has plainly revealed itself in the airline industry. Recent reports say that the airline industry will break a record $1 Trillion in revenue, but the actual profit is predicted to be approximately only 3% of that, at about 36.6 Billion. In fact, without “loyalty revenues” from speculatively valued frequent flyer miles and banking partnerships, all major airlines operate at a considerable profit loss. Even the bourgeois economists must admit that the industry is unstable for social capital, blaming ‘thin margins’ and the ‘high wages’ demanded from the unions for why it has been teetering on the edge of collapse for decades, requiring the bourgeoisie to resuscitate it multiple times via government bailouts.

The first of the major US bailouts happened in 2001 under the smoke screen and panic of the September 11 attacks. The airline capitalists pointed to a 30% decline in air travel afterwards as the primary cause for their pitiful state of affairs, lobbying to the bourgeois parties to help reverse this ‘misfortune’ that had been thrust upon them from the outside; the bourgeoisie under Bush expeditiously relieved them with $15 Billion within two weeks of September 11. In reality, as the American bourgeoisie geared up to wield its imperialist might against Iraq in an effort to redivide the oil markets under the guise of “the war on terror”, the airline crisis was inevitable and would have happened if Manhattan had not suffered an attack that September morning. Before 2001, American Airlines was already reporting “considerable” losses in their third quarter and, due to what has been dubbed the Dot-Com recession, which at its peak resulted in an 80% loss in value for the Nasdaq Composite Index, financial analysts were already predicting a loss of $2.5 Billion for the US airline industry. Many of the developed ‘old-line’ monopolies were also experiencing competitive pressure from the emerging ‘low-cost’ airlines in the 90s that were undercutting the ‘big players’, largely by paying lower wages, and sucking up a larger share of the market.

The oil industry, being one of the largest industries globally, is obviously a major component of all modern manufacture, production, and transportation; but in industries like transportation, that are entirely conditioned on access to large amounts of ready-made fuel on the market, the price of oil has a profound impact. Fuel costs, in fact, constitute approximately 30% of the constant capital employed in the airline industry. The volatile price of crude oil throughout the 2000s exposed the sector to constant uncertainty. The American state’s imperialist ventures in the Middle East were thus not merely ideological campaigns but responses to an economic crisis already underway – crises that manifested in the transportation sector among others. The interdependence of military production, global oil control, and civil aviation cannot be overstated.

Starting in the 2000s, the airlines began seeing consolidation again, beginning with Trans World Airlines being acquired by American months before September 11, 2001. America West Airlines, after filing for bankruptcy for the second time in the decade, merged with US Airways in 2005, combining two of the largest airlines in the country at the time (US Airways would later be swallowed by American in 2013). In 2008, ATA Airlines was forced into bankruptcy from the financial crisis and was subsequently bought by Southwest, while Northwest and Delta Airlines, emerging from their own bankruptcies, would merge into the largest airline of the time. United, feeling the competitive pressure from the now dominant Delta, sought its own expansion and merged with Continental in 2010, ousting Delta from the throne. Southwest responded by buying out Air Tran the same year, securing its position as the fourth largest airline in the US.

So we find the original monopolies, United and American (who devoured Trans World), that were formed by the bourgeoisie in response to the crisis in the 30s, reconsolidating yet again in response to the financial crisis of 2008; with Delta and Southwest becoming worthy competitors by culling the weaker airlines.The bourgeois virtue of competition disappears in the real historical course of capitalism and concentration of industry prevails.

In 2019, the economy in general was already showing signs of a slowdown and even the bourgeois economists were already seeing the writing on the wall. For the airline industry, economists were pointing out the effects of overproduction and how they were out-pacing the national economic growth (2%) by increasing capacity. Airlines like American were reported to have the highest debt to EBITDA ratio among the total debt ratio in the industry, rising from 3.8 to 4.1. They had joined the bloated collective surplus of US debt that by this time had reached heights 50% higher than that of the 2008 crisis and had begun its dramatic Euphorion-like crash. The convenient alibi of global pandemic acted as a surrogate for the overproduction crisis that subsequently threw the world capitalisms into a nosedive.

Under the ruse of ‘external’ disasters, the airline companies then in turn forced wage concessions from the workers who are told they must share in company poverty, or are simply expelled into the surplus labor army while the industries ‘rebuild themselves’ at no real loss to the capitalists. In 2001, air transport workers were met with 30,000 layoffs and wage cuts; in 2020, after allocating $11.9 Billion of bailout money towards buybacks of their stock, companies like American Airlines subsequently laid-off 20% of its workforce, all while the CEOs raked in tens of millions individually.

False Solution of Nationalization

Reformist opportunists make the same old cry for the “nationalization of the airlines”, reminiscent of the calls from Railroad Workers United (RWU) to nationalize the railways; suggesting that the state, what is just the organizing body of the bourgeoisie, is somehow untouched by the economic laws of production in private enterprise and will be able (if it even wants to, for that matter) protect the people from the disasters inherent to capitalist production and its systems of transportation. In previous articles on railroad nationalization we referred to this text from Prometeo, which equally applies here:

“…Nationalization does not suppress the market or the exploitation of labor. It merely regulates the economy according to market forces. Nationalized industries are guaranteed a monopoly within their own borders, but this does not affect the market as a whole. Nationalization also does not prevent the realization and appropriation of surplus value. In fact, it often helps to rescue deficit economic units. Nationalization guarantees capitalist profit in all cases. On the level of inter-imperialist relations, nationalizations are the most bare and obvious expressions of the tension of all national economic forces…. Finally, in the game of class struggles, nationalizations represent the most refined method of immobilizing the active energies of the proletariat and regimenting its fellow poputčiks” (Prometeo, n. 4 of December 1946).

The U.S. airline industry is already deeply integrated into the state apparatus. From direct bailouts to routine antitrust exemptions, the government has long acted as its financial backstop. Further integration would not liberate the working class from exploitation; it would only rationalize that exploitation more efficiently, aligning it more directly with national economic and military objectives.

Already, the US bourgeoisie are working to create Artificial Intelligence powered networks of commercial factories that can quickly shift from commercial to wartime production, quickening their control and requisition of war machines when imperialisms collide, building off of currently existing models like the Air Force’s Civil Reserve Air Fleet and the Navy’s National Defense Reserve Fleet contracts with commercial transportation companies to increase military transportation capacity when needed for war. The recent $131 Million House proposal for the 2026 military fiscal budget sets to create this “Commercial Reserve Manufacturing Network”, able to answer the bourgeoisies call for blood at a moment’s notice.

Similar sentiments were expressed in a report by Michael Bloomberg in January titled: Strategic Edge: A Blueprint for Breakthroughs in Defense Innovation. The Chief Financial Officer of Divergent Industries and former director of the Air Force’s innovation arm, AFWERX, and one of the report’s authors sums it up: “Right now, we literally are printing hyper car frames in the morning and cruise missiles in the afternoon.”

A sober confession of the bourgeoisie and a perfect summary of the ultimate logic of commodity production in the age of imperialism.

(To Be Continued in the Next Issue)

Welfare has existed since ancient times to address poverty, such as flood coverage in Babylon, barley rationing under the Akkadian Empire, the grain dole and land grants under the Roman Republic and medical treatment in Egypt, ect; mostly in response to concerns of the means of subsistence for workers affecting the productive forces through economic or ecological crises and social revolts. Similar economic functions persisted in progressing historical stages of production, such as the Tudor and Elizabethan Poor Laws; however, our study is of modern industrial capitalism as it concerns the proletariat.

The early 1800s were met with the lingering birth pangs from the shift of agrarian society to industrial society, from the transition of individual labour of craftsmen into the social labour of the proletariat and the contradiction of the bourgeoisie. As class struggle was initially underdeveloped, there were philanthropic experiments made by members of the bourgeoisie to integrate labour into capital: employees were given free healthcare and education in cooperative communities influenced by utopian socialist thinkers such as Robert Owens or Charles Fourier.

Germany and the First National Healthcare System

The first Nationalized Healthcare Insurance scheme was set up in 1883 in Germany under Otto von Bismarck, in response to the economic crisis in the previous decade, as Germany was industrializing and to stave off growing socialist sentiment from the growing popularity of the SPD, despite its opportunist and revisionist programme. Despite the claims of bourgeois liberal economists, Bismarck was no socialist, his role was to stabilize capital by placating the rising proletarian forces by easing workers’ momentary conditions. Engels, paraphrasing a section of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, said "You, Mr. Bismarck, have only overthrown the Bonapartist régime in France in order to re-establish it in your own country!”

After WWI and the ruthless destruction of the German Revolution and the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht by the entirely opportunists SPD, under Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske with the help of proto-fascist Friekorp, the SPD attempted to dispel any revolutionary sentiment from the proletariat by capitulating to the mostly dispossessed workers through expanding the welfare state: with unemployment insurance, housing aid and veterans pensions.

The growing Nazi Party utilized the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV) initially as a small charitable organization based in Berlin, but with the installation of Nazi Regime, the NSV was incorporated into the State – eliminating and seizing all worker orientated welfare organizations, forcing them to subordinate to the Nazis. With nearly ⅓ of Germans beingrecipients of welfare, the NSV ran a budgetary deficit and was subsidized by state funding; they resorted to cutting the wages of workers, expropriating jewish assets, and slave labour to keep it in operation.

The proliferation of the welfare state was not historically made by the capitulation of the left-bourgeois through the kindness of their hearts or rigorous debate of the subject; it was made in the reconstruction period in the aftermath of both world wars as calculated efforts to quell revolutionary sentiment from the proletariat, as they were devastated by immensely brutal conditions – such as starvation, poverty and homelessness; whole city blocks were turned to rubble and most food went towards feeding the military in the war effort. It was only through the fear of a mobilized class, that the bourgeoisie made concessions to the working class.

American Healthcare

Now one might ask: “Why did not America join suit with their European counterparts in developing a robust welfare system? Were they not also a player in both the world wars?” Well, an obvious answer is seemingly complicated at first, yet understandable when broken down from an analysis of the historical aftermath of both imperialist wars on the ground in America.

After WWI, America went towards productivist trade war policies – such as tariffs, tax cutting, deregulation and speculative investments – to ensure a balanced budget and a spending/trade surplus; there was a great overproduction of goods, leading to a deflation of prices. With the first red scare, after the successes of the October Revolution,the rising revolutionary sentiments of the American proletariat, and the strike wave of 1919, the National Association of Manufacturers adopted a strategy to undermine unions called the American Plan; making employees sign contracts that pledge them to not join a union and creating employee tied benefits to eliminate all labour militancy, causing union membership to decline by 25%. The extreme overproduction of goods in “the Golden Age of America” culminated in a sharp rate of deflation resulting in a market crash, as businesses could not make a return of profit from their products, causing them to take on loans, increasing interest rates to which many couldn’t repay, and resulting in the event known as the Great Depression. Resentment toward capitalism increased as more people were starved and general conditions worsened for the working class, forcing many into the reserve army of labour to regulate wages as an attempt by bourgeois enterprise to remain profitable. To subdue this fury and the rise of proletarian revolution, the bourgeois state decided it was in its best interest to develop welfare programs known as the ‘New Deal’ through the Federal Emergency Recovery Act, the Social Security Act, National Recovery Administration, United States Housing Authority and Fair Labour Standards Act; not simply out of a benevolent fervor and care for working people, but to calm the growing working class labour militancy that happened during this period – stabilizing capital; learning from the experience of the German revolution of the previous years that showcased the counter-revolutionary nature of social democratic reformism. The ruling class essentially preemptively eliminated the revolutionary momentum by linking both business interests and “labour” interests into the bourgeois state with the NLRB and NRA (a class collaborationist, essentially a “progressive” mirror image, of the corporatism of Mussolini’s fascism), criminalizing class unionist tactics with the Taft Hartley Act, and banning communist leadership in unions and all advocacy for the overthrow of the government with the Alien Registration Act.

In-depth social democratic measures did not develop in America as they did in Europe because both wars did not financially or physically devastate mainland America, which, therefore, never had to deal with a reconstruction post war period and had already quashed the nascent labour militancy.

The post World War era, with Allied forces occupying Japan and Germany, allowed the development of their economies as an imperial stronghold to fight against its new imperial rival, the USSR, starting the Cold War; utilizing the Marshall Plan to invest $13 billion towards the reconstruction of the economies of Western Europe, fostering trade relations to prevent “the spread of communism” and squash what remained of labour militancy through the AFL and other American regime unions, operating as mediators in Europe’s labour unions to ensure labour peace.

The Welfare state continued to grow in the 1950s as expansions were made to the New Deal Programmes, adding 10 million to social security including benefits towards farm workers, domestic workers and the self-employed, mostly in response to the recessions of post-WWII and after the Korean war. The Medicare Program was signed in 1965 as the Great Society policy, caused in response to the 1960-1961 recession, sending many proletarians into the reserve army of labour due to the overproduction crisis, designed to depress wages and enforce labour discipline when the Union Movement was on decline and unable to fight against the conditions; marking the solidification of total bourgeois domination – not only on the political front as per the nature of the Democratic state – but also economic side. In the late 50s, collective bargaining agreements were permitted amongst the public sector on a state level, in an era called “The Little New Deal”, and solidified on a federal level in 1962. Unionization rates of public sector jobs had increased at the same time that the private sector decreased. However, 1969 was the last time there was a large surplus in the state budget and marked the inevitable disintegration of the welfare state as the state started to “tighten the belt” of government spending in austerity measures.

The beginning of the 70s was met with an economic crisis, after the rise of imperial competition with increased exports from Germany and Japan in the preceding decade caused trade deficits with these countries and devalued the U.S. dollar; ending the gold standard and Bretton Woods System and resulted in the largest crash since the Great Depression and even more capital consolidation. This crisis caused a subsequent increase in labour militancy and strikes in America: 3 million workers engaged in 5,700 strikes in the year of 1970 alone, proving the catastrophism of marxist determinism and the rise of trade union consciousness. However, without clear revolutionary leadership, many nascent proletarian forces were subsumed into regime unions, marking the inevitable gradual dismantlement of the welfare state that distinguished the last 40 years in America. The austerity measures of Reagan, often denoted by liberals as unique acts of greed by an evil man were a necessary response of bourgeoisie to the debt crisis with the end of Bretton Woods as well as the subsequent elimination of sections of the state that did not function in the immediate interests of capital, as the state was in a budgetary deficit. As America transitioned from the greatest creditor to the largest contemporary debtor, it corresponded with the general excision of state expenditures of sectors not immediately necessary in the reproduction capital. The 90s and early 2000s met with the same pattern but, with the fall of the USSR, its main imperialist rival, America’s place in the global market had become largely uncontested, leading towards more direct imperial conflicts, such as the War on Terror campaign, to secure monopoly capital’s interests in the Middle East.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was only put into place as a carefully crafted response to the 2008 market crash. The reserve army of labour doubled within a year, acting as a rotating wheel of labourers constantly in supply for capital’s needs, and what was left of labour militancy was unable to combat such devastating conditions, as the union movement was thoroughly dismantled over the previous 40 years. The Occupy Wall Street movement was merely a reaction to economic crisis and subsumed into an inter-class activism that wished for a more ‘humane’ and ‘moral’ capitalism; redirecting such material grievances back into the bourgeoisie – either to philanthropists like Bill Gates or into the bourgeois state as a whole.

During the period of the COVID-19 pandemic there was a temporary increase in welfare measures, like unemployment benefits, stimulus checks and increases in those dependant on medicare in response to the economic crisis that took place, alongside the opportunity to consolidate capital, eliminating many of the petit bourgeoisie with corporate mergers. This increase in the welfare state resulted in the “amplification of social democratic calls for a public healthcare system”, as reported by our paper back in April 2020, and the growth of such forces has developed as the ever present threat of crisis has been on full display since the pandemic.

The current bourgeois regime plans on slashing 80,000 jobs of the Veterans Affair Department and contract services. There was a rally of over 5,000 veterans in Washington D.C. in protest on June 6th, to commemorate the Allies victory of the Normandy landing in the Second Imperialist War. The VA exists as an organ to tie the often dispossessed and immiserated strata of the proletariat utilized in the plethora of imperialist wars into the bourgeois state apparatus even after service is finished; by having their livelihood attached to state programs such as: pensions, disability compensation, education, housing, healthcare and business grants. The VA is often touted by many reformists as an exemplary model of a “robust nationalized welfare services” that are already being utilized in America, and could simply be expanded to become universalized to every citizen.owever, this does not fundamentally change productive relations of capitalism, by shifting hands of the distribution of goods onto the state, rather than private enterprise.

As was with the creation of the welfare state, the dismantlement of welfare programs also becomes a necessity for the bourgeoisie as the crisis of overproduction unfolds towards inevitable collapse. This crisis of the welfare state is being shown ever so more glaringly obvious in the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’, which has called for increased tightening of the belts on medicare and medicaid, forcing more patients to pay out of pocket for medical expenditures and more layoffs of medical workers, mostly affecting hospitals in areas that rely on medicare funding to function, like in rural areas.

Benefits such as pensions, unemployment, medical care, housing education, etc. are merely deferred wages returned to the proletariat by the bourgeoisie to appease the working class’s immediate demands, as an attempt to avoid the internal contradictions of capitalism.

“As we have demonstrated with detailed calculations over the twenty years of its implementation, this systematic bourgeois plan of attack on the working class in Italy entails a drastic reduction of the wage mass, as the pension is nothing other than deferred wages, what would be necessary for each worker to set aside monthly for their sustenance when they are no longer employable. (...) In the last century, bourgeois states, in the ideal framework of both fascist organicism and social-democratic/Stalinist organicism – converging toward the same goal, the utopian quest for a rational capitalism – centralized among the functions of the Leviathan-State also social security for the working class: no longer could the working class demand from the capitalists an increase in wages necessary for this purpose, but that share would be taken by the State from wages (whether from the employer’s or the worker’s accounting makes no difference) and immediately transformed into Capital. Evidently, it is a massive amount of value and a great impulse to the development of accumulation and profits.

In this mechanism, the proletarian remains a proletarian. What the state social security entity deducts from the monthly wage does not take the form of capital, so that at the end of working life the worker is given a periodic pension, but will never get back the full amount collected. And the pension is neither received nor calculated as the yield of a certain accumulated capital, invested at a given interest rate (doing the math, it would be much lower), but as deferred wages, the fruit of years of work, not of savings” (Il Partito Comunista n.321, 2007)

As the overproduction crisis rears towards the surface, not only does the state excise sections of itself by downsizing to cut costs from state coffers to remain imperially competitive, through cutting funding to programs, agencies and workers, so too does industry excise sections of itself to remain profitable and competitive. General real wages for healthcare workers have not changed much; rather yet, healthcare workers have been forced to work more hours, servicing more patients with less workers per hospital, meaning they work more for the same wages, or rather they are receiving less per amount of labour performed.

There have been many strikes called by healthcare workers in California, Minnesota, Michigan, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island in America and Heathrow UK, as healthcare workers instinctively respond to the growing pressures on labour as America shifts towards productivist imperialist trade wars to ensure profits in defense of the bourgeois national-economy i.e. capital.

The bourgeois state, wholly an organism of the collective concentration of capitalist interests, even in spite of competition from opposing forces of the market, however, is resolutely united in their joint exploitation of the proletariat. Even so, attempts to improve the working class’s conditions exist only as a “superficial palliation” of the consequences from capitalism’s economic necessities. The supposed equalization of the proletariat and bourgeoisie, is not a matter of genuine reconciliation of class conflict, but an advanced form of capitalist rule that desires “redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.” Such reforms will not be made by activism or electoral politics, the communists’ goals should be to build up labour militancy through unions, “as schools for class struggle”, for the immediate improvement of the proletariat’s conditions but acknowledging that such compromises are always fleeting and illusory.

Our Party confirming over 20 years ago:

“Far be it for us to defend the welfare state, an invention of the bourgeoisie and historical opportunism, but the current attack and the debate that has opened up on the issue deserves to be addressed realistically and without mincing words. First of all, the welfare state must be rejected as an improvement of either the old liberal state or the fascist-style ethical state: it is neither an improvement nor a final result, nor a place of equality and justice. Rather, it is the last stage of Capital, a historical ploy of the bourgeois system to postpone its crisis and its end by organizing welfare and security, which are nothing more than the management of the surplus value extracted to intervene in the face of threats of rebellion and frontal attack by the proletariat” (Il Partito Comunista, No. 243, 1996).

We as the working class, can only rely on our own organs for the defence of our conditions, for the unemployed, employed, disabled, able bodied, healthy and sickly, but that requires a class unionist approach that will allow for the working class to fight, not only cover the gaps in their insurance, but to also to allow for a continued fight for class emancipation.

Only with the conquering of political power by the proletariat in revolution, led by the International Communist Party, can social questions be resolved organically with the abolition of capitalism; rather than giving into the delusion that schemes developed by the bourgeois state can save the working class from the devastation created by capitalism itself in the first place.

Current data from the bourgeois scientific record for 2024- 2025 confirms what workers worldwide have been experiencing for decades. The climate crisis is accelerating, driven above all by capitalist industry and militarism. The warming planet is already reshaping everyday life. In 2024, the global average surface temperature was +1.55 °C above the 1850 - 1900 baseline, the highest in at least 175 years. The World Meteorological Organization warns that there is now an 80% chance at least one of the next five years will breach +1.5 °C. At that threshold, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events will increase sharply.

Heatwaves like those in southern Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia in 2024, where temperatures exceeded 50 °C, are deadly to outdoor workers, the elderly, and those without cooling. Floods such as those in Libya and Pakistan in recent years displace millions and destroy homes, schools, and hospitals. Rising seas, currently advancing at 4.62 mm per year, the fastest rate in over two millennia threaten to inundate low-lying cities from Jakarta to Miami, with hundreds of millions facing displacement by 2100. Wildfire smoke in North America in 2023 - 2024 caused an estimated hundreds of thousands of excess respiratory-related ER visits. Droughts in East Africa and Central America have driven spikes in hunger, with the FAO estimating 735 million people were chronically undernourished in 2022, a figure worsened by climate shocks.

Fossil fuel combustion accounts for roughly 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The Global Carbon Budget 2024 reports fossil CO₂ emissions at 37.4 gigatonnes, a record driven by the permanent capitalist imperialist powers. The largest national emitters are China (30%), the United States (14%), the EU (~7%), and India (7%), together responsible for nearly 60% of global CO₂ output.

Heavy industry, steel, cement, petrochemicals, remains among the most carbon-intensive sectors, collectively responsible for around 25% of CO₂ emissions. These sectors are deeply embedded in capitalist growth cycles, construction booms, consumer goods turnover, and planned obsolescence keep production and emissions high. The top 100 fossil fuel producers, according to the Carbon Majors Database, are linked to over 70% of industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.

Beyond the greenwashed naivety of a potential ecological capitalism, renewable energy rollouts are often coupled with expanded fossil infrastructure, ensuring that global coal, oil, and gas use remains near historic peaks. The military sector is a massive, often hidden emitter. If the U.S. military were a country, it would rank among the world’s top 50 emitters, burning over 100 million barrels of oil annually. Military aviation and naval fleets are among the most fuel-intensive operations on the planet.

Imperialist wars conflict compounds the crisis. The Iraq War alone generated emissions comparable to adding 25 million extra cars to the road for a year. Destruction of infrastructure, oil wells, power plants, industrial sites during war causes spills, fires, and long-term contamination, while reconstruction demands vast energy and material inputs. Yet, military emissions are typically excluded from international climate reporting, a loophole established during the 1997 Kyoto Protocol negotiations.

Militarism and industrial capitalism are symbiotic. Military power safeguards global supply chains, resource extraction, and markets; industry supplies the materials and technologies that sustain permanent war-readiness. Both rely on fossil-fuel-heavy logistics, manufacturing, and infrastructure.

The IPCC AR6 warns that without rapid, deep cuts, the world is on track for +2.7 °C warming by 2100 under current policies. This level would trigger irreversible loss of major ice sheets, multi-meter sea-level rise over coming centuries, and collapse of key ecosystems such as tropical coral reefs (already suffering more than 50% decline in cover).

At +2 °C, the proportion of the global population exposed to severe heatwaves at least once every five years jumps to 37%, compared to 14% today. Crop yields for staple grains like maize and wheat could decline by 5-10% per degree of warming, exacerbating food insecurity. Freshwater scarcity would affect an additional 350 million people, and climate-related economic damages could reach trillions annually, disproportionately in the Global South.

The numbers are clear, capitalist industry and militarism are the primary engines of climate change. Their emissions are concentrated among a few states, corporations, and sectors, yet their impacts are global. Climate breakdown is not the by-product of “humanity as a whole,” but the outcome of a capitalist system that treats perpetual growth, fossil fuel dependence, and armed dominance as non-negotiable. Only the global revolution of the proletariat and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat with its International Communist Party at the lead can put an end to the irrational laws of capitalist economy that work every day to engulf the entire world in absolute destruction, rendering the planet uninhabitable be it due to nuclear winter or irreversible climate change.

The recent floods in Central Texas, which claimed the lives of more than a hundred workers, children, and elderly, are not a “natural disaster” but another episode in the long chain of social crimes committed by the capitalist mode of production. When the Guadalupe River rose twenty-six feet in under an hour, engulfing homes, camps, and entire communities, it was not only water that swept away lives, it was decades of neglect, the calculated dismantling of public protection, and the cold logic of profit before human need.

The county’s so-called emergency “management” lay in ruins before the first drop of rain. Officials were missing or asleep; warning systems were nonexistent; funds that could have financed sirens and evacuation plans remained idle or were siphoned into the usual coffers of capitalist development. Neighboring towns that had invested modest sums in public warning systems saved lives; Kerr County did not, because, in the accounting books of the bourgeoisie, even minimal safety for the working class is too costly.

This is the same pattern we saw in Lahaina, Hawaii, where in 2023 the bourgeois authorities allowed the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century to spread without activating the world’s largest outdoor siren network. Over one hundred people perished, thousands lost their homes, and immediately capital descended on the ruins, buying up land and forcing survivors into exile. While billionaire vultures descended on the area to buy the cheap properties for themselves.

FThe intensification of rainfall in Texas, the record heat that fuels droughts and fires in the West, the rising seas that gnaw at every coastline, these are the planetary consequences of fossil-fueled industry, agribusiness, militarism, and overproduction.

The bourgeois state, whatever its political flag, exists to defend the conditions of exploitation. Its disaster agencies are underfunded, its infrastructure crumbling, because public resources are devoted to subsidies for capital, tax cuts for the rich, and military adventures abroad. When disaster strikes, aid is slow, inadequate, and filtered through bureaucratic and corporate channels; when reconstruction begins, it is carried out under the sign of profit, not human need. In fact the destruction plays a vital role in rejuvenating the static capital.

We live in the midst of capitalism’s general crisis, where its economic contradictions, overproduction, falling profit rates, speculative instability, intertwine with environmental collapse. The ruling class cannot and will not reorganize production to avert disaster; on the contrary, it seeks to turn each catastrophe into a new field for speculation and dispossession. In Texas, as in Hawaii, in the wake of hurricanes, floods, or fires, the survivors are left to fend for themselves while developers, insurers, and banks prepare their harvest from the ruins.

Under capitalism, the forces capable of preventing or mitigating disasters, science, technology, coordinated labor are subordinated to the pursuit of profit. The working class pays twice: first in exploitation at the point of production, then in abandonment and ruin when disaster strikes.

Our party affirms that only the destruction of the bourgeois state and the expropriation of the capitalist class can put an end to this cycle.

In a communist society, preparedness would not be a budget line to be cut, but a basic function of the associated producers. Warning systems, resilient infrastructure, and rapid, universal relief would be as natural as the coordinated labor that builds them. Disasters would still occur, but they would no longer be massacres.

Until that victory, every flood, every fire, every “natural” disaster will expose the same truth, that capitalism is the greatest catastrophe, and only the proletarian revolution can bring an end to it.

On July 9, India, a nationwide general strike was held that Indians call Bharat Bandh. The numbers are impressive, the organizers estimate about 200 million striking workers who, for a day, have paralyzed large sectors of the economy and services in many states of the Indian giant.

The strike was called by 10 of India’s 11 largest trade union confederations against the economic and labor policies of the central government. However, it is a trade union front controlled by bourgeois left-wing parties and self-styled communists. The Indian National Trade Union Congress is run by the large Indian National Congress bourgeoisie party, now relegated to the opposition, but scrambling again to serve the needs of his majesty capital.

The AITUC, India’s oldest trade union federation, is under the direction of the Communist Party of India, while the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, is the trade union wing of the Communist Party of India (marxist), founded in 1964 by a split of the CPI. Finally, another major union is the All India Central Council of Trade Unions which is politically linked to the Communist Party of India (m-l), born from one of the many divisions that took place in the 1970s.

It is nothing new that since the bourgeois band of Modi reigns in India, the only great trade union confederation that generally does not adhere to these strikes is the Bhartiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government party.

The demands of this strike were summed up in 17 points presented to the Minister of Labour. Among the main ones is the withdrawal of the four new Labour Codes, approved by Parliament between 2019 and 2020. These revoke 29 pre-existing laws, with the Indian government’s stated goal of “improve the ease of doing business.”

Although the government has given the green light to these reforms for five years now, their full application has been delayed pending individual states to pass the implementing rules.

The unions argue that they reduce workers’ rights, increase working hours, precariousness and exploitation. They also asked for the introduction of a monthly minimum wage, automatically adjusted to inflation, of at least 26,000 rupees (about 290 euros). They reiterate that working hours should be maintained at eight hours a day while the new laws would allow companies to get up to 12 hours to work.

The unions are also calling for the privatization of state-owned companies in key sectors such as railways, banks, insurance, post offices, mines, electricity, defense and telecommunications.

It also claims the return to the previous non-contributory pension system and the guarantee of a minimum pension of 9,000 monthly rupees for all members of the mandatory pension fund and other social security schemes (excluding the immense informal sector).

Another point of the document calls for the prohibition of the widespread practice of contract and outsourced work by imposing permanent employment in the public sector, industry and services.

All this in a scenario that fully guarantees the right to organize and strike to all workers without restrictions.

The Informal Workers

The backbone of the strike was public sector workers, in particular insurance, postal, coal and iron mines, banks and steel workers. The transport sector has seen a strong membership of bus and train drivers, although some large independent rail unions have not joined. Numerous trackblocks and interruptions have occurred in different areas of the country. The wide participation of the workers of the electricity grid is also to be noted in several countries.

Millions of workers from the “informal sector” also joined, characterized by the lack of regulation, written contracts, without paid leave, sick leave, health insurance, pension plans and other forms of protection. Wages are often below legal lows and there is no regulation on working hours. In the workplace, the lack of safety and hygiene is the norm. The lack of employment contracts makes it difficult for these workers, who make up the majority in different states, join the unions and bargain collectively. They are often internal migrants, working in unregistered micro-enterprises, not infrequently family-run. Among them are construction workers, small business workers, domestic workers, agricultural workers, operators of childcare centers, home workers, porters, school canteen operators, rickshaw and taxi drivers, and many others.

The Regional Framework

The strike had a significant impact in almost all Indian states, although its intensity and participation was different in the regions. Traditionally stronger areas for trade union and left-wing movements have experienced near-total paralysis.

In Kerala, governed since 2016 by the Left Democratic Front (LDF), an alliance of parties led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI(M), public and private offices including transportation had remained closed, shutting down almost all commercial activities. The port of Kochi and the nearby refinery were also closed despite the laws of the state forbidding it. In several cities, protests were held.

Even in West Bengal the strike has experienced a strong impact with road and railblocks and massive demonstrations. There have been clashes between left-wing activists, police and supporters of the TMC (Trinamool Congress) the current center-center party in Bengal that since 2011 has taken over, after 34 years, the Left Front, led by the “communist” parties. The coal sector and jute factories, where unionization is strong, have seen massive adherence.

But even states not ruled by the left, such as Tripura, Odisha, Bihar and Jharkhand, have seen workers join the strike with road and railroad blocks, and broad adhesions in several key sectors such as the coal industry. Strong adhesions were registered in Uttar Pradesh, in particular among the workers of the electricity grid.

Also in Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Puducherry, Gujarat, Goa, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh there have been subscriptions and service interruptions.

In the Maharashtra, the strikes and workers’ blocs have joined Maoist political activists who protested against the recent Public Security Bill. This legislation gives the state government broader powers to prevent “illegal activities,” particularly “urban naxalism,” the Maoists. In Tamil Nadu there would have been several thousand temporary arrests of the participants in the strike and demonstrations.

The Unresolved Question of the Peasants

Among the 17 points of the trade unions there are requests that come from the world of small farmers. One concerns the Minimum Support Price (MSP), the guarantee that products are purchased by the government at a “fair” price, protected from market volatility and intermediary speculation. Another point requires the pardon of loans for this class, a chronic and irremediable snare with which capital strangles Indian countryside.

If the figures of the adherence to the strike demonstrate the great numerical strength, and therefore the potential of the Indian working class, it must be reported that the wage-earner class has joined the acronym of rural workers who mainly collect small farmers who cultivate a land of property or rent in the long term.

Among these, the United Farmers’ Front (Samyukta Kisan Morcha, SKM) stands out, consisting of dozens of agricultural unions that in several states, including Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, organized massive peasant demonstrations in support of the strike and against the government.

Their strength lies in the large number of small and marginal farmers, who still constitute the vast majority of the Indian peasant world and who, in the recent past, had led massive protests against the new agricultural laws of the central executive. The article – Among peasant protests and workers’ strikes” in this newspaper n.407.

This category in India accounts for about 86% of all farmers who own less than 2 hectares of land. Of these, the “marginals” (with less than 1 hectare) are the largest slice, about 65%. They have 47% of the total arable land area. This share decreases from year to year, a slow but continuous process of proletarianization.

For many of these small and marginal peasants, wage labour has become the principal, or integrative source of income needed. As early as 2018-19, wages, or a salary, represented the highest income item for the average agricultural household. Many "owner farmers" have often been forced to look for work as laborers, usually without any formal contract, after cultivating their field.

However, there is also another aspect to consider: several farmers, although “small”, hire laborers, sometimes seasonally and for operations that require manual labor. In this case the farmer has an interest in keeping the wages of the laborers low. The increase in the minimum wage, a key claim of laborers, would bring an additional burden for the farmer, who struggles to live with the land’s profits.

They are therefore different classes with different needs and it is in this framework that the relationship between the movement of wage workers and that of the varied peasant world must be set, as well as the propaganda of the false communist parties.

Meanwhile, the government, driven by the capitalists, is forced to break with the past and make India increasingly competitive to attract capital. Agriculture must produce at ever lower costs, in competition with other regional markets and to feed the millions of proletarians thrown into the vortex of industries, from which to extract surplus value.

This is the aim of the Indian capital, which tomorrow will also be pursued by those who oppose the current government. Indian capital and international investors want modern production in the countryside. The Indian bourgeoisie no longer has the possibility of maintaining these hybrid sub-classes, the centralization and modernization of agricultural property is a slow but inexorable process in India.

Certainly in India the heterogeneous peasant world, which for millennia has been the basis of society, will try to resist, to survive, but the death sentence of their small managements is written in history. The only way out will be the revolutionary transition to a new society, to socialized production, freeing the small peasants from work of the small parcel, which in the world of Capital no longer represents a richness but a slavery.

The Indian workers, and their class brothers of each country, will break these chains by attacking capital head-on.

But today in India, as everywhere, political and trade union opportunism prevails, which blocks or diverts the motion of all those who have been disinherited in the defense of the national interest and the preservation of bourgeois power.

The strength of the proletariat as a class, the only potentially revolutionary one, lies not exclusively in the number, but by the sound consistency of its defensive organizations and their political direction, which must end the intransigent struggle against the bosses and their state. This will only happen when one of their minorities, the most advanced elements of the proletariat class, are recognized in the revolutionary communist party.

Over the past six weeks, U.S. immigration enforcement has seen a sharp escalation, marked by high-profile raids, contentious legal battles, and a growing backlash from organized labor and interclassist community groups. Since July, these confrontations have begun to transform what were once episodic protests into a sustained, coordinated interclassist movement in opposition to ice raiders that remains relatively localized in immigrant hubs such as Los Angeles.

The most recent flashpoint came on July 10 in Camarillo, California, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and federal agents raided a cannabis farm. More than 200 workers were detained, and the operation turned deadly when farmworker Jaime Alanis Garcia fell nearly 30 feet while attempting to evade agents. The raid drew fast condemnation from unions, left bourgeois immigrant-rights advocates, and civil liberties groups, who framed the death as the direct consequence of a militarized enforcement strategy but consistently fell short of identifying the class nature of the attacks.

Only a day later, agents executed search warrants at Glass House Farms and another cannabis-related operation in Southern California. In response protesters and workers physically blocked road access to the sites, prompting a police response with tear gas. More than 100 farmworkers were taken into custody, and several people required medical care. The tense standoff underscored a growing reality that workers are not simply bystanders in these operations they are self-organizing on the spot to resist.

In early August, the executive branch pushed the issue to the highest court, urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a standing injunction that barred ICE from conducting “roving” raids based solely on generalized characteristics such as speaking Spanish or doing day-labor work. Civil liberties organizations, particularly the ACLU, condemned the request as an attempt to normalize racial profiling. Meanwhile, the ripple effects of enforcement have reached far beyond worksites. Across several small towns, Latino cultural festivals long-standing community events were cancelled due to fears of possible ICE presence. While officials cited no direct threats, organizers described a “climate of fear” so pervasive that it effectively shuttered public celebrations.

In Los Angeles, the resistance has shifted from reactive protests to sustained mobilization. July saw the launch of a “Summer of Resistance” campaign, coordinated by labor unions such as SEIU 721 and United Teachers Los Angeles, workers from UTLA, UFCW 324, UFCW 770, Teamsters Local 396, alongside bourgeois immigrant-rights and interfaith organizations. This interclass coalitions\ organized rapid-response patrols, know-your-rights trainings, and a citywide communications network to track ICE movements. Volunteers from groups like Unión del Barrio began patrolling freeway overpasses and staging areas, especially near Terminal Island, to identify and broadcast enforcement activity in real time. Their alerts often spread via social media serve as early-warning systems, allowing immigrant workers to take precautions. While effective at frustrating many of ICE street level policing activities in the localized area of Los Angeles. The organizing culminated on August 12, when hundreds gathered in MacArthur Park for a 24-hour “community stoppage.” Labor leaders called for both a halt to raids and a reimagining of worker power, linking immigration enforcement to broader worker struggles.

These actions are rooted in the recognition that immigration enforcement is no longer a separate political issue for unions, it is a worker issue. The sectors experiencing the heaviest enforcement, from agriculture to service industries, are all heavily staffed by immigrant workers. Raids chill organizing efforts, deter workers from reporting safety violations or wage theft, and weaken workers’ leverage over the boss. For these unions in Los Angeles have recognized that defending immigrant members means defending the interests of the broader working mass.

The last six weeks have thus revealed a dual track of escalation. On one side, ICE has pursued large-scale raids, pushed for expanded “roving” arrest powers, and maintained a presence that reaches deep into the public and cultural life of immigrant communities. On the other hand, labor unions and grassroots groups have evolved their tactics from spontaneous protest to long-term infrastructure blending street-level monitoring, public rallies, and strike action into a unified opposition.

The effort demonstrates a step forward for many of the respective unions to recognize the immigration issue as an issue which generally impacts the labor movement itself. It shows a positive step in the direction towards the future class union based in solidarity between all sections of workers and unions. However, for the struggle to develop towards its full potential the workers movement must take the lead within the struggle setting it firmly on working class grounds outside the realm of interclassist coalitions dominated by left bourgeois activist frameworks.

Instead it is essential for workers to struggle to cast off the yoke of the NLRB straightjacket to take back up the weapon of the solidarity strike, left opportunist leadership that council defeatist tactics of compliance and divert the union towards activist and legislative tactics at the cost of centering the unions most powerful weapon the strike must be combatted at all levels in the locals and national levels. The current all pervasive attack on the living standards of the working class in the United States can only effectively combat with the weapon of generalized strike action and its towards that aim that every union in the country should be aiming.

In TICP 64 we wrote a short article about the strike action taken by the bin workers in Birmingham and the appeal for international solidarity made by an exiled Sudanese worker at the ‘mega-picket’ on May 9th.

Since then, there have been further developments which we will discuss after first highlighting a feature of the strike that reveals - yet again - the problems that often arise in the UK due to the trade union movement being so tightly bound to the reformist Labour Party (which famously declared itself to be ‘the party of business’ in the run-up to the last election).

The Unite union, which the striking workers belong to is, in its own words: ‘a general trade union, representing workers across various industries in the UK and Ireland. It was formed in 2007 by the merger of Amicus and the Transport and General Workers’ Union. Unite is known for its diverse membership and its commitment to fighting for workers’ rights, fair pay, and safe working (…) It represents workers from a broad range of sectors, including manufacturing, public services, transport, and more.’ A lot of potential for bringing together workers in different sectors then.

It is also the largest union affiliated to the Labour Party, and in the case of the current strike, it is in an excruciatingly contradictory position, because: 1/ it is also one of the biggest donors to the Labour Party through its ‘political fund’, 2/ the Deputy prime minister and secretary of state for communities & local government, Angela Rayner, is a member of the union, 3/ the employers of the bin workers are in fact the Labour Party led Birmingham City Council, some of whose councillors are also members of Unite.

How has it dealt with these contradictions?

At its recent conference in the middle of July, Unite voted overwhelmingly to re-examine the relationship with the Labour Party, and to suspend Angela Rayner from Unite membership for “bringing the union into dispute”. This will be followed by an investigation into their behaviour with a “view to expelling them from the union”.

And as part of their investigation into their behaviour the union might do well to consider the observations made by bin worker Danny Taylor, made in his speech to the conference: ‘instead of visiting the picket lines’ he said,’[Angela Rayner] met with scab agency strike breakers and congratulated them on a job well done’. And she apparently also insisted that the strikers should accept a deal that would see their wages slashed.

The Birmingham council leader and fellow Unite members on the council, acting in similar fashion, have also had their memberships suspended due to threats they made to effectively fire and rehire workers on pain of redundancy.

A report by Ray M. on the rs21 [Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century] website, gives further voice to Danny Taylor “[who] addressed the conference to explain the background to the dispute and the need for solidarity. He reminded delegates that during the pandemic, bin workers didn’t get to work from home – they put their health at risk doing collections that kept the city going. Yet Birmingham Council had just announced a manoeuvre to threaten the sack for striking workers who refuse to accept pay cuts. This is ‘fire and ‘rehire’ by another name.

(…) Councils across the country face a financial crisis. If management wins in Birmingham it gives a green light to attacks on workers across local government. ‘If they get away with this here’, Danny told the conference, ‘other councils will follow. Every worker in local government will feel the impact’.

In her closing remarks to the conference, Sharon Graham, the Unite union leader, said that following the news of Unite’s motion to re-examine its relationship with the Labour Party, and expel the deputy prime minister and Birmingham councillors from the Union, [the veiled threat being that the union would stop funding the Labour Party] she’d received a text from Downing Street, ten minutes after the news of the motion became public!

Apparently Unite has never before taken a step like this, and the Labour Party knows that waiting in the wings is a new, ‘left labour’ party, as yet unnamed, that could take its place: the one led by Jeremy Corben, ex-leader of the Labour party and most visible representative of those leftists who believe the apparatus of state can somehow be taken over and wielded in the interests of the working class.

But having the UK’s biggest union cut off the Labour Party’s funding – leaving aside the question, if they actually do it, whether they would financially back some other party – would be a significant move insofar as the link between the Union and the Labour Party would be weakened if not entirely broken. Evidently the very thought of it is giving the Labour Party the jitters!

Another interesting aspect of the strike is that the union also suspects that the commissioners appointed by the government to address the council’s difficulties managing the waste management services, have a financial interest in prolonging the strike. Since the 6 commissioners originally appointed by the Conservative government) arrived in Birmingham, they have apparently raked in around £2,000,000 in fees and expenses and are paid between £1,100 and £1,200 per day. [Nice gig if you can get it!!].

The Unite general secretary Sharon Graham stated a few days before the conference that: “The commissioners have stood in the way of a deal that could and should have been reached months ago. Despite never attending negotiations, they have obstructed every effort to bring these strikes to an end - wasting millions upon millions of public funds in the process.

Meanwhile, with all this in the background, 100 street scene operators (a designation that includes refuse workers as well as those working on parks, gardens and highways) at Wrexham council have balloted for industrial action over changes to working patterns.

A posting of 17 July on the Unite website explains that previously this group of workers were given additional days off over Christmas and could volunteer to work overtime. “However, the council forced through changes without any consultation with workers or Unite, which means they now have to compulsorily work Saturdays and are threatened with disciplinary action if they do not attend. This is a choice by the employer to extend the working week without agreement and means every worker would lose half a day’s pay. The ballot closes on 5 August and industrial action could take place in late August. Unite members are also considering any potential strike action to take place over Christmas, when households usually have more rubbish needing to be removed than usual”.

And other sectors are now entering the fray, perhaps inspired by the resoluteness of the Birmingham bin workers.

Under the auspices of their union, the BMA, the resident doctors [formerly known as junior doctors] have just rejected the government’s 5.4 % pay offer and are in the middle of a five day strike for a 29% rise, on the basis that they have seen a 20 per cent pay erosion in their salaries since 2008. This twelfth strike in their long running dispute will run to July 30th with further strikes threatened until January unless demands are met.

The BMA is now taking an increasingly hard approach in the matter of ‘derogations’, a system where the NHS can ask a doctor to cross the picket line where patient safety is at risk, and as of the evening of the 27th July, out of 25 requests for derogations 18 were rejected. Perhaps the announcement by the leader of the Conservative Party that they would make strikes by doctors illegal is making the BMA even more determined to press forward their demands!

And the nurses are gearing up for action as well. On the 28th July the nurses’ union, the RCN, held a consultative vote on the 3.6% pay offer, having previously described it as ”grotesque” to offer nurses a lower increase than doctors, teachers, prison officers and the armed forces. The result of the vote is expected later this week but the union thinks the deal will be overwhelmingly rejected with the possibility of strikes following later in the year.

And finally,an update on the Birmingham bin strike:

In our report on the Birmingham bin strike in TICP 64, readers will recall that Birmingham Council was granted a court order, in May, to stop waste vehicles being stopped from leaving depots by those on the picket line, and we talked about workers having an almost ingrained talent in finding its way round such obstacles.

Well, on 25 July, coinciding with ‘mega-picket 2’ which was called to rally further support for the ongoing strike, it was welcome to see on the BBC website the headline “Bin lorry blocking row send council back to court”.

We read that Birmingham City Council has applied for contempt of court proceedings against the Unite union over striking bin workers blocking refuse collection vehicles.

The BBC article goes on to quote a city council spokesman, and there seems to be a certain note of desperation and frustration in his voice when he says?

"Despite writing repeatedly to Unite for several weeks to highlight what we believe to be clear breaches of the injunction, the situation has worsened".

"Since the injunction was granted, vehicles have been blockaded on roads to and from our depots, with Unite representatives and members stepping in front of, and even leaning against, moving heavy vehicles and blocking road junctions.”

It appears the struggle continues!

On July 14th, dock workers organized through the Container Handling Workers Union (ENEDEP) and the Permanent and Probationary Port Workers’ Union (PLO) in Greece, led a joint action to halt a shipment of Indian produced enriched steel intended for military use by Israel in the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza. The Port of Piraeus workers, joined by other anti-war protesters, blocked the unloading of the ship Ever Golden while denouncing the war and refusing to allow the dock to become a “hub for the transfer of war equipment.” The shipment, having been obstructed, was then sent off to be transhipped by the Chinese owned COSCO Shipping Pisces, in an attempt to smuggle the steel through under the noses of the workers and was set to arrive that following Wednesday, July 16th.

The workers, again, organized and coordinated another blockage, with thousands of people rallying under the cry that their “hands will not be soaked in blood.” The unions clearly expressed that these actions are as much an act of self defense for the workers as they are an act of solidarity; they do not wish to come under the crosshairs of warring bourgeoisies, becoming victims of the war themselves.

Similarly, in June, French dockworkers with the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) union of port workers at Fos-sur-Mer refused to load a shipment of 19 pallets of ammunition belt links used to manufacture machine guns that were set out to be delivered to Haifa, Israel. The strike successfully sent the Israeli ship back home empty handed. Afterward, Italian dockworkers in the Unione Sindicale di Base (USB) and Greek dockworkers in ENEDEP made public statements declaring they too would refuse loading and unloading any and all arms shipments to Israel. These actions are the result of a growing network of European dockworker unions in France, Italy, Malta, Slovenia, Spain, and others that have begun coordinating actions and sharing information about weapons shipments among themselves, to obstruct when possible.

This revolt of the proletariat against their national bourgeoisies and their imperialist wars confirms the need for continuous consolidation of the working class into class unions and how even just a few unions in coordination can disrupt the carefully orchestrated flow of war materials between the capitalist states to be used to kill proletarians abroad. It is on the basis of the economic struggle and self-defense that these worker defense organizations should continue to strengthen their coordination along international lines and further distinguish their class’s interests apart from those of the capitalists, but only with the class party and global revolution will we see the end of capitalism and its wars.

The worsening economic hardship and uncontrolled increase in exploitation in Turkey have led to an increase in the number of trade union struggles. Workers affiliated with Petrol-İş, public sector workers, defense industry workers, and many others, all affiliated with the Türk-İş confederation of regime unions have taken up the struggle against declining living standards and eroding purchasing power.

Strikes Organized by Petrol-İş Members

In Gebze, 150 workers at Portakal Plastik, affiliated with Petrol-İş, went on strike on May 7, 2025, after the employer refused to increase wages by 52%, despite the workers’ demand for a 95% raise. The slogans chanted during the strike emphasized both the organized struggle and the refusal of the Turkish working class to accept its dire conditions. After 28 days, an agreement was reached, ending the strike, and workers’ wages were increased to an average net gross salary of 45,000 TL. Additionally, it was decided that an average 66% wage increase would be implemented in the first year, with an additional 3% increase in the second year based on the inflation rate. Furthermore, 11 days of net pay were granted for the duration of the strike, the number of annual bonuses was increased to 3 in the first year and 4 in the second year, and the overtime rate for weekdays was raised to 100%, while overtime for weekends and holidays was increased to 4 times the daily rate.

At the Soda Kromsan factory in Mersin, the Petrol-İş union had decided to go on strike on May 14 due to the lack of progress in the TIS negotiations. However, the parties reached an agreement in the collective labor contract signed on May 8, which includes a 73% wage increase for the first six months, an additional 3% increase based on inflation for the second six months of the first year, and an additional 2% increase based on inflation for each of the two six-month periods of the second year. In addition, a seniority increase of 1 TL was added to the hourly wage, raising the new hourly wage to 152.29 TL.

A collective bargaining agreement was signed at the Plascam factory in Kocaeli without 300 workers going on strike. Following the lump-sum increase of 10,000 TL, it was decided that the first year would see an 85% wage increase, and the second year would include an additional 3 percentage points on top of the inflation rate. With this adjustment, the average net wage at the factory has risen to 44,000 TL. The minimum wage for a newly hired worker will be 38,000 TL. In addition, workers will receive four bonuses per year in addition to their salaries. Social rights were increased by between 93% and 217%. These social rights will be calculated based on net salaries.

As can be seen from the last two examples, the bourgeoisie is now afraid of what the working class, which is engaged in a more active struggle, is capable of. TPI Compozit workers, who are organized by Petrol-İş, went on strike on May 13 after rejecting the employer’s offer of a 30 percent wage increase in response to their demand for a 120 percent increase. While the strike continues, TPI workers are also demanding improved working conditions and private health insurance. To call the conditions in which TPI workers labor “humane,” one would have to be a bourgeois economist. Workers in the main production unit are not only forced to work for four hours straight without a break but also lack the necessary equipment to protect their health. It is hardly surprising that the Pulmonology Department of the hospital near the factory is overflowing with TPI workers. As if all this were not enough, when managers detect any illness among workers, they first suggest a department transfer. If the worker refuses and has been employed for less than three years, they are dismissed with a lower seniority wage and no severance pay. The situation is similar in other units of the factory. A worker from the Enercon Finish department mentioned that workers who contract any illness are called to work shifts and pushed to the point of quitting. The TPI workers’ strike is still ongoing.

Workers affiliated with the Petrol-İş union in Dilovası and İzmir went on strike on May 22 after the employer rejected their demand for a 117% wage increase under the collective bargaiaining agreement, offering only a 60% increase. The company, which generated 2.4 billion in revenue, allocated only 8% of its profits to its workforce – a stark example of the immense wealth created by capitalism and the inevitable poverty it brings. While the strike was ongoing, DYO workers, TPI workers, and Temel Conta workers, who have been fighting since January, joined forces in Çiğli. For the bourgeoisie, there is nothing more terrifying than workers chanting slogans like “Long live class solidarity” and “There is no liberation alone, either all together or none of us.” DYO workers also achieved the result of this organized struggle with the collective bargaining agreement signed on July 4. In addition to securing a 73% wage increase, they gained many more social rights. This strike should show us and many other sections of the working class that the united struggle of the working class is one of the greatest weapons in our fight against capital.

Due to the failure of negotiations between Toros Tarım, which has factories in Adana and Mersin, and Petrol-İş regarding the collective bargaining agreement, a total of 213 workers went on strike on May 21. The 52% wage increase offered by the employer kept workers below the poverty line. Almost all workers are complaining about the growing difficulties in making ends meet. While the bourgeoisie lives in abundance and prosperity, condemning the workers they employ to poverty is nothing but a manifestation of their parasitic nature. The workers at Toros Tarım, as a segment of the working class that has embraced class solidarity, also made sure to convey their support for workers participating in other ongoing strikes. The strike at Toros Tarım is still ongoing.

The Struggle of Public Sector Workers

The government’s imposition of a 16 percent wage increase on public sector workers under the Public Sector Framework Protocol (KÇP) was met with a backlash. While workers are struggling to survive under capitalism, the government has offered them a ridiculous amount. We are not the only ones saying this; the workers think the same way.

“They are mocking us. This offer clearly means go on strike. The end result will be a strike”...

In response, the organized power of the workers sprang into action. In Bağcılar, in front of the Epitim and Research Hospital

The Istanbul branch of the Social Services Workers’ Union held a press conference. Workers carrying banners reading “We reject poverty wages; we want to live like human beings” voiced their demands for a decent life, unconditional transfer rights, and equal pay for equal work. Reactions poured in against the government’s KÇP process. Nedime Mutlu Yıldırım, President of the Istanbul Branch of the Health Workers’ Union, stated that the government had been stalling workers for three months and had disregarded workers with the wage increase it offered.

Yıldırım emphasized that workers are the ones who keep the public sector running, saying, “This fact must be clearly understood: This issue is not just about public sector workers; it concerns everyone. The public must not remain silent in the face of this injustice and the resulting disruptions in public services.”

In the third month of KÇP and TİS negotiations, the government’s 16 percent offer fell short of the 15.09 percent inflation rate for the past five months, according to TÜİK data. Workers affiliated with Türk-İş and Hak-İş reacted to this situation and are pushing union leaders to take action. While Türk-İş emerged with an action plan, Hak-İş only demanded the signing of the protocol. Despite being detained by the governor’s office, unions affiliated with Türk-İş made statements in many parts of the country. At the call of Sağlık-İş, many healthcare workers in public hospitals voiced their demands.

Reactions poured in against Hak-İş, and workers called for escalating the struggle. Workers staged a protest that turned into a large rally in front of the Ministry of Treasury and Finance, opposing the Turkish Heavy Industry and Services Sector Public Employers’ Union (TÜHİS) proposal of a 16% poverty wage increase, demanding a decent standard of living. As Turkish-İş General President Ergün Atalay delivered his speech, slogans such as “Action, action” echoed among the workers. Demonstrating their determination and commitment to the struggle, they chanted slogans like “If negotiations end, the struggle begins” and “This will end with a strike.”

Even 107 days after Hak-İş and Türk-İş submitted their draft proposal to the government, the only response was press statements. Hak-İş’s sole reaction was to demand that the KÇP process be concluded immediately. What a worker-friendly union! Seeing this, workers resigned from Öz Sağlık-İş in protest against the union’s passive stance. A worker said, “The contract was signed in April, but we still haven’t received the raises. The authorized union never came to the site, never informed us. We didn’t even know what was demanded in the contract. Why aren’t you using the workers’ power at the negotiating table? Why are you condemning us to the KÇP?” Another worker said, “They said we got the 40-hour workweek we demanded in April, but there’s no 40 hours. They didn’t include overtime hours in the contract. That’s why the employer isn’t implementing the 40-hour week; they say they increased break times.” Last week, the Health-Workers Union made a press statement despite not being authorized. They spoke out for the KÇP. Many workers came here – was that so bad? We call it an action, but when we say ‘action,’ they act as if we’re cursing them.”

A worker expressing his reaction to the KÇP said, “The contract was signed in April in Çapa,

but we still haven’t benefited from the raises. The authorized union hasn’t come to the site even once, hasn’t informed us. We didn’t even know what was demanded in the contract. The contract signed at the table – why aren’t you using the workers’ power? Why are you condemning us to the KÇP?” Another worker said, “They said we got the 40-hour workweek we demanded in April, but there’s no 40 hours. They didn’t include overtime hours in the contract. That’s why the employer isn’t implementing the 40-hour week; they say they increased break times.” Last week, the Health-Workers Union made a press statement despite not being authorized. They spoke about the KÇP. Many workers came here – was that so bad? We call it an action, but when we say action, they act as if we’re cursing them.” When it comes to workers, the bourgeois government disregards even its own laws!

In response to these reactions, the government representative at the Public Framework Protocol (KÇP) negotiations, the Turkish Heavy Industry and Services Sector Public Employers’ Union (TÜHİS), announced today that it had increased its second wage hike offer by 1 percentage point to 17%. The additional 1 percentage point increase offered by the government amounts to only 12.5 lira per day. In some places, this does not even cover the price of a loaf of bread.

Workers interpreted this raise as a call to go on strike. The worker base called on the confederations to decide on a strike. In statements made in many places, workers emphasized that they were insistent on their decision to strike and fight, stressing that the government’s impositions were far from the reality of workers.

On July 6, a strike broke out in Izmir, and nearly 600,000 public servants called for struggle, saying, “This is the uprising of people who cannot survive.”

Harb-İş Workers

Social service workers are not the only victims of the collective bargaining agreement negotiations and the government’s imposed raises. One of the strongest indicators of a country’s imperial power is its investment in weapons. These arms investments constitute a large arms industry. A strike in the arms industry not only paralyzes the bourgeoisie’s national defense but also provokes a greater response than any other strike. Because the factories where the bourgeoisie produces the weapons to suppress the working class have been confronted by the working class as a class.

Defense industry workers are also feeling the effects of this economic crisis. Defense industry workers at the 1st Air Maintenance Factory Directorate in Eskişehir have stated that they can no longer make ends meet due to the uncertainty surrounding the collective bargaining process and the worsening economic conditions. Rents exceed their salaries, workers are forced to take on extra jobs, and they are being exploited even more to increase the bourgeoisie’s profits.

Unfortunately, nationalist prejudices among workers remain widespread. We are directly quoting the words of one factory worker: “The annual value added that my factory alone contributes to the country is 11.5 billion TL. Approximately 2,000 people work here. Each of us produces 5.5 million TL in added value. We only want 10% of this from the state. This would be enough for us to achieve prosperity. We haven’t received any inflation adjustments, and there’s no prosperity share. Our wages have eroded over time. If the defense industry isn’t addressed, there won’t be any skilled workers left".

The bourgeois state does not even deem 10% fit for workers. While workers struggle to survive on meager wages, every struggle for their rights pits them against the concepts of homeland and state. A worker who said he had to take on extra work to make ends meet said, "I have been working for 15 years. I have never experienced a period like this. Some go to car washes, others work as waiters at wedding halls, or in markets. It’s impossible to survive without extra work. This situation has gone beyond being just the workers’ problem; it’s become a social issue. Our central headquarters must immediately announce an action plan in response to this situation. They need to get us out into the streets.”

With the prolongation of the collective bargaining process, resignations have also begun to increase.

Eskişehir workers are not the only defense industry workers expressing their dissatisfaction with this situation. Workers from the Gölcük Military Shipyard, members of Kocaeli Harb-İş, marched to Gölcük City Square. During the march, slogans such as “Hit it, hit it, let Şimşek hear,” referring to the deeply unpopular Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek, “The workers are here, where is the government,” and “Government, wake up, take care of your workers” were chanted.

Şakir Akçer, President of the Kocaeli Branch of Harb-İş, said, "The world is moving in a new direction. While our surroundings are on fire, is it normal for workers producing for the development of the defense industry to struggle to make ends meet? How can defense industry workers not even pay their rent? We don’t know what to do with the wages we receive at the end of the month. We can’t even support our families for a week. We’re not asking anyone to give us medals. Just give us our rights. This is not a faint voice. Those of us who do this work earn wages that are just above the poverty line. We have set up our labor camp. Defense industry workers who produce helicopters and submarines earn wages that are just above the poverty line". he said.

However, Kocaeli is not the only shipyard boiling with the fire of rebellion. In Tuzla, Istanbul, and many other defense industry branches, workers are boiling with the fire of rebellion against poverty! The bourgeoisie is truly unmatched in creating the conditions that will bring about its own end. Freeing defense industry workers from regime unions is one of the best measures that can be taken against the approaching world war. This is true not only in Turkey but throughout the world. Of course, the bourgeoisie is aware of this, and the reason it is exerting incredible pressure on defense industry workers is that it can smell its own death.

There are two permanent solutions to all this poverty, exploitation, and the approaching imperialist war: either communism or the annihilation of all humanity.

Within the last few months the United States has seen new worker struggles erupt. They are largely fueled by the conflict of workers facing lower absolute wages due to inflation on the background of high corporate profits for the year. This is a slight intensification of the class struggle, not quite comparable to the “labor summer” of 2023 or the type of strikes that we are seeing in other nations where general strikes have even been seen recently, but it is an increase in the temperature of labor conflict.

Municipal Worker Strike in Philadelphia

Teamsters’ Waste Management Strikes: Planned and Ongoing Actions

QSL Port Workers Strike In Illinois

Grocery Workers in Colorado

Student Workers in Washington

The North American section has advanced its intervention within major proletarian economic organizations through leadership positions, strategic resolution campaigns, and coordinated contract alignment work. Earlier this year Party militants within the Class Struggle Action Network, a workers coordination, moved forward a campaign to put immigrant worker solidarity resolutions forward in unions across the country in order to move unions out of narrow parochial self-interest and on the field of class solidarity.

In the International Association of Machinists, a sympathizer has moved into key leadership roles, enabling immigrant worker defense resolutions and proposals for a coordinated May Day 2028 strike to gain traction at the district and territorial level. The Immigrant Worker Defense Resolution has already passed in the American Postal Workers Union, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers locals in Richmond and Portland, Service Employees International Union, and the Teamsters, with further organizing underway across fifteen additional unions. Through putting forward these principled lines of action as official proposals at union local meetings and regional assemblies militants have been able to put forward class unionist principles and effectively confront opportunist leadership who would rather ignore the issue in the name of business unionism as usual.

In the Industrial Workers of the World, militants have been working with class unionist elements building rank-and-file support through active committee participation and coalition work with baristas and service workers.

Within the Southern Workers Assembly, over 300 workers participated in a recent Action Summit. Party militants were present and widely distributed Party and class struggle materials in addition to promoting our immigrant worker defense positions. This connection provides access to decision-making across a network of more than thirty worker assemblies in at least six states comprising membership from much larger number of unions.

In Illinois, work focuses on winning support among newly expanded graduate student unions to join the 2028 strike effort, using official surveys, endorsements, and union communications to agitate for participation. The Chicago Teachers Union’s existing alignment for 2028 provides a strategic opening to build solidarity within the education sector.

Internationally, the North American union intervention working group meets monthly to coordinate this work, with plans to connect to comrades in other regions for broader study and unified strategy. Across all fronts, the priority is to turn immediate struggles and contract battles into a foundation for mass, coordinated actions rooted in the material needs of the working class, ultimately advancing the fight for the reforging of the class union.

Every day, images and news reports emerge from the Gaza Strip of crowds of hungry, thirsty, sick, and exhausted people being machine-gunned as they queue in the sun for a plate of food or a bottle of water, with hospitals and schools bombed. Thousands of Palestinians, including very young children, are being held without trial in Israel, while the entire population of Gaza is locked up in an open-air prison that is being reduced and bombed every day.

Gaza is not the only region in the world where people are massacred for no apparent reason, where they die of hunger or thirst. But this calculated genocide is the responsibility of a democratically elected government and parliament, the “only democracy in the region,” carried out by a regular army of a state, not by criminal mercenary gangs, with weapons freely sold, if not donated, by equally democratic countries.

Not only the State of Israel but all states are involved in the massacre: even those Arab states that claim to be friends of the Palestinians, Turkey, which claims to defend Muslims, and Iran, which, together with Israel, has financed and armed Hamas.

Because the life of a people counts for nothing to the servants of global capital. For the monstrous concentrations of wealth around the world, the only law and morality is the pursuit of profit. Let humanity die, as long as the insane accumulation of capital survives.

In every country, big capital, through its men, its parties, its state apparatus, holds entire peoples hostage. Their lives are nothing but a commodity to be traded. They are defended if they are useful, otherwise they die. In the natural selection of capital, the most unscrupulous and bloodthirsty survive.

The systematic destruction of the Strip and its inhabitants has been going on for almost two years now, in full view of the whole world. Only in the last few days do governments seem to have noticed. But the chorus of condemnation and disapproval, entirely verbal, from numerous chancelleries, and the shamefully symbolic parachuting of a few crates of aid for a population of two million, should not give rise to any hope of relief.

The international organizations created at the end of World War II in the face of obvious crimes confirm their total impotence and cosmetic role in hiding the monstrous face of capitalism. The UN and the International Criminal Court issue condemnations that remain only on paper.

The facts therefore demonstrate that the only right that counts is that of force; there is no right without a force that can exercise it. The bourgeois Israeli state, a vile mercenary of the US, exploiting a power vacuum in the region, has been given the task of bombing the capitals of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen with impunity. But the whole West rejoiced that, in Iran, “Israel is doing the dirty work for us too,” as the German chancellor said contemptuously.

This is the value of the so-called “international law” in defense of “peaceful coexistence between states.”

Force can only be opposed by force. Individual disgust or indignation is therefore worthless in stopping or mitigating the massacre. In a class society, power lies with the classes. So far, we have seen confused spontaneous demonstrations, but the working-class organizations, the parties, which do not exist, and the unions, which follow the bosses, have remained silent. Thus consenting to the slaughter of their working-class brothers in Palestine.

In a situation that sees the approach of a more general military clash between imperialisms, the genocide in Gaza will be repeated many times, both on the people who have the misfortune to find themselves on the lines of friction between the blocs and in the rear.

This is the scenario facing the international proletariat if it allows itself to be regimented for the approaching war.

The proletarian class, organized in its reborn economic defense organizations and led by the revolutionary communist party, is the only force that can oppose that of rotten capital: to the discipline of the states, its class discipline; to bourgeois war, proletarian war.

The new peace process, launched on October 1, 2024, with a handshake between Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the fascist MHP party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi - Nationalist Movement Party) and the deputies of the Kurdish nationalist party DEM (People’s Equality and Democracy Party, also abbreviated HEDEP), has reached a point of no return with the start of the PKK’s surrender of weapons.

This process, which is of great importance for bourgeois politics both in Turkey and throughout the Middle East, and in the current context of imperialism leading to world war, offers no significant solution to the Kurdish question.

This is further confirmation of what our party has stated on the question of oppressed nationalities, namely that the path to their solution within the framework of the capitalist mode of production has historically been closed by the popular, national, and anti-colonial revolutions anti-colonial revolutions in Africa and Asia in the three decades following the end of World War II, bringing the bourgeoisie to power throughout the world on the ashes of the pre-capitalist political regimes on which historical European colonialism was based.

The remaining national questions – such as the Kurdish, Palestinian, and many others – which remained unresolved at the end of that historical cycle of national liberation struggles, whose revolutionary content lay in the transition from pre-capitalist political and social regimes to capitalist ones, will now only find resolution and solution after the completion of the new revolutionary political and social content on the agenda of history, namely that of the international proletarian revolution.

Without and before it, any party that still today takes it upon itself to fight for any cause of national emancipation, deprived as it is and as it cannot be otherwise of the revolutionary material base that in past movements resided in the revolutionary character of a part of the bourgeoisie, generally in the poor peasants, can only become an instrument of one or another regional and world imperialist power, that is, no longer an instrument of political emancipation and social revolution but of imperialist war, the supreme instrument of capitalist preservation and the destruction of humanity.

Implicit in this reversal of the role and function of parties that still claim to fight on its terrain is the inevitable betrayal of the national cause. The PKK, as has been clear for some time and denounced by our party for decades, has fully confirmed this historical picture, as illuminated by Marxism.

Negotiations between the Turkish bourgeois state and the PKK date back to before the AKP came to power in 2002. In “The Kurdish Question in the Light of Marxism” (“Communism” nos. 97 and 98 of 2024), we wrote about the previous peace process attempted between 2012 and 2015: "At the beginning of 2015, the parliamentary wing of the PKK, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), and the Turkish government declared that they had reached an agreement. After a largely successful ceasefire period, the 2015 Turkish general elections led to a strong gain for the HDP (13% of the vote, +7.5%), an equally strong decline for the AKP (41% of the vote, -9%), and a hung parliament. Shortly thereafter, after two police officers were killed in northern Kurdistan, the Turkish government launched police operations in cities and military operations in rural areas against the PKK, ending the ceasefire and the peace process. The operations continued in the following years, leading to the destruction of numerous cities in northern Kurdistan. All PKK suspects in the killing of two Turkish police officers in 2018 were acquitted by the court due to lack of evidence. The “peace process” between Turkey and the PKK has shown once again that in capitalism, peace is when the next war is being prepared.

Like the end of the old peace process, the beginning of the new one came when such a maneuver became consistent with the interests of the Turkish bourgeois regime, both in foreign and domestic policy.

The developments that made it necessary in foreign policy were, on the one hand, the war in Gaza that broke out on October 7, 2023, and the deepening imperialist conflict in the Middle East; on the other hand, the collapse of the Syrian Baathist regime on December 8, 2024, which the Turkish state had been aware of six months earlier. The presence of an experienced, equipped, and trained military force such as the PKK would have represented a weakness for the Turkish state in a context that is leading to world war.

In domestic politics, the increasingly serious economic crisis, the loss of popularity of the People’s Coalition – of which the AKP (the “Justice and Development Party” of Turkish President Erdoğan) and the MHP (the “Nationalist Movement Party” of Devlet Bahçeli) are the key components – and the rise of the CHP, the Republican People’s Party, which emerged victorious from the last municipal elections and which, despite large-scale arrests, is putting increasing pressure on the government, are the conditions that are bringing about a new government coalition.

Thus, past words have been forgotten and, under the leadership of Devlet Bahçeli, the Turkish state has extended an olive branch to the PKK. Abdullah Öcalan, described for decades as a “terrorist leader” in state rhetoric, has become the “founding leader.” And Öcalan has done his part, ordering the PKK to lay down its arms and disband.

Although the guerrilla leadership in Kandil – the PKK headquarters in the mountains of the same name in Iraqi Kurdistan – tried to delay the orders of the “leadership” and set some conditions, in the end, the laying down of arms began after Öcalan’s official speech, first at the PKK congress, then in front of the cameras at a ceremony attended by important leaders such as Bese Hozat and Mustafa Karasu. The weapons were destroyed near Süleymaniye, in northeastern Iraq.

On the level of bourgeois and parliamentary politicking, the DEM (Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party), whose base is opposed to the current Turkish government, was taken from the opposition and transformed into a reserve of the government bloc. This has forced the CHP, which has offered critical support to the peace process, to move closer to Turkish nationalist parties hostile to the Kurds, such as the “Good Party” (İyi) and the “Victory Party” (Zafer). Erdoğan and his entourage’s goal for the upcoming elections seems to be to present themselves as the candidate of peace against the continuation of the conflict with Kurdish nationalists, as opposed to a candidate such as Mansur Yavaş, the mayor of Ankara, a Turkish nationalist, anti-Kurdish, with a past in the MHP. Although the alliance with the DEM is limited to peace with the Kurds, it could pave the way for some of its members to draft a new constitution that removes the legal obstacles to Erdoğan’s re-election.

The fact that the main demand put forward by Kurdish nationalists is the freedom of Öcalan, who for decades led the organization, placing himself at the service of all the regional powers that oppressed the Kurds and this or that great imperialist power, shows what the peace process promises. The other promises on the table are a kind of amnesty for most of the guerrillas and politicians in prison, the possibility for some to participate in democratic politics, and the return, in some form, of the Kurdish municipalities that the Turkish state has placed under administration. The empty pacifist rhetoric – the silence of weapons, the recognition of rights, dialogue instead of war – has been counterbalanced by the repeated assertion that the Kurds will not be given even a crumb of autonomy. Nor is there any discussion of the demand for education in the mother tongue.

One of the most important aspects of the new peace process is the fate of the region governed by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by the Kurdish nationalist movement in Syria. On January 28, SDF commander Mazloum Abdi announced during talks in Damascus with Al-Jolani, the new Syrian president, that an agreement had been reached on the reorganization of the army and the territorial integrity of the country, specifying that the SDF would become part of the Syrian army. On the other hand, the draft constitution prepared by Hay’at Tahrir al Sham – the Islamist organization headed by Al-Jolani, in power since December – did not satisfy the Kurdish nationalists, who insisted on their demand for autonomy, seeking to delay the dismantling as long as possible, just as the PKK leadership in Kandil had done.

In the end, after years of being the tools of the United States on the ground, the Syrian Kurds heard from the US ambassador in Ankara and the special representative for Syria, Barrack, that they would not get even a shred of autonomy in Syria. Thus, the so-called “Rojava Revolution,” which began with the withdrawal of the Assad regime from Syrian Kurdistan, was quickly liquidated by order of the United States. Kurdish nationalists in Syria are so dependent on US imperialism that they could not raise the slightest objection to the decision imposed on them.

In the current situation, which is leading to a new world war, the Turkish state is filling its biggest security gap, which is the question of Syria. Kurdish nationalists, who now openly declare that Kurds in Turkey will enter the service of the Turkish state, cannot oppose the entry of Syrian Kurds into the service of the Syrian state.

In this context, there is one point that neither Turkey, Syria, nor the United States is addressing: the Iranian arm of the PKK, the PJAK. No one is talking about the PJAK surrendering its weapons. Behind the scenes of the staged destruction of weapons, it appears that the PKK’s military force is about to be transferred to eastern Kurdistan. In this way, the Kurdish dagger, in line with the interests of US imperialism, would be pointed at the Iranian bourgeoisie.

All these events demonstrate once again that, under the current conditions, the Kurdish question cannot be resolved within the framework of the capitalist regime, under the leadership of global and regional imperialist powers.

The only solution is through class struggle. The Kurdish proletariat must fight for its interests, organized in class unions together with the Turkish, Arab, and Iranian proletariat, reconnecting with its experiences of struggle, which in the past led to the establishment of workers’ councils in Iraqi Kurdistan.

It is on this path that leads to revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, seizing power in each of the capitalist states that exist today, that, once the material bases of the capitalist interests that today exploit unresolved national questions have been destroyed, they can finally find a solution.

The Terrorist Attack

On April 22, the Baisaran Valley, a town near the mountain town of Pahalgam in the Indian territory of Jammu and Kashmir, was the scene of a terrorist attack. A group of five armed militants killed 26 civilians and wounded dozens more.

The commandos, armed with M4 and AK-47 assault rifles, reportedly targeted groups of Hindu tourists. According to several witnesses, the victims were selected on the basis of their gender (only men) and religion (exclusively non-Muslims); local Kashmiris were spared.

This modus operandi is reminiscent of that employed by Hamas in the attacks of October 7. Some victims were reportedly forced to prove their Islamic faith by reciting the Kalima, an act of faith pronounced to express adherence to Islam. The only confirmed Muslim victim is a local worker, a pony rental operator, who reportedly tried to defend the tourists.

The attack was claimed by a relatively new group known as The Resistance Front (TRF), which emerged in 2019 shortly after the Indian central government’s decision to revoke Kashmir’s partial autonomy.

The TRF is considered to be closely linked to, or an integral part of, the jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which has carried out numerous attacks on Indian territory in recent decades, including the 2008 Mumbai assault, which lasted three days and left 170 people dead.

However, a few days after the attack, the TRF denied involvement, claiming that the claim of responsibility, sent via Telegram, was the result of a cyberattack orchestrated by Indian intelligence.

Targeting tourists is nothing new for these groups; on the contrary, it responds to a clear desire to gain international and media attention. The goal is twofold: to undermine regional stability and damage India’s tourism economy, a sector that has experienced significant growth in Indian Kashmir in recent years.

In June 2024, a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims returning from the Shiv Khori temple near Ransoo, in the Reasi district (Jammu and Kashmir), was attacked and nine passengers were killed. The attack was claimed by the Kashmir Tigers, another little-known group known for its ambush tactics using light weapons. It is believed to be affiliated with the Sunni Islamist organization Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), founded in 2000, which in Urdu means “Army of Muhammad” and which over the years has been characterized by its use of suicide bombers.

In an attempt to reinforce an image of normality in the region, India organized a G20 summit in 2023 in Srinagar, the capital of the district of the same name in Jammu and Kashmir. The event was followed by protests from China and Pakistan.

The attacks are often targeted at civilians, ethnic and religious minorities, pilgrims, tourists, but also workers, as demonstrated by the cowardly action of the TRF in October 2024, when it attacked a tunnel construction site in the district of Ganderbal, also in Kashmir, killing seven migrant workers.

According to data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal, between 2000 and 2024, approximately 15,000 civilians were killed in India as a result of terrorism, not only in Jammu and Kashmir, but in various regions of the country, figures that reflect the complexity and spread of the phenomenon.

From Words to Action: Operation Sindoor

Indian leaders immediately blamed Pakistan, accusing it of supporting and fueling terrorism in the region. Islamabad, while reiterating the illegitimacy of India’s presence in Kashmir, rejected any involvement, referring the accusations back to the sender.

The day after the attack, New Delhi responded with significant retaliation: suspending the Indus Waters Treaty and closing the Attari-Wagah border, the only legal crossing between the two countries, located not far from Amritsar in Indian Punjab.

The Indus Waters Treaty, signed in 1960 under the supervision of the World Bank, regulates the sharing of water from the vast basin of the subcontinent’s longest river. The Indus rises in the mountains of Tibet, crosses part of India (mainly Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir) and flows through Pakistan, emptying into the Arabian Sea south of Karachi.

The Treaty grants India exclusive use (usually for agricultural and hydroelectric purposes) of the left tributaries: Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej. The Indus and the right tributaries: Chenab and Jhelum, are for Pakistani use. However, the treaty allows India to build hydroelectric projects on these rivers, but without altering their flow to Pakistan.

These waters are essential to the Pakistani economy: used mainly for agricultural production, they account for about 80% of the country’s total water needs. Pakistani Energy Minister Awais Leghari therefore called the suspension of the treaty “an act of water warfare; a cowardly and illegal move,” reiterating that “every drop is ours by right and we will defend it with all our might.”

Two days after the attack, both countries canceled visas and severed trade ties. Pakistan closed its airspace to Indian aircraft and suspended the fragile Simla Agreement, which establishes respect for the Line of Control (LoC) and a commitment not to change it unilaterally. As proof of the worth of these documents signed between bourgeois marauders, this agreement has been violated countless times since 1972.

On April 29, Indian Prime Minister Modi, during a meeting with defense leaders, granted the Indian armed forces “complete operational freedom.”

Tensions rise: on May 3, Pakistan flexes its muscles and tests the Abdali ballistic missile, with a range of 450 kilometers. On the same day, India imposed maritime restrictions on Pakistani ships and cut off all trade by sea.

The night between May 6 and 7 marked the beginning of Operation Sindoor. The Indian armed forces carried out attacks on Pakistani territory against nine sites identified as “terrorist infrastructure.” According to Indian sources, these targets included training camps and headquarters of the terrorist groups Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), the latter an organization that includes Kashmiri fighters.

Islamabad responded immediately with intense mortar and heavy artillery bombardment along the Line of Control. On the night between May 7 and 8, Pakistan struck several military targets in northern and western India with drones and missiles; some of these attacks were neutralized by Indian air defense systems.

On May 8, the Indian armed forces responded with missiles and drones, targeting air defense radar systems in several Pakistani locations, including Lahore. During the night between May 8 and 9, Pakistani drone raids against Indian targets continued, hitting, among others, the airport in Srinagar and the air base in Awantipora. It is estimated that Islamabad used over 300 drones.

On May 9, there was a significant increase in the intensity of fire along the LoC from both sides, characterized by the use of mortars and heavy artillery.

The following day, a ceasefire was negotiated between the two sides. However, despite the agreement, there were still numerous clashes along the border. Only on May 12, after four days of violent military exchanges involving missile strikes and intense drone attacks, did the two countries announce a truce, which proved to be stable.

As in any clash between bourgeois states, statements by government representatives and military leaders showed considerable differences regarding the number of casualties and the outcome of the attacks.

Pakistan accused India of striking civilian areas, killing 40 civilians and 11 soldiers, and injuring about 200. New Delhi categorically denied Pakistan’s claims about civilian casualties, but claimed that its operations had killed more than 100 “terrorists” in the first wave of attacks alone.

According to Indian sources, its military losses were five soldiers and 15 civilians killed and 43 wounded as a result of artillery and small arms exchanges along the Line of Control and Pakistani drone strikes.

The Ceasefire

The announcement of the agreement on May 10 was made by the US president and only later confirmed by the Pakistani foreign minister and the Indian foreign secretary. Trump, playing the role of comedian that has been assigned to him, said: “After a long night of talks mediated by the United States, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a complete and immediate ceasefire. Congratulations to both countries for using common sense and great intelligence. Thank you for your attention to this issue!”

These words did not go down well with the Indian ruling class: attributing the credit for the mediation to the United States suggests that India has yielded to external pressure, whereas, in the nationalist imagination, the Kashmir issue and relations with the Pakistani enemy are internal affairs between the two states. Furthermore, Trump has placed the two countries on the same footing, failing to identify India as a victim of terrorism.

It is clear, however, that we are in a historical phase where local issues are part of a global imbalance and cannot be addressed in total autonomy.

In this crisis, the two major imperialist powers, the US and China, have maintained a cautious position, calling for moderation from both contending states, after arming them for decades. Certainly, the United States, although historically linked to Pakistan, is oriented toward strengthening its strategic ties with India in an anti-Chinese capacity. Beijing, on the other hand, is traditionally an adversary of Delhi and an ally of Islamabad, with which it has built increasingly close economic and commercial ties.

Furthermore, for India, an armed conflict would undermine the already shaken global supply chains and scare away international capital, which today finds fertile ground for investment there. A long war could severely test India’s ability to contain, even partially, Chinese influence.

The Position of Revolutionary Communism

The countless conflicts, large and small, that characterize the current phase of the capitalist mode of production are inexorable manifestations of the march of capital toward a new global carnage, dictated primarily by the general economic crisis of overproduction. War is an inescapable necessity for the ruling classes; there is no alternative to our “either capitalist world war or proletarian revolution.” It becomes essential for the bosses, for their governments of all colors, to channel the workers of all nations into fratricidal slaughter.

All the bourgeoisies, and in this scenario the Indian bourgeoisie and its Pakistani twin, will continue to fan the flames of conflict, feeding, when and as much as necessary, the multiple groups of “terrorists,” who are the expression and useful servants of the various bourgeois factions that raise and subsidize them and who, beyond their supposed ideology, will always stand against the revolution and against the workers.

Territorial disputes such as that in Kashmir will be a useful pretext for pushing nationalism, as will religious conflicts, which will be exacerbated to strengthen the bourgeois state and hurl it against the proletarian movement.

But war also has the merit of unmasking opportunism in all its forms. In India, the two large self-styled communist parties, the Communist Party of India and its 1964 split, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), have once again shown their true reactionary nature by openly supporting Operation Sindoor, emphasizing the importance of national unity in response to “terrorism.” The Indian proletariat must reject these dictates and take up, together with their Pakistani class brothers, the slogan “The enemy is in our house,” against national unity for international unity in the struggle of the working class.

Other Indian and Pakistani left organizations, apparently more radical, today opposed to both national bourgeoisies, support national liberation struggles, from Tibet to Baluchistan to Kashmir. In a world at the present general stage of historical development, words denouncing these oppressions of minorities are used as instruments of war between imperialisms, as in the Ukrainian scenario with regard to the Donbass republics, or in the Palestinian carnage.

A third world slaughter can only be stopped by the world proletariat, united above nationalities, ethnicities, and religions, and guided by the international communist party, transforming the war between states into a war between classes for the affirmation of communism.

After a brief lull, the Houthis struck again near Hodeidah, sinking the Magic Seas and Eternity C, killing and abducting sailors and forcing insurers and shipowners to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope at great cost. Israel answered with air raids on Houthi sites, knitting the shipping war to the Gaza front. As always, the class burden falls downward sigh crews, disproportionately Filipino wage workers absorbing the trauma, injury, detention, and death, while owners pass higher premiums and detour costs through the price system.

Europe has become the day-to-day gendarme of this artery of commerce. The EU’s EUNAVFOR Aspides extended to February 2026 reports supporting 640+ merchant ships and giving 370+ close escorts with Italian, French, and Greek frigates, yet even its commander admits there aren’t enough hulls to cover every request (and some vessels that were hit hadn’t filed for escort). By mandate Aspides is defensive, leaving shore launch infrastructure largely untouched – hence the cycle: short lulls, then spectacular attacks that reset insurers’ risk models and send traffic back from Suez to the Cape. Meanwhile Washington, after pausing strikes in early May, keeps Operation Prosperity Guardian on a lower-key escort/surveillance footing, effectively leaving Europe to police the corridor while U.S. power signals elsewhere.

Strip away the rhetoric and the logic is naked: protect capital’s seaborne lifelines, socialize the hazards onto crews and coastal communities, and treat price spikes as collateral to be managed. Each additional European escort reduces losses where present, but paperwork checks and insurance demands cannot abolish an asymmetric campaign rooted in wider wars. Unless the political drivers in Yemen and Gaza change, expect the same bourgeois equilibrium: EU-led convoying, occasional punitive strikes by others, longer voyages and pricier freight and the human toll paid by working seafarers who make the “free” circulation of commodities possible.

Since 2020, general party meetings have been held via videoconference; only where we have sections do comrades follow the proceedings together from the local party headquarters. This means that in some regions we have to connect early in the morning and in others late at night.

To overcome the language barrier, we prepare in advance and make available to everyone translations of the reports of the sections and groups, and the text of the reports, in English, Spanish, and Italian. Comrades’ impromptu comments are translated on the spot.

As always, the atmosphere at our general meetings is fraternal, collaborative, and marked by great respect for everyone’s commitment and hard work. The meeting takes place in an orderly and productive manner, among communists who place the good of the party and the revolution far above the miseries of bourgeois personalism and intellectualism, from which we have always happily freed ourselves in our movement.

Thus emancipated, we enjoy the communism that we have had the joy and satisfaction of helping to pave the way for.

As usual, two tasks are assigned at the general meeting, one concerning studies and practical activities, without making them rigidly opposed to each other, and the other concerning the results and general reflections on them. We devote the first session to bringing together the various activities of the party in a common understanding and evaluation, listing the progress made and any difficulties encountered; the second session is devoted to the presentation of reports on various topics, commissioned for study and indepth analysis by individual comrades or small groups.

Here, as usual, we present a brief summary of the reports.

The topics covered were as follows:

     - The rearmament of States.
     - The war between Ukraine and Russia.
     - The initial defeatism of the Palestinian and Israeli proletariat against the State of Israel and against Hamas (Already published in the previous issue).
     - The IndiaPakistan conflict (This report is published in this issue).
     - The crisis of capital and the competition for oil.
     - The International of Red Trade Unions.
     - Race, class, and the agrarian question in the United States. Slavery and the rise of the bourgeois world, part 2 (report published in issue 2 of Comunismo, in print).
     - Alienation, objectification, and the crisis of human relations in capitalism: sex and love.
     - Documents of the left wing of Ottoman socialism and the Communist Party of Turkey, part 5.
     - The working class in Burkina Faso, part 3.
     - Events of German capitalism.
     - Party activity in North America.

An increasingly divided European Union pretends to find unity as a third imperialist pole, in opposition to those led by China on one side and the US on the other. But the newly elected Chancellor Mertz already contradicts this: “The federal government will provide the armed forces with all the financial means they need to become the strongest in Europe.”

The pretext is that “strength keeps aggressors at bay.” In truth, if the history of the last century has shown anything, it is that the clash that is being prepared is only falsely between the attacked and the attackers, because war is an economic necessity for all forms of capitalism, and rearmament is a consequence of this.

For the moment, the states of Europe seem to be siding with the US. The German chancellor continues: “We see elements of systemic rivalry in China’s foreign policy actions and view with concern the growing closeness between Beijing and Moscow.” Similar tones are coming from Paris and London.

It is not that the European bourgeoisies are more warmongering than others, they are just in a weaker position than their rivals, and they speak openly of world war, rearmament, and mobilizing the population, after decades of proclaiming the sacred principles of the rejection of war, democratic peace, and similar nonsense, always with the same intent of confusing the proletariat.

Since 2022, defense companies around the world have seen their orders, revenues, and stock prices swell, with corresponding dividends for shareholders, who in Europe are often the states themselves. In Germany, Rheinmetall is considering buying Volkswagen’s Osnabrück plant to build tanks, one of three factories that the carmaker wants to close in Germany. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the company has increased its stock market value tenfold, while Volkswagen car sales in 2024 have fallen by 3.5%.

At the meeting, we brought to the attention of our comrades the data on military spending by individual states. Knowledge of these figures and their variation over time provides a picture of the balance of power between imperialisms, avoiding bourgeois media propaganda.

The data published by SIPRI starts in 1949, in the early years following the end of the Second Imperialist World War, and covers more than 140 countries. Today, we will limit ourselves to examining the changes that have taken place in recent years and only in relation to the countries that spend the most.

During 2024, a total of $2.718 trillion (at 2023 dollar values) was spent on arms worldwide, an increase of 9.4% over the previous year, a sharp rise. This expenditure is equivalent to 2.5% of global gross domestic product. This is the tenth consecutive year of rising global spending, but since 2021, global spending has accelerated, and even more so in the last year.

The biggest investors in arms are the major imperialist countries, that “handful of states” that today, as in the early 20th century, dominate the world. Eight of them, the US, China, Russia, Germany, India, Great Britain, France, and Japan, account for 66% of arms spending with $1.804 trillion. The top 15 spend 80% of the world total, but account for less than half of the population.

The United States of America, with a population of 347 million, 4% of humanity, spends 37% of the world total on arms.

The availability of arms, which are increasingly powerful and destructive, is proportional to the economic development of capitalism. Military force therefore benefits the capital invested in the military-industrial complex, which has no homeland but responds only to the interests of finance and profit.

In Russia, spending has reached $150 billion, an increase of 38% compared to 2023 and double that of 2015, corresponding to 7% of the country’s GDP, more than three times the share of European countries. The five largest European countries (France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Poland) alone spent $311 billion. The figures provided by Von der Leyen are patently false.

The mercenary Ukrainian bourgeoisie is martyring the country on the orders of European and US imperialism, which supplies it with loans and weapons. In the last year, the country’s military spending has reached $68 billion, 34% of the country’s GDP. Ukraine also has an active national arms industry that employs nearly 300,000 workers. The Ukrainian industrialists have therefore already won their war!

Germany has increased its military spending by 28% compared to the previous year, reaching almost $86 billion, earning fourth place in the world rankings. Disarmed Germany has been able to quickly recover thanks to its financial potential and powerful industrial apparatus.

In Poland, a country with a military tradition and steeped in anti-Russian nationalism, military spending had already begun to grow massively since 2018; the government took advantage of the war in Ukraine to cry out about the Russian threat, and since 2017 it has almost tripled. In the last year, it has increased by as much as 30%, reaching $35 billion and exceeding 4.0% of GDP.

Britain is one of the few Western countries that has kept spending stable. London is not sparing Russia its anathemas, but the increase in spending in 2024 will struggle to cover inflation alone.

European NATO members already spend a total of $454 billion, or about three times Russia’s spending, and 30% of NATO’s total spending. But, as SIPRI points out: “Simply increasing spending will not necessarily translate into a significant increase in military capabilities or greater independence from the US.” The general increase in military spending demanded by the President of the European Parliament does not actually serve to strengthen a “European defense,” which does not exist, but only to feed the military industries. Each state spends on its own army. A European army will never be formed. On the contrary, in 5-7 years we will have a powerful German army, a powerful French army, a powerful Polish army, and the war front will once again cross Europe as it did twice in the last century.

The US, the world’s greatest imperialist power, has reached a spending level of $997 billion, an increase of 5.7% over the previous year, 3.4% of GDP, 37% of global military spending, and 66% of NATO spending. In addition to spending on personnel and bases that the US maintains across much of the globe, the commitment, according to SIPRI, goes “towards modernizing military capabilities and nuclear arsenals to maintain a strategic advantage over China and Russia.”

Canada, the other major North American country, has kept its spending steady at around $29 billion, or 1.3% of GDP.

Brazil is the largest investor in arms in Latin America, with spending of around $22 billion, down significantly from $27 billion in 2018.

Mexico has increased its commitment by 39% to $16.7 billion, mainly to strengthen the National Guard and the Navy, which are active in the war against organized crime and illegal immigration.

Military spending by Middle Eastern countries was around $243 billion, an increase of 15% compared to 2023 and 19% compared to 2015.

Israel increased its spending by a whopping 67% to $45 billion. This represents almost 9% of the country’s GDP, second only to Ukraine. US military ‘aid’, under an agreement signed during the Obama administration, amounted to $3.8 billion per year, about 15% of Israel’s normal defense budget. Since October 7, 2023, this commitment has been exceeded by “emergency aid.” In the first year of the war alone, the US allocated approximately $23 billion to Israel and related operations, nearly six times the usual package. The US covered approximately 70% of Israel’s war-related military expenses, enabling it to conduct a prolonged campaign on multiple fronts. Weapons were supplied by the US (67%), Germany (32%) and Italy (1%). We can therefore say that the genocide in Gaza was commissioned by Washington and made possible by the US and Germany.

Other countries in the region did not increase their spending significantly, with the exception of Lebanon, which increased it by 58% to $635 million.

Significantly, Iran reduced its military commitment by 10% to $7.9 billion. The impact of sanctions and the social situation within the country prevent the regime from demanding further sacrifices for the war.

Saudi Arabia remained virtually stable at $79 billion, but appears to be preparing to sign an agreement for a massive purchase of arms from the United States: $142 billion. To put this into perspective, between 1950 and 2022, the Kingdom purchased a total of $164 billion worth of American arms.

The world’s second imperialist power, the People’s Republic of China, increased its spending by 7% over the previous year to reach $318 billion. Beijing is investing in the modernization of its armed forces, the strengthening of its cyberwarfare capabilities, and its nuclear arsenal. The difference in the cost of weapons on the Chinese market compared to that of other countries, especially the US, makes it difficult to estimate the real size of the Chinese military apparatus. China is concentrating its resources in the Indo-Pacific. The US armed forces, on the other hand, although superior to the Chinese overall, are engaged in many regions of the globe, which today gives Beijing an advantage.

Japan has increased its spending by 20% to $58 billion, the largest increase since 1958, bringing spending to 1.4% of GDP, exceeding the 1% that had been imposed on the country since World War II.

Taiwan’s spending, despite growing tensions with Beijing, has remained virtually stable at $16 billion.

India increased its military spending by just over 2% to $84 billion. This represents 28% of China’s spending and 9% of the US’s, a very significant difference, which is also reflected in the quality of equipment, nuclear capabilities, modernization, and treatment of personnel. The solution sought is to replace imports of weapons systems with domestic production.

Pakistan, on the other hand, has reduced its spending by about half a billion in recent years, settling at 8 billion, after peaking in 2021 at 106 billion.

On the African continent, despite being shaken by some of the bloodiest wars for civilian populations, especially in the sub-Saharan region, spending on arms and armed forces has increased by only 3% compared to 2023 and 15% compared to 2015.

During the recent negotiations, the Russian delegation stated that the aim of the talks should be “lasting peace,” addressing “the root causes” of the conflict. The Kremlin’s conditions for peace are: Ukraine’s neutrality, i.e., not joining NATO, not hosting foreign troops or bases, and not possessing weapons of mass destruction; recognition by Ukraine and the international community of the annexation of Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia to Russia.

The Ukrainian government has repeatedly called these demands “unacceptable” and repeats that “Crimea, like all of Ukraine, must be free.” But it has no “cards to play,” as it was reminded on “world television.”

The Ukrainian capitalists are certainly worried about having to confess to the proletarians sent to the front that their sacrifice has been in vain. And not because those soldiers have lost the national war, but because this is the result of all wars, a new division of the spoils from which the proletarians are always excluded and which benefits the ruling classes.

The Ukrainian bourgeoisie’s refusal to make concessions to the victor is unrealistic and criminal, when it is now clear that it is impossible to stop the Russian advance, let alone organize a counterattack to regain the lost territories. The continuation of the war will cost thousands more lives and cause further terrible destruction without changing the final outcome of the conflict. As a former adviser to Zelensky said, “Ukraine can negotiate and lose five regions today or continue fighting and lose eight in a few months.”

But in this attitude, the Ukrainian government is backed by some European states that continue to call for a “just peace.” Not even the “willing,” i.e., France, Great Britain, Poland, joined by Germany, with pretensions of taking the lead, intend to provide decisive military aid to Ukraine, either in arms, men, or financial aid. The same position is held by NATO.

According to various observers, Russia, strengthened by the perception of a growing military advantage and the progressive disengagement of the United States in supplying arms to Ukraine, is preparing a summer offensive. Ukraine, on the other hand, suffers from a shortage of soldiers, lacks the necessary weapons, and its economic resources are dwindling.

Meanwhile, the continuation of the war is in the interests of all capitalists: it favors the military industry and allows the plundering of Ukraine’s mineral and agricultural wealth for the benefit of European and American industrial giants.

Moreover, the Russian bourgeoisie is also at risk. Economic, social, and political problems have been accumulating during these years of war and could trigger a resumption of class struggle.

Therefore, there is very little chance that the upcoming negotiations will have a positive outcome and put an end to the war. It is no cliché to say that it is easier to start a war than to end one.

A war that has now lasted more than three years, involving millions of soldiers, has enormous costs in terms of human lives and materials, and has depleted a large part of the arms and ammunition reserves of Western countries as well as Russia and its allies.

Russia started the war because war is always profitable under capitalism and to react to NATO’s encirclement. The oligarchic Ukrainian bourgeoisie waged a proxy war, sold out to Western capitalists, first and foremost the Americans. The war will therefore end when the big European, American, and Russian corporations agree on how to divide up Ukraine’s assets.

The talks between Trump and Putin had hinted at peace based on a blatant division of those riches, part of an agreement for broader economic ties between the two imperialist states. Currently, it seems that everything is back on the table, perhaps reopening the game for other players, such as China, which has been present in the area for years, and European states such as Germany, Great Britain, Poland, France, and Italy, minor imperialist powers which, despite having contributed to arming Kiev with weapons and money, now risk being excluded from the game.

Furthermore, on the borders, the bourgeoisie of Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland are waiting for the right moment to reclaim the territories that were taken from them at the end of the Second World War. The outcome of this struggle for Ukraine can be summed up in one sentence: it has lost everything. This is yet another lesson for the proletariat on the value of bourgeois appeals for the struggle for freedom, national independence, the defense of the homeland, and other such nonsense.

The war in Ukraine, like those in the Middle East, is part of the need for war of world capitalism. All the major states are accelerating their efforts to improve the efficiency and consistency of their armed forces. The demand for new weapons systems is welcomed by industrial sectors which, hit by the crisis of overproduction, will convert their civilian production. The European Union is urging its member states to increase their military spending by revising their national budgets, even by increasing debt. This was considered heresy until a few months ago. They are calling on governments to spend less on health, education, and infrastructure and more on the military.

The issue even worries Italy’s Minister of Economy, who makes no secret of his dislike for Brussels politicians: “It will be very difficult politically to increase defense spending disproportionately and reduce social spending: I don’t think any government is willing to do so.”

We must prove the Minister wrong: governments will do it, even at the cost of not being re-elected, because they serve the interests of the bourgeois regime, and the bourgeois regime wants rearmament. It will not be democracy or parliaments, whether right-wing or left-wing, that will defend the living and working conditions of the proletariat in the coming years, the years of preparation for general war. It will be the proletariat itself that must do this, fighting resolutely for substantial wage increases, a general reduction in working hours, improved working conditions, and against nationalist and patriotic propaganda, rearmament, and threats of war.

As the struggle between Stalin and Zinoviev began to intensify, Fyodor Raskolnikov, operating under the name Petrov, a Stalinist, became the official head of the Eastern Section, replacing the Zinovievist Safarov as its leading figure. From that moment on, the Eastern Section’s watchword was Bolshevization. Almost immediately, it set to work organizing a new party congress in close collaboration with Şefik Hüsnü and his faction, which in the meantime had modified its position on Kemalism to align itself with that of the Eastern Section: to support the Kemalists, but only when they were in grave danger.

The congress was held in February 1925 in Istanbul. Some of the most important left-wing militants, such as Ginzberg, Navshirvanov, Süleyman Nuri, and Torosyan, did not attend because they had fled to Russia or the Caucasus and had been excluded from the party’s work. Non-Muslim communists were represented by a new ally of Şefik Hüsnü, Nikos Zachariadis, a young Greek member of the IWU.

Before the congress, two distinct currents emerged among the delegates from the central line of Aydınlık: a pro-Kemalist right wing, led by Ahmet Cevat Emre, and a left wing, led by Salih Hacıoğlu and Nazım Hikmet and supported by some veterans of the Baku section, such as Hamdi Şamilov and Mustafa Börklüce, who criticized the party for flirting with the Kemalists, now completely compromised with imperialism and reaction. Apart from Hacıoğlu, the only other veteran leader of the left present was Kazım of Van.

Among the criticisms of the right, it was said: “Our cause is not that of the intellectuals, but that of the workers. We also need intellectuals, but the main issue is to raise the consciousness of the working class. Let us devote all our energies to organizing the workers and winning their sympathy, and to establishing a more sincere and solid unity among ourselves.”

Şefik Hüsnü made a dramatic self-criticism. However, thanks to the support of the Eastern Section, he was elected party secretary without opposition and his powers were greatly expanded. Neither the right nor the left wing managed to gain a foothold during the congress. The Central Committee that emerged was a compromise. The Aydınlık center was the largest and included Vedat Nedim Tör, elected secretary of the CC, Sadreddin Celal, and Hasan Ali Ediz; Ahmet Cevat Emre and Şevket Süreyya Aydemir represented the right, while Salih Hacıoğlu, Hamdi Şamilov, and Nazım Hikmet represented the left.

However, the compromise went beyond the establishment of the new CC. The line of the Eastern Section, defended by Şefik Hüsnü, was formulated in an apparently radical way, so that inexperienced left-wing militants would commit themselves to the opposition, and sufficiently favorable to Kemalism to keep most of the right wing in line with the center.

The first test for the new CC came with the Sheikh Said rebellion in northern Kurdistan: a relatively small nationalist reactionary movement that was brutally suppressed by the government. The party leadership enthusiastically supported the Kemalist repression.

Cut off from work in Turkey, the leaders of the old left turned their attention to young Turkish militants attending the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) in Moscow or Baku. The formation of the Left Opposition faction, led by Ginzberg and Süleyman Nuri, was announced to the Comintern on November 17, 1925. The left’s appeal, entitled Declaration on the Situation of the Turkish Communist Party, consisted of two sections: political and organizational.

The criticisms of the new CC’s conduct were:
     - denying the existence of a working class in Turkey;
     - the aim of the workers of Turkey was to promote the process of national capital accumulation;
     - shifting party recruitment towards radical university students by pursuing a bourgeois left-wing policy.

Ginzberg also noted that the new leadership treated the various nationalities present in Turkey as “enemies of the people,” failing to criticize the forced exodus of Greeks.

The left explained that it had obeyed discipline as long as it could, but a point had been reached where the interests of the class in Turkey had been compromised. For this reason, the time had come to form an opposition faction:

"The crises of the Turkish Communist Party, arising from the contradictions between the growing activity of the awakening Turkish working class and the petty-bourgeois passivity of the hostile party leadership, compel us, as active working-class militants and founders of our party, to raise our most energetic and insurrectionary voice of protest in the interests of the Turkish proletariat and the Comintern against the bourgeois collaborationist policy of the Turkish party, which is destroying the party of the proletariat and deceiving the Comintern with artificially created bluffs. The interests of the Turkish proletariat demand an inevitable revision of the line of conduct of the Eastern Section of the Comintern towards the leadership of the Turkish Communist Party. The errors of this line have been pointed out many times before and after the Fifth Congress.

“We, the members of the Turkish Communist Party who have signed this document, as disciplined militants, not only did we not prevent the implementation of this line, but we did not violate it until the errors and crimes of the Central Committee accumulated to such an extent that they changed the character of the party leadership. To close our eyes to such a leadership, which has objectively become an agent of the bourgeoisie in the Turkish workers’ movement, would be to commit murder against our class.“

Thus going on the offensive, the Left Opposition listed its demands:

”In this context (...) we put forward the following demands:

"Convene an emergency conference with the emigrants of our party, with the founders of our party, who were comrades of Comrade Suphi, and with representatives of the communist workers of the KUTV (...)

The conference should prepare the Party Congress by examining the following issues:
     a) The preparation of the theoretical part of the program,
     b) Revision of the minimum program,
     c) Preparation of the political theses on the question of peasants and national minorities,
     d) The question of a united trade union front and its conquest,
     e) The reorganization of the party on the model of factory and workshop cells,
     f) Improvement of the party’s statutes and social composition to ensure the organizational and managerial hegemony of the workers in the party,
     g) The organization of the party’s secret apparatus and the publication of a newspaper and a magazine,
     h) Financial issues,
     i) Revision of the educational program for Turkish communist workers in the KUTV. Appointment of a special commission to objectively examine the causes of the deaths and suicides of exiled comrades and the situation of the Turkish section in the KUTV.

In particular, in its approach to resolving the party’s problems, the left showed itself to be in favor of a “single trade union front” rather than a united front with other like-minded parties. This was nothing new for the left: the Istanbul left had always opposed any kind of collaboration with non-communists and had worked actively to destroy the socialist and social democratic parties.

The Anatolian left had gone so far as to merge with left-wing nationalists and had paid the price, risking losing the party because of its questionable leaders. The Baku left had been born out of the rejection of the idea of a common front between communists and Kemalists, which had led to the death of Mustafa Suphi and his comrades.

As for the reference to the reorganization of the party on the model of factory cells, this should be considered together with Ginzberg’s 1924 text entitled “The Revolutionary Growth of the Workers’ Movement in Turkey,” which discusses the organization of groups in factories, trade unions, and neighborhoods. We can therefore conclude that the left’s approach was not opposed to the formation of factory cells, but did not limit internal organization to such limited bodies, rather it was in favor of the creation of unions and local groups.

In addition to Ginzberg and Süleyman Nuri, the most important left-wing figures excluded from the party’s work for opposition were Navshirvanov, Kazım of Van, and Torosyan. It is difficult, though not impossible, to trace the left in history after the formation of the Left Opposition. Kazım of Van was co-opted into the Central Committee in 1926, and there is no evidence that he played an active role in the opposition after this time.

The speaker finally presented three documents relating to the last section of this work.

The first is the “Declaration of the Left on the Situation of the Turkish Communist Party.”

The second is the article entitled “The Situation in Turkey” published in Die Fahne Des Kommunismus (“The Flag of Communism”), the newspaper of the German left-wing opposition organization Leninbund, on July 19, 1929.

The third is the introduction to the Turkish translation of Trotsky’s “The Real Situation in Russia,” which is notable for its praise of Trotsky as the leader of communism without identifying itself as Trotskyist.

The three texts will be reproduced in the extended publication of the report.

In previous meetings, we provided an overview of the history of Burkina Faso from pre-colonialism to the present day, as well as a brief analysis of the political and economic situation in the country after the coups d’état of 2022, its relations with other neighboring countries in the Sahel, Mali, and Niger, culminating in the first military, then economic and political alliance of the Sahel States (AES), its ongoing war against the Islamist insurgency, a direct factor leading to the coups, and its potential future prospects for the global class struggle.

At this meeting, we focused on the movements of the working class from colonialism to the present day and on labor relations within the colonial economy.

The proletariat in Burkina Faso has historically been, and still is, a statistical minority of the total working population, the majority of which belongs to the peasantry. However, from the last days of colonialism to the present, the working class has been a decisive factor in the country’s political events. In an early developing capitalist economy, the organized labor movement has not yet been completely co-opted by the bourgeoisie as in the metropolitan countries.

At the end of the 19th century, at the height of modern capitalist colonization in Africa, French capitalism found pre-capitalist and largely communal social structures in the west of the continent, characterized by work within family units, with slave trade and the exchange of a few goods on the margins of communities. The vampire logic of capital, hidden behind the ideology of “civilization,” saw it as an area open to its ’expansion. Upper Volta, later Burkina Faso, due to its lack of natural resources and poor soil fertility, was mainly used as a labor reservoir for other West African colonies, particularly the Ivory Coast.

This form of primitive accumulation, while maintaining a colonial capitalist structure, perpetuated non-capitalist forms of production. This was not only due to the purely colonial nature of the plunder, which stabilized capitalist underdevelopment, but also to the resistance of the indigenous population.

The population of colonial Upper Volta was divided into the dominant colonial class and the peasants. Within the former, a distinction was made between the administrative bureaucracy, military officers, and the capitalist class proper, i.e., the purchasers of labor. These different classes were also in conflict with each other and within themselves: between colonial administrations (in 1933 between the Ivory Coast, Sudan, now Mali, and Niger); between private capital and the state represented by colonial administrators; between national capitals, in this case French and British.

French colonization initially sought to establish cotton plantations. It also attempted to commercialize the ancient practice of harvesting shea nuts and kapok (a cotton-like material). However, these attempts were unsuccessful.

With the increase in food production during the 1930s, commercial production for the world market also grew. This was boosted by the Régie-Abidjan-Niger railway, which opened in 1910 and was extended to Bobo-Dioulasso, further southwest of Ouagadougou, in the 1930s.

French economic policies sought to impose a double burden on the indigenous population: in addition to the evils of capitalist production and its labor relations, they flooded the colony with goods imported from the metropolis. But this attempt also failed, as the peasants rejected the monetary economy, relying on family/tribal agricultural production for their food needs and on local crafts.

To force the indigenous population to participate in the monetary economy, the French imposed a tax system, in particular a per capita tax in 1906. This necessitated administrative and accounting procedures and periodic censuses. But even in the 1930s, the gap between the peasant economy and the capitalist economy was still very wide. The resistance of the village economy continued even after the Second World War.

French colonial rule imposed a number of forced, unpaid days of labor per person per year on each village: about eight days of work per person between 1917 and 1938. This labor was used to build and maintain basic local infrastructure. The labor was drawn from the non-capitalist sphere at almost no cost to the colonial economy, as the costs of maintaining and reproducing the workforce were outsourced to the peasant economy.

In addition to forced daily labor, wage labor was also used.

In the late 1930s, in order to develop crops on the Ivory Coast, which required a large labor force, the French introduced programs to encourage the Mossi and Gourounsi ethnic groups to colonize the area. This policy was only moderately successful: families were instead attracted by wage labor and the production of cash crops.

Conscription into the French army was another form of forced labor. It reached its peak during the First and Second World Wars. We have already mentioned in previous reports the Volta-Bani War of 1915-1916, a heroic resistance by peasants against the large quotas of young men sent to war. This turned into an armed struggle against the colonizers, some of whose notorious reprisals we have already mentioned.

In general, these labor policies imposed by the colonialists were obviously extremely unpopular, and the peasants rebelled in subtle but effective ways to avoid them.

The peasants avoided colonial labor and taxes either by fleeing, simply moving to another village, or emigrating to the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast, a rival British colony, had a much more developed economy than the French colonies at the time, did not need a forced labor policy, and required more wage labor.

Public infrastructure, roads, railways, and telegraph links were not built to integrate the colony or colonies into a unified internal market or to promote industrialization, but to extract labor and raw materials more efficiently for the metropolis and the world market. As Marx observed, colonialism was not “progressive” even by the standards of capitalism: not only did it lead to a sharp deterioration in the quality of life of indigenous Africans, but it even failed in the raison d’être of capitalism, ultimately blocking the development of the productive forces. Only the overthrow of colonial rule and subsequent political independence could allow capitalist relations to develop beyond colonial limits, thus preparing the material ground for the emergence of the proletariat and the subsequent proletarian revolution. This is the main reason why communists supported the bourgeois-democratic movements in the colonies.

The next report will document and interpret the emergence of the proletariat on the historical scene and its class struggles in post-colonial Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso).

Since 2008, the year of the global financial crisis, German capitalism has been showing clear signs of the contradictions that have been running through it for decades, revealing the instability of a seemingly solid system. Beneath the surface of efficiency, productivity, and stability lie historical tensions, regional divisions, and social and economic imbalances that are rooted in the structure of the German nation-state and the way its capitalism has developed since the second half of the 19th century.

The stages of this trajectory begin with the unification of 1871, pass through the East-West division after 1945, and arrive at the current phase of German capitalism in its effort to expand, adapt, and resist crises.

Until unification, which formally took place in 1871 following Prussia’s victory in the war against France, fragmentation into multiple political regimes (constitutional monarchies, principalities, free cities) had hindered the development of a national capitalist economy. The Customs Union (Zollverein) and the expansion of the railway network were the first steps, but it was only after unification that the German industrial revolution could be said to have begun.

In just a few decades, Germany made an exceptional leap forward: industry came to account for almost 48% of GDP, compared with 30% in 1871; per capita GDP doubled between 1871 and 1913; steel production reached 17.6 million tons, second only to the United States, and far exceeded France (4.6) and the United Kingdom (7.7); in chemicals (dyes, fertilizers, drugs, explosives), Germany dominated the global market with companies such as BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst. The railway sector, heavy engineering, and machine tool production were pillars of the national economy. Siemens and AEG led innovation in electrical and industrial engineering.

In this rapid development, the German industrial bourgeoisie strengthened its economic power, but remained politically subordinate to the conservative landed aristocracy.

The urban proletariat grew in numbers and organization, but remained heavily exploited. The industrial cities saw the birth of the first socialist and trade union movements, while the countryside continued to be dominated by backward social relations. The development of German capitalism was therefore based from its origins on a tension between economic acceleration and political stagnation, between productive modernity and institutional conservatism.

By 1913, imperial Germany had already established itself as the industrial heart of continental Europe. This dynamism was the basis for competition with the European colonial powers.

During the First World War, the entire industrial apparatus was converted to the war effort. Civilian production collapsed while public spending soared.

In the years that followed, amid rampant inflation and political instability, the Weimar Republic began reconstruction with American support (the Dawes Plan), but the crisis of 1929 brought the economy to its knees. With over 6 million unemployed in 1932, discontent spread and industrialists increasingly supported the Nazi party.

The Third Reich revived industry through rearmament: military spending rose from RM 1.9 billion in 1933 to RM 15.5 billion in 1938; employment was boosted (with unemployment at 2% in 1939).

After its defeat in the war, Germany was one of the victims of the new division of the world into blocs. In 1949, the partition of Europe between the victorious powers led to the creation of two German states: the Federal Republic, subservient to the US and openly capitalist, with its capital in Bonn, and the Democratic Republic, subservient to Russia, falsely socialist, with its capital in East Berlin.

The reconstruction process was very different in the two countries. West Germany was able to count on enormous support from the Marshall Plan: it received around $1.4 billion between 1948 and 1952, mainly for industry and infrastructure modernization. Thanks to this initial boost and the still partially intact productive structure (especially in the south and west), the so-called Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle,” began.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the FRG experienced extraordinary growth rates, with GDP growing by an average of 7-8% per year until 1966, while unemployment fell from 11% to 1.2% in the decade 1950-60, with nearly 7 million war dead.

German industry became heavily export-oriented. Cars (Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW), machine tools, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals placed the FRG at the forefront of global manufacturing. This development was accompanied by a strengthening of the regime’s trade unions and a system of co-management (Mitbestimmung) whereby workers were led to believe that they could influence certain company decisions.

East Germany followed a very different path. The GDR adopted a supposedly planned economy, inspired by Russian state capitalism. The main industries were nationalized between 1946 and 1948, giving rise to the so-called Volkseigener Betrieb (VEB), the “people’s enterprise.” Production was mainly oriented toward intermediate goods and heavy industry, while the availability of consumer goods was limited. Economic growth was stable but more modest than in the West and often hampered by structural inefficiencies.

One of the main problems for the GDR was the flight of skilled workers to West Germany: between 1949 and 1961, around 2.5 million East Germans emigrated in search of higher wages and better living conditions. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 was a drastic response to this exodus.

Although the GDR had achieved remarkable levels in basic mechanics and electronics during the 1970s, it lagged behind technologically and was heavily dependent on trade with the USSR. The comparison with the FRG was uneven: in 1989, on the eve of the fall of the Wall, the GNP per capita of the GDR was less than half that of the West, and productivity was stuck at 65% of the Western level.

The fall of the Berlin Wall took place on November 8, 1989. Economic, legal, and institutional reunification took the form of an annexation of the GDR by the FRG. The East German mark was converted at a rate of 1:1 for wages and pensions (and 2:1 for savings), which was disadvantageous for East German companies. Within a few years, much of the industrial fabric of the former East Germany was dismantled or sold off to Western investors. The Treuhandanstalt, the privatization agency, managed over 14,000 companies, more than 70% of which were assigned to Western entities. Many were closed. In the eastern states, around 2.5 million jobs were lost in the 1990s alone.

The economic gap between East and West has not narrowed: per capita GDP in the East remains around 75-80% of the Western average; wages are 15-20% lower, in some cases even 25%; and young people have continued to migrate to Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich.

Since the 2000s, some areas, such as Saxony and Brandenburg, have attracted new technological investment, particularly in the electronics, renewable energy, and automotive sectors (e.g., Tesla in Grünheide). However, most of the eastern Länder are still characterized by greater dependence on the public sector, low private investment, and rural depopulation, giving rise to feelings of exclusion and post-reunification disillusionment.

After an initial slowdown in the 1990s, caused by the costs of reunification, the German economy experienced a second wave of expansion in the 2000s, driven by Chinese demand (especially in the automotive and mechanical engineering sectors), lower labor costs (Hartz reforms), and the single European currency, which favored exports.

The 2008 crisis was very deep, with industrial production falling by 25% in one year, although Germany was among the first countries to recover thanks to exports.

In 2017, manufacturing GDP reached an all-time high, but a structural slowdown began in 2018, which was then exacerbated by the pandemic and rising energy costs following the war in Ukraine.

The automotive sector is now in serious difficulty: production fell by more than 20% between 2018 and 2023; Chinese manufacturers (BYD, NIO, XPeng) are eroding market share; in 2023, the government withdrew incentives for the purchase of electric vehicles.

High energy prices have had a heavy impact on industrial costs, which are now 30-40% higher than the European average, prompting many companies to relocate. At the same time, the shortage of skilled labor and stagnant public investment are undermining future competitiveness.

Confidence in the German model is being eroded at its very foundations: labor, industry, and stability.

End of Report of May General Meeting in the Next Issue

An analysis of the economic policy of Roosevelt’s New Deal is of particular interest today because it makes it possible to reaffirm, on the basis of extremely clear data, two criteria of interpretation of social facts repeatedly reaffirmed by Marxist criticism in the face of the converging assault of revisionism and official democratic ideologies, and therefore to see clearly also in the developments that that policy has had in this post-war period, both on the economic level and in the political superstructure.

The first is that, in spite of the differences in political form, the capitalist regime reacts to its own internal crises in a unified way, with methods of economic policy that bring democracy and fascism together. Interventionism, dirigisme, state management – these are on the other hand the classic recipes of reformist “economic and social recovery” – are common aspects of every bourgeois political regime in the phase of maximum exasperation of its internal contradictions, convergent expressions on the international level of the policy of capitalist conservation.

The second is that State intervention in the economy, far from signifying a subjection of Capital to the rule of a supposed collective entity, representing the “general interests” of that other abstract collective entity which is “the people”, constitutes the most acute and ruthless form of the maneuvers of the “public powers” in defense of Capital, and therefore of its domination by an ever more restricted circle of private interests. In a subordinate line, the New Deal is the open demonstration of the inconsistency of the thesis according to which “state capitalism” would translate on the economic and political level the historical advent of a third class, that of “technicians” or “directors” (managers) or “bureaucrats”.

The result is that the attribution of the label “progressive” to the Roosevelt New Deal as to any form of dirigisme or State management of the economy – a label that we cannot see why democratic ideology does not extend to fascism, which is historically the progenitor not of interventionism coeval with the capitalist regime, but of its organized planning and consolidation – can have only one meaning for Marxist criticism: the recognition that those forms mark a step forward in the ruthless class domination of the bourgeoisie, an exaltation of the exploitation of labor-power by Capital. If there is progress, O theorists of gradualism, it is only in the weapons of defense of capitalism, in the theory and practice of counterrevolution.

As for the differences in political superstructure, which give a semblance of justification to the antithesis democracy-fascism with all its consequences on the political and military terrain, they are rooted solely in different relations of force between classes. Fascism was born, in Italy as in Germany, as a response to a direct revolutionary threat of the proletariat: its extrinsication was therefore essentially political and resulted in the peaceful abandonment of democratic forms and the violent and open exercise of class dictatorship, which, starting from the primary objective of liquidating by force the class organizations of the proletariat, had to conclude by logical consequence – for the need to oppose to the unitary threat of the proletariat an equally compact front – in the suppression of the bourgeois multi-party system and parliamentarism.

Rooseveltism was born as a response not to a direct revolutionary pressure of the proletariat, but to the immediate cataclysm of an unprecedented economic crisis: for the purposes of the resolution of this crisis, while the economic therapy will take place on the classic binary of fascist interventionism, the maintenance of democratic political forms and the preservation of workers’ trade union bodies not only did not constitute a hindrance, but allowed for more elastic and ramified maneuvers of preservation, which foiled the possible social and political repercussions of the crisis with methods, instead of coercion, of corruption, the classic democratic corruption. It is not surprising, therefore, that Fascism found its “economic way” only at the end of a long experience of political domination, as consequent and unhesitating this as uncertain and contradictory that one (the first Mussolinian Fascism is even orthodox in the economic field, and with liberalist movements), while the New Deal is suddenly presented as an instrument of economic defense and, in a certain sense, serves as a worldwide paradigm for the new experiences of state interventionism in the economy, typical of the totalitarian regimes of the 30s and 40s, as well as the more consummate techniques of exploitation of democratic political forms for the purposes of social defense typical of today’s democracies.

Financial Measures

It is not important here to examine the causes of the Great Crisis which, from 1929 to 1933, raged in the United States in parallel with the world economic crisis. What is important is to note that this last crisis had all the more catastrophic repercussions in the United States since it had emerged from the First World War as the largest creditor country and since – another aspect of the same evolution – its economic organism had expanded during and after the conflict. The seriousness of this crisis appears, more than in the brutal and sensational figures of the immediate financial collapses and of the productive paralysis, in the extremely slow pace of the American recovery, which will begin later than in any other country, and will therefore reach in all fields the pre-crisis levels later, it will show greater oscillations despite the controls and state interventions, it will be able to say it has been healed only at the outbreak of the European war – with the transformation of the United States into an “arsenal of democracies” – and it will be explained at a dizzying pace by their entry into the war. The index of industrial production (compiled by the League of Nations on the basis of 1929) fell in fact in 1933 to 52.8 (83.5 in England, 53.5 in Germany) with the lowest peak in March of that year (49.6 and, in the production goods industry, 28), slowly rose again to 75.6 in 1935 when in England it was already at 105.7, and in Germany at 94; in 1936, it was still 13 points lower than the 1929 level and only 35 points higher than the 1932 level; it would suffer a new decline in the following year, and begin to rise again in 1939. The unemployed, who in 1929 were 1.8 million, grew in 1933 to 13.2 million and, if the partially unemployed are also included, were still 11.4 million in 1935. Finally, prices in bulk (1929=100) fell in March 1933 to 63.2 and were still at 83.1 in June 1935. Born out of the Great Crisis, the New Deal will have as a result the dizzying economic rise of the United States during the Second World War and their ability to rise without imbalance to their current position of world dominance: further proof of the conservative nature of Rooseveltism.

It is not in the immediate emergency measures taken by the Roosevelt administration – brought to power by a wave of plebiscites in the name of a return through methods of state intervention and dynamism opposed to Hoover’s laissez faire policy, to the pre-crisis “prosperity” – that the typical face of the New Deal is revealed. Those measures are purely classic financial measures. This is not surprising: the immediate and most sensational aspect of the crisis was the collapse of financial institutions, the closure of branches, the dislocation of the credit network which had been both the manifestation and the weapon of the great post-war expansion. But, even then, the aim of the administration was clear: it was a question of liquidating the banking situation inherited from the crisis of 1929, rebuilding the commercial and investment credit system, helping institutions and economic groups directly affected by the crisis, and “restoring” the public debt. This program included the measures of March 1933, in the most critical phase of the American economy: suspension of bank payments, purchase by the State of the preferred shares in the portfolios of banking institutions, reopening of the banks on the basis of their solidity. Clearly, these measures will not save either small savers or small banks; they will save large credit institutions and facilitate the concentration of the banking and credit system. At the same time, a series of measures instituted a direct control by the State on the investments of federal banks and on operations with foreign banks, while the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, already created by Hoover during the previous year, would orient its policy in the sense of “socializing the losses” of the entire economic complex to guarantee the salvation of the large industrial companies. In short, state intervention was immediately translated into the rescue, with “public” powers and money, of financial and industrial organizations in crisis.

But the New Deal would soon have to reveal even more clearly its face as a direct instrument of the great capitalist industry. The Roosevelt administration is the “brain trust” of the preservation of the interests of the ruling class: its ideology is similar to that of the fascist “Labour Charter” of 1927: collaboration between capital and labor under the aegis of the state for the general purposes of the nation, stimulation of the economic mechanism through a general mobilization of “collective” resources: even before its famous domestic regulatory laws, it will set the international example of abandoning the “gold standard” and by torpedoing the World Economic Conference convened by Hoover, it will accelerate the international tendency to close in monetary and customs barriers national economies. Its enemy is declining prices – those famous declining prices that classical bourgeois economics presented as one of the virtues of free competition and, in general, of capitalist production. The devaluation of the dollar, the suspension of trade treaties, the raising of tariffs, are the first measures in favor of the rise of domestic prices the policy of intervention in the industrial and agricultural sectors will be inspired by the same principle: after having paid for the rehabilitation of financial and industrial institutions in crisis, the “nation”, “the people” will pay with higher prices and with the forced distribution of agricultural products – with a policy of “scarcity in consumer goods” – the policy of generosity and breadth of the State (down with Hoover’s “thrift”!) towards the great “Corporations”.

Industrial and Agrarian Policy

While the system of subsidies to unsafe industries – dear to all experiences of state capitalism, and well known to fascist and post-fascist Italy – provided for the rescue of the largest (and therefore most vulnerable to crisis) industrial complexes and favored their concentration, the Industrial Reconstruction Act, and the organization created by it, the N.I.R.A., put in the hands of industry another defensive weapon: the elaboration of the famous industrial “codes”. Officially, these aimed at eliminating unfair competition and at introducing collective labor contracts with wages and working hours established by the authorities. In reality, the fundamental objective was to limit competition through the classic methods of industrial cartels: the setting of minimum prices (higher than those at the beginning of the market) and the restriction of production, both through the planned allocation of “quotas” of production to member industries, and through the limitation of new plants and new production equipment. The “industrial codes” of the progressive Roosevelt also eliminated that semblance of protection against the excessive power of the industrial magnates set up by antitrust legislation: cartelisation was promoted by governmental encouragement, and the public administration did not even need to resort to needless armed intimidation of the fascist corporations and of the supreme authority of the State, but invited the same industrial representatives to “self-regulate”, providing for its part to sanction the agreements concluded and to legalize, with the N.I.R.A. trademark to the products of the cartelized companies, the boycott of the recalcitrant ones. Both the authorities from which the codes emanated and those in charge of controlling their application were of strict industrial origin, and it is needless to say that, in the relative committees, the decisive weight was assured to the great economic powers. The Roosevelt government, professing to be the guardian of the average American against the excessive power of “big business”, thus proved to be the docile instrument of capitalist concentration.

It is true that, in the meantime, the codes contemplated the stipulation of collective agreements for the reduction of working hours and the introduction of minimum wages; but these measures, which are found in different phases of corporatist legislation, had a clear task of class preservation: the State wrested from the workers’ unions, just in those years recovered from the long crisis of the 20s, the weapon of wage deamnds, allowed with the absorption of masses of unemployed (in fact, with the generalization of the figure of the partially unemployed) to ward off the threat of a permanent army of jobless and, stimulating with minimum wages productivity, allowed the industrialists to achieve a reduction in costs in a regime of stabilized prices and indeed tendentially increasing. On the other hand, the immediate impact on the standard of living of the working class was minimal: the reabsorption of unemployment was very modest, even taking into account the workers partially reabsorbed through the mechanism of reduced working hours (which were very often not respected); in 1935, the average contractual wage was higher than in 1929, but very few workers worked full-time and the unemployment rate had increased enormously (a source as unsuspected as the Brookings Institute’s study, The Recovery Problem in the United States, 1936, calculated that, if distributed evenly over the same mass of workers, the 1935 wage would have been only 67% of the 1929 level); there were also strong wage differentials between male and female workers and between white and black workers. Finally, the recognition of trade unions and the establishment of joint consultation bodies (such as the National Board, in which the two representatives of employers and employees were joined by a presidential representative.... Impartial of the government) made it possible to bind the workers’ organizations to the federal administration, which would in fact function, in all presidential elections, as Roosevelt’s greatest pawn of support.

The N.I.R.A. measures, such as those we will discuss shortly in the agricultural field, would be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1936. The immediate effect for the ruling class was achieved, the large industrial unions felt consolidated enough to resume their march without “self-control”; but it is characteristic that it will be the industrialists themselves who will urge, with the beginning of the war economy in 1939, the controls and interventions that three years earlier, through the Supreme Court, they had dismantled. The net result of this period of moderate state intervention was, however, very clear: an intensive development of industrial and financial concentration, an insurance at public expense of high prices, a stabilization of social conflicts.

In one of the periods of electoral decline, Roosevelt was to mount a demagogic campaign against big business and the launching of an “Investigation of Concentration of Economic Power” in 1938, and he himself was to announce publicly: “a concentration of private power unprecedented in history is taking place...0.1% of all corporations publishing a balance sheet..... own 52% of the total assets of these corporations. Less than 5% own 87% of these assets. The 0,1%...take in 50% of the total net profit: less than 4% collect 84% of the total profits...47% of all American households and citizens living alone have...incomes of less than $1,000; at the other end of the scale, a little less than 1.5% of American households enjoy an income that sums to the overall income of 47% of the aforementioned households.” And, further on, he observed that, out of a number of shareholders of large anonymous companies of 8-9 million, 80% collected only 10% of the dividends and owned no more than 10% of the shares, while half of the total of these were in the hands of 1% of the shareholders. Concentration was particularly developed in certain branches: one company had a de facto monopoly of the production of raw aluminum; three trusts produced 61% of American steel; three companies 86% of all automobiles produced in the United States, and so on. Of course, Roosevelt (like Truman) then posed as the defender of the average American citizen, or rather of the worker, against the bullying of the “barons”: in reality, he had made their bed with his entire economic policy and, at most, claimed from the State, because of its capacity for an integral vision of the problems and interests of the class, the power to protect the stability of the system better than the categories, closed within their narrow, immediate and short-sighted horizons. The policy of the N.I.R.A. will find in this respect its most brilliant development during the Second World War, not only in the perfect collaboration between industrialists and the government, but also in the exquisitely progressive practice whereby the executive power, not content with passing fabulous war orders to private industry and entrusting it with lucrative “scientific” research, it would take charge of building new factories at its own expense, which it would resell at a favorable price after the conflict to large trusts, or it would use “its” money to renew the equipment of private companies which, either for short-sightedness or for lack of capital, could not have done so on their own.

Moreover, the same agrarian policy of the New Deal, in many ways similar to the fascist one, responded to the conservation interests of industrial capitalism and of the large landowners. The famous A.A.A. (Agricultural Adjustment Act) inaugurated a policy aimed at favoring the reduction of cultivated areas in order to stem the fall in the prices of some basic commodities (wheat, cotton, tobacco, etc...) and possibly increase them. The theory of this policy of scarcity, at a time when people were starving, was: “to restore the prices of the fundamental products of farms to a level that would restore their purchasing power to a level equal to the purchasing power of agricultural products in the 1909-14 base period”. The methods were basically as follows: restriction of the production of certain agricultural commodities by means of subsidies to farmers; destruction of unsold products; purchase by the State of the surplus of these products burdening the market and compressing prices; agreements between producers’ cooperatives and distributors to maintain and increase prices; all combined with export loans and import duties.

It is obvious that such a policy tended to maintain a market for industrial products at the expense of both the consumer and the taxpayer; but its social effects in the agricultural field were even more radical.

First of all, it is well known – and official American writers are among the first to recognize this – that the entire system of distributing subsidies to farmers to reduce certain productions was centralized in the hands of the large farmers who were able to supplement the net advantage of a stabilization and often an increase in their prices with the additional advantage of the capture of the largest share of government subsidies (Myrdal, in his famous and orthodox survey of black people in America notes that, according to a partial study of 246 Southern plantations, the average liquid income of planters per plantation was in 1937 $3590, of which $883 came from A.A.A.; the average liquid income of tenants on the same plantations, on the other hand, was $300, of which $27 came from A.A.A.; and a few large owners got up to $10,000 in subsidies). In addition, by reducing the acreage of the large extensive crops (cotton, wheat, tobacco), favoring the mechanization of agriculture and, later, the passage to more specialized crops, the agrarian policy of the New Deal precipitated ever greater masses of tenants into simple labor and total unemployment, a process also favored by the provisions according to which the subsidies would have to be partly ceded by the owner to the tenant, and which therefore favored the denunciation of leases. In reality, the contradictory nature of this agrarian policy, which on the one hand demanded a reduction in cultivated land and on the other favored the spread of agricultural machinery, had as a consequence that production did not decrease except to an insignificant extent: after the declaration of unconstitutionality of the A.A.A. in 1936, the Roosevelt administration decided to reduce the amount of land under cultivation. in 1936, the Roosevelt administration passed to the application of new norms, one of which involved subsidies to direct farmers who agreed to replace old crops with more specialized and profitable ones and to introduce practices of "soil conservation", and the other provided for the purchase of surplus wheat and cotton as insurance against years of crisis, thus guaranteeing to farmers a constant income and a possibility of development of production and export in the years of fat profits, those of the war.

From Indirect to Direct Intervention

Up to this point, more or less up to 1936, the New Deal is presented as a system of elastic disciplinary intervention of the economy in favor of the general interests of preservation of the capitalist class and therefore, in practice, of the large and increasingly concentrated economic oligarchies. The financing systems of this gigantic disciplinary apparatus are still “classical”: the principle of the “balanced budget” remains, of financial expenses with corresponding revenues. But the last phase of the New Deal, after the decrees of “unconstitutionality”, presents a new face: the classical economists dip into Keynesianism. The problem of balancing the budget vanishes: there will be no more limits to the increase of public debt. The State, on the other hand, no longer limited itself to defending and encouraging the autonomous initiative of the industrial, financial and agricultural categories (we note, en passant, how the Rooseveltian era also marked the period of maximum capitalist penetration in the South, both with the establishment of industries favored by the State, and with the taking possession of land by northern financial institutions, and with the enormous network of mortgage credit and the management of the various forms of subsidy): the State intervenes to create new industries and to promote public works; the State invests to the extent that the private individual is unable to do so, or does not have the equipment to succeed. It is the period in which, out of tender pity for the slums of the large industrial cities and the small agricultural communities, the State provides for the building of houses, reviving the hardest hit of the economic branches – construction – and opening up, with the regime of contracts and concessions, the phase of the orgies of “capitalists without capital”: It is also the period in which the State, which for the first time in the democratic and progressive America had begun a work of economic assistance to the unemployed with direct subsidies, convinces itself that it “pays” more indirect assistance, that which consists in “creating jobs”.

The federal administration ceases to disburse money to the states for direct assistance to the unemployed and, with the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, inaugurates a policy of public works for able-bodied workers and of limiting direct subsidies to the disabled, and another unsuspected author, Mitchell, notes that, under this system, the State obtained the double advantage of “paying” (security) wages higher than subsidies, but generally lower than those current in private employment", and built roads, reclaimed land, created power plants and electrical installations, with an intensified exploitation of labor-power to be put on account of charity; it opened “emigrant camps” for peasant families uprooted from the great plantations of the South and transplanted in new areas of tillage, with the advantage that the whole program of “internal migration” cost only 75 dollars per year per family against 350 of direct assistance, and allowed to open to economic activity “virgin” areas and, once tillage was completed, to award them to the vultures of land speculation and to the industrialists of agricultural transformation; with the Farm Security Administration (1937) it provided, more fascist still, to fix to the land the former proletarianized tenants granting loans of “rehabilitation”, destined to the creation of small self-sufficient companies on lands purchased by the State; organizing the Civilian Conservation Corps, it conveyed the displaced youth, without work and potentially rebellious, in “work services” that remind one of Hitler; and finally, with its most gigantic work, the Tennessee Valley Authority, it transformed, by means of gigantic investments, a valley of small farmers and shepherds into the largest reservoir of electric energy in the United States, where power plants, built and owned by the government but managed by capitalists (i.e. sold to private individuals who have no capital of their own and pay interest and depreciation to the State for the use of fixed assets, keeping the product and thus the profit), they produce cheap energy for small farms but, above all, for the large industrial processing industries that have sprung up in the area (among other things, the energy of Tennessee, this “community” that makes our reformers and socializers swoon, later proved to be an essential element in the expansion of the atomic plants of Oak Ridge and the aluminum factories of Alcoa). With its intervention, the State acts, in short, as a stimulator of the entire economic cycle, it “creates employment”, that is, it multiplies the possibilities of extortion of surplus value.

Shall we sum up this rapid synthesis of Rooseveltian measures? The State intervenes for the double purpose of economic stabilization and social stabilization: it provides rescue for industries in danger, for the financing of their expansion, for the maintenance of their prices; to further consolidate this policy of preservation, it forces them to control and discipline themselves; when the therapy has reached its effect, and the large concentrated companies show that they can walk by themselves, the State, not without propagandistically preparing the ground with an... anti-monopolistic campaign, goes further – becomes an entrepreneur and, partially manager, that is, creates industries, inaugurates economic initiatives, arouses new possibilities of work, which, either through the regime of contracts, or through that of selling at a good price, or through the opening of “virgin zones” and “depressed areas”, will return for a round all but complicated in the narrow circle of the “appropriators of the products of human labor” (which, as in the case of T.V.A. or as in the case of nationalized enterprises in all countries and, in general, in all forms of state capitalism, are not necessarily “owners of the instruments of production”); in the agricultural field, it sustains prices and the “purchasing power of the direct cultivator”; in reality, it proletarianizes the middle classes to the advantage of the great bourgeoisie and, by storing surplus agricultural products, it constitutes that gigantic “granary” which will allow America, after stabilizing its prices and keeping those of the world market artificially high, to resell the waste of its overproduction to the wartime allies and to buy with its “generous gifts” the post-war serfs; in the social field, it does not eliminate unemployment but “redistributes” it; it does not increase the average wage per head, but ensures a minimum wage to the reserve of unemployed (or partial workers); it legally recognizes the trade unions in order to bind them to the general policy of the exploiting class.

Who paid for and pays for this multilateral defense organization of the American ruling oligarchy? The whole world has paid and is paying for it; contemporary and venture generations of American taxpayers have paid and will pay for it. The federal public debt, from the financial year 1929-1930 to 1941 – the eve of Pearl Harbor – had risen from $16 billion to $58 billion. The international debt to the United States, who can calculate it? The New Deal, progressive and interventionist, democratic in its political forms as well as fascist in its economic policy, was the necessary premise for the greatest machine of exploitation of the workforce (American and international) that the history of capitalism has ever known: the “non-colonialist” empire of Wall Street.