With each passing day, this dilemma becomes more pressing. Since 2008, capitalism has been in its biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. At the same time, it is a systemic crisis, greater than all previous ones, in which economic, political, ecological, health, ideological and world hegemony crises combine and feed back into each other. Since the root of the crisis lies in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, it is impossible for capitalism to seek any path other than increasing exploitation, repression and destruction. Therefore, there is no solution possible within the margins of the capitalist system.
Ultimately, the need to restore profitability imposes on all governments the central aspects of their policies. That is why all of them, be they of the traditional bourgeois, extreme right or reformist political forces, apply austerity against the working peoples. This generates growing social and political polarization, and recurrent rebellions, revolutions and political crises of regimes in all regions of the world, which prevent the regimes from constituting any stability and perpetuate the political crisis. This, in turn, is fueled by the ideological crisis that has been growing since the collapse of the Washington Consensus after the 2008 crisis, with capitalism being increasingly questioned on a mass scale.
The economic, political and ideological weakening of the US due to the 2008 crash piled on top of its military and geopolitical weakening since its defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The weakening of the world’s leading imperialist power, combined with the economic and geopolitical growth of China, has generated a crisis of world hegemony. This is deepening with a growing inter-imperialist dispute over a shrinking mass of profits, intensifying inter-imperialist friction and placing the possibility of a nuclear world war back on the table.
The desperation to regain profitability also continues to deepen the catastrophic ecological crisis. The annual reports of the UN Climate Change Conferences present an increasingly alarming picture of the likelihood of crossing a point of no return in global warming that would endanger the survival of the human species. Ecological disasters are multiplying around the world with fires, droughts, floods and other extreme weather events. Yet capitalism continues to sustain polluting, destructive and greenhouse gas-emitting methods of production far beyond any plan that could reverse the current destructive dynamic. And it is incapable of doing otherwise.
The Covid-19 pandemic added another dimension to the systemic crisis of capitalism. It revealed how its productive mode generates lethal epidemics and pandemics that its institutions are unable to control. The health crisis did not begin with Covid19 and did not end with its relative control, as the persistent epidemics of cholera, malaria, dengue, AIDS and others that kill millions every year demonstrate. It is a permanent aspect of the crisis of the capitalist system.
Every dimension of this systemic crisis confirms that capitalism is an exhausted system that can no longer develop the productive forces or drive the progress of humanity. On the contrary, it perpetuates an unprecedented destruction of both nature and humanity, the two main sources of wealth. It does so by destroying the environment to the point of endangering its capacity to sustain human life, by generating pandemics that it is unable to control, by intensifying its competition over profits to the point of making world wars and nuclear holocausts possible. At full speed and without brakes, capitalism is driving humanity towards the precipice of barbarism and extinction. It cannot slow down or reverse this dynamic because it is systematically incapable of acting against the imperative of recovering profitability above all else.
Those who predicted that capitalism would achieve a new stage of expansion and development after the fall of the USSR have been denied by the harsh reality. Capitalism only offers more misery and destruction. All reformism is utopian, all possibilism is a scam.
Every project that set out to radicalize democracy, put an end to neoliberalism, redistribute wealth or improve the conditions of the masses without destroying capitalism have ended in bitter failures. All self-styled progressive or nationalist governments ended up applying the same austerity recipes as the neoliberals. Broad left projects like Syriza or Podemos, and “radical” figures like Boric, Pedro Castillo and Petro, similarly became administrators of austerity when they came to govern.
Any measure that significantly improves the lives of the working masses is impossible under capitalism. Moreover, not even the most moderate measures in favor of the masses are tolerated by a system that collapses if it does not intensify exploitation with austerity and repression. There is no margin for Keynesian orientations, welfare states or reformist concessions. On the contrary, the entire political arc that operates within the margins of capitalism seeks to increase exploitation, and to intensify repression and authoritarianism to improve its chances of imposing this intensified exploitation on the working masses.
For the same reason, the political projects of the right and the extreme right that come to govern also end up failing and falling. Because they too fail to fulfill the expectations of changes and solutions that they generate.
No partial or substantive solution to the problems of humanity is possible without defeating the bourgeois class and its states. Any solution is only possible if the working masses destroy capitalism and take power to build a socialist society in which they themselves democratically determine their destiny.
The world economy is not rebounding
All predictions for 2024-2025 describe the situation of the economy as “uncertain” and speak of a post-pandemic “soft landing” for the US. What the World Bank’s annual report[1] show, translated into Marxist political economy terms, means:
* The USA expects a growth barely above 1 %. That is to say, although it managed to avoid recession in 2023, its predicted stagnation in 2024-2025. And this is just for that country (important, of course), but not for the main advanced capitalist economies outside the US.
* In the rest of the G7 economies, the outlook is dark: the German economy fell by 0.3% in 2023 and a worse 2024 is expected, mainly due to the weight of the fall of the manufacturing industry.
* The economies of France and Britain had negative performances in the last quarter of 2023. The same is true for Canada and Japan, while Italy is stagnating. And there are several other advanced capitalist economies that are already in recession: the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Norway.
* In the so-called emerging economies, there is a slowdown after the 2022 post-pandemic “rebound” effect and the normalization of international trade.
Although inflation rates at a global level fell slightly in the second half of 2023, if you take the whole period from the end of the pandemic until now, prices for most people in the advanced capitalist world have risen by 20%. Of course, in poor countries, or in Argentina, a middle-income semi-colony, inflation exceeded 200%.
Meanwhile, taking the 2019-2023 period as a reference, the average real incomes of wage-earning households on a global scale have fallen since the end of the Second World War.
And it is a fact, to be contemplated as a hypothesis-prognosis, that the inflationary dynamic, which was moderated last year, could resume as a consequence of the regional escalation of the conflict in the Middle East since NATO’s imperialist incursion on the Red Sea coasts of Yemen and Israel’s genocidal offensive on Gaza, which raise energy prices once again.
Two strong definitions by the World Bank that verify our approach:
* There may not be a recession in the United States, but “the world economy is on track for its worst half-decade of growth in 30 years.”
* The fall of productive investment in jobs and value-creating income in the major economies is behind the current slowdown.
Our Marxist analysis completes this partial approach, adding that the slowdown in productive investment is caused by global capital’s historically low level of profitability (with the partial exception of technology and energy monopolies), which stimulates capital’s speculative behavior.
Together with this key tendential phenomenon (the low rate of global profit), other factors that alter the world capitalist economy combine:
* Over-indebtedness of corporations, countries and individuals.
* The US Federal Reserve’s inflation-cooling mechanism of raising interest rates makes credit more expensive and, therefore, complicates the solvency needed to service debts worldwide. This continues to be a highly explosive factor, since it conditions the economies of the countries that are subjected to imperialism with brutal social adjustments that intensify polarization and class struggle.
* The latest Oxfam report, entitled “Survival of the Richest”,[2] shows that extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously for the first time in 25 years. During the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, $26 trillion (63 %) of all new wealth was captured by the richest 1 %, while $16 trillion (37 %) went to the rest of the world combined. The fortunes of billionaires have increased by $2.7 billion per day this period and the number of billionaires and their wealth have doubled over the past ten years.
* At the same time, at least 1.7 billion workers now live in countries where inflation exceeds wages, and more than 820 million people (about one in ten people in the world) go hungry.
* Three-quarters of the world’s governments are planning public sector spending cuts over the next four years, driven by the policy of austerity to deal with debts of US$7.8 trillion.
In this general picture, the bourgeois-imperialist world agenda of war economy against the masses, with a combination of labor, social security and tax reforms, are short term patches to gain time, which in turn intensify all the social contradictions and social polarization.
For its part, China continues to experience tensions, especially in the real estate sector, due to the creation of speculative bubbles in that sector, given its openness to private capital intervention. For the time being, it is resorting to state rescue interventions to avoid greater problems. It thus incorporates a phenomenon present in the economies of the main capitalist countries, that of zombie companies (whose balance sheet barely provides for their own maintenance and depend on artificial state aid to remain afloat). This contradictory factor incorporated into the economy of the Asian giant is a variable of permanent imbalance.[3] Although China’s growth standards continue comparatively high, they are still below pre-pandemic numbers. This leads China to strengthen its global strategy of accelerated imperialist expansion as a mechanism of compensation that seeks to appropriate a greater share of global wealth. In this road map, it clashes with the US and sharpens inter-imperialist tensions.
Imperialist hegemony in dispute
A distinctive feature of the current world situation is the growing inter-imperialist frictions and conflicts, which generate a dynamic of growing confrontations between superpowers, stoking regional wars and more imperialist aggressions against the sovereignty of dependent and semicolonial peoples. The causes of this dynamic are to be sought in the weakening of the world’s leading power, the US, the growth of China as an economic and military power, and the intensification of the global dispute for surplus value since the crisis of 2008.
US imperialism became the sole world superpower after the fall of the USSR. However, that hegemony also left it alone in the position of absorbing the effects of the global class struggle, which caused it a rapid erosion. The quagmire of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 2000s, and their subsequent defeat, weakened the US considerably on a global scale. Sub-imperialist powers gained greater margin to operate at the regional level and China began to emerge as a global competitor.
Undoubtedly, the US is still the world’s leading imperialist power. But the eagerness of others to occupy the spaces generated by its relative weakening and the determination of the US to preserve and recover its hegemony are provoking a growing inter-imperialist friction.
The war in Ukraine, the rise of rebellions and coups in the Sahel, and especially Israel’s new genocidal aggression against Palestine, are the most acute expressions of this dynamic.
In Ukraine, Russia, the main power in that region, seeks to regain the ground it lost after the dissolution of the USSR, while the US and NATO seek to hold on to what they gained and expand their own sphere of influence. The Russian invasion of Ukraine raised global inter-imperialist tensions with a regional war that has been dragging on for two years and combines with the just resistance of the Ukrainian people.
In the Sahel, a mass anti-imperialist rise has provoked a string of military coups against puppet governments of French imperialism in Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Gabon, as well as in Sudan. The process has dealt a blow to Western imperialism, which extracts strategic minerals from the region. Meanwhile, Russia seeks to position itself as an alternative, taking advantage of its military insertion though mercenary organizations like the Wagner Group that maintained close alliances and business arrangements with the new regimes.[4] China, which has been advancing economically and politically in the continent, also seeks to take advantage of the retreat of European imperialism.
Israel’s genocidal aggression since October 7 has provoked a complete reordering of the global inter-imperialist dispute. The US’ need to support and attempt to contain Israel led it to suddenly weaken its support for Ukraine as well as its global priority in the Pacific in order to transfer aircraft carriers and troops to the Middle East. China and Russia, for their part, have not lifted a finger in defense of Palestine. They maintain political and economic agreements with Israel, and seek to take advantage of the US’ “distraction”, demonstrating once again that they do not represent a progressive alternative to Western imperialism.
The US and China are the protagonists of the main conflict on a global scale. They already compete economically; China long ago surpassed the US as the main trading partner of the European Union, Africa and South America. In recent times it has also taken the significant leap into beginning to challenge leadership in the most technologically advanced sectors of production, the most recent expression of which has been in the field of AI.
China fortifies and feeds its economic progress with a strategy to develop as a world power. The New Silk Road project involves colossal investments in infrastructure in dozens of countries, free trade agreements, massive loans with agreements that cede ports and other factors of sovereignty to China, and the establishment of the first Chinese military base abroad.
On the other hand, the US does not wish to cede any position and, since Biden’s inauguration, has been aggressive in its attempt to reestablish itself as the world’s hegemonic power after a period of relative retreat under Trump.
Reclaiming Taiwan and establishing its control over the South China Sea is high on China’s expansion plan. This in particular and the above in general intensify China’s friction with the US and its allies, although, for now, it is in neither’s interest to escalate the conflict.
Some sectors of the left ignore or minimize the intensification of global inter-imperialist friction, leaving themselves poorly armed to respond to the conflicts that break out. Others exaggerate the inter-imperialist conflict, as if we were already at the beginning of a third world war or witnessing its irreversible imminence, generally at the service of a campist orientation, considering one imperialist camp less bad than the other. Or raising a mistaken defeatism in regional conflicts like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which ends up benefiting Russian imperialism.
The reality is that an imminent or short-term world war is not the most likely hypothesis today. There is, however, a growing intensification of tensions between the imperialist factions. None of the powers yet sees itself in a position to face a global conflict. Nor are the existing blocs and alliances firm, as the war in Ukraine has shown. The contradictions between the US and the European Union, which has trade and political relations of its own with both Russia and China, show that the NATO allies do not have entirely the same interests. Even within Europe, there are conflicting interests, as Brexit made clear. Similar contradictions are also seen among the members of the G20 and BRICS. Regional powers are also emerging that operate with a degree of independence from both the US and China.
However, although none of them is interested in a global escalation today, the very real dispute for surplus value in the middle of the current crisis is leading to growing conflict. Although the immediate perspective does not seem to be towards an open military confrontation between world powers, we cannot rule out that the dynamic of the situation may advance in that direction in the future. And we should expect general instability to predominate and local or regional wars and conflicts to intensify, where struggles in defense of the right to national self-determination will also gain strength.
Ukraine two years after the beginning of the Russian invasion
The war in Ukraine was the epicenter of inter-imperialist tensions since its beginning in 2022. Two years after it began, the conflict is in a stalemate. Since his initial plan to reach Kiev and impose a puppet government failed, Putin has been busy consolidating his grip on the 20% of Ukrainian territory bordering Russia. The Ukrainian resistance, which had managed to stop the Russian advance, has been wearing down with the passage of time and did not achieve any significant success in the much-publicized counter-offensive promoted by the Zelensky government.
The impact of the war on the price of food and energy was causing friction between NATO allies and there are already European governments openly pressing for Ukraine to cede territory and end the conflict. The US, which has had to redirect its forces to try to control the crisis in the Middle East, has been increasingly withholding material aid. It has been demonstrated that the policy of Western imperialism was never aimed at achieving a military defeat of Russia by Ukraine, given the danger of destabilizing Eastern Europe as a whole. Its policy centered on weakening Russia to keep it from advancing in its project of recovering the influence it had in the times of the Soviet Union and consolidate itself as an imperialist power that could transcend the region and, together with China, shift the global balance of forces in its favor.
In Ukraine, the situation is becoming more and more critical. In addition to the tens of thousands of victims and displaced persons, a significant portion of the country’s infrastructure has been destroyed, millions of jobs have been lost and attacks on workers’ rights by the government have advanced. The failures on the front and the hardships of the mass majority, which contrast with the corruption and privileges of the officials and the oligarchy, have been weakening Zelensky’s anti-worker and pro-imperialist government in the eyes of the masses.
Meanwhile, in order to silence the criticism of important sectors of the population against the war and its consequences in terms of lives and economic deterioration, Putin and his allies in the region have liquidated the most elementary democratic freedoms in their countries, unleashing an internal repression that has forced all opposition labor union and political organizations to emigrate or go underground.
The role played by a large part of the global left has been lamentable in this conflict. The traditional campist left was joined by various currents identified with Trotskyism, which have ended up aligning themselves with Russian imperialism under various mistaken arguments. This weakened the necessary solidarity with the Ukrainian working class and youth, who have sustained the thick of the resistance and also with the sectors of Russian, Belarusian and other Eastern European workers who opposed Putin’s war from the beginning and pronounced themselves in support of their Ukrainian class brothers.
Only a handful of forces of the left raised a principled policy of support for the Ukrainian people’s right to self-determination and to confront the invader with weapons in hand. The ISL and our group, the Ukrainian Socialist League, supplemented this policy with the demand for the unconditional withdrawal of the Russian army, the dissolution of NATO and the withdrawal of Western imperialism from all of Eastern Europe. Additionally, we have raised a policy independent and critical of Zelensky and warned against placing any confidence in Western imperialism, and we did so on the ground, not from the comfort of thousands of kilometers of distance. We stand for peace, but without annexations by Russia, and we stand for the right to self-determination of Ukrainian regions that request it, as long as it can be exercised freely, without the boot of the Russian oligarchy.
The outline of this policy is based on the teachings of Leninism, which maintain their validity 100 years after Lenin’s death. It takes into account the combination of tasks that is posed and is meant to be carried by the working class and the youth of all countries, be they imperialist or dependent, in struggle against all bourgeois camps and campist forces.
Palestine in the center of the world situation
The armed action carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023 was a tremendous blow for Israel. It destroyed the supposed invulnerability of the Zionist state and its powerful modern armed forces. The Israeli response was a brutal collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza: a new genocide, with bombings, the deployment of white phosphorus, a total blockade of food, water, electricity and medicine, which continues still. Just over 100 days into the attacks, more than 30,000 Palestinians have already died or are missing, including 12,000 children.
The imperialist powers support Israel. The US leads this support and, at the same time, seeks to contain the fascist Netanyahu, who, in a flight forward, continues the bombing of Gaza, has attacked southern Lebanon and is extending the crisis to the rest of the Middle East. Even before the conflict, his judicial reform caused a strong internal division and it is not likely that he will manage to hold on to power when the armed conflict ceases.
The Palestinian cause is today the epicenter of world polarization. There is a powerful international solidarity movement, with its most massive demonstrations in the heart of imperialism: the US and Europe. This is linked to the fact that there are strong workers’ struggles and a certain political radicalization of youth development in those countries. Mobilizations there are greater than in the Arab countries, where they are held back by their bourgeois governments. In turn, the unprecedented unmasking of the genocidal and terrorist character of the State of Israel is a political defeat for Zionism. A few countries have broken off relations and South Africa is accusing Israel of genocide in the International Criminal Court.
Of course, we regret the loss of all civilian lives. But we defend the right of Palestinians and all oppressed people to take up arms against their oppressors. And we repudiate those who manipulate Israeli deaths and the Nazi genocide, but deny Israel’s massacres. We have fundamental differences with Hamas, because their project is a capitalist and Islamic state. But the only culprit of this conflict is Zionism, which 75 years ago imposed a colonial and pro-imperialist enclave in Palestine, massacred its people, stole their lands, expelled millions, discriminates Israeli Arabs and to this day carries out ethnic cleansing. Its plan for Gaza oscillates between maintaining military control and expelling Palestinians to install Zionist settlers.
Hamas is an Islamic fundamentalist organization, which won elections in the Gaza Strip in 2006. It was initially funded by Israel to weaken Arafat’s PLO, the traditional Palestinian leadership. Hamas grew by taking advantage of the betrayal of the PLO, which in 1993 signed the Oslo Accords and recognized Israel.
In the 75 years since Israel was founded, the complete failure of the two-state policy has been demonstrated. No one can coexist with a serial killer. A single or bi-national state within the framework of capitalism is equally no solution. The only just peace can come from abolishing the State of Israel and rebuilding a single, secular, non-racist, democratic and socialist Palestine. This project must include the right of return of the Palestinian refugees and also a comprehensive solution for the Israeli working class that breaks with Zionism, within the framework of the socialist revolution in the Middle East.
For that strategy we encourage the construction of revolutionary parties in the region, because Arab workers must confront their capitalist governments. We call to maintain the mobilization in support of Palestine and in repudiation of the genocide committed by Israel; to confront the campaigns that try to victimize the victimizer and silence all anti-Zionist criticism by labeling it as anti-Semitic, and to demand that all governments break relations with Israel.
Polarization and regime crisis
The depth of the crisis leads the bourgeois and conciliatory political leaderships to develop, when they reach the government, very aggressive austerity plans that deteriorate the standard of living of the working masses to unbearable levels. This has been provoking the crumbling of traditional bourgeois parties and a rapid experience with the new formations that come to government, the collapse of regimes and the emergence of new political phenomena.
A very sharp process of social and political polarization has developed, dividing societies and leading to growing confrontations. One of these poles is finding political expression in the emergence of right-wing and extreme right-wing forces in several countries. However, their social insertion and capacity to confront the class struggle is not yet strong enough to defeat the working class and impose their projects. The other pole is increasingly stronger in the streets, protagonist of strikes, massive mobilizations, rebellions and revolutions, but it still does not have a political expression that fully represents it, which can only be constituted if the revolutionary left is strengthened.
The growth of the right and the extreme right is intimately linked to the failure of the nationalist, populist and center-left governments that awakened great expectations in the mass movement at the beginning of this century. The big bourgeois media and several religious institutions have played a very important role in the shift to the right of the masses.
Decades of crisis have also worn down the institutions of bourgeois democracy in the eyes of the masses and weakened the regimes of this type as mechanisms of domination and control. That is why the bourgeoisie is forced to implement more and more repressive measures and the regimes become more and more authoritarian, not only in the dependent countries, but also in the most advanced capitalist countries.
As we explained in the world document approved by the second Congress of the ISL, “we cannot lose sight of the fact that, at the same time, there is a great number of new capitalist states, with billions of people, where bourgeois democracy never became institutionalized. In others it was abandoned long ago. China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria and dozens of Arab and African countries have authoritarian regimes and very little margin to grant democratic freedoms and stay in power. That is why they unleash brutal repressions when the mass movement rises up against them. In the processes of mobilization taking place in some of these countries we must participate actively and not give in to the campism that always seeks to discredit mass actions and justify repression “so as not to play into the hands of imperialism”. Supporting genuine expressions of discontent with a policy that differentiates itself from both the right and imperialism as well as from authoritarian capitalist governments in left-wing garb is crucial to contest the vanguard and mass layers in these places.”[5]
The advance of the ultra-right and how to fight it
At the end of 2022 and in 2023, the right and extreme-right won new electoral victories, especially in Europe. In Sweden, the Moderate Party (right wing) and the Sweden Democrats (far right) formed a government alliance after placing 2nd and 3rd after Social Democracy. In Finland, the National Coalition (right wing) won the parliamentary elections, seconded by the Party of the Finns (far right) and formed a government with two other forces. In the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom (ultra-right) won the legislative elections and formed a government with three other right-wing parties. In Spain, the PP (right-wing) advanced in the regional elections and won in the general elections, at the expense of Vox (far-right), although it did not obtain a majority to take over the government. In Greece, the official New Democracy (right-wing) won the legislative elections and three extreme right-wing parties obtained 13%. In Germany, the extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany has been growing. In Turkey, the authoritarian Erdogan, of the AKP (radical right), was reelected president. In Switzerland the SVP (right) won, and in two German regions the AfD (far right) advanced. The far-right Brothers of Italy and Fidesz-MPSz parties govern Italy and Hungary and Trump is in the race to try to come back.
In the Egyptian presidential elections, the former coup general El-Sisi, of the Future of the Nation Party (right wing), was reelected for the second time. In Latin America, Argentina saw Milei, of La Libertad Avanza (ultra-right) win the presidency. He is a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist experiment which, allied to the Macri-led right wing, seeks to impose a harsh plan of austerity and authoritarianism. In the presidential elections of Ecuador, the right-wing Noboa, of the weak ADN coalition, won. And in the regional elections in Colombia, where Petro, of the Historic Pact (center-left), governs, right-wing variants won.
The main cause of these advances has already been mentioned before: it is the failure of the self-styled “progressive” governments, which under that garb apply harsh capitalist adjustments, generating frustration, social discontent and ideological confusion in the mass movement. In the absence of strong options in the anti-capitalist left, which could counteract the lying smear campaigns launched against the left and socialism by the propagandists employed by capital, mass anger is being channeled at the political-electoral level by some variants of the right and ultra-right.
Unlike the fascist formations of the previous century, the current ultra-right acts within the framework of the bourgeois democratic regime and not with methods of civil war against the working class. Reformism overestimates it to justify its strategy of class conciliation and political support for bourgeois governments as a lesser evil, which should not be confused with the necessary unity in anti-fascist action.
The growth of the ultra-right radically polarizes societies and is generating a process of rejection, political opening, organization and increasingly stronger mobilization in layers of the masses. Just in the last days of this January, 2024, we have seen a mobilization of one and a half million people in Germany against the possibility of the neo-fascists of the AfD coming to power and in Argentina a General Strike was held and more than a million workers and popular sectors mobilized on January 24 against the new far-right government of Javier Milei. And there are similar mobilization processes in Italy, initiatives against fascists in Greece and many other countries.
The ultra-right is a danger to be considered and fought against politically and culturally, given the global tendency towards more authoritarianism, repression and even military interference in social repression to force through their austerity plans. Against this situation, we must be in the vanguard in the streets and emphasize the defense of democratic rights and liberties as part of our general program and revolutionary policy. At the same time, we must agitate toward the masses and patiently explain in the vanguard that only workers’ governments and socialism, as an international project, will be able to guarantee social well-being, freedom and real democracy for the majority.
As part of the initiatives of the ISL, we also have to promote activities, events and international forums against the extreme right and participate in those that are convened, in the context of our exploration and permanent orientation of regrouping of the revolutionaries.
The revolutionary pole
The workers’ and people’s rise. The space to the left
Just as it would be a mistake to underestimate the danger represented by the growth of the ultra-right, it would be much more mistaken to deny the dynamic of the workers’ and people’s upswing that has been growing for years and took a leap in 2023 with the entry of the powerful workers’ movement of the US and Europe. We must also add the offensive of the Palestinian resistance, which destabilized the plans of imperialism in the Middle East as a whole.
We have already developed the importance of what is happening in Palestine. Let us dwell on the strikes and mobilizations of the most powerful battalions of the working class. In the US we have recently witnessed victorious strikes by the three major automakers and the biggest strike wave in 50 years. According to Cornell University, there were more than 400 strikes in 2023, including those that paralyzed the Hollywood entertainment industry and the largest among health care workers in history. All this was preceded by the huge mobilization unleashed by the assassination of George Floyd and the political radicalization of women and youth.
In Great Britain, for a couple of years now, workers have begun to stand up again and have carried out important strikes among railway workers, teachers, health care workers and large neighborhood protests against raises of rates. In France, there has been a battle of the working class against the pension reform, there are strikes for wages, there was a youth rebellion against police violence, there are mobilizations against racist laws and road blockades by farmers. In Germany, one of the longest railroad strikes in living memory is underway and millions of people have mobilized against the rising ultra-right. In Spain, there have been strikes of nurses and health workers, railway workers and Iberia airline workers. In Ireland, there have been strikes of teachers, doctors and transport workers. In Italy, public transport, air traffic controllers, cab drivers. Similar conflicts are taking place all over Europe.
In Latin America, 2024 began with a general strike and a million workers mobilized in Argentina against the repressive and anti-worker laws of the new extreme right-wing government. In previous years, there had been popular rebellions in Nicaragua, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and large mobilizations in Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico and Paraguay, among others.
In the Sahel, since 2020, military coups have been taking place with mass support against puppet governments of French imperialism: Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, and in 2023 Niger and Gabon joined them. Let us recall that Africa and the Middle East had the first Arab Spring from 2010 to 2012, which overthrew the dictatorships of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. The second Spring, from 2018 to 2022, overthrew the governments of Jordan, Lebanon, Sudan, Algeria, Syria and Iraq. In Iran, there was a popular rebellion in 2019 against inflation and another one in 2022 following the assassination of Mahsa Amini by the Islamic police.
In Asia, in recent years, we have had rebellions and large mobilizations in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and a large-scale General Strike in India.
The persistence of national liberation struggles as a result of imperialist invasions or situations not resolved by capitalism (Ukraine, Western Sahara, Kashmir, Honk Kong, Taiwan, etc.) mark the need for revolutionaries to continue supporting and defending the sovereign right to self-determination of peoples as part of our transitional program.
The most important contradiction of the current stage continues to be the absence of strong revolutionary leaderships, with sufficient accumulation in the working class movement to influence the outcome of the struggles and rebellions that develop. This provides a certain margin of maneuver to the treacherous labor leaderships and explains why it has been difficult to achieve resounding victories and many processes end up diverted by the mechanisms of democratic reaction or defeated by state repression.
Another weakness of the main processes of mobilization and semi-insurrections that have been taking place is their popular character, without the working class occupying the center of the scene. Since the working class is not at the vanguard, the emergence of democratic organizations, the coordination of the different sectors in struggle and the linking of our program with sectors of the masses is not facilitated. We must closely follow the new conjuncture that opened in 2023 and has as one of its most important characteristics the irruption of the working class of the central countries onto the stage, because this can begin to create a different dynamic and have a global impact.
No matter how hard they try, the capitalists today lack the sufficient strength to inflict historic defeats on the struggles that are developing and, although the problems of leadership of our class and the popular sectors do not allow us to resolve the crisis in our favor, the perspective is towards an even greater deepening of the upswing, with more workers’ strikes, mobilizations and recurring rebellions.
As we wrote in the World Document of the last Congress, “our challenge is to take advantage of this new stage in each country to train our younger cadres, to insert ourselves socially and politically in the working class and the most dynamic sectors of the mass movement and to take leaps in our construction, being aware that we are only at the beginning of a process that will tend to deepen and will give us multiple opportunities to advance. Only if we advance in the construction of strong revolutionary socialist organizations and manage to lead sectors of our class in this stage will we be able to transform ourselves into an objective factor that will counteract the weaknesses of the processes, help the workers’ movement to play the strategic role that is needed and to contest power in the coming rebellions and revolutions that will take place. Only in this way will we get the pre-revolutionary situation we are in to not end up retrating, to become revolutionary and allow us to change history.”
And we added: “The crisis of the mechanisms of domination is opening wider spaces to dispute for influence in layers of the masses. The extreme right is taking advantage of this to position itself among the most conservative and backward sectors of the mass movement. We revolutionary socialists have to boldly deploy all the initiatives, orientations and tactics within our reach to begin to capitalize the space that also exists for the extreme left, and will tend to enlarge with the worsening of the crisis. To capitalize it, besides being at the vanguard of the struggles, we must raise deep rooted proposals, not only against the governments but also against the regimes, the treacherous leaderships and make propaganda in favor of the system for which we are fighting and the need to regroup the revolutionaries.”
COP 28: the false ideology of green capitalism as a solution for the socio-environmental catastrophe
2023 broke climate records on a global scale when the planetary average temperature reached almost 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Average global temperatures during 2023 were higher than at any time in the last 100,000 years.
In December, while COP 28 was taking place in Dubai, Brazil reached temperatures of 45° and thermal sensations of over 50° in Rio de Janeiro. Australia was exceeding its own records several thousand kilometers away.
However, In this context, the UN climate summit, the official global climate policy body of the establishment, insisted on parallel and useless ideological operations to confront the planet’s socio-environmental crisis:
* It affirms that it is necessary to advance in a “post-fossil” transition from the energetic point of view as a declarative political definition.
* But, at the same time, it proposes to enable market mechanisms to face this transition “at some point”. Specifically: taxes on greenhouse gas emissions.
Under the conditions of capitalism, it is a known fact of the most elemental political economy that any corporation with monopoly power to fix prices, like the large energy companies, transfers the tax burden to the final sale price. Therefore, the tax does not block polluting emissions at all, but does raise the prices of energy and its derivatives across the commercial chain. So, with this “carbon market solution”, the working masses pay double the socio-environmental cost of this false solution: because global warming does not diminish and therefore its class consequences are paid by the masses; and, secondly, because energy insecurity is amplified with the inflation of energy prices.
The hegemonic fraction of the global bourgeoisie went from climate denialism to the ideology of individual responsibility, and now promotes “green capitalism”. All of this is a hoax designed to gain the time that capital needs to distract the mass movement (and to continue to valorize capital), time that humanity does not have in socio-environmental terms.
Concretely, the crucial element of the planetary ecological situation, connects the ongoing disaster with the rhythms of the economic crisis and its political-social-military expressions:
* In its permanent counter-revolutionary logic to reverse the falling rate of return, capital deploys an agenda of structural counter-reforms, which include a leap in the commodification of nature to lower production costs (agribusiness, fracking and industrial stockbreeding). So there is more ecocidal aggression against biodiversity, more deforestation and emissions of methane, which also produces global warming.
* Although the COPs make declarations of their “transitional – post-fossil” vocation, the exploitation of coal has intensified, the war in Ukraine has shot up the price of energy and encouraged the concentration of capital in this branch, and now the conflict in the Middle East is deepening this dynamic. Ergo, more petro-dependence, more greenhouse gas emissions.
In the background, what reappears again and again as an urgent need, which for capital truly means squaring the circle, is an emergency socio-environmental program, in an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and (eco) socialist key at a regional and international level:
* Exit from the fossil energy matrix, expropriating without compensation the monopolies of the sector and subsidize a state transition with social control towards clean and renewable energy (the IPCC as an authorized scientific body has proven with experimental models that renewables have conditions to produce 10 times all the energy needed on the planet).
* Ban all socially unnecessary polluting industries: agribusiness, mega-mining, fracking. Advance comprehensive agrarian reform and large-scale agroecological production to ensure the right to healthy, wholesome and accessible food for the masses.
* Strengthen public state-owned transportation under the social control of workers and users, discouraging the polluting use of individual transportation.
* Reduce the working day with a salary equivalent to the family basket and distribute the available work among all the active labor force: thus assuring the right to full employment and at the same time, social free time on a large scale.
* Democratic planning of the production and distribution of goods and services in the conditions of an economy with the main socialized levers in the hands of working men and women. This is the key against the capitalist anarchy of production that is incompatible with a sustainable planet.
Of course, these are some indispensable measures for a revolutionary transition as a process of civilizational salvation of a world that capital is leading to the precipice.[6]
The positive aspect of this framework is that the urgent environmental agenda is gaining more and more weight in extended layers of a young and active vanguard, which is becoming more radicalized, has sensitivity and a growing consciousness that is at least anti-capitalist and is expressed in struggles and groups that organize and gain an extended social sympathy. The challenges for revolutionaries continue to be linked to becoming a structural part of these struggles and, at the same time, patiently win the best of the the sector’s vanguard to our strategic positions, thus organically strengthening the sections of the ISL throughout the world.
Gender: anti-rights offensive and responses
The year 2022 closed with the Taliban regime banning Afghan women from university. In Iran, the Islamic regime repressed and stopped feminist and popular protests, and in September 2023, a year after the murder of young Mahsa Amini by the religious police, the parliament voted tougher sanctions against women who do not wear a hijab in public. These are signs of the political and religious reactionary offensive that followed the ebb of the 2015-2019 global feminist wave.
According to the UN Women’s 2023 Report, “the world is failing to achieve gender equality, making it an increasingly distant goal” that, “at the current pace, will take 300 years”.[7] Several numbers illustrate this gap:
* Only 61.4% of women of optimal working age are in the labor market, compared to 90% of men in the same situation.
* For every dollar earned by men in global labor income, women earn only 51 cents.
* Women spend an average of 2.3 hours a day more than men on unpaid domestic and care work.
* Worldwide, “one in four people believe that a man is justified in beating his wife.”[8]
The feminization of poverty and male violence are growing at the same pace as economic crises, climate change and wars. With logical inequalities across continents and countries, these recurrent scourges are aggravated under imperialist capitalism. And the advance of the right and ultra-right boosts their campaign against what they call gender ideology.
According to the ILGA 2023 Report, hate speech, hate crimes and persecution of LGBT+ people have also increased.[9] For example, Uganda imposed the death penalty for “repeated” homosexuality, Hungary legalized anonymous reports to homoparental families, the Russian Supreme Court described the LGBT+ movement as extremist, Erdogan redoubled his hate campaign, and Florida and six other US states banned all school textbooks with themes of gender diversity.
In the face of this offensive, resistance and struggles arise, but without the magnitude and radicalism of the recent wave. On March 8 and November 25 – the day against gender violence – there were massive marches in several countries, such as Mexico and Spain. On November 25, the ISL participated highlighting solidarity with women in Palestine and Africa. Additionally, the role of women in several countries, in labor union struggles -such as health and education- and national liberation struggles -such as the Western Sahara and Kurdistan- stands out.
In February 2023, there was an international feminist meeting in Madrid with some 3,000 attendees, and in March, 50 women leaders from 30 countries founded a “feminist international” in Mexico City. Both events were led by reformist sectors. Though they proclaimed a “popular, intersectional, class-based, anti-capitalist, dissident, decolonial, anti-racist, ecologist, anti-punitive, democratizing and for-peace feminism”,[10] several of the organizers are officials of bourgeois governments that apply harsh austerity policies and disappoint expectations, even on gender issues.
It is key that the ISL and all its sections intervene in the struggles of women workers, feminism and the LGBT+ movement to develop them and strengthen our construction. A a young radical vanguard participates there that disbelieves in the institutions and parties of the system and is open to revolutionary ideas. The competitors, from greater to lesser, are: 1) Reformism, which slows down and diverts the struggles towards the institutional paths. 2) Radical feminism or radfem, which places men, isolated from social classes, as their main enemy. 3) The identity politics currents, which prioritizes differences, dividing the struggles and is the most anti-revolutionary party. 4) Sectors that promote an autonomous feminism, equal in rank with the working class movement, diluting the leading role of the latter.
In political struggle with these erroneous positions, we raise our socialist and revolutionary feminism that fights against the patriarchal capitalist system in its entirety.
Prioritizing the youth
The crisis of capitalism affects the youth in particular. Unemployment among young around the world far exceeds, often doubling, that of the general population. They are the most affected by precarious work and instability. Austerity policies restrict access to public education and degrade its quality. Throughout the world, the proportion of young people who neither study nor work is growing. They are also criminalized, persecuted and frequently murdered by the repressive apparatuses of bourgeois states. Capitalism offers nothing to the youth, it leaves them without opportunities, without a life project, without hope and without a future.
That is why it is the youth who most easily and frequently come to the conclusion that they have nothing to lose, appear at the forefront of the rebellions and revolutions that sweep the world and raise the most radical positions. Some scribes of capitalism try to point out cases of young sectors backing right-wing or extreme right-wing projects, but these exceptions confirm the rule. In the absence of mass alternatives on the left, young people who reject the system that oppresses them may at some point support a “disruptive” proposal from the right, but it is an ephemeral support. The global dynamic of the youth is against oppression, against repression and against everything the right wing represents.
The youth are the vanguard of the rise of the class struggle in recent years. They raised and held the front line of the rebellions in Chile and Colombia; they were at the head of the Black Lives Matter rebellion in the US and of the uprisings in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Peru; they were at the head of the strikes and working class mobilizations in France, the UK and the US; they are the vanguard of the heroic Palestinian resistance; and in general they are at the forefront of all the processes of mobilization, rebellions and revolutions, as well as among the most active and militant layers in the labor movement, in the strikes and in the processes of labor union leadership renewal.
The youth is the most prominent driving force behind movements and struggles in defense of the environment, women’s rights and the LGBT movement, issues that concern and move the youth in particular. Although in these years there have been no major student movements, the defense and struggle for public education is also an important and sensitive issue for young people.
For all these reasons, the youth has always been, and is, even more so in this situation of systemic crisis of capitalism and rise of class struggle, a strategic sector for the construction of revolutionary parties. Only by engaging the radicalized youth that make up the vanguard of the processes of mobilization and winning them to the strategic exit of the world socialist revolution will we be able to build our parties and our International with the best of the vanguard of the global class struggle.
To avoid barbarism it is necessary to build parties and an International with mass influence
To conclude, we reproduce the most important conclusion of our last Congress: “The dynamics of the capitalist crisis presents us with the conclusion that the only possibility of interrupting this accelerated course towards barbarism and extinction to which the current ruling class is leading us is with the triumph of the world socialist revolution. The masses are doing their part; year after year rebellions and revolutions are taking place in all regions of the world. But in none, until now, has there been a revolutionary organization with the accumulation, influence, capacity and intention to contest and win the leadership of these processes to lead them towards socialist revolution. This remains the biggest of all problems.
We have seen all attempts to combat or evade this problem fail. The autonomist theories that flourished after the fall of the USSR, that said that the world could be changed without taking power, have been repeatedly refuted by reality. Whenever power has remained in the hands of the bourgeoisie, the latter has used it to crush every movement that has challenged it.Some question the validity of building revolutionary parties by questioning whether their strategic objective is possible. If the revolution is not possible, an organization whose existence is based on leading it is useless. If the only objective is to fight for democratic and social improvements within the capitalist system, it is better to limit oneself to building broad parties with a program limited to those demands.
We maintain that this perspective is mistaken, pessimistic, possibilist and reformist. The only thing preventing the triumph of the socialist revolution at present is the absence of revolutionary organizations structured in the workers’ movement and with sufficient influence to contest the leadership of the revolutionary processes that effectively take place one after the other and will undoubtedly continue to take place. Consequently, our strategic task is to build these revolutionary, Leninist organizations based on the training of professional cadres and a democratic and centralized regime for the struggle for power.
Since we do not intend to build testimonial sects but to gain mass influence and recruit the best of the vanguard, we have to be open to participating in certain broad anti-capitalist experiences when these manage to capture the sympathy of important sectors of workers and youth who turn to the left. That is why, without ever losing our political and organizational independence, we are part of the left wing of the PSOL in Brazil. But we cannot confuse these or other tactics, such as the FITU in Argentina, with our strategy, which involves the construction of Bolshevik parties. These tactics are useful insofar as they help us to build the revolutionary party. Experience shows that they do not last forever. We have to be prepared for when they cease to be progressive and reality forces us to delimit ourselves.
All our organizations, from the largest to the smallest, must have an orientation to build themselves in the most dynamic sectors of the working class and pay particular importance to the industrial proletariat. Both to be a national reference to the vanguard, as well as to have influence in periods of rising class struggle and even more when there are rebellions such as those we are witnessing in some countries and it is fundamental to lead sectors of our class. The work and growth in the youth, which is key for the formation of cadres, has to be at the strategic service of increasingly structuring ourselves in the working class.
A fundamental tool for building our national groups and parties has been the existence and dynamism that our International Socialist League has been acquiring. At the same time, the growth we are achieving at an international level shows that there are increasingly favorable conditions in the world for advancing in the regroupment of revolutionaries.
The strength of the ISL lies in its project, which attempts to unite in the same organization comrades coming from different traditions, not only on principled programmatic bases, but also and fundamentally on a healthy method of mutual respect, without impositions of any kind, and deeply democratic, to try to advance towards a new tradition that surpasses the existing ones.
Propagandizing the ISL project in each of our countries and strongly promoting international campaigns and initiatives that emerge from it can not only allow us to transform our world regrouping into a pole of attraction, but also help us in a qualitative way to take new leaps in our construction.”
Coordination of the ISLJanuary 2024
[1] https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/661f109500bf58fa36a4a46eeace6786-0050012024/original/GEP-Jan-2024.pdf
[2] https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621477/bp-survival-of-the-richest-160123-en.pdf
[3] https://lis-isl.org/en/2023/03/14/2-congreso-de-la-lis-la-economia-mundial-en-su-laberinto-hoja-de-ruta/
[4] Russia is replacing the Wagner Group in the Sahel with the military structure of the Africa Corps,
created by the Russian government.
[5] https://lis-isl.org/en/2023/03/14/2-congreso-de-la-lis/
[6] https://lis-isl.org/en/2023/03/14/2-congreso-de-la-lis-la-expresion-socioambiental-de-la-crisis-civilizatoria-apuntes-para-el-debate/
[7] https://www.es.amnesty.org/en-que-estamos/blog/historia/articulo/la-pobreza-tiene-genero/
[8] The UN warns that prejudices against women are entrenched around the world, Spanish newspaper El País, 6/12/2023.
[9] https://ilga.org/severe-spikes-arrests-prosecutions-lgbt-gender-diverse-people-2023
[10] https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20230331/8867273/mujeres-lideres-mas-30-paises-fundan-internacional-feminista-mexico.html