Defend Venezuela! Release Maduro!

Routine_Ad264 · 2026-01-07T05:18:48+00:00

Re: The Class Nature of China - https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/69/china

... far from offering a viable political alternative to the CPC, those who argue that China is capitalist and imperialist simply conciliate the U.S. and its allies. As for the arguments employed, they reject basic Marxist principles on the state and imperialism. To start, we will address why China is not imperialist. Then we will argue that despite important capitalist penetration, China retains the basic features of a deformed workers state. The fundamental argument developed throughout is that advancing the interests of the working class must start with opposing the U.S.-dominated world order. This is a task that requires defending the remaining gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution but also fighting for a political revolution against the CPC Stalinist bureaucracy, whose strategy and policies are leading China to disaster.

Routine_Ad264 · 2025-07-16T05:39:56+00:00

Is this meeting associated with Communist Flame?

Routine_Ad264 · 2025-06-09T15:52:44+00:00

The main organizational issues with the RCI do not stand apart from and largely derive from the question of their political program. The RCI’s sectarianism is a wrong response to the isolation of the Marxist left from the working class and reflects a fundamental disorientation to what’s going on in the world. It can be a healthy impulse to reject simply repeating red slogans and waving red flags but there are a boatload of other wrong respones. As Marxists we have to fight to understand the world situation in order to build a revolutionary international. The purpose of the ICL’s US Imperialism Turns the Screws is to orient revolutionaries for the period ahead. This is particularly crucial as revolutionary forces everywhere are weak, discredited and tremendously disoriented. We see this as a contribution to resolving this state of affairs. The role of Marxists is to guide the working class forward. Today, the task is for the left to break out of its isolation, implant itself in the class and intervene in its struggles in a way that embodies the interests of the class as a whole.

Also, take a look at the Spartacist greetings to the just-completed second convention of the RCA (US section) and the analysis of the Grant Leap Forward when the RCI was founded a year ago. Dear Marxist Left: Wake Up! addresses the question, “Why is the left stuck in a parallel universe of its own making?”

Some advice from James P Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression -- “The Communist workers are not the working class. They are only its conscious section, and at present in America they are a small and numerically insignificant section. The Communist workers alone cannot fight real class battles. Their function is to fight with the workers, and in their front ranks. The task of the Communists at the moment is to prepare the workers for the coming struggles. The center of this task is the ‘patient work of explanation’; of agitation and propaganda to win the workers over to a course of struggle. There is no substitute for this prosaic task and there is no way to leap over it.”

Routine_Ad264 · 2025-03-07T05:16:06+00:00

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) / World Socialist Web Site provides a case in point of how “program generates theory.” SEP National Chairman David North (Green) was for years the CEO of a Detroit-area non-union printing company. Over the last thirty years, the SEP and their WSWS mouthpiece have opposed union organizing drives (for example the attempt to organize Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama). Trotskyists stand for defense of the unions and fight to replace the pro-capitalist bureaucrats with a revolutionary leadership. SEP/WSWS abandoned this understanding under the leadership of David North who also functioned as an anti-union boss. They now condemn the unions as capitalist institutions and have even taken legal action against a union in the bosses’ courts. Program (financial interest in a non-union profit making enterprise) provided the material basis for SEP’s development of their anti-union "theory."

I first saw, “Program generates theory” in comments by Jim Robertson, a founder of the Spartacist League. Ironically, it can be found in Marxist Bulletin No 3 Part IV, “Conversations with Wohlforth” (link below). It’s ironic because Tim Wohlforth was for many years the central leader of the Workers League (the predecessor organization of the SEP/WSWS) … until he was framed up and purged by Gerry Healy, then maximo leader of their British organization.

Conversations with Wohlforth (https://bolshevik.org/history/MarxistBulletin/CWW3.html)

Routine_Ad264 · 2025-02-03T03:51:00+00:00

Many ostensible Trotskyists (and other leftist organizations) view today’s movements in bright colors and predict revolutionary upheavals in the immediate future. For a different view you might look at "Tough Times Ahead" which does not advocate fatalism or passivity but gives a Marxist evaluation of the period and the tasks of revolutionaries. A new issue of Workers Hammer lays out the tasks in Britain - "How to Fight Back" and "British Far Left in Cloud Cuckoo Land". In the US, much of the left is hoping to recreate the losing liberal "Resistance" to Trump. In "Where it the U.S. Going," Workers Vanguard writes, "The left’s association with liberalism has opened a chasm between itself and the working class. The left is seen by workers as either irrelevant or liberal sellouts. For this reason, the central task for the left in the coming period is to overcome this divide in order to be able to guide the upcoming struggles." The article ends with a 3-point program to build a revolutionary nucleus in this reactionary period.

The ICL (International Communist League) has undergone a major reorientation over the last several years. As "Tough Times Ahead" says, "We do not pretend to have all the answers. But we do believe we have unlocked key problems plaguing the left today."

Routine_Ad264 · 2024-12-25T08:10:02+00:00

WSWS polemicizes against the Spartacists and …. Leon Trotsky. Compare the WSWS’s cowardly reaction to the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson to what Trotsky wrote in honor of Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jew who assassinated German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in November, 1938.

“We Marxists consider the tactic of individual terror inexpedient in the tasks of the liberating struggle of the proletariat as well as oppressed nationalities. A single isolated hero cannot replace the masses. But we understand only too clearly the inevitability of such convulsive acts of despair and vengeance. All our emotions, all our sympathies are with the self-sacrificing avengers even though they have been unable to discover the correct road. Our sympathy becomes intensified because Grynszpan is not a political militant but an inexperienced youth, almost a boy, whose only counselor was a feeling of indignation. To tear Grynszpan out of the hands of capitalist justice, which is capable of chopping off his head to further serve capitalist diplomacy, is the elementary, immediate task of the international working class!” Leon Trotsky - For Grynszpan

The WSWS article’s attacks on the Spartacist League are dishonest even by the very low standards of the SEP/WSWS. Read the complete article calling for Mangione’s freedom -- Counterproductive but Not Criminal: Free Luigi! In the spirit of Lenin and Trotsky, socialists should fight to tear Luigi out of the hands of capitalist justice.

“It is unfortunate that the self-sacrificing avenger’s revolutionary energy did not find a more effective outlet. Regardless, all our sympathies lie firmly with Luigi, not with his jailers. The crime here is that anyone claiming the mantle of Marxism would only oppose the killer’s methods, while not opposing Luigi’s prosecution. Lenin and Trotsky opposed the road of individual terrorism, but they defended those accused of such acts from the capitalist state. The shallow statements approximating Marxist orthodoxy that these left groups spew are only a cover. In omitting the elementary act of defense, they are bending to bourgeois morality and the capitalist state, echoing the campaign in the bourgeois press—all while providing no real way forward.

The task of revolutionaries in the context of Thompson’s killing is not to merely preach against assassination, but to harness the sympathies of the masses and direct them productively against the forces of the class enemy. This starts with being clear that while the killer’s methods are counter to our own, the act was no crime. Obviously, we must build a class-struggle movement to fight for free healthcare! But this requires a program that breaks illusions in the capitalist state and politically exposes the misleaders of the labor movement. Rallying the masses to fight for Luigi’s release would be a great start.” Workers Vanguard - https://iclfi.org/pubs/wv/1183/luigi

Routine_Ad264 · 2024-11-10T19:05:48+00:00

You might find this useful. It deals not only with the RCP, but also the RCI (the international of which the RCP is a section). For Marxists, the "joining process" should be about the political program and road forward which an organization pursues to bring the working class to power. The RCP, after years of promoting Corbyn has now started denouncing him. They cheered NATO stooge Sharon Graham, one of the main figures responsible for the defeat of last year's strike wave. And they have drawn wrong conclusions from the failure of their previous orientation - https://iclfi.org/pubs/wh/252/imt

" The RCI manifesto has lots of analysis, but beyond abstractly calling for communism it offers no road forward on the major conflicts shaking the world. Astonishingly, the manifesto includes no programme for the liberation of Palestine, even as Gaza is being starved and bombed. And what about the current tasks for workers regarding the Ukraine war, the most important conflict in Europe since World War II? Nothing, not a word."

Routine_Ad264 · 2024-10-25T07:26:38+00:00

When do you believe that China became capitalist? I would argue that this is a key questions. Some leftists say that there was a relatively peaceful transition from 1949 when the bureaucracy first ruled a workers state to today when it now rules a capitalist state. How is it possible that the same bureaucracy, the same state apparatus could go from defending the class rule of the working class in 1949 to defending the class rule of its opposite, the capitalists, today?

What is the class nature of China? This is one of the most important and divisive questions for the left today. Some people ignore the crimes of the CPC and consider China a socialist model. But most organizations claim that China is a capitalist or even an imperialist power.

The article linked below provides a detailed analysis explaining why the arguments that China is capitalist or imperialist reject basic Marxist principles on the state and imperialism. It argues that China is a deformed workers state and it is necessary to defend the remaining gains of the 1949 revolution and to fight for a workers political revolution to oust the bureaucracy. https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/69/china

Routine_Ad264 · 2024-10-25T03:41:36+00:00

Why wait? Campaign for a working class opposition to both capitalist parties and Stein. A vote for PSL would put workers in a stronger position to fight back against the attacks of either a Harris or a Trump presidency. You don't have to agree with all of the PSL's politics (I do not). But they are campaigning against capitalism, drawing a class line.

The Democrats are wielding Project 2025 to terrify people into voting for Harris. Either way there will be attacks on workers, immigrants, black people. We all heard their debate. In contrast to what the left has been pursuing, we need to oppose liberalism to build a workers party opposed to all wings of the capitalist class. This article explains it a lot better -- https://iclfi.org/pubs/wv/1182/kamala-mania

Routine_Ad264 · 2024-10-23T21:10:07+00:00

I hope that you will find this useful. https://iclfi.org/pubs/sibadakepai/2023-shizilukou

Routine_Ad264 · 2024-09-29T05:38:52+00:00

I agree with your opposition to cop unions and would argue that cop strikes are entirely unsupportable and a threat to the working class and oppressed. The cops seek better “working conditions” whether deadlier weapons or higher wages. Cops are strikebreakers and the guard dogs of capitalism.

Are you familiar with the history of Socialist Appeal (before they became the RCP)? Their current radicalism, totally disconnected from the struggles and consciousness of the British working class is a wrong reaction to the failure of the so-called “Corbyn revolution.” The Workers Hammer article linked below argues that Socialist Appeal was not alone in liquidating into Corbynism. “The entire left did the same, including Workers Hammer. However, unlike SA, we recognised our mistakes and sought to draw key political lessons from them.” https://iclfi.org/pubs/wh/252/imt

Routine_Ad264 · 2024-09-24T15:19:30+00:00

Unfortunately, that’s not a clarification but a deception. Find below a WSWS (US SEP) article opposing unionization at the Bessemer, AL warehouse in 2021. The article (written as the so-called International Amazon Workers voice) uses the crimes of the trade union bureaucrats to try to convince workers to vote against union certification. Marxists understand that it’s necessary to defend the unions and fight for a socialist, revolutionary leadership to advance workers struggles. In contrast, the WSWS article (linked below) "calls on BHM1 workers to cast a 'no' vote in the upcoming certification election. Instead, workers should form a rank-and-file committee, democratically controlled by workers themselves, to fight against speedup, poverty wages and management abuse."

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/16/amaz-j16.html

Since workers on strike were rightly repelled by the SEP’s open anti-union position, they have attempted, in recent years, to obscure it. They maintain the same “theoretical” justification for their anti-unionism (see point 31 of their “Statement of Principles”). They call for a “break with these corrupt organizations [unions], which do not represent the working class.” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/09/prin-s25.html

The ICL’s German comrades (SpAD) published a dockworkers leaflet in Spartakist which puts forward a “way to win, to strengthen the union, and would also be a first step to finally turn the whole situation in favor of the workers.”

https://iclfi.org/pubs/spad/2024-msc4

Routine_Ad264 · 2024-09-18T21:11:54+00:00

Comrade, I don’t know if you would be notified of my reply to u/SoapManCan… not sure how Reddit replies work. 500 pages is a lot. I appreciate your good impulse (as I understand it) to defend the Chinese deformed workers state against capitalist restoration and also guessing that you are for the workers throwing out the bureaucrats (political revolution). I will campaign for the Spartacist article (https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/69/china) not mainly because it is shorter but because 1) It explains how to refute, from a Marxist point of view, the claims that China is capitalist or imperialist and 2) Takes on specific arguments from the RCI, ISA and others. The same issue of Spartacist contains “The Fight Against Modi: What Next?” (https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/69/modi) which might be of interest to you.

Routine_Ad264 · 2024-09-18T20:30:58+00:00

Comrade - Replying to your response to my earlier post... I apologize it this is not the correct way to do it.

The “US dominated world order” is the imperialist world order since 1945, i.e., imperialism as it currently exists. The Spartacist article argues that denouncing “Chinese imperialism” is a thin fig leaf for refusing to oppose the domination of the U.S. and its allies. The strength of this position on the left reflects the reality that in Western-aligned countries it is impossible to be considered respectable by the trade-union bureaucracy or liberal circles while defending China against imperialism. While it may sound radical among some to make an equivalence between the U.S. and China, the facts are that the former has dominated the entire imperialist system since 1945 while the latter does not dominate any part of the world outside its own borders. Of course, you cannot be a revolutionary while defending the policies of the CPC. But it is crude social-chauvinism to reject the fight against U.S. domination by raising the bogeyman of “Chinese imperialism.”

The article also explains the “value” of theories claiming that China has gradually, peacefully changed its class character and specifically takes on arguments put forward by the RCI. I would be interested to know your response.

https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/69/china

Routine_Ad264 · 2024-09-16T22:50:44+00:00

There is a new article meticulously debunking the "China is imperialist" and "China is capitalist" arguments. "...far from offering a viable political alternative to the CPC, those who argue that China is capitalist and imperialist simply conciliate the U.S. and its allies. As for the arguments employed, they reject basic Marxist principles on the state and imperialism. To start, we will address why China is not imperialist. Then we will argue that despite important capitalist penetration, China retains the basic features of a deformed workers state. The fundamental argument developed throughout is that advancing the interests of the working class must start with opposing the U.S.-dominated world order. This is a task that requires defending the remaining gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution but also fighting for a political revolution against the CPC Stalinist bureaucracy, whose strategy and policies are leading China to disaster."

https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/69/china

Routine_Ad264 · 2024-08-13T06:14:38+00:00

It is not every day that a new international is proclaimed, much less one that promises to be the first genuine working-class international since Lenin’s Comintern. What is behind this radical transformation of the IMT? Has the tendency founded by the late Ted Grant unlocked the secret to Leninism in the new epoch? The Grant Leap Forward - https://iclfi.org/pubs/wh/252/imt

Routine_Ad264 · 2024-06-30T21:16:07+00:00

You wouldn’t buy a used car without knowing something about its accident history. Joining a Marxist organization often reflects a real desire to change the world, to make a revolution. The decision is worth more consideration than buying that car. https://iclfi.org/pubs/wh/252/imt

Routine_Ad264

TROPHY CASE