"All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet 'ripened' for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for proletarian revolution have not only 'ripened,' they have begun to get somewhat rotten.... The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership."  – Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program

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Hunter Students, Faculty and Staff Win an Important Victory for Free Speech (click on image for article)

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Other Publications (click on headlines to order) Journal of Class Struggle Education Workers Internationalist pamphlet on the history of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America.   Internationalist pamphlet with writings by Marx, Engels, Bebel, Zetkin, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky. Plus articles from Women and Revolution

Marxist Readings

Marxism and Education

Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution

Women’s Liberation through Socialist Revolution

Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Now!

Immigration Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants

Labor Labor’s Gotta Play Hardball to Win

Brazil

Ecuador

France

Greece

Haiti Workers Solidarity, Yes, Military Occupation, No

Iraq

Mexico

Palestine For Arab-Hebrew Workers Revolution

Philippines

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Quebec

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Welcome! The Internationalist Group, section of the League for the Fourth International, fights for international socialist revolution, the conquest of power by the working class, led by its Leninist party, championing the cause of all the oppressed. After a decade and a half in which the ruling class trumpeted the supposed "death of communism," the imperialists are bogged down in losing wars of colonial occupation in the Near East while a global economic crisis shakes the foundations of the capitalist order. With mass unemployment, poverty and hunger ravaging the planet, once again there is talk of socialism and revolution. But as in the past, the key question is that of forging a vanguard to lead the struggle of the workers and the oppressed. Read more... The founding statement of the Internationalist Group is available on this site, as well as the LFI's declaration, Reforge the Fourth International, in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Tagalog.
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No Vote for the Bosses’ Parties and Politicians! On Ballot Props: Vote for Defending Basic Rights The Internationalist Group has called repeatedly to “Break with the Democrats, Bosses’ Party of Racist Repression, Imperialist War and Gaza Genocide,” for “no vote to any capitalist party or politicians” and for a revolutionary workers party. Now that the elections are upon us,  some who oppose both major capitalist parties, and the alternatives, nevertheless feel the urgency to vote on hotly contested ballot propositions, particularly on abortion. In many states there is a plethora of initiatives, often confusingly worded, and we have received a number of queries about where revolutionary Marxists stand on those issues. This article is in response to those questions. On Ballot Props: Vote for Defending Basic Rights (4 November 2024)   Democrats, Republicans vs. Public Education We Need a Class-Struggle Workers Party By Class Struggle Education Workers/UFT During the past school year in which Democrats as well as ultra-rightist Republicans slandered pro-Palestinian, anti-Gaza genocide protests as supposedly “antisemitic” and brought in police to shut them down. Now the final spurt to the November elections is in full swing, and teachers unions are going all out to elect the Democratic Party slate. After President (“Genocide Joe”) Biden dropped out, the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association jumped Kamala Harris. Adding to the enthusiasm was her vice-presidential pick, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a former high school football coach and teacher. As the Democrats posture as supposed friends of labor, women and educators, over the years, the historic alignment of the teachers unions with the Democratic Party has not put an end to, or diminished Republican attacks on public schools and teacher-bashing. On the contrary, Democrats have chimed in on the agenda of charterizing, corporatizing and privatizing public education. Teachers unions are in the crosshairs of racist reactiona­ries and Wall Street money men, Democrats and Republicans alike, because they are an obstacle to the drive to gut public education.The Democratic Party is a capitalist party, a party of the bosses. We need is a fighting workers party prepared to lead hard class struggle to defeat the bipartisan capitalist war on public education. CSEW: We Need a Class-Struggle Workers Party (16 October 2024). The Fruits of Mayoral Control (16 October 2024)   Revolution Publication of the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth and of students from the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York (click on masthead to go to Revolution archive) Revolution No. 21 (September 2024) click or on image for full list of articles All-Purpose Bigot Trump or Genocide Joe’s VP Harris? The Only Choice: Build a Revolutionary Workers Party After Joe Biden’s July 21 withdrawal from the presidential race and replacement by his vice president Kamala Harris, the mood in U.S. capitalism’s governing Democratic Party turned from gloom to what it’s hyping as an explosion of “joy.” In Gaza, the explosion of bombs provided by the Biden-Harris administration to Israel continued to obliterate schools, hospitals and entire neighborhoods, burying whole families under the rubble. In her acceptance speech, Harris vowed that “as Commander-in-Chief,” she would ensure that the U.S. has the  “most lethal fighting force in the world.” While Republican ex-president Donald Trump is, once again, demonizing “illegal immigrants,”  Harris’ response to Trump’s provocations has been to try to outdo him in anti-immigrant rhetoric. As the genocidal war on the people of Gaza rages on, and U.S. imperialism’s bipartisan drive toward World War III accelerates, the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth and CUNY Internationalist Clubs say no to Harris and Trump, no to the Democrat/Republican war machine, and call to build a workers party that fights for socialist revolution. The Only Choice: Build a Revolutionary Workers Party  (August 2024) DNC: Militarism on the March (August 2024)  AOC: Biden-Harris’ Prime-Time Promoter (August 2024) The Rap Sheet of “Top Cop” Kamala Harris (18 September 2020) Women’s Liberation through Socialist Revolution! A Struggle for Survival: Women in Gaza Today Women in Gaza today – under the bombs supplied to Israel by U.S. imperialism’s Biden-Harris administration – face a desperate daily struggle for survival. Driven from one part of the besieged enclave to another, feeding their children becomes nearly impossible. Homes, hospitals and entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, with families buried beneath the ruins. Famine looms, and the starvation is intentional. Now bourgeois feminists who wanted Hillary Clinton to become Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism in 2016 hope to pass that torch to Kamala Harris. Many students are rejecting the “official story” of the U.S. role in the world that they were taught, in which the crimes of the capitalist rulers around the globe are presented in humanitarian garb, “human rights” rhetoric, or sometimes in feminist garb. For Palestinian Arab women today, the double oppression of women fundamental to capitalist society is made even more dire by this genocidal war, compounded by the oppression by the religious/ethnic-based Israeli state. Zionist and imperialist oppression and war can’t be defeated through a nationalist program, but only through internationalist class struggle leading to socialist revolution worldwide..  A Struggle for Survival: Women in Gaza Today (September 2024)   Mass Arrests Hit Gaza Solidarity Encampments Across U.S. Flash Point UCLA: Student Workers Strike Against Repression of Pro-Palestinian Protesters On the night of April 30/May 1, the Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles was subject to a vicious attack by Zionist and fascistic thugs. The organized goon squad attack was carried out in tandem with the university authorities, and followed up by mass arrests of those defending the encampment. The union of graduate student workers at the University of California, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811, responded to the attack by voting to strike for free speech. Tens of thousands of academic workers took strike action to defend democratic rights and to show their solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people. But instead of striking the whole UC system, UAW leaders called on select campuses to be shut down while keeping large parts of the membership at work. A class-struggle leadership is needed to shut down the entire UC system and bring in other sectors of labor and the oppressed, to defend the democratic and union rights of all. Flash Point UCLA (August 2024) Hunter College Students, Faculty Demand: “NYPD, Out of CUNY Now!” Speak-Out Against Repression of CCNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment On May 1, the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York held a speak-out outside Hunter College, bringing out approximately 200 students and members of the CUNY faculty/staff union, to protest the New York Police Department’s violent dispersal of Gaza solidarity encampments at City College and Columbia University the previous night and early that morning. Four members of the Hunter Internationalist Club were among those arrested. The NYPD attacks were part of the nationwide wave of repression launched by university administrations, as well as state and local politicians (including Democrats from City Hall to the state house to Congress), who unleashed the cops to brutalize and disperse campus protests against the joint U.S./Israel genocidal war on the Palestinian people. Speak-Out Against Repression of CCNY Gaza Solidarity Encampment (August 2024)  Defend the Palestinians! Defeat the Witch Hunters! McCarthyite Film Ban at Hunter College Struck Down By Student-Faculty Protest As the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza rages on, it has been accompanied by a  “war censorship drive” on the “home front.” Campuses around the country are being hit with bans and witch hunts that bring to mind the McCarthyite period of the early anti-Soviet Cold War. At Hunter College, CUNY Internationalist activists were centrally involved in a fight to defeat the college president’s attempt to stop the screening of a film critical of Israel. McCarthyite Film Ban at Hunter College Struck Down By Student-Faculty Protest (February 2024)  Spartacist League: A Weird and Desperate Frenzy For Mass Student/Labor Action Against U.S./Israel War and NYPD Repression By CUNY Internationalist Clubs After the arrests in the early hours of May 1 of hundreds of participants in Gaza solidarity encampments at Columbia University and the City University of New York, within hours, the CUNY Internationalist Clubs called an emergency speak-out at Hunter College that drew almost 200 students and faculty to protest the police/CUNY repression. In the aftermath, the Spartacist League put out fliers calling to “Strike the Campus!” When there was no walkout, it tried to explain the failure to suck a “strike” out of its thumb by trying to scapegoat the Internationalist Club. While the used-to-be-revolutionary group going under the misnomer Spartacist flits from one stunt to the next, the Internationalists fought for mass CUNY- and city-wide union/student march against the repression and witch hunts targeting pro-Palestinian protesters. For Mass Student/Labor Action Against U.S./Israel War and NYPD Repression (11 May 2024)  Then and Now: Democrats’ War Abroad, Police Brutality at Home The 1968 DNC Protests As the Democratic National Convention assembled this August, promoting “joy” for a new commander-in-chief of U.S. imperialism, they hoped the hoopla would blot out horrific images of the U.S./Israel war on Gaza and of last spring’s violent police repression against pro-Palestinian campus protests. Yet the fact that the quadrennial imperialist shindig was being held in Chicago inevitably harkened back to the infamous DNC of 1968, held amid nationwide protests against the mass murder being carried out by another Democratic administration: U.S. imperialism’s dirty colonial war on the workers and peasants of Vietnam. Despite the brutal cop attacks on protesters at the ’68 convention, and the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton the next year, many antiwar protesters found their way back to the Democratic Party with the 1972 presidential campaign of Democratic Party “dove” George McGovern. The historic task of breaking the stranglehold of the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties, and forging a revolutionary workers party, remains on the agenda. The 1968 DNC Protests (September 2024)  To Uproot Racist Oppression: Socialist Revolution Black Liberation – Struggle and Strategy For many young people who have gotten involved in revolutionary politics in recent years, the protests of 2020 were a deeply politicizing and life-changing experience. It was clear at the time that the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a cold-blooded killer cop was only the tip of the iceberg. We live in a racist country where African Americans are killed for “walking while black,” driving or just being in your car, or sleeping in your own home while black. The 2008 election of the first black president, while a social change, was not a political change. Marxists understand that racism is rooted in the material reality of racial oppression, arising from the profit-making mechanisms of slavery and the slave trade. It is continuously reproduced based on the massive inequalities of capitalist society. To fight racism, Marxists stand on the program of revolutionary integrationism, rejecting liberal accommodation to the racist status quo, and looking to unite the working class across the color line. A strategy based on separation, such as black nationalism in its various incarnations, is illusory. This illusion, arising in times of defeat and despair, cuts against the actual struggle for black freedom. Black Liberation – Struggle and Strategy (September 2024)   What We Saw – and Didn't – at Important Met Exhibit Black and Red Keys to Harlem Renaissance Story This summer, activists from the Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York and the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth visited the “Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was exhilarating to see the incredible art in the exhibit, but the exhibit left much of the “red” – the radical political connections and reverberations of the Harlem Renaissance – out of the picture. To understand the sources of, for example, the poems “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay and “White Man” by Langston Hughes, it is necessary to look at the history of the “Great Migration” to the North of the Southern black population, the “Jim Crow” system of violent racial segregation and the explosion of artistic creativity and innovation in the first years of the Russian Revolution. Yet while displaying a glorious oil painting by Elizabeth Catlett and Winold Reiss’ portraits of Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, the exhibit noted nothing about their leftist radicalism, and the word communist was not mentioned at all. We have to fill in the blank spaces the exhibit left out. Black and Red Keys to Harlem Renaissance Story (September 2024)  Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) (September 2024)  Facing U.S. Rulers’ Democrat/Republican Duopoly Party for Socialism and Liberation: A Revolutionary Alternative? Facing the “choice” of Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, a good number of young people can’t stomach backing war-criminal politicians. A few express some interest in the Green Party, a minor bourgeois party whose purpose is to pressure the Democrats. The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is running its own presidential campaign under the watchword Vote Socialist 2024. The fight for a sharp break from the Democratic Party is at the center of genuinely revolutionary politics in the United States, yet the PSL’s actual politics cut against that struggle. Throughout its history – and today – it advances “tactics” that help tie workers and youth to the Democrats. In 2016 and again in 2020, the PSL called called on people voting in the Democratic presidential primary elections to vote for Bernie Sanders, and this spring it hailed the movement to  “vote uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries. Moreover, in Chicago the PSL joined an “Abandon Biden Convention” in a political bloc with the Green Party. What is urgently needed today is a class-struggle workers party that puts forward genuinely revolu­tionary politics counterposed to all capitalist parties and politicians, and forthrightly advances a program of international socialist revolution. That the PSL most certainly does not. Party for Socialism and Liberation: A Revolutionary Alternative? (August 2024)  Cosplay Communism From Bernie Boosters to “Revolutionary Communists of America” An article on the group’s website declares that “Hundreds of millions watch launch of the Revolutionary Communists of America!” Other articles bombastically announce,  “I Built a New Communist Cell Over My Spring Break,” and “I Met Another Communist on the Street and 30 Minutes Later, He Was an RCA Member.” They plaster stickers on street light posts with an image of Karl Marx depicted as Uncle Sam, asking “Are You a Communist,” complete with a QR code for a form to join the brand spanking new RCA. Actually, it is the transmogrification of the staid old International Marxist Tendency, now calling itself the Revolutionary Communist International, hyped up with gimmicks galore to give off a “with it” vibe. This is the same outfit that over years has supported “strikes” by and “unions” of police and prison guards, claiming that these professionals of state repression are “workers in uniform.” It’s the same reformist social-democratic group that only a few a years ago was among the most assiduous boosters for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, was “excited” to be best builders of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America, and avoided the word “communist” like the plague. After the makeover, the facade is different but the politics are still reformist. A genuine communist party is not built by such self-aggrandizing posturing and unserious stunts  From Bernie Boosters to “Revolutionary Communists of America” (September 2024) New Members Not Supposed To Know About It RCA/IMT’s Long History of Supporting Cop “Unions” When new members of the recently rebaptized “Revolutionary Communists of America” are confronted with their organization’s longstanding support for police “unions” and “strikes” they tend to voice angry denial, or sheer disbelief. Older members, more experienced in the twists and turns of opportunist politics, try to change the topic. Yet these social democrats in Trotskyist garb wrote a 30,000 word diatribe against the Internationalist Group defending their call to include the protection societies of the professional strikebreakers in the labor movement. Real Trotskyists call for “cops out of the unions.” Providing the proof, we cite the RCA’s the shameful record on the armed fist of the bourgeois state. RCA/IMT’s Long History of Supporting Cop “Unions” (September 2024) Fight for Socialist Revolution! On Joining the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth The Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (RIY), youth section of the Internationalist Group, was founded in 2017 by young activists radicalized by the clash between illusions of “hope and change” under liberal Democrat Barack Obama and the harsh reality of unending racist oppression, which continues today under his former vice president Joe Biden. A key source of RIY’s growth has been its consistent struggle against illusions that opportunist “leftists” pushed in capitalist politicians from Obama and Biden to Democratic (Party) Socialists of America idols Bernie Sanders and “AOC.” Several young activists explain why they joined the RIY. On Joining the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (September 2024) Argentina: Drop the Charges Against Polo Obrero, Stop the Persecution of the Piquetero Movement Ultra-rightist Argentine president Javier Milei’s “shock” program of brutal austerity, massive cutbacks, layoffs and wholesale privatizations1 has gone together with criminalizing protest and escalating repression against the left and broader social movements. This campaign to “retake” the streets from protesters has been accompanied by a judicial offensive targeting above all organizations of the left. The most prominent recent offensive has been an indictment of leaders of the Polo Obrero (Workers Pole), the mass unemployed organization of the Partido Obrero (PO – Workers Party). The left and labor must solidly oppose all attempts to persecute and prosecute those who resist the depredations of the capitalist state, including the deeply corrupt judicial caste, both under the ultra-rightist Milei government and its Peronist and conservative predecessors. At the same time, it is necessary to draw a balance sheet of the “strategy” of acting as a recipient of government funds. The League for the Fourth International calls to drop all charges against the Polo Obrero, and for complete independence of the workers movement from the capitalist state. Argentina: Drop the Charges Against Polo Obrero (September 2024)   Labor: All Out to Support Boeing Machinists Strike! On Friday, September 13, some 33,000 workers of the aircraft manufacturing giant Boeing near Seattle, Washington went out on strike for the first time since 2008. The strikers are members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), and although the union leadership had negotiated a tentative agreement with the company, the deal was overwhelmingly voted down (with over 94% of the members voting against it while 96% voted to strike). This is a key class battle for unions and working people not only in the Pacific Northwest but nationwide, and all of labor should pitch in to help win it. Key demands are a greatly increased pay scale (right now, starting pay for Machinists is below that of fast food workers in Seattle) and to bring back defined-benefit pensions, which the IAM tops negotiated away in 2013. A strike to restore pensions would galvanize the labor movement coast-to-coast. Given Boeing’s abysmal safety record, another key demand would be for union control of safety. Labor: All Out to Support Boeing Machinists Strike! (15 September 2024) From the Current Issue  The Internationalist No. 73 (June-August 2024)  click above or on image for full list of articles Israel Out of Gaza, the West Bank and Golan – U.S. Imperialists Out of the Middle East! Gaza Genocide Made in USA For International Workers Action to Defend Palestinians, Defeat U.S./Israel Slaughter Day after day, people around the world see photos and videos of harrowing scenes from the Israeli invasion and gruesome war on the Palestinian Arab population of the Gaza Strip. What is happening, and what millions are witnessing, is an actual genocide unfolding, aiming at the destruction of an entire population. The Zionist militarists are waging a one-sided war to drive out and decimate the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza – who for decades have been locked up in the tiny enclave on the shores of the Mediterranean – while preparing a possible sequel in the occupied West Bank. And in carrying out this slaughter, the Israeli forces are dropping monster bombs, manufactured and supplied by the United States, from fighter jets built and supplied by the U.S. Without the U.S. armaments, it would be impossible for Israel to carry out mass murder on this scale. A detailed analysis of the planned genocide underway in Gaza, and the U.S. role in it. Gaza Genocide Made in USA (10 August 2024)   Genocide by the Numbers (10 August 2024)  For a Class-Struggle Workers Party Break with the Democrats, Republicans and All Capitalist Parties From the beginning of July, the world’s interest suddenly shifted from the horror show of the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza, and the continuing U.S./NATO war against Russia over Ukraine, to focus on the upcoming elections in the United States. The faltering, almost paralyzed performance of Democratic president “Genocide Joe” Biden in the first presidential candidates’ debate on June 27 threw Democrats into a panic. Under pressure from billionaire financiers and Democratic Party grandees, three weeks later Biden withdrew from the race. In two days, Vice President Kamala Harris nailed down the nomination. Meanwhile, Trump picked a fascistic ideologue, JD Vance, as his running mate. So in November, U.S. voters will have the “choice” between immigrant-bashing fascistic Republicans preparing to introduce police state measures, and a Democratic ticket that smears pro-Palestinian protesters as “antisemitic” and is careening toward a thermonuclear World War III. “Pick your poison” is no answer. The Internationalist Group, which calls to defend Russia and China against the U.S. imperialist war drive, and to defend the Palestinians and defeat the Israeli mass murderers in Gaza, says: no vote to any capitalist party or politicians. Break with the Democrats, Republicans and All Capitalist Parties (20 August 2024) Marjorie Stamberg (1944-2024) Revolutionary Trotskyist, Marxist Educator, A Leader of Struggles for All the Oppressed Our comrade Marjorie Stamberg died on May 29 after a three-year battle with ovarian cancer. She was 79 and had been active in the New Left, was a pioneer fighter for women’s liberation, a Trotskyist activist and leader since her ’20s, a teacher for the last quarter century, and a revolutionary all her adult life. Throughout, she fought tirelessly for the working class, for black people, women, immigrants and all the oppressed. In different arenas, she defended all those exploited and downtrodden by capitalism. She was the candidate of the Spartacist League for New York state assembly and New York City mayor. Later, as an educator and delegate of the United Federation of Teachers, she defended immigrant students and families. Up to her last days, as a central leader of the League for the Fourth International and its U.S. section, the Internationalist Group, Marjorie continued the struggle for international socialist revolution, which was her life. She never stepped back from that goal. It was a measure of Marjorie’s fortitude that in November 2023, when it was increasingly difficult for her to walk, she participated in three Gaza solidarity protests in one week. She was determined to show her opposition to the slaughter by the Israeli Zionists and U.S. imperialists; to refute the slander by the purveyors of genocide who equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism; to speak out on behalf of the Palestinian Arab people under attack, and to defend the rights of others to do so as well. Firm in her communist convictions, she was also a warm collaborator, mentor and friend of so many who worked with her. Her comrades and colleagues cherish her great contributions, which will continue to inspire us and hopefully many others in years to come. Read an extensive account of Marjorie’s revolutionary life. Marjorie Stamberg, Revolutionary Trotskyist, Marxist Educator Who Led Struggles for All the Oppressed (June 2024)  Women’s Liberation and the Class Line A Voyage of Discovery and Rediscovery By Marjorie Stamberg A historical account of the rise of what is now called “second wave feminism” out of the New Left, and what it meant in practice. Marjorie outlines how the most class-conscious fighters against the oppression of women came to grips with the contradiction between feminism and Marxism. Reading Engels and rediscovering the work of pioneering communist women, suppressed by the Stalinists, they were won to the program of women’s liberation through socialist revolution. Women’s Liberation and the Class Line (October 2015)    Marjorie Stamberg Protests Gag Order, Speaks Up for Palestinians In November 2023, when she was already having trouble walking, Marjorie went to three Palestinian solidarity events in one week. She spoke at a protest called by Class Struggle Education Workers on the steps of the headquarters of the NYC Department of Education, against an order by the schools chancellor trying to intimidate teachers, students from protesting the genocidal war on Gaza. Here is what she said (video link in article). Marjorie Stamberg Protests Gag Order, Speaks Up for Palestinians (16 November 2023)  Mobilize Workers Action Against U.S./Israel Genocide in Gaza! “BDS” Dead End: Liberal Divestment Schemes, No Road to Liberation of the Palestinian People Calls for “boycott, divestment and sanctions” (BDS) against Israel were a main demand of just about all of the 100+ encampments that sprang up on college campuses across the United States this spring to protest the genocidal war on Gaza. The encampments served to keep antiwar protests going and even, in a certain sense, represented an escalation from the innumerable marches calling for a ceasefire, which did not diminish the relentless slaughter. Many in the Gaza solidarity encampments were desperately looking for some way to take action against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. But the liberal “divestment” call, while it provides a “hook” to raise demands on local authorities, diverts attention from the most immediate issue: the role of the United States in jointly carrying out, together with the Israeli warmongers, a monstrous genocide in Gaza. And it does not point to a way forward in liberating the Palestinian people from Zionist domination. The fundamental issue is what force to look to: the rulers of U.S. imperialism who liberals think can be pressured into being a force for good, or the power of the international working class. “BDS” Dead End (22 July 2024)  Israel: Not Just an “Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier” for the U.S. (22 July 2024)   Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s First Woman President New Face, Same Old Ploy of the Bourgeoisie The landslide victory of Claudia Sheinbaum, candidate of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) in Mexico’s June 2 presidential elections, has generated enormous enthusiasm in vast sectors of the country. In a country of rampant machismo (male chauvinism), in which the oppression of women takes on blatant forms, the fact that a woman has been elected president represents, and reflects, an important social change. Her election victory also reflects that she is seen as the guarantor of the continuation of the policies of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his bourgeois populist government, in particular the increases of the minimum wage and the welfare measures of AMLO’s social programs. Nevertheless, in the Mexican elections of June 2, the three candidates for the presidency all represented the capitalists. Their differences are at most tactical. Their common purpose is to maintain the system of exploitation of this semicolonial country, in the service of the imperialists. Thus the Grupo Internacionalista, Mexican section of the League for the Fourth International, called for “Not one vote for the bosses’ parties: MORENA, PRI, PAN, PRD, MC, etc. Whoever wins, the exploited and oppressed lose. Forge a revolutionary workers party!” Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s First Woman President (July 2024) From the Previous Issue  The Internationalist No. 72 (January-May 2024)  click above or on image for full list of articles All Out in Solidarity with the Palestinian People! May Day 2024: For International Workers Action Against the Genocidal U.S./Israel War on Gaza! With the barbaric war on Gaza now in its sixth month, it is utterly clear that this is an actual genocide, targeting the entire Palestinian Arab population of what has been termed the world’s largest open-air prison. It is also clear that this is a joint U.S./Israeli war. What’s desperately needed is the mobilization of power that can bring the slaughter to a halt, the power of the working class, in the United States and around the world. So far, calls for labor solidarity have been mainly on paper, and what port shutdowns there have been were mostly called by community groups rather than the unions. This coming May 1, the workers day, should become a day of militant international workers action – including strikes and labor-led mass mobilization – to stop the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza. Recently, the Palestinian General Federation of Labor, Gaza has issued an appeal to unions in the United States to do just that. Class-struggle militants should act now to organize turn this into reality. May Day 2024: For International Workers Action Against the Genocidal War on Gaza! (26 March 2024)  Defend the Palestinians! Defeat the McCarthyite Witch Hunts! Gaza Solidarity Encampments and Cop Repression Spread Across U.S. Democrat Biden, Republicans Smear Protests as “Anti-Semitic” Cops/Security Guards Off Campus! Labor: Defend Student Protesters! As the U.S./Israel war on the Palestinian population of Gaza reached its 200th day, with over 40,000 killed, the horror of the genocidal slaughter mounts relentlessly. While the Democratic administration of U.S. president Joe Biden continues to supply Israel with arms to carry out the butchery, on the home front Democrats and Republicans lyingly label anti-Zionist protests “anti-Semitic.” When the president of Columbia University, Nemat Shafik, groveled before the witch-hunting Congressional inquisitors, vowing to crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters, a Gaza solidarity encampment was erected on the New York City campus. After New York City police cleared the camp, arresting over 100, outrage swept across the country. Solidarity camps proliferated, as did police repression, often brutal. Facing the full weight of the capitalist state, a virulent slander campaign right up to the White House and bipartisan support in Washington for the war on Gaza, liberal pressure politics won't work. The student protesters must look to the power of the workers movement to defend the Palestinians and defeat the imperialist and Zionist warmongers. Gaza Solidarity Encampments and Cop Repression Spread Across U.S. (30 April 2024) From the ICL-LFI Debate In Defense of the Trotskyist Program On January 13, a debate on the subject of “The Fight for the Fourth International Today” was held in New York City between the League for the Fourth International and the International Communist League. (The LFI’s U.S. section is the Internationalist Group; the ICL’s is the Spartacist League.)  The background to the debate was the ICL’s sweeping renunciation of the historic program and revolutionary continuity of the Spartacist tendency, which the “new” SL/ICL now dismisses as “Deformed at Birth.” The new management has declared that the 1996 expulsions that gave rise to the IG and LFI were unprincipled, that the smearing of the Brazilian comrades was despicable, that what the ICL wrote about us for 28 years was a lie, that the ICL betrayed over and over, and much more. But it has no real explanation of what drove them to it, and despite this record of betrayal, it purports to be a revolutionary leadership. The debate underscored that the historic program of the Spartacist tendency belongs to the LFI, the ICL has denounced it and thrown it into the garbage. In fighting in defense of the revolutionary program of Trotskyism that was upheld by the Spartacist tendency for three decades beginning with its inception in the early 1960s, the League for the Fourth International fights for new October revolutions to open a socialist future for the workers and oppressed throughout the world. Read here the presentations, rebuttal and summaries by speakers for the LFI. In Defense of the Trotskyist Program (January 2024)  Debate Between the International Communist League (ICL) and the League for the Fourth International (LFI) New York City, 13 January 2024 Video of full debate After upholding the Trotskyist program for three decades, a deep-going political and organizational crisis of the Spartacist tendency, touched off by the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, led to the expulsion in 1996 of longtime cadres who went on to form the IG and then to join with comrades in Brazil, France and Mexico to found the LFI in 1998. The January 13 debate – chaired by labor historian Bryan Palmer, biographer of U.S. Trotskyism’s founder James P. Cannon – consisted of a first part, “The Fight for the Fourth International Today,” and a second part, “Permanent Revolution.” Each part was followed by a discussion period in which supporters of both organizations and from other groups took part. Debate Between the ICL and LFI (video) (July 2024) Revolutionary Internationalist Youth at SL Forum “Just asking…” At the debate between the International Communist League and the League for the Fourth International, held in New York City on January 13, a leaflet was distributed reprinting remarks by activists of the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (youth section of the Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the LFI) at earlier forums by the Spartacist League (U.S. section of the ICL). The RIY supporters asked pointed questions about the recent line changes by the ICL, which include admissions of “unprincipled” actions against supporters of the LFI. The ICL still has not explained how and why they occurred. The text of the Revolution leaflet is printed here. “Just asking…” (13 January 2024) A Weaponized Smear for Witch-Hunting, Police Repression and Thug Attacks Genocide Defenders Slander Anti-Zionists as “Antisemitic” At a Holocaust Memorial ceremony at the U.S. Capitol, Democratic president Biden denounces a fictitious “ferocious surge of antisemitism” on campuses around the U.S. In witch-hunting hearings, Congressional Republicans demand that professors and teachers be fired for expressing solidarity with Gaza and opposition to the genocidal war. In New York, the mayor has sent police to brutally break up pro-Palestinian protests while the governor has appointed inquisitors to investigate schools and universities. What we are witnessing here is a cynical, orchestrated, bipartisan hysteria to justify U.S./Israeli genocide by smearing opposition to it as “antisemitic.”  And the purpose of this vile slander is to bring down capitalist state repression to silence critics of the mass murder being carried out by the Zionists and imperialists. Yet while slandering the pro-Palestinian protests and encampments as “antisemitic,” the Zionists are in fact making common cause with antisemitic white supremacists, fascistic elements and outright fascists. Meanwhile, the portrayal of Israel as an “apartheid state,” is altogether too generous and misleading. The logic of Zionism is not superexploitation of Palestinian labor by denial of rights, as under South African apartheid, but “ethnic cleansing” by forced population transfer leading to what we are now seeing before our eyes: genocide. The League for the Fourth International calls for an Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East. Genocide Defenders Slander Anti-Zionists as “Antisemitic” (14 May 2024)  NYC May Day 2024 May Day, the international workers holiday, took place this year amid a raging genocidal U.S./Israel Zionist war against the Palestinian people of Gaza, and the continuing U.S./NATO war against Russia over Ukraine. Both wars are way stations on the road to a a third world war, a looming threat centrally aimed at counterrevolution in China, the largest remaining bureaucratically deformed workers state. The League for the Fourth International, virtually alone on the left, defends Russia and China against the imperialist war drive and calls for a binational Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East.  In the United States, May Day came at the height of protest encampments of solidarity with Gaza, with hundreds of protesters arrested in New York City in the early morning hours of May 1. At the City University of New York, CUNY Internationalists quickly organized a protest against the arrests at noon, and then joined the Internationalist contingent for the march. NYC May Day 2024 Mobilize Workers Power to Halt the Genocidal War! Bay Area ILWU Local 10 Calls for Labor Boycott of Arms to Israel Meeting on May 1, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area unanimously passed an important resolution denouncing “the genocidal war on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip,” and stressing that “all the heavy bombs being dropped on Gaza are supplied by the United States, as are all the warplanes from which they dropped.” Recalling that the “ILWU has a long history of defending the rights of the Palestinian people,” the resolution for the union’s upcoming convention declares “the ILWU will refuse to handle military cargo to Israel” and “will honor picket lines protesting the war on Gaza.” It also recalled the union’s actions refusal to load bombs to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and munitions to the death squad junta in El Salvador, as well as the ILWU’s May Day 2008 West Coast port shutdown against the war on Afghanistan and Iraq. Palestinian unions in Gaza, under the bombing and murderous attacks by vengeful Israeli occupation troops, had appealed to unions in the United States in particular, to “be our voice” and undertake action against the slaughter. The call went out from workers in Gaza, and ILWU Local 10 answered, loud and clear. The resolution, by a key local of a powerful union with a track record of fighting on behalf of the oppressed, could help spur workers around the world to concrete action against the Zionist and imperialist war. Bay Area ILWU Local 10 Calls for Labor Boycott of Arms to Israel (14 May 2024)  Germany: For Workers Mobilization Against the War Drive and Police-State Measures! Against Social Democracy (SPD, Die Linke and Satellites) and All Brands of Reformism – Build a Revolutionary Multi-Ethnic Workers Party! Amid the vicious genocide by the United States and Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza – for which Germany, as Israel’s second largest arms supplier, is co-responsible – obligatory support for Zionism has officially been declared “Staatsräson” (in diplomatic jargon raison d’état, or a matter of state overriding any other considerations). The severity of the repressive measures against any and all defense of the Palestinians stands in stark contrast to the dwindling support of the population for this monstrous war crime. The list of demonstrations and assemblies that have been banned or attacked in Germany since October 7 is long. The most recent are the brutal dispersal of the April 20 Berlin demonstration against arms deliveries to Israel and, a week earlier, the protest against the storming of the Palestine Congress. Meanwhile, the ruling class has thrown down the gauntlet: it’s “pensions or rearmament.” Against the war hysteria, the Internationalistische Gruppe calls for workers mobilization against repression and to stop the transport of war material to Ukraine and Israel. Germany: For Workers Mobilization Against the War Drive and Police-State Measures! (1 May 2024) Defend Michael Pröbsting (RCIT) and Der Funke (IMT) Stop Austria’s Repression of Pro-Palestinian Protest On May 2, the trial of leftist pro-Palestine activist Michael Pröbsting in Austria for a video statement expressing solidarity with the Palestinian resistance ended with a “guilty” verdict and a conditional prison sentence of six months. The prosecution cited a leaflet of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency from last October opposing the Zionist state of Israel. Also under attack are two Austrian socialist youth leaders, Sonja and Alex, affiliated with the International Marxist Tendency. This targeted repression against leftists goes together with the banning of Gaza solidarity protests, including one in Vienna on 11 October 2023, at which criminal complaints were filed against more than 300 demonstrators for violating the ban. We reprint here a statement by the League for the Fourth International read at demonstrations in New York and Los Angeles calling for the charges to be dropped. Stop Austria’s Repression of Pro-Palestinian Protest (26 April 2024) Dock Workers: Block Military Cargo to Israel Against the Genocidal War on Palestinians in Gaza! By Jack Heyman The massacre of Palestinians in Gaza is escalating as the Israeli military continues its carnage. The United States is co-responsible for this genocidal war, having supplied the bombs, and the planes from which they are launched. Answering an appeal by the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions for union action to stop arms to Israel, many unions around the world have issued declarations of solidarity with the embattled Palestinians. In Italy militant "rank-and-file" unions have struck and stopped loading of Israeli ships. But the leadership of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), representing U.S. West Coast dock workers, refused to pass a resolution merely calling for a ceasefire n Gaza. The ILWU was long considered a beacon of labor solidarity, having stopped arms to Pinochet in Chile and the military junta in El Salvador, and initiating a 1984 boycott of a ship from apartheid South Africa. Now, although several ILWU locals have passed resolutions and many individual members have participated in protests against the war on Gaza, the leadership has put the kibosh on opposition to the war as it seeks a “seat at the table” in Democrat Joe Biden’s White House. The ILWU tops' increasingly open embrace of class collaboration is likewise reflected in its working for a year without a contract and finally agreeing to a contract with no protection against automation on the docks. What’s urgently needed is a class-struggle leadership . Dock Workers: Block Military Cargo to Israel (15 February 2023) Against the Anti-Picketing “Protocol” and Milei’s Anti-Worker Mega-Decree, Argentina: Smash the “Chainsaw” Assault on Labor and the Unemployed – Fight for a Workers Government! On January 24, Argentina experienced the first national strike since 2019, as trade unions, the left and community organizations mobilized against the avalanche of anti-worker laws of ultrarightist president Javier Milei, who took office in early December. In the strike up to 200,000 demonstrators marched in the capital, Buenos Aires, plus another 150,000 in all the main cities in the country. The impact was limited by the decision of the unions to keep public transportation running until 7 p.m., and above all by the policy of the Peronist union leaders who sought to pressure the deputies and senators with a nationalist appeal. After the relatively small protest of the left on December 20, this time there were tens of thousands in the streets, enough to break the “anti-picketing protocol” of security minister Patricia Bullrich. However, the electoral left and allied piquetero groups limited themselves to asking the Peronist union bosses for a “plan of struggle” instead of organizing a powerful class-struggle mobilization against all the capitalist governments, and to break the imperialist yoke by fighting for a revolutionary workers government. Argentina: Smash the “Chainsaw” Assault on Labor and the Unemployed (23 January 2024)   Port of Oakland Shut Down! All Out to Defend the Palestinian People! On January 13, several thousand protesters came out in the early morning hours to the Port of Oakland, California to stop the loading of a U.S. military ship. As a result of their mass picket in solidarity with the Palestinian people being massacred with U.S.-supplied munitions, workers were not dispatched from the hiring hall of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10. The Internationalist Group issued a leaflet and solidarity statement calling on unions everywhere to take action to stop the supply of arms to Israel, which was distributed to the Bay Area protesters. Port of Oakland Shut Down! All Out to Defend the Palestinian People! (13 January 2024) Portland-Area Unions Call for Workers Action Against U.S./Israel War on Gaza As the massive killing of the Palestinian Arab population of Gaza by the Israeli military continues unabated, in December two construction worker unions in the Portland, Oregon area passed resolutions calling for workers action against the war. The resolutions, by Ironworkers Local 29 and Painters Local 10, stress that this is a U.S./Israel war, and call to support and encourage actions by labor to refuse to handle arms shipments to Israel, as appealed for by the Palestinian trade unions. The resolutions are reproduced on the website of Class Struggle Workers – Portland, which has been urging area unions to adopt such calls for action. Portland-Area Unions Call for Workers Action Against U.S./Israel War on Gaza (December 2023)  Hunter College Speak-Out Defies Intimidation Campaign Defend Gaza – We Will Not Be Silenced! On November 7, more than 100 students and faculty held a speak-out and marched around the campus of Hunter College campus of the City University of New York to protest attempts the silence protest against the U.S./Israel war on Gaza and to regiment universities and colleges. The protest was initiated by the CUNY Internationalists, who declared that the drive for McCarthyite is coming straight from the federal, state and local governments, the media and Wall Street investors, in tandem with professional pro-Israel witch hunters.  Hunter College Speak-Out Defies Intimidation Campaign  (12 November 2023)
Argentine Economy in Freefall, Brutal Austerity On the Way Argentina Elections: Mr. Chainsaw vs. Washington’s Favorite Peronist Workers Left Front (FIT) Tailing After the Peronists On November 19, Argentine voters went to the polls in the second round of presidential elections in the midst of an economic crisis that has hit the most vulnerable sectors of the working class, while the dramatic fall in purchasing power and real wages affects all but the elites. The election was won by Javier Milei, an ultra-conservative, free-market economist and supporter of dollarization, running against Sergio Massa, the minister of economy of the incumbent Peronist government and the official candidate of “stability” (i.e., more of the same). Milei is a supporter of former U.S. president Trump (and of his Brazilian counterpart Bolsonaro) while Massa has collaborated closely with the Biden administration. For the working class, the programs of both bourgeois candidates would result in an economic crisis even more brutal than the current escalation of prices bordering on hyperinflation. There was no choice for the workers in the election. However, in the face of the hysteria of sectors of the government and the left about a supposed “Argentine fascism,” not one of the components of the Workers and Left Front (FIT) called for a “no” vote (blank ballot). This electoral cartel only serves as a left pressure group on Peronist bourgeois populism. Argentine workers should have cast a blank ballot while preparing for sharp class struggle against the coming austerity. Argentina Elections: Mr. Chainsaw vs. Washington’s Favorite Peronist (16 November 2023)   Class Struggle Education Workers Protest D.O.E. Attempt to Ban Opposition to U.S./Israel War Down with the Gag Order Against NYC Teachers! By Class Struggle Education Workers Almost immediately after Israel launched its massive bombing campaign against Gaza, Israel’s imperialist backers went on the warpath to squelch opposition to the unfolding Zionist slaughter. In the United States the repressive campaign was directed at universities in particular, where support for the Palestinians is widespread, but also against K-12 schools. Any and all protests against Israel’s mass murder were labeled anti-Semitic. In New York City, as Palestinian solidarity protests mushroomed, ex-cop mayor Eric Adams and his schools chancellor David Banks issued a joint statement blasting “toxic rhetoric and division at educational institutions.” Then, on the day before a November 9 day of action, walkout and after-school rally, which was endorsed by several teacher groups, Banks fired off an email decreeing that teachers and staff “should not express their personal views about political matters during the school day” or while on school grounds, or “even outside of the workplace and via social media posts or otherwise.” Class Struggle Education Workers responded with a protest outside the Department of Education headquarters on November 16.  Down with the Gag Order Against NYC Teachers! (30 November 2023)  Voces del Epicentro Un folleto de Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas (click on image to download pdf) As the coronavirus pandemic erupted in the United States, the first epicenter was in the neighborhoods of New York City with the highest number of immigrants, where Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas (Class Struggle Immigrant Workers) has been active. Read the reports from TIC activists and teachers in Class Struggle Education Workers on the impact of this capitalist disaster, and the lessons to be drawn from it. Also reports from the strike of packinghouse workers in Yakima Valley, Washington. (In Spanish) To order a print copy of the pamphlet, click here Defend Combative Immigrant Workers Against Repression Italy: Draghi Government of Repression, Impoverishment and Death Mobilize the Entire Working Class to Defeat All-Sided Attack! No to Dead End of Reformism – Forge a Revolutionary Workers Party! In the ongoing emergency of this second year of the coronavirus pandemic, the Italian bourgeoisie decided to dump the weak and unstable coalition government of the Democratic Party and Cinque Stelle (Five Stars) movement, replacing it with Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank. The first shots of the Draghi government have been to increase repression against the workers movement, in particular against the S.I. Cobas “rank-and-file” union of mainly immigrant workers. Some of the most deeply exploited sectors of the working class have undertaken trade-union and solidarity actions, centered on logistics. The response of much of the ostensibly socialist left has been to form an Action Pact with political supporters of S.I. Cobas, a political coalition of heterogeneous forces based on a reformist 15-point political program. This program consists overwhelmingly of appeals for the capitalist government to take action, rather than for workers themselves to enforce their demands. What genuine communists must say to the masses in the harrowing coronavirus crisis is that the working class must establish its revolutionary class rule, seizing and collectivizing the means of production and organizing production to satisfy human need, not the profits of the few. This fight requires above all the forging of a revolutionary workers party. Italy: Draghi Government of Repression, Impoverishment and Death (26 April 2021)  For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! Slavery and the Constitution: Origins of U.S. Capitalist “Democracy” Long ago and far away in the B.C. (Before Coronavirus) era, bourgeois politics in the United States fixated briefly on impeachment. The Democrats leading the lower house of Congress did not, of course, impeach Donald Trump for his crimes against the oppressed, for example his vicious persecution of immigrants in the U.S. After all, the record deportations under the Democratic administration of “deporter-in-chief” Barack Obama paved the way for Trump. Trump was “brought up on charges by the wrong class for the wrong crimes,” we noted at the time. One generation after another is brought up with the mythology of the Constitution as an embodiment of “democracy” in general, to be worshiped alongside the “Founding Fathers.” Yet the authors of the Constitution understood very well that they represented not “the people” in general but the ruling class of planters and merchants, and wrote it to safeguard their interests, in particular to bolster and uphold the power of the slaveowners in the newly established American republic. The U.S. Constitution established a series of institutions that are strikingly anti-democratic. They remained so even after slavery’s abolition through the Civil War. Revolutionaries explain the need for a revolutionary workers party to lead a socialist revolution to overthrow the entire capitalist system. Slavery and the Constitution: Origins of U.S. Capitalist “Democracy” (August 2020) PSL Targeted for Marches Against Cop Murder of Elijah McClain Defend Denver Anti-Racist Protest Leaders! On Thursday, September 17, police raids were carried out in Denver, Colorado against the organizers of protests denouncing the racist murder of Elijah McClain, a young black man, by police in suburban Aurora in August 2019. Six of the protest leaders were arrested, including four members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which has played a leading role in the protests. They have outrageously been charged with multiple serious felonies, including the absurd charge of “kidnapping.” Following Trump’s failed attempt at imposing martial law in Washington, D.C. and the subsedquent the dispatch of federal agents to Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Denver arrests mark a new escalation of police-state measures that are a threat to the civil liberties of all. The Internationalist Group  and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth denounce this ominous attack on the right to protest. We demand that the arrested activists be immediately released and that all charges against them be dropped. Defend Denver Anti-Racist Protest Leaders! (18 September 2020) Elijah McClain (1996-2019) (August 2020) “We’re All in This Together.” You Think? Top Ten Lies in the Time of Coronavirus and Mass Protests By Charles Brover U.S. capitalism is in the midst of a triple whammy crisis – economic, social, and public health. Inspiring massive protests against racism and cop terror not seen in their size and scope since the 1960s have set this nation’s cities aflame day after day, and have spread internationally. The historic protests are occurring against the backdrop of unconscionable government delay, deception, ignorant happy talk, and anti-scientific incompetence. Official public health malpractice has driven the confirmed death toll from COVID-19 to over 160,000. This plague is disproportionately ravaging black, Latino, and immigrant working class communities. For Marxist revolutionaries the racist system that is at the root of the oppression of black people in the U.S. (and elsewhere) is class-based capitalism. While the cities are in paroxysms of rage, grief and plague; while millions are fighting to save their livelihoods and their lives, the capitalist rulers, their politicians, and tamed pundits promote lies, damn lies, and even more murderous lies. Here are our top ten picks. Top Ten Lies in the Time of Coronavirus and Mass Protests (8 August 2020)   Millions of Undocumented Immigrants and Their Families Facing the Abyss New York: We Demand Equal Treatment and Emergency Support for Excluded Workers! Declaration of Class Struggle International Workers (TIC) In the sixth month of the health crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pademic, infections are spiking in much of the country while mass unemployment continues to grow and marches against racist police brutality continue. New storms of crisis are coming for the working class, and for immigrants in particular, beginning with a threatened wave of evictions. Nationally, undocumented immigrants are denied “stimulus” aid, unemployment benefits or any official support. In New York some 200,000 undocumented workers have lost their jobs or cannot find work, while over a million workers considered “essential,” a majority of them immigrants, receive poverty wages while running great risk of contracting the virus. Class Struggle International Workers demands that the state of New York include all workers, particularly the undocumented and those in the “gig economy,” among those eligible for unemployment benefits; that state and city governments make up for the exclusion of immigrants from federal support; and that rent be canceled and all residential evictions be prohibited during the pandemic. New York: We Demand Equal Treatment and Emergency Support for Excluded Workers! (11 August 2020) Urgent: Protest Arrest of Leftists in Bolivia The rightist de facto government of Bolivia that seized power in last month’s “civic-police-military” coup has carried out a new act of repression, arresting Carlos Cornejo, correspondent of leftist Internet publication La Izquierda Diario, and the artist Leonel Jurado, charging them with “sedition.” They were seized yesterday afternoon in the city of El Alto, where they were helping prepare an event in solidarity with families of the at least ten people killed in the police massacre against a protest at the Senkata gas plant there on November 19. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International demand the immediate liberation and dropping of all charges against Carlos Cornejo, Leonel Jurado and all victims of rightist repression in Bolivia! Urgent: Protest Arrest of Leftists in Bolivia (17 December 2019) Left Reformists in Existential Crisis An Internationalist Group Pamphlet (click on image to download pdf) With the Bernie Sanders candidacy and the dramatic growth of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America, the left reformists have been thrown into crisis. This 84-page pamphlet features documents from oppositionists who fought inside left groups to uphold the revolutionary politics of Lenin and Trotsky. To order a print copy of the pamphlet, click here Socialist Action’s “Solidarity with Solidarity” How Fake Trotskyists Carried the Bags for Imperialism While the reformist left in the United States is in profound crisis, tripping over each other as they chase after the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America, Socialist Action has remained relatively stationary and appears more red in comparison with those social democrats who are now being devoured by their own opportunism. In reality, SA’s program is pink social democracy. At every key juncture where defense of the degenerated/deformed workers states has been posed point-blank, Socialist Action has lined up with imperialism, from Poland in 1981 to the USSR in 1991 and continuing today. Poland was a key episode in the imperialist drive against the Soviet bloc, which led to capitalist restoration whose devastating consequences continue to be felt around the world. Today SA denounces China as imperialist and North Korea as capitalist while genuine Trotskyists defend them against imperialist threats and attack. And it’s not just words. When the chips were down, these fake-Trotskyists hailed their comrades’ direct and concrete role in delivering vital  CIA-financed equipment to counterrevolutionary Polish Solidarność. Read the details here. How Fake Trotskyists Carried the Bags for Imperialism (April 2019) “American Apartheid” by Design A Review of Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America By Charles Brover, Class Struggle Education Workers After more than a decade of hard struggle and the passage of laws in the mid-1960s against official Jim Crow segregation, the civil rights movement suddenly stopped. What was termed de facto segregation was deemed off-limits, or at least had to be left for another day. Rothstein’s book conclusively proves that rigid residential segregation and discrimination against African American, Latino and Asian minorities was always de jure, officially sanctioned. This has had a devastating effect on everything from school integration to murderous police repression. But while laying out key elements of the structural foundation of black oppression in the U.S., The Color of Law fails to go to their root in the system of racist American capitalism. In the United States in 2016 there were 2.3 million  evictions: 6,300 a day, four every minute. And with over 3.5 million homeless people in the country, there are 19 million unoccupied dwellings. This powerful essay from Class Struggle Education Workers demonstrates that it will take nothing short of a socialist revolution to solve the housing question. “American Apartheid” by Design (21 November 2018)  While “Democratic Socialist” Ocasio-Cortez Chimes In Bipartisan War Criminals Celebrate War Hawk John McCain U.S. imperialism lost one of its most vocal and active warmongers on August 25 – Arizona Republican senator John McCain. Universally praised by ruling-class politicians as a “war hero” and “maverick,” McCain’s funeral at the National Cathedral was attended by some of the most infamous mass murderers of this and the last century, from Henry Kissinger to former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Far from being a “war hero,” a “man of honor” or paragon of “human decency,” Senator John McCain was a war criminal who bombed civilians. He was shot down over North Vietnam on a bombing run against a civilian factory. But McCain’s most valuable service to U.S. imperialism was as an inveterate war hawk in Congress. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Ukraine, Libya and Syria, he beat the drums for murderous imperialist intervention. What’s striking about McCain’s war crimes and endless warmongering is that in virtually all cases, he was joined or supported by Democratic politicians. And, notably, among those praising McCain was Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her eulogy was consciously paying the price of admission to the bipartisan imperialist club of the U.S. Congress. Bipartisan War Criminals Celebrate War Hawk John McCain (September 2018)  As The Boss, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Blames Black Community for Violence Chicago: Democrat-Led Cops Continue Racist Killing Spree For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution On July 14, Chicago police gunned down yet another black person, Harith Augustus, a barber. “Snoop” Augustus, known as a peaceful man, was stopped on the pretext of exhibiting the “characteristics of an armed person,” and was shot dead even though he had a valid gun license. For the police in this rigidly segregated city, and throughout this country founded on the bedrock of slavery, it is always open season on black people. And on Latinos, immigrants, Native Americans … the list goes on. Moreover, in Chicago and almost every other big city, Democrats are the bosses of the racist killer cops. This is all coming to a head in the upcoming trial of killer cop Jason Van Dyke for the murder of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. And Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel, running for a third term, is stoking racist reaction by blaming lax “morals” in the black community for the violence engendered by rampant poverty, unemployment and brutal police occupation. Yet some of the same themes are echoed in protests, where instead of denouncing racist police repression the focus is on opposition to “gun violence” in general. Talk of “reforming” the police or controlling guns only serves to divert protest away from a revolutionary perspective and to strengthen the repressive agencies of the capitalist state, while leading protesters into the dead-end of bourgeois pressure politics. The stark fact is that there is no solution to war, poverty and racist repression under capitalism. Chicago: Democrat-Led Cops Continue Racist Killing Spree (August 2018)  DSA: Fronting for the Democrats An Internationalist Group Pamphlet (click on image to download pdf) A 70-page pamphlet analyzing the organizational and political history of the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America. Includes articles on: The ABCs of the DSA (August 2017) Imperialist Social Democracy vs. Black Liberation (December 2017) The Real Heritage of Michael Harrington's DSA “Democratic Socialism” in the Service of U.S. Imperialism (February 2018) DSA Debacle Over Cop “Union” Organizer (September 2017) DSA Dodges Debate: “Socialism: What It Is (and Isn’t)” (January 2018) Bernie Sanders and the Pressure Politics of the Opportunist Left (June 2015) No, Bernie Sanders Is Not a Socialist (March 2016) Yesterday’s “Obama Socialists,” Today’s Bernie Boosters (December 2015) James P. Cannon on “Third Parties” To order a print copy of the pamphlet, click here Bourgeois Populism and Social-Democratic Reformism: A Dead End Italy: Anti-Immigrant Election Hysteria The campaign for the March 4 Italian elections has been dominated by vile xenophobic anti-immigrant chauvinism. All the competing bourgeois parties and coalitions attack the bogeyman of “illegal immigration.” The racist Lega (ex-Nord)  rails about the “invasion of aliens, drug pushers, delinquents and illegals,” raising slogans such as “Italians first! Now or never! Stop the invasion!” With the populist Cinque Stelle (Five Star) movement running first in the opinion polls, its historic leader, Beppe Grillo, recently called for immediately deporting all “illegals.” The strategy of the Democratic Party government has been to put itself at the head of the anti-immigrant hysteria by aggressively extending the sway of Italian imperialism in the Mediterranean, Libya and to the south. This imperialist drive to the south is accompanied by a campaign of all-sided racist repression against immigrants and refugee seekers in Italy. What the domesticated left is counterposing to the three main bourgeois coalitions of Forza Italia/Lega, Cinque Stelle and the PD with its various appendages of homeless bourgeois politicians, is a mixture of bourgeois populism and social-democratic reformism. in the present climate of anti-immigrant hysteria and fascist attacks, what is needed are mass mobilizations bringing out the power of the working class to stop the fascists. Above all, we must forge a genuinely Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard.  Italy: Anti-Immigrant Election Hysteria (24 February 2018)  (italiano) Elezioni del 4 Marzo: Isteria anti-immigrati (24 febbraio 2018) Boston: Let Siham Byah Come Home! No Deportations! By Class Struggle Education League On January 27, hundreds of defenders of immigrant rights from many leftist organizations, labor unions, churches and sanctuary networks rallied in Boston to protest the deportation of Siham Byah. A prominent Occupy Boston activist and single mother, Byah was grabbed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) police last November 7, torn from her son, beaten in a local jail, driven to Virginia and then deported to Morocco. The Class Struggle Education League, based in Lowell, Mass. and New Hampshire participated in the protest, emphasizing the importance of mobilizing the power of workers action to stop the I.C.E. deportation machine. It also noted the parallel to the struggle against slave-catchers under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, a battle which came to a head in Boston and set the stage for the U.S. Civil War. The CSEL is undertaking joint work with the Internationalist Group. Boston: Let Siham Byah Come Home! No Deportations! (4 February 2018)  Guess Who’s Bernie Sanders’ Foreign Policy Go-To Guy, and What Power Bishop Is His Vatican Fixer But, of course, one and the same Jeffrey Sachs who designed the post-counterrevolution “shock treatment” in Poland. Also in Bolivia where it led to tens of thousands of workers fired and brutal anti-union repression. In preparation for the no-photo-op pope-meet-and-greet, Bernie and Jeffrey dined with Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, “the pope’s right-hand man and one of the Vatican’s top power players.” This is the same cardinal who helped engineer (together with Hillary Clinton) the 2009 Honduran coup, and before that covered up for bloody massacres and “disappearances” in the 1980s. But then, Pope Francis himself is a veteran of Argentina’s 1970s dirty war. Guess Who's Bernie Sanders’ Foreign Policy Go-To Guy, and His Power Bishop Vatican Fixer (17 April 2016) A Question of Whose Class Interests Prevail Flint Water Crisis: Capitalism Is Poisoning Us The residents of Flint, Michigan have been living a nightmare ever since in early 2014 the city’s state-appointed “emergency manager” and the governor’s office decided to switch the water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. As a result, the population has been subjected to lead poisoning, particularly affecting the very young and elderly. The levels of contamination are astronomical. For almost two years Republican state authorities and Democratic federal officials refused to do anything about complaints. Now an emergency has been proclaimed, but the water is still undrinkable. Meanwhile, the same “emergency manager” has been overseeing Detroit schools as they descend further into the abyss. The emergency has been created by decaying capitalism: industrial pollution, closing factories and a bipartisan attack on teachers and public education. The dictatorial managers must be kicked out, but changing parties will change nothing. The bottom-line issue is which class is in power. Capitalism is literally poisoning our futures. Flint Water Crisis: Capitalism Is Poisoning Us (3 March 2016) The State of Pennsylvania Seeks to Bar His Lawyer The Frame-Up of Corey Walker By Charles Brover Corey Walker was arrested in July 1996 on a bogus murder charge from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He has been behind bars ever since. Evidence of his innocence was withheld. He is the victim of prosecutorial misconduct and incompetent legal representation. Lorenzo Johnson, who was arrested in the same case, also remains in prison even though a federal appeals court recognized the insufficiency of the evidence against him, but was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court. Now the state is trying to deny Walker the attorney of his choice, Rachel Wolkenstein, who has defended Mumia Abu-Jamal. Pennsylvania authorities will stop at nothing to cover up lying and manufacture of evidence, coercion of witnesses and suppression of evidence of innocence by police and prosecutors. This requires silencing Corey Walker and short-circuiting his legal appeal. In seeking to disqualify Wolkenstein from representing him, the state attorney general's office cites her political views that the judicial system is an organ of racist oppression that must be overthrown by socialist revolution. This witch-hunting attack and the continued incarceration of Walker and Johnson go to the heart of Jim Crow “justice system.” Free Corey Walker and Lorenzo Johnson! The Frame-Up of Corey Walker (4 February 2016) Jim Crow Justice and the Capitalist State (4 February 2016) Whose Life Is On the Line? Cop Stats (4 February 2016) Bad Apples, Broken Windows, and Other Myths About the Police (4 February 2016) Occupation of Hundreds of Schools Blocks Threatened Closures Student Revolt Shakes São Paulo, Brazil By Class Struggle Workers/UFT For the last three weeks, the city of São Paulo, Brazil has been convulsed by a combative upheaval of high school students protesting the state government’s plan to close 92 schools and order hundreds of thousands of students to change schools. When the state governor tried to ram through this plan without consultation, students responded by occupying almost 200 schools. Then, when military police began clearing out occupied schools this week, students took chairs and tables and set up class in busy intersections and highways. The students, backed by teachers, also refused to take high-stakes test. After several days, the governor backed down. This  is a dramatic example of how the international capitalist offensive against public education should be fought – by mass action in the streets, bringing out students, teachers, parents and mobilizing the power of the working class. Student Revolt Shakes São Paulo, Brazil (4 December 2015) The Haitian Revolution and U.S. Imperialism July 28 marks the 100th anniversary of the first U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915, under Democratic president Woodrow Wilson. This led to an occupation of 19 years, as well as occupations of the Dominican Republic next door, of Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras and Veracruz, Mexico, and followed the 1898 U.S. invasion and occupation of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Philippines. But the occupations didn't stop there. In 1994, Democrat Bill Clinton invaded Haiti a second time, and in 2004 Republican George Bush II invaded a third time. Haiti today continues under imperialist occupation, this time outsourced to a United Nations “peacekeeping” force. As proletarian internationalist opponents of imperialism, on this centenary we republish articles from Workers Vanguard when it was the voice of revolutionary Trotskyism on the 1915-34 U.S. occupation, and a two-part series on Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution that led to the first black republic in history, as well as sparking slave revolts throughout the Caribbean and in the United States. (30 July 2015) Yankee Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934 Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, Part 1 Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, Part 2 Protest the Police Lynching of Sandra Bland On July 10, Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African American activist and education worker, was driving from Illinois to her new job at the historically black Prairie View A&M University in Texas, her alma mater. Sandra was pulled over by a Texas Ranger, supposedly for changing lanes without signalling. The trooper abusively demanded she get out of the car, theatening to use a Taser electric shock on her. After having her head slammed on the ground, Sandra was arrested for supposed “assault on a public servant,” for insisting on her rights. Three days later, she was found dead in her cell in Waller  County, Texas. The authorities claim she committed suicide. We say the police are guilty. Sandra was lynched by the cops. On July 22, hundreds gathered in New York City's Union Square to protest the police murder of Sandra Bland. Class Struggle Education Workers, CUNY Internationalist Clubs and the Internationalist Group joined in. Protest the Police Lynching of Sandra Bland (22 July 2015) (video) NYC May Day 2015 The Internationalist Group, CUNY Internationalist Clubs and Class Struggle Education workers had a spirited contingent in the May Day march in New York City. Leading the contingent was a group with red flags with the hammer, sickle and 4 of the Fourth International. Then came a banner made by the Hunter Internationalist Club, proclaiming:“Ayotzinapa-Ferguson-NYC, Smash the Racist Capitalist State, Workers to Power. Signs emphasized the call to Defend Black Baltimore following the occupation of the city by the National Guard to squelch the upheaval over the police murder of Freddie Gray, and to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, who faces execution in prison by deliberate medical neglect. Also highlighted was the call for workers action against police terror, noting the historic action by ILWU Local 10 that shut down the port of Oakland on May Day and marched on City Hall calling to stop police terror. NYC May Day 2015 video (9 May 2015) NYC May Day 2015 photos (6 May 2015) NYC May Day 2011 video NYC May Day 2010 video Sunset Park Fights Back Against Police Attack It’s been only two months since Eric Garner was chokeholded to death in Staten Island by the racist cops, and barely a month and a half since the police murder of 17-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But despite the national outcry and a thousands-strong march in New York in late August, two incidents in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn show once again the face of racist police violence under liberal Democratic NYC mayor Bill de Blasio. The first involved a heavy‑duty arrest of a vendor after a festival in the park; in the second, a cop slammed a pregnant woman on the pavement on her abdomen and her son and husband were arrested. The residents of this heavily immigrant neighborhood feel singled out for aggressive enforcement under NYPD chief William Bratton’s “broken windows” strategy of massive arrests for minor infractions. On Saturday, September 27, some 300 people came out to protest against the brutal police siege. While many called for Bratton’s resignation, racist cop terror is endemic in capitalist America. To put a stop to it will require nothing less than workers revolution. Sunset Park Fights Back Against Police Attack (28 September 2014) Defend North Korea and China Against Imperialism and Counterrevolution U.S. War Provocations Push Korea to the Brink For the Revolutionary Reunification of Korea, North and South! Over the last month and a half, the United States and South Korea have engaged in an escalating series of military provocations against North Korea. Simultaneous “war games” have simulated a nuclear aerial bombing of the North, a ground invasion from the South, annihilation of the leadership and the “insertion” of tens of thousands of U.S. troops searching for nukes. While the imperialist media are, as usual, strenuously demonizing the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and playing up blustering statements coming out of the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, the Pentagon has been laying the basis for a military strike against the North. The whole operation is part of detailed plan elaborated by the Obama administration, dubbed “the playbook,” for U.S. shows of force. But this is no football game. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International defend North Korea, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, against the war provocations, economic blockade and any attack by U.S. imperialism and its South Korean junior partners, no matter how it starts. We also defend North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, its main deterrent against a war by the power which laid waste to the North in the Korean War. U.S. War Provocations Push Korea to the Brink (13 April 2013)

The founding statement of the League for the Fourth International La Declaración de la Liga por la IV Internacional se encuentra aquí en español.  La Déclaration de la Ligue pour la Quatrième Internationale se retrouve ici en français.  A Declaração da Liga pela Quarta Internacional é disponível aqui no português. Deklarasyon ng Liga para sa Ika-Apat na Internasyonal. Introducing The Internationalist El Internacionalista es el órgano en español de la Liga por la IV Internacional.  Vanguarda Operária é o jornal da  Liga Quarta-Internacionalista  do Brasil.  Liga für die Vierte Internationale Artikel und Erklärungen der LIVI auf Deutsch.

Contact us at the following addresses: U.S.A. To contact the League for the Fourth International write to: Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY, 10008, U.S.A. Tel (212) 460-0983. Fax (212) 614-8711  E-mail: internationalistgroup@msn.com  BRAZIL To contact the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil write to: Caixa Postal 084027, CEP 27251-970, Volta Redonda, RJ, Brazil  Caixa Postal 3982, CEP 20010-974, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil E-mail: lqb1996@yahoo.com.br GERMANY To contact the Internationalistische Gruppe in Germany, write to:  Postfach 80 07 21, 21007 Hamburg, Germany  E-mail: permanenterevolution@posteo.de ITALY To contact the Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia, write to: Anna Chiaraluce, C.P. N. 78, Ufficio Postale San Sisto, 06132 Perugia (PG), Italy E-mail: it_internazionalista@yahoo.com MEXICO To contact the Grupo Internacionalista/México write to: Apartado Postal 12-201, Admón. Postal Obrero Mundial, CP 03001, Mexico D.F, Mexico E-mail: grupointernacionalista@yahoo.com.mx

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