"The UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, set the tone of the conference by announcing “humanity is heading for collective suicide.” This apocalyptic warning, plus the GAP report, were intended to galvanise the COP into decisive action. Did it work? Even asking this question verges on the ridiculous. All previous COPs have failed to deliver any reduction of emissions and this one, far from being “the conference of implementation”, followed the same well beaten path."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-08/capitalism-takes-one-more-step-towards-our-extinction

"Inequality, the rising fortunes of a numerically insignificant elite, the advance in pauperisation, are symptoms of the disease. The disease itself is capitalism. The symptoms cannot be tackled without eliminating the disease. This is what we as serious Marxists propose. Not asking the state to tax the rich, whose control of the political structures of society means such measures will always fall short of the objective of halting the concentration of wealth in the hands of a minority, which is an essential aspect of the capitalist process, but the revolutionary abolition of class society."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-10/inequality-is-a-symptom-capitalism-is-the-disease-revolution-is-the-cure

"The working class is the only force that can stop the war — by ending capitalism, which is the driver of war in the modern world. But at the moment the working class is weak and divided. In much of the world it is — happily or unhappily — tied to the nation, and hardly aware of itself as an international class that has the historic mission to overthrow capitalism and create a worldwide socialist society. In this new situation, revolutionary groups (and ostensibly revolutionary groups) have been casting around trying to understand what is happening, and finding parallels in the history of the workers’ movement."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-13/the-war-in-ukraine-the-working-class-and-the-future-international

"Some might point out that the movement of the continental plates, at the origin of the earthquake, cannot be stopped, which is true, indeed, banal, but, if we cannot completely avoid the consequences of geological movements on people, we can at least also significantly mitigate them. In fact, people live in certain socio-economic and political contexts, and it is these, in the final analysis, which influence, not to say determine, the number of victims and the extent of destruction. The social formations in which "man" lives today are those designed by capitalism, in which the only thing that matters is the accumulation of money, of profit extorted with the exploitation of wage labour, and its metamorphosis into interest and land rent."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-19/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-natural-disaster-in-a-capitalist-world

Today marks 175 years since the publication of the Communist Manifesto. For this occasion, we share here an article written 25 years ago for what was then the 150th anniversary.

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/1996-03-01/is-the-communist-manifesto-still-relevant-today

"The period between the 1830s and the 1880s saw the working class arrive on the historical stage as a class-for-itself properly speaking. This was the era when workers began to successfully form the first political parties and trade unions; this is when the First International was founded in an attempt to unite the political and the economic struggles of the working class. On the other hand, the period between the 1890s and the 1920s, when syndicalism emerged, coincided with the transition towards the imperialist phase of capitalism. This was no accident – the increasing centralisation of capital demanded the increasing centralisation of labour. Syndicalism was inherently associated with the historical process of the centralisation of local trade unions and workers’ societies into federations on the national level."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-23/syndicalism-then-and-now

"One year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine nothing has happened to in any way change our view that this is more than a war over Ukraine. It is the next step in the growing imperialist rivalry for economic control of the resources of the planet which capitalist production has so degraded over the last two centuries. It is a real step towards generalised warfare to add to the myriad of conflicts which have already created 100 million refugees across the world."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-24/one-year-since-the-invasion-of-ukraine-on-the-road-to-world-war-three

"As explained in our previous issue, we have decided to re-issue a serialised and updated version of an article which appeared almost 50 years ago in only the second edition of the first series of Revolutionary Perspectives, when the group that was to become the CWO was setting out its Marxist political analysis. Apart from some additional commentary, mainly to address concerns by contemporary readers, most of the additions are in fact re-insertions of material from the original draft which had at the time been omitted to save space."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-02-28/capitalism-s-economic-foundations-part-ii

"Only by recognising that capitalist society offers them nothing but increasing exploitation and ruinous conditions of life on behalf of a parasitic class can workers direct their efforts to destroy this murderous system and build a new one in which they alone plan production for their collective needs and not individual profit. However, the current union framework offers no such perspective. By agitating nearly exclusively for wage increases and splintering the class amongst each industry and sector, allowing themselves to be constrained by anti-strike legislation, and making bureaucratic manoeuvres behind their members’ backs, they prevent the workers from becoming a genuinely revolutionary class for itself and discovering the necessary political forms it needs to fight back in this intensifying class war."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-03/unite-the-strikes

"This year, we repeat the fundamental message that the ‘liberation’ of women in general, and working-class women in particular, can only come about with the end of capitalism. It is only through the destruction of this rotten system that the working class as a whole will be able to establish a genuine human community that can allow everyone to be free."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-08/international-working-women-s-day-against-all-oppression-and-exploitation

"On 14 February 2023, the "Charter of Minimum Demands of Independent Union and Civil Organisations of Iran" translated below was published with the signatures of 20 organisations and institutions. We don't know much about the background and history of how this Charter has come about, but we have previously reported on the struggles of three of the signatories – Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Workers’ Syndicate, the Council for Organising Protests by Oil Contract Workers and the Coordinating Council of Trade Union Organisations of Iranian Teachers – and published some of their statements."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-06/iranian-workers-need-an-internationalist-class-programme

"The reformist Holy Trinity – activism, trade unionism and parliamentarianism – has been joined by the "Enough is Enough" campaign. Its 5 demands are "a real pay rise," cheaper and nationalised energy, using state welfare programs to limit food poverty and homelessness, and – of course – taxing the rich. They talk of "rights", "national disgrace", "government duty", “patriotic gestures” and complain about the "super-rich" and "big businesses." Like "Don’t Pay", this is again an attempt to make capitalism fair. If only the rich were taxed, state spending redistributed and different politicians (Labour) were in control, the system could be made fair. But this system, based on exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class, can never be made fair, and the entire ruling class and their political parties, including Labour, are committed to this."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-12/capitalism-cannot-be-made-fair

"Blinken and Biden have upped their rhetoric here. Not only has Blinken used it as an attempt to gain a “public apology” from China, which China refused. The administration is now making pronouncements that China may be considering supplying lethal military aid to Russia for the war in Ukraine, and that China may have already supplied non-lethal military aid for that purpose (armor, uniforms, etc.), on top of the economic assistance that China has provided Russia in the form of new markets for oil to replace the lost European ones. And this is of course always linked with China’s plans for Taiwan (which the US is now saying it will go to war with China over)."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-14/us-ramps-up-anti-chinese-aggression-amidst-maneuvers-over-ukraine

"The war is not worth a drop of workers’ blood. In imperialist war there are no good sides or lesser evils. Any political support for either side, no matter how qualified, is support for imperialism; it represents abandoning the interests of the working class and supporting those of the capitalists and the crossing of class barricades."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-17/ukraine-war-no-to-imperialist-war-yes-to-class-war

"We don't have to show why it is imperative to reject this new attack, nor is it up for us to propose a more just reform. The balance of the budgets of the bourgeois state, the health of the companies or that of the national economy are none of our business! The concessions, rights or advantages obtained in the interest of the workers are determined by the struggle, the balance of power between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie whose interests are radically opposed. Nothing is secured, as long as capitalism lasts, it will try to take back what it was forced to give up. Instead, we must think about organising our fightback!"

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-20/inflation-pensions-war-spiral-only-open-mass-struggle-can-stop-the-descent-into

"No matter what promises politicians and their parties make to working people to secure our support, we know that these promises, whether kept or unkept, will not make a single dent in the crisis of capitalism or improve our living conditions one bit under this system. Indeed, there is no law that could sate capital’s “vampire thirst for the blood of living labour”. And consequently, no method for running a competitive capitalist economy in the interest of the working class."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-24/nsw-elections-no-matter-which-party-gets-in-power-it-s-capital-who-wins

"We workers have to recognise that "there is no homeland to defend" and that "the only war worth fighting is the class war". We have to take up the struggle of the world proletariat, not that of some nation or ethnicity. The internationalist communists of the world must patiently reorganise their revolutionary forces to build a future international revolutionary party, just as the Zimmerwald left did over a century ago."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-25/from-the-zimmerwald-left-to-the-establishment-of-the-communist-international

"The working class across the globe is being asked to pay for the economic effects of its supply chain disruptions be it heating in Berlin or food security in Cairo. The deterioration of real wages is being met by a more proactive state in crushing strikes from the American rail workers to Ontario educators and Newfoundland paramedics. And with the above, it becomes clear that, in the tundra, both the NATO alliance and Russia are digging in as ICBMs in the Kola Peninsula and Nebraska aim at each other."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-27/trenches-of-the-tundra

"We reproduce here the statement by the group Camarade, one of whose members was grievously injured by the police during the demonstration on 25 March. We believe that the brutality of police repression, like something out of a war zone, is no accident. It is linked on the one hand to the gravity of the various crises confronting the bourgeoisie, and on the other hand to the ongoing imperialist war."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-28/statement-concerning-s-comrade-who-is-in-a-life-threatening-condition-following

"The mutiny of Terrace is just one of many in our class’s history which dismisses the myth that the Second Imperialist War was a period of social peace on the home front. With today’s imperialist tensions, it serves as a reference against the notion of national unity for the great, justified and heroic slaughter of our class. When the veneer of civilization was coming apart, two class perspectives opposed each other."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-29/the-terrace-mutiny-of-1944

"Pitched battles in the class war were fought across the country; shipyard workers in Quebec and the Maritimes, workers at the transit system, steel mills, and an aircraft plant in Montreal, steelworkers in Sault-Sainte-Marie, ON, Trenton, ON, and Sydney, Nova Scotia, miners in Kirkland Lake, ON, and Ford auto workers in Windsor all took to illegal strikes in defence of their living conditions."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-03-31/the-good-war-of-wwii-class-struggle