"Teaching strikes in Scotland and Wales have already ended with below inflation pay rises of 7% and 8% respectively as across the board what started as a huge strike wave is fizzling out, a series of compromises between a government unwilling to pay and union leaders unwilling to fight. For any strike to succeed it must be led by the workers themselves, organised across workplaces and able to freely discuss their concerns, put forward their own demands and keep up pressure against management instead of surrendering its autonomy to a middle-man, only interested in getting them back to work. Can you afford to wait for the next round of balloting?"

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-05-08/education-funding-crisis-or-structural-crisis

"In the book Evans attempts to show that anarchist resistance to this process of state reconstruction was more widespread and serious than generally assumed. To this end, over the 200 or so pages we are presented with a chronological overview of the struggle between the oppositional and collaborationist currents within the Spanish anarchist movement that took place between the years 1931 and 1939. It is worth summarising that history before we comment on some of its political implications."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-05-11/revolution-and-the-state-anarchism-in-the-spanish-civil-war

"Elections are often touted as the cornerstone of democracy, the means by which people exercise their political power and shape the future of their society. However, under capitalism, the realities are far from this idealistic image. The working class will not see its own emancipation on the ballot paper, but only the parties and representatives of various bourgeois factions that are candidates for our exploitation."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-05-14/turkish-elections-the-crisis-of-capitalism-will-not-be-resolved-at-the-ballot

"The strike is yours! Decide on these tactics together, union mandated or not. Your greatest strength is your solidarity which cannot be reduced to the union. The generalized assault on our class requires a generalized struggle! While the prospect may seem far-off, nobody is going to initiate it for us."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-05-16/montreal-why-are-the-banq-workers-on-strike

"Only once we’ve replaced our rotten system of production for profit, with a system of production for need, will increases to our standards of living become permanent. Meanwhile, in the present situation, the real gain from any struggle can only be confidence in self-organisation, greater awareness of belonging to a wider working class and wider recognition within the class of the possibility that a different world is possible."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-05-19/the-present-wave-of-strikes-and-the-way-forward-for-the-working-class

"Capitalism is dragging humanity into an abyss. Rampant price increases, rising interest rates, collapsing banks and ecological disasters accompany the capitalists plunder of the planet in their drive for profits. Growing numbers of refugees are fleeing from immediate hell to anywhere they can. Meanwhile the war in Ukraine is dreadful confirmation of the ‘final solution’ capital has in store for the whole world."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-05-20/a-new-world-is-still-possible-but-we-have-a-fight-on-our-hands

"Both Russian and Ukrainian workers are suffering death at the fronts to defend ... what? The property and interests of their oligarchic cliques. For our rulers, defence of “the nation” makes sense since they own most of it. For the rest of the population, imperialist war means the loss of home and livelihood and for many, the loss of life itself."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-05-22/imperialist-war-or-class-war

"The purpose of the committees is to put internationalist nuclei in contact with one another, in order to define the rudiments of a common political intervention against the coming war, and to establish relationships with others that firmly situate themselves on internationalist terrain; relationships that will be of inordinate utility down the line, as they were in previous times."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-05-24/appeal-for-the-creation-of-a-nwbcw-committee-in-san-francisco-usa

"There is something suggestively symbolic about a state funeral for the decaying corpse of a corrupt and corrupting capitalist, the symbol of money that “unites and breaks faiths; blesses the accursed; makes horrid leprosy welcome; it honours thieves and gives them titles, reverence, praise in the assembly of senators” i.e. the bourgeois institutions. It truly reflects today’s decadent system."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-06-18/nunc-est-bibendum-on-the-death-and-state-funeral-of-silvio-berlusconi

"The news of the sinking of the migrant boat off the coast of Greece, with the loss of hundreds of lives, came at the same time as the grotesque state funeral awarded to the sexually predatory and crooked former Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. This provoked the following response from our Italian comrades. Since it was written, it has now been revealed that the trawler had been stationary for hours (and was not en route to Italy as the Greek authorities claimed) and there are some suggestions that the trawler may have sank when the Greek coastguard tried to tow it towards Italian waters. News of this has sparked protests in Greece itself."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-06-21/another-massacre-in-the-mediterranean

"For our part, the ICT has taken the internationalist position a stage further by trying to work with other internationalists who can see the dangers for the world working class if it does not get organised. This is why we have joined in with the initiative to develop committees at a local level across the world to organise a response to what capitalism is preparing for workers everywhere. We are only at the start of this work and not all internationalists have yet joined it. Many have not understood what is at stake and some have not understood that we need to pave the way to practical organisation now while we still can and before it is too late. The following document is not only a balance sheet of what we have experienced after one year of No War but the Class War (NWBCW), it is also a clarification of what it is about and hopefully will go some way to banishing doubts and misunderstandings."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-07-05/the-no-war-but-the-class-war-initiative

"Three days after the death of Nahel Merzouk, 17, who was shot dead on Tuesday 27 June in Nanterre by a police officer who stopped his vehicle, riots have reached a rare level of violence in banlieues across France, in overseas territories and even in smaller cities usually less affected by these kinds of uprisings. The rioters have set fire to various sites of State power: town halls, prefectures, high schools, police commissariats… the list goes on."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-07-06/on-the-recent-riots-in-france-and-the-proletarianisation-of-the-banlieues

"On the international front nothing has changed. The same tendency towards the formation of two armed camps that the war brought about is continuing. It is significant that China re-affirmed its support for Russia during the crisis and, with other BRICs like South Africa and Brazil not joining in Western campaigns of condemnation, the alliance remains firm. Imperialist interplay goes on, with the USA weaning Modi’s India away from Russian arms dependence due to its fears of China, whilst Iran has finally entered the Shanghai Cooperation Council as a full member. Those who thought the Wagner Group revolt would lead to peace in Ukraine are going to have to wait a lot longer as the globe becomes even more dangerous and divided."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-07-10/the-wagner-group-revolt-and-future-course-of-the-war

"Martin, the lifelong communist militant and comrade of the IWG passed away in June 2022, leaving the world and his family too young. In his personal life he was a fan of science fiction, the Grateful Dead and was a US Civil War historian. We remember the communist militant comrade Martin and continue the struggle for revolutionary class consciousness, and ultimately a new society, with him in our thoughts."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-07-11/in-remembrance-of-comrade-martin

"With only the incentive to produce greater and greater profits, the only future under capitalism is a barren wasteland. In recent decades, more and more capital has been poured into oil and gas, as imperialist warfare provides the incentive for speculation and profit, from the Gulf War to the current war in Ukraine. The capitalist system can only intensify the cycle of ecological disaster but can never cause it to cease."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-07-23/capital-is-content-to-fuel-the-fires-in-north-america

"The key argument of the degrowthers is that capitalism must stop accumulating. As we have argued above, this implies the collapse of the system and its replacement by cooperative production controlled by the producers themselves. Degrowth literature continually skirts around this central issue, which leaves the door open to uncritical and even conciliatory positions towards social democratic and Stalinist politics, which in addition to maintaining capitalist society are inherently ecologically unsustainable."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-07-25/degrowth-and-marxism-a-critique

"We cannot wait passively, for the union to throw crumbs at us. We cannot wait to be sacrificed as lambs to the slaughter, while UPS and capitalist enterprises around the world squeeze every nickel and dime from the pores of the workers. We can only depend on our strength in numbers, and on our creativity as an international class. As our main weapon, strikes need to be transformed. They need to cease being an affair whose pace is set by union functionaries. They need to be transformed into an affair directed by the mass of workers, whose access to the megaphone isn’t barred by their lack of official credentials."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-07-31/ups-struggle-strike-while-the-iron-is-hot

"In the meantime capitalism has brought us a new round of inflation and interest rate rises which are bringing misery to millions. This has led to scores of strikes in the UK and elsewhere in an attempt to redress the balance. As long as they remain within the framework of accepting the current system of wage slavery the system is safe. But that is not the only threat capitalism poses."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-08-01/the-state-we-are-in

"The revolutions of 1848 belong to a now bygone era. Yet, the events of 175 years ago have inevitably shaped the modern world. For our rulers, they leave behind a contradictory legacy. For workers, they represent the dawn of a new movement."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-08-09/1848-the-working-class-bursts-onto-the-scene-of-history

"Even in our so-called ‘Communist Left’ circles, it is a little-known fact that Amadeo Bordiga spent most of 1923 (3 February – 26 October) in a Rome prison cell where, as well as preparing his own defence and that of his thirty or so fellow-accused, he drafted a political manifesto on the crisis facing the barely two year old Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I), a manifesto he intended for discussion by the whole membership."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-08-14/amadeo-bordiga-s-prison-manifesto

"In the event the tentative agreement is voted down, it opens up another possibility for a strike. If it occurs, it is critical the strike does not comprise one act in a war of positions between management and IBT functionaries, and is instead undertaken by workers as workers; that is, as members of a class whose living and working conditions are attacked by capitals’ frenzy to a) increase revenues, and b) reconfigure national economies for war."

https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2023-08-19/balloting-on-tentative-agreement-at-ups-workers-mobilizations-in-the-usa-are