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IN MEMORY OF LOREN GOLDNER

Our comrade Loren Goldner passed away on April 12th. His death represents the loss of a great militant and brings a great sadness for those who knew him.

Loren’s political life began with his arrest as a student at Berkeley amidst the sit-ins and anti-war riots of the sixties. In this context Loren was radicalized and turned to Marxism in search for a critique of Maoism, Stalinism and the New-Left that dominated the scene. For a while he joined the Independent Socialist Club, which eventually would become the trotskyist organization International Socialists (IS). But before that happened, Loren left Berkeley and the ISC behind and began traveling regularly to Europe attracted by the traditions of the Ultra- Left. In Europe he became familiar with Socialisme o Barbarie, the Situationist Iinternational, Invariance, Jean Barrot, Le Prolétaire and other elements of the Italian Left in exile. Important for his political formation was an encounter with Henri Simon who represented for Loren a definitive break with any idea of the Soviet Union being a “degenerated worker state” and a historical link to the internationalist orientation that he was to embrace.

By the seventies Loren had settled in New York City.  

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Together against capitalist wars and capitalist peace!

From 20 to 26 May 2024, groups and individuals from different parts of the world will meet in Prague to coordinate anti-war activities, as part of a Week of Action which will include an anti-war congress from Friday 24 to Sunday 26 May. Internationalist Perspective supports and will participate in this pro-revolutionary event.

The organizers state:

We consider it necessary, in the process of resistance to war, to develop an anti-capitalist practice which seeks to preserve political autonomy. In concrete terms, this means that we want to organize outside the political parties, outside the structures of the states, and against all states. We are particularly interested in the ways how we can oppose all the harsh conditions to which we have been exposed and subjected during interstate wars and capitalist peace. We are interested in ways to sabotage wars, how to deprive our enemies of resources, how to undermine the ability of states and their armies to continue wars.

Which way to go and what is to be done? How to join forces and get organized? We will look for answers based on class, not national differentiation; answers that take into account the sheer contradiction between rank-and-file soldiers and officers, between wage laborers and bosses, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.  

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A debate on the IP-leaflet on Gaza

We recently published a leaflet denouncing the war in Gaza. The intention was to distribute it at demonstrations as a means of engaging participants in discussion. After it was published on our website, it was criticized by some of our members and by others in the milieu for not being clear enough about the fact that the inter-imperialist nature of the war in Gaza is paramount, and that only proletarian class struggle can impede and break the inter-imperialist conflicts and wars endemic to capitalism.

Whereas we agree on these last points, a revision of our leaflet has led to a disagreement centered on the role played by the increasing number of proletariats who have become superfluous to capital, in the unfolding of capitalist crisis and war; and this war in particular.

We believe that it is important to have political debates in the open and the reader may expect more articles on these subjects forthcoming.

In the meantime we publish a string of texts that were produced in the immediate wake of the leaflet. Our hope is that by making available our discussion and openly showing the nature of our debate, others will be encouraged to contribute.

IP

The Gazan Inferno

For revolutionaries, the two most important statements to be made about this butchery are: that this is but the latest murderous eruption of global inter-imperialist antagonisms, and that the only solution for the proletariat is through class struggle.  

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IP LEAFLET

No War in Gaza! Fight the Nightmare Which Haunts Us All!

War is the climax of the nightmare in Gaza. We hear the numbers rise every day, but the losses are immeasurable. Like many of the past 50 years, it is an asymmetric war, which in this case means that one side’s troops first enter a home to kill an entire family, while the other can rain down bombs to the same end. Asymmetry means that many more Gazans have been murdered than Israelis, as they are the collateral damage whose lives each army has written off as an acceptable cost. We call for an immediate end to the war, the release of hostages and prisoners, an end to the blockade. We call to build international solidarity against warmongers and nation-builders.

We refuse the language of right to the land, of border legitimacy, and of national security. The rallying cries and waving flags hide the truth: we are being tricked, bribed, or forced into the wars of our masters. We refuse to excuse mass murder in the name of “justice”, “resistance”, or “defense”. War can never bring peace or freedom beyond the peace of a graveyard and the freedom to pillage the dead.  

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WARMONGERS LEFT AND RIGHT

The world watches in horror as one of the most advanced armies on earth is destroying a mostly defenseless enclosed urban zone, like shooting fish in a barrel. No wonder there is widespread outrage and a worldwide demand to stop this madness. But rather than to stop the war, many leftists want to continue it, on the side of Hamas. And they want us to ignore the violence against innocents committed by their side because it was done for a good cause. Was it?

The apologists of Hamas claim that its army are indigenous freedom fighters rising up against a colonial power and that the history of colonial wars shows that these conflicts are inevitably brutal, with many innocent victims on both sides. It is up to the ‘freedom fighters” to decide how they wage their struggle, they claim, and those who support the liberation of “the Palestinian people” should not question their methods. Especially not if they are white and living in countries which had colonies themselves. Shame about the past or present behavior of “their” countries should silence any critical thought on the tactics and goals of the “anti-colonial” struggle. They are not well placed “to hand out moral lessons to the resistance.”  

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CAPITALISM’S DEATH WORLD

A Banksy mural in Gaza

On the very first day of Hamas’ sadistic rampage, the Israeli authorities took to the microphones to declare to the world that this was Israel’s 9/11. And indeed, there are some striking similarities. Between the tactics and goals of Al Qaeda and Hamas, as well as between the imperialist opportunities their actions created for the US and Israel.

Both Al Qaeda and Hamas attacked civilians indiscriminately. Both are guided by an Islamist ideology1, based on myths of a glorious past and an even better future in heaven, feeding on the anger and resentment that poverty, repression, and discrimination amply produce. What do they want? A real state, a vast territory under their control, ruled not by “the people” but by themselves, a state that imprisons and tortures anyone who dares to disagree (as Hamas does in Gaza), claiming their authority cannot be challenged because it is sanctified by religious dogma. They have utter contempt for human life, including sometimes their own. They are a clear expression of the death culture that capitalism in this epoch produces. They are racist, not in the strict sense of classifying people on the basis of skin color, but in the broader meaning of dehumanizing people on the basis of their “otherness”, the conditions under which they are born, like their ethnicity or culture.  

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NAUSEA

Sculpture by Tania Font

We publish below a text that originally appeared on the French website Lundimatin. Not because we agree with everything its author writes: we reject in particular her biological-determinist view “that perhaps the root of the problem, and of all the violence that shakes the world, is masculinity”. But we share the nausea she so passionately expresses. Her voice must be heard.

Nausea

The Israeli government is a shameful entity, a shameless colonial and imperialist power that has been committing heinous war crimes on a daily basis for 75 years. It kills, humiliates and arbitrarily imprisons children and civilians whose only crime is to dare to be Palestinian. Nausea at every demand of the government, its army and its fanatics. Anger and grief at every Palestinian death.

The Israeli government and the massacres it has committed since 1948 are the real enemy, the criminal – and therefore the one that must be destroyed. THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT.

Now I’m feeling sick again. The assimilation of an entire population, within which class struggle, racial discrimination and political differences exist, as they do in every country in the world, the assimilation of this entire population to its government, to its ethnic identity, is fascist, harmful and murderous thinking.  

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HOT AND COLD WAR

1. THE STARK PRESENT

The summer of 2023 has drawn to a close. The pandemic is in the lull, ‘normality’ has resumed but the grim atmosphere has not disappeared. The climate crisis is getting worse, disasters attributed to “Mother Nature” dominate the news. But the economic crisis also proliferates. What both crises have in common is that they affect people very unequally. They show that we live in a class society.

The Dow Jones, the so-called barometer of the US economy, has been doing quite well. Those with a lot of money can still make it grow. The rest of us are doing less well. Inflation is eroding wages. Millions of Americans are currently losing their health insurance. There are increasing numbers of homeless people. The gap between rich and poor is widening in every country, but globally, the gap is deepening between countries capable of playing a competitive role in the ultra-productive information economy and all the others.

Mass flight from poorer countries is the result. The information revolution has unified the global economy but at the same time it is expelling many. The deeper the global crisis sinks and the more the information technology increases productivity, the more ‘superfluous’ people there are.  

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An Anti-War Assembly in Milan

On September 15th the Centro di Documentazione Contro la Guerra organized an open assembly called “La Guerra in Ucraina non va in Vacanza” (The war in Ukraine doesn’t go on holiday) to which IP participated. The venue was located in a central nerve of Milan at the COX 18, an occupied space since 1976, also home to the well known Calusca City Lights, now the Archivio Primo Moroni, an extensive archival project of leftist literature. The purpose of the assembly was to denounce the barbarism that is still underway in the Ukraine after 19 months from its inception, with still no end in sight.

The assembly lasted about two and a half hours and the format was very open: after a concise introduction given by the organizers, in which they restated their position of “revolutionary defeatism”1, Sandro Moiso who writes for the journal Carmilla spoke for about 45 minutes delineating the current “world disorder”; afterwards, the floor was open to discussion.

Many people intervened without any formal restraints, stating their positions, adding nuances and posing questions. The tone was never academic and many voices were heard. According to the organizers the modest turnout of about 30 people was a bit disappointing since the aim was to open the discussion of the war to a wider audience and not only to “few experts who are already certain of everything ”.  

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A CONFERENCE OF LEFT COMMUNISTS

Last May, at the invitation of Internationalist Perspective and Controversies, some left communists from six countries gathered in Brussels to talk and listen to each other.1 Aside from IP, Controversies, and a few unaffiliated comrades, activists of the following were present:

Old Mole Collective

ex-FOR (Fomento Obrero Revolucionario)

Collectif Smolny

AAAP (Association Archives Anton Pannekoek)

AFRD (A Free Retriever Digest)

Bilan et Perspectives

Cercle de Discussion de sympathisants et sympathisantes de la Gauche Communiste de Paris,

Critiques Grand Large

For logistical reasons, we were not able to invite all those we would have liked to invite. Some whom we did invite were not able to come but sent written contributions (like the Spain-based group Barbaria). Some others declined our invitation, fearing that the debate would degenerate into hostile confrontation, or that the differences in positions would be too big to make meaningful discussion possible. Even some who did come to the conference had the same fears. Fortunately, among all the participants there was a willingness to hear what others had to say. Nobody tried to “win the debate”. Rather than a confrontation in which participants seek only to reinforce their own positions, there was exposure to different ideas.  

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