Recent comments on the Intsdiscnet-list on “Fascists March on Berkeley” (4/27/17) raise that issue with which those committed to the struggle against capitalism have grappled since the 1930’s: anti-fascism. Historically Antifa or anti-fascism within the worker’s movement became the clarion call of Stalinism, and then the veritable basis of the Grand Alliance between Stalin, Roosevelt …
Introduction From its start, Internationalist Perspective (IP) has believed in the importance of revolutionary theory, because, in our view, the communist revolution can only be a conscious act of social transformation, not something the working class stumbles into unconsciously, driven automatically by crisis and calamity. But we also believed that revolutionary theory is not a …
In Pontecorvo’s film Queimada, set in the 1830s, the agent provocateur, Sir William Walker, points out that a decade can show the contradictions of a century. Fast forward almost 200 years. It only took a few days into 2016, the strains of Auld Lang Syne having barely faded away, to highlight the contradictions of the …
A Critique of the theses of the GIK and “labor coupons” (Excerpts from an exchange with Kees) Kees, you write: “The problem that I see is the following: as we are not in a situation of ‘abundance’ but in a situation of ‘scarcity’ there will inevitably be ‘exchange’ (or else total arbitrariness) based on some …
Continue reading “The Economy in the Transition to a Communist Society”
Over the past several years Rojava or Western Kurdistan, legally a part of Syria, has been seen by many anarchists, libertarians, and even Marxists as the locus of a social revolution, one that demands solidarity on the part of revolutionaries, all the more so as it has been the object of brutal military assaults, first …
Continue reading “Rojava in the Vortex of Inter-Imperialist Antagonisms”
Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé… (“Let’s go, children of the fatherland, the day of glory has arrived…”) The opening of the ‘Marseillaise, the French national anthem The following text is a statement IP put out after the terrorist attacks in Paris last november. It was widely shared on social …
A few questions linger after these elections. Such as: is the new US president a psychopath or is he a sociopath? Whatever the correct diagnosis may be, it can’t be denied that his election testifies to a considerable increase of discontent, disaffection and anxiety in a broad swath of the American population. Trump won, by …
Capitalist states, whether they are defending local or regional economic and politico-military interests or seeking global hegemony, must constantly evaluate and re-evaluate their strategic interests, their alliances, and the threats that they confront. For American imperialism, in the waning days of World War Two, before the atomic bombs led to Japan’s surrender, it seemed apparent …
Continue reading “Inter-Imperialist Antagonisms in the Age of Trump”
Internationalist Perspective 60 appears at a moment of heightened social tensions, and widespread social movements from the US to Greece and Sweden, from China to Mexico, which have their roots in the grim reality of a crisis of capitalism that has not been ameliorated over the past seven years, and which beyond its manifestation as …
Anxiety is rising and no wonder. The lack of economic prospects, the social dislocations resulting from capital’s penetration of the whole world and its expulsion of ever greater numbers of people from actual production and jobs, the wars over possession it engenders, with their merciless slaughter of civilians, whether through air bombardments or suicide attacks, …