Since quite a few years pro-revolutionary internationalists have been organizing summer meetings, including week-long “summer camps”, to inform each other, to discuss and establish contacts. We reported earlier on some of those gatherings that took place last year in Europe. This year we welcomed the return of one of the oldest of these initiatives, which had taken a break during the covid years. Unfortunately, none of us was able to attend but from what we heard of friends who were there, it must have been quite interesting, with participants from many countries, reports on class struggles from around the world and discussions on theoretical issues, all in a friendly atmosphere of solidarity.

While we had to skip that summer camp, we were able to participate in another, organized by the so-called “Beach Communists” in the south of France, also attended by comrades from many (mostly European) countries. What distinguished this camp from the other one was, among other things, that it situated its discussions within a perspective of organizing and participating in class struggles and did not shy away from affirming political positions. Indeed, earlier it adopted a common platform which, after some debate, was unambiguous in its defense of ‘revolutionary defeatism’, the rejection of supporting either side in the wars of capitalism, including those in Ukraine and the Middle East.  

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This text was written for discussion at an international “revolutionary defeatist” meeting in Minerve, France, in August. A report on this gathering will be posted later.

Otto Dix: Wounded Soldier, 1916

0. Why this text?

Because the instinctive reaction of most people who are worried and repulsed by the growing number of wars and the atrocities they lead to, is to assume that they are caused by bad leaders, aggressive politics, unjust ideologies, and to support the side that seems less bad, more peaceful and less unjust. It is not self-evident to grasp that these bad leaders and aggressive politics are themselves a product of the social relation that is capital, and that this social relation will continue to produce such leaders and politics and ever more catastrophic destruction, as it sinks deeper into its self-created crisis. Slogans or simplistic tales are not enough to convince many who are genuinely determined to fight war that, in order to do so, they must fight capitalism. We must be able to demonstrate to them that we live in a global social order that brutally clashes with the needs of humanity. That it is a system at war with the planet, at war with life itself.  

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Trump has been back in office for less than a hundred days, and while the charge he is leading is unmistakable, its destination remains uncertain. The two texts that follow are attempts to make sense of what is being set in motion, and what that reveals about the current configuration of political and economic power.

Both reject the idea that Trump marks a rupture in American priorities. Instead, they trace how long-standing tendencies in U.S. statecraft — toward authoritarianism, militarization, and social demolition — are being sharpened and accelerated. Chaos is deliberately being created for the purpose of reorganizing governance and geopolitical alignment around the shifting needs of capital.

The texts differ in how they understand the nature of the project, and disagree on the coherence, or lack thereof, of the Trump administration’s policies. The first sees the administration as a vehicle for multiple, often competing factions — held together by Trump’s personal authority but lacking a stable ideological core. The second views the administration’s actions as part of a coherent effort to prepare for inter-imperialist war.

The two texts offer views from different perspectives on the unfolding of events. Both were written and discussed before the Trump administration raised the stakes on April 2 by imposing hefty global tariffs.  

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