The internationalists

Leaflet for a demo in Sheffield, UK

Iranian ruling class splits

On the one side — those sectors which more or less look to the family of the Ayatollah Rafsanjani (one of the richest and most powerful in the country), who are tired of the limitations on economic activity imposed by international sanctions and want a greater opening towards outsiders. On the other side, those sectors of the bourgeoisie whose power has been strengthened in the last few years,favourable to the aggressive policy of Ahmadinejad.

We received the following document from a courageous Iranian internationalist. As far as we understand he has sent it to a number of internationalist left communist organisations and his position is one we would fully endorse (even if we would have liked more on the concrete organisational issues such as existing class organisations and the need for an independent political organisation of the working class). Hopefully these will be forthcoming in future documents. We have taken the liberty of correcting the English without in the slightest altering the intentions of the author. IBRP 20 June 2009

After the election circus, Ahmadinejad was presented as winner and this resulted in the political confrontation and crisis between bourgeois gangs. The leader of one faction, Moussavi would not accept the result and mobilized protestors throughout the entire country which resulted in some demonstrators getting wounded or killed.

With the publication of the Origin of the Species 150 years ago, Darwin described what happened in the hundreds of millions of years given to the Earth’s age by geologists such as Charles Lyell. Without this enormous timespan (which, in fact, grossly underestimates the current view that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old), natural selection would not have had time to work on the variations produced in the reproduction and produce the immense range of animal species present today. The work of Lyell and others in overthrowing the 6000 year age favoured by Christians working from the Bible chronology laid the basis for Darwin’s overthrow of the entire biblical creation story.

In fact Darwin’s [1] bombshell not only undermined the mythology of Christianity but of Judaism and Islam as well.

Introduction

The economic pundits are no longer talking about whether the financial crisis will affect the “real economy”. With world trade falling and unemployment rising reality has already answered that. So The Independent ran an article by an HSBC boss entitled, “Marx was Right” whilst The Financial Times has now started a series on “The Future of Capitalism”. The question being asked today is how capitalism can survive the deepest crisis it has faced since the inter-war years. Even so, there is a yawning gap between the severity of the crisis and the capitalists’ ability to respond. The article here, translated from the December edition of Prometeo, the theoretical review of our sister organisation in Italy, points to the absurdity of trying to solve a systemic crisis on the basis of a banker’s view of the world which sees money as the creator of wealth. This illusion is what fuelled the ballooning of fictitious capital in the first place.

Pho­­s­pho­­rus­ hitting­ a Unite­d Natio­­ns­ s­c­ho­­o­­l in G­aza

The recent so-called “war” in Gaza was not really a war in the general sense of the term. Since it was unleashed by an occupying power on a largely defenceless civilian population in occupied territory it was historically comparable to the campaigns of collective punishment carried out by other occupying powers, particularly those of the Nazis in France or Poland during the Second World War. It would be more accurate to term it a massacre, accompanied by a campaign of destruction of the civilian infrastructure carried out as a collective punishment. The cause of this punishment is the support given by the masses of Gaza to HAMAS [1]. It appears that the Israeli running class imagined that bloodletting and destruction on this scale would erode support for HAMAS and bring about a more pliable ruling group.

Nationalism and the Unions

In the aftermath of the Lindsey oil refinery strike, the Unite General Secretary (for the ex-Amicus bit), Derek Simpson was pictured (between two models) on the front page of the reactionary Daily Star holding a Union Jack with the “British Jobs for British Workers” on it. The Daily Star later ran an article claiming that they had won the strike with their support for “Britons First”. All this is a pack of promotional lies. It was the solidarity and self-activity of the rank and file workers that won the struggle. And the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of the workers who took part in the strike rejected the nationalist agenda which the press and the unions tried to impose on it. As the strike ended, the strike committee finished with the call “Workers of the World Unite”, and was greeted with cheers by the workforce.

However, the battle here is not over.

Time for us to Stop Making Sacrifices — Let’s Organise and Fight for a Better World!

May Day 2009 Statement of the IBRP

It’s Their Crisis

This First of May comes at a time of dramatic crisis for the world working class. In just three months fifty million people worldwide have lost their jobs. In the USA 32.2 million people, or more than ten per cent of the population, are now receiving food stamps (worth $83 or £56 per month). This is not just a crisis about deregulated capitalism but the deepest capitalist crisis since the Second World War. Having exploded in the financial sphere, the knock-on effects for the real economy — which is in fact where the crisis was born — are overwhelming.