Resolution adopted by the International Secretariat of the LRCI, 29 December 1989

Eastern Europe’s most repressive regime has fallen. Its most hated Stalinist dictator is dead. But the Romanian revolution is not over, as the bourgeois rulers of the west would like to believe. Only its first phase is at an end. The most important tasks lie ahead. Read more...

Resolution adopted by the International Executive Committee of the LRCI, 4 March 1990

The release of Nelson Mandela has focused the attention of the world upon South Africa in a way not seen since the revolutionary situation of 1984-86. But this time we are not faced with workers’ strikes or uprisings in the townships. Rather, we have the spectacle of the ANC preparing to sell a “negotiated settlement” to the black masses. This is nothing short of a betrayal of the South African workers and should be branded as such. The current stage of the struggle in South Africa is dominated by the ANC’s perspective that apartheid can be abolished peacefully through negotiations with the white supremacist South African government. This policy holds grave dangers for the black masses of South Africa. Read more...

Passed at the MRCI delegate conference, September 1988

1. For Marxists the goal of communism entails the fullest development of the productive forces so that the material necessities of life are automatically available to all and not only to a tiny minority: the characteristic feature of all class societies.

Capitalism, as the highest and most progressive form of class society based on private property, has witnessed the greatest quantitive and qualitative development of the productive forces, based on the application of science and technology. This development has not been an even and continuous process due to capitalism’s contradictory laws of motion. Its development is motivated, not by planned satisfaction of human need, but by the capitalist class’ competitive compulsion to increase the rate of exploitation and offset the tendential fall in the profit rate. Read more...

We reprint here a 1949 article from Quatrième Internationale, the French language journal of the Fourth International (FI) on the 1948 French miners’ strike. During the strike the miners were subjected to murderous repression organised by Jules Moch, the Socialist Party Minister of the Interior. But responsibility for the strike’s defeat lay with the French Communist Party (PCF) led trade union, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), which consistently refused to spread the action throughout the French working class. Read more...

Fifty million people died in World War Two. Now anniversary events are taking place across the world to mark the beginning of the slaughter. This article, originally published in the British socialist paper Workers Power in 1989 explores some of the myths that we are taught about the war. Read more...

What were the real causes of the destruction of 1939-1945? The Second World War explained from a Marxist analysis Read more...

During the First World War the German revolutionary, Karl Liebknecht declared "the main enemy is at home”. Lenin, elaborated the policy or revolutionary defeatism. By this he meant that the defeat or an imperialist power at war was preferable to a victory won at the cost of the class truce at home. Read more...

The Second World War was supposedly the "finest hour" of the British Communist Party (CP). It grew to 56,000 members, controlled many workplace organisations and had great influence in the unions. But throughout the war the CP acted as the puppet of Kremlin foreign policy. Read more...