Did the mafia kill Tom Henehan?
— ICFI (1953) (@1953Icfi) June 16, 2024
The assassination of Tom Henehan is not "ancient history", or a topic reserved for niche historians... In fact, only a rejuvenated Trotskyist movement will be able to disclose the truth behind Toms murder. https://t.co/1fo00T4X2X
— ICFI (1953) (@1953Icfi) June 18, 2024
Preface:
We recently made contact with a small group of Chinese Trotskyists who have asked us to republish the following informal essay which highlights some of the material difficulties in Mainland China for the working class and the necessity of socialist revolution. We hope that this humble beginning is the portend of a wider collaboration between the Trotskyists of Asia and the West, aiding the fight for a revolutionary program using the latent potential of social media and the proliferation of online translation programs.
The comrades revealed that they previously tried to collaborate with the ICFI to fight for Trotskyism in China but were met with disappointment:
"From my personal perspective, our theories are completely consistent. Judging from my interactions with the International Committee during these times, the fact is that the International Committee does not care about our actions."
"He defined the struggle of us, Chinese Trotskyists, to defend Marxism against Pabloism as a crazy adventure..."
"From this perspective, the possibility of the establishment of a proletarian party in China has actually been reduced."
Letter:
I. Brief background introduction
On May 20, my family encountered an unexpected change from the outside world: the community staff in my hometown asked my family to move from a rental house with heating to my hometown on the grounds that it was "inconvenient to monitor" - otherwise, my family's minimum living allowance would be revoked.
In order for readers to understand the situation, let me briefly explain the situation of my family: my father suffered from cerebral infarction, and my mother had problems with her lumbar spine due to diabetes due to the burden of family expenses; and my sister suffered from spina bifida and was diagnosed with depression due to the incoordination of her spiritual world. She had a low level of education and had difficulty finding a job; I myself was still studying in college - it can be said that my family could not lose the minimum living allowance, just like the Abrahamic religions could not lose Jerusalem.
Even in such a difficult situation for my family, the community staff still had to achieve their goal by giving a completely impossible choice - to change the cage and drive my family away from the position of minimum living allowance, so that they could let the residents who could please them get this reward.
——Even though my old house is dark and damp, and cannot be repaired due to property rights issues, they still turn a deaf ear to it.
II. The necessity of revolution
This kind of thing is by no means an exception in the mainland. The patronage network formed by bureaucracy has blocked all ways for the proletariat to fight for their own rights, and we can only accept social pressure and constantly suppress our inner desire for a better life.
The purpose of the bureaucrats doing this is to show off their power: this is particularly evident among grassroots bureaucrats. To make a popular analogy, the class monitor will take charge of the class when the head teacher is not there. At this time, he is likely to use his power for personal gain to satisfy his own interests; it is this pleasure of manipulating other people's lives and the need to obtain patronage networks that drive them to govern in this way. This is fundamentally due to the worship of power under the authoritarian system. It takes a lot of space to explain this phenomenon, so the author will not show off his writing skills here; in short, the relative lack of revolutionary enthusiasm of the proletariat in mainland China, the concealment and deliberate deception of true socialism by the bureaucrats, etc., are the fundamental reasons for this phenomenon.
The author has been engaged in writing Trotskyist articles in the mainland before. He was born into the proletariat, so he understands that only under the true revolutionary thought and through the vanguard party to achieve unity with the world proletariat can we fight for a better life for us (emphasis added), so that our children and grandchildren will no longer be tortured by the exploitation and alienation mechanism of capitalism, and can realize their own value in real labor; only in this way can the world not fall into the barbarism that will inevitably lead to the capitalist world war and protect human civilization.
This article is just an essay; it is just a summary of the author's position on the articles he wrote in the past, and it is not a very formal commentary or other genres of articles;
But in short, I hope this article can let you see that the revolutionary voice of the mainland Trotskyists has never been abandoned.
For more writings by the Chinese Trotskyists, please visit:
https://chinesetrotskyism.substack.com/
https://x.com/TrotskyismChina
The overturning of Weinsteins conviction exposes cracks in the orientation of the MeToo movement towards bourgeois justice and the prosecutorial powers of the state. Sexual violence is rooted in the class nature of society. Only the workers can offer a solution 2 social problems.
— ICFI (1953) (@1953Icfi) April 26, 2024
The task before the working class is to overthrow the labor bureaucracy by building rank and file committees as alternatives to the labor fakers. These committees must struggle to unite all workers internationally.
— ICFI (1953) (@1953Icfi) April 26, 2024
We have been made aware of an interesting exploration of the possibilities of international trade unionism in a polemic written against the ICFI from 2020:
"It is necessary to highlight, in this connection, that it is only to the degree that our Party exerts its influence over all organizations of the working class, including trade unions, that the narrow, nationalist perspective upon which these bodies have been hitherto organized, and with which the current union bureaucracies in particular continue to disorient the rank-and-file, will be transcended. This can only be achieved by directly introducing to the rank-and-file slogans to counter the nationalist orientation of traditional trade unionism, particularly within those industries in which the internationalization of production reaches its most advanced organization. (When the UAW bureaucrats attempt to impose wage freezes under the pretext of averting auto factory shutdowns in the United States, we advance among all of the rank-and-file the slogan “sliding scale of internationally indexed wages” to not only undermine the effort to maintain US and Mexican workers in competition against each other, but also build the basis for new organizational forms through common struggle.) ..."
"The more contemporary political struggles within industrial trade unions, which are specific forms of class struggle, must be understood in the context of the expanded accumulation of constant capital (which increasingly replaces living labor while producing a surplus of capital requiring export for valorization), the direct pressure exerted by imperialist capital endowed with ever greater mobility and capacity to “offshore” production, the conscious policy of the ruling class to politically coopt critical layers of organized workers in strategic industries that remain within national borders, etc. These forces magnify all of the conservative social and political elements inherent within industrial unions organized on the basis of the nation state to the point of rendering their politics reactionary.
However, those that see this as “proof” that workers’ unions in general are no longer arenas of revolutionary struggle, that they can offer nothing progressive to workers, etc., and thus elevate the assertion that revolutionary tactics are defined by whether or not they are conducted within or outside a given structure (trade union) to that of a “principle,” not only fail to see that the real process underway is one in which the material basis for this old form of the workers’ mass organizations has been eroded by economic development itself, but also, and this is the critical point, that this process itself contains within it the very solution to the problem.
Just as capitalist production can no longer be conceived within the narrow bounds of the nation state, the mass organizations of the working class, contemporary trade unions, must also transcend these limits both in terms of organizational structure and the slogans revolutionaries raise within them to politically educate the rank-and-file. ..."
"As such, the nationalist orientation and structure of contemporary workers’ organizations forms the outer limit of their politics. The progressive transcending of these limits requires the conscious political intervention of revolutionaries directing the rank-and-file towards overcoming the narrow confines of nationalism. It is worth noting, in this connection, that the strategists of imperialism, who have on more than one occasion proven themselves more “dialectical” than revolutionaries, have already attempted to benefit from this tendency by dispatching their subalterns from within the union bureaucracies throughout the new centers of industrialization in developing economies. Indeed, state-sponsored diplomatic missions from imperialist countries abroad now regularly include reactionary union leaders.
It should be clear, as such, that the new “trade unions” (I am forced to use this term as language, so far as I am aware, has not caught up with the material forces propelling this phenomenon) will (re)develop or organize on an international basis. This is why transitional slogans like “sliding scale of wages” must be modified to include the international indexation of wages as a means of highlighting the common class interests of workers in imperialist and low wage peripheral countries pitted against each other."
While we would be critical of certain points, such as orienting to "reform" movements in the unions which are often the creations of a faction of the bureaucracy, we recommend a read:
Once Again on the Question of Trade Unions and the Tasks of the Party
