Events in the Middle East are having a profound impact on consciousness in Britain. While the establishment all sing from the same hypocritical hymn sheet, hundreds of thousands are taking to the streets. Revolutionary explosions impend.

This second instalment of the discussion between comrades of the IMT in the Spanish state and comrades of the Socialist Movement focuses on the class character of the state and how the Socialist Movement proposes to reach socialism.

Since the collapse of SYRIZA in Greece’s general election back in June, the party leadership has been captured by a populist shipping magnate. This is an ignominious but fitting ending for a party that once inspired hope among millions of workers, only to see those hopes dashed by the betrayals of the party leadership. New local elections have confirmed the party’s collapse. But while SYRIZA may be dead as a vehicle for the discontent and anger of the Greek working class, we are seeing that anger expressed in massive abstention, and to SYRIZA’s left, in the rising vote of the Communist Party (KKE).

From the outset of the latest Israel-Palestine conflict, the capitalist media in Britain has acted as an obedient mouthpiece for the establishment, echoing their imperialist propaganda. We need to build a voice for the exploited and oppressed.

Facing attacks from the establishment press, and meddling from university and student union bureaucracies, the communists are continuing their efforts to mobilise solidarity with Palestine. We say: Intifada until victory!

On 17 October, the Paris prefecture banned a meeting, which was to be held at the Bourse du Travail the next day, to demand the release of pro-Palestinian activist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, detained in France for nearly 40 years. On the evening of 18 October, at the time of the meeting, the Paris Labour Exchange was closed under the surveillance of the CRS (riot control police).

Our comrades in Britain have come under attack from the establishment and their media mouthpieces for daring to defy them by showing solidarity with the Palestinian people, and calling for mass struggle against imperialism. We will not be silenced.

Across Britain, a movement has erupted in solidarity with Palestine. But this is being met with a repressive response from the authorities, as the ruling class looks to silence dissent and debate. Workers and youth must mobilise in defiance.

In France, as elsewhere, the extremely brutal response of the Israeli government to the Hamas attack on 7 October has aroused the indignation of millions of young people and workers. But in the name of "Israel's right to defend itself" and "the fight against terrorism and anti-Semitism", the Macron government decreed that this indignation was unacceptable and must be silenced, at all costs.

The war has come to Poland! However, it has not arrived in the form that the media parrots and paid hacks have been threatening for years: i.e. of Putin’s tanks rolling up to the Vistula to restore the Russian Empire. Instead, the borders of Poland are being guarded against fleets of grain coming from Ukraine, which threaten something at least as precious to every capitalist as independence: the market.

The main bourgeois media outlets in Switzerland – 20 Minuten, Tagesanzeiger, NZZ, Weltwoche– have launched a witch hunt against the communists. They are targeting us because we are organising in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

The idea that European countries can be divided into those of the chaotic and unstable South, and the ‘stable’ and ‘efficient’ North, is officially finished. After Britain and Germany, the time has now come for the Netherlands to drop the label, “a boring place where nothing never happens”. In the past months, almost all the party leaders across the political spectrum have resigned. And in the coming elections, 70 political parties have so far registered possible candidates! Chaos and fragmentation loom.

In the recent Slovakian parliamentary elections, Direction – Social Democracy (SMER–SD) emerged as the biggest party on a platform of economic concessions to workers, and withdrawal of support for the Ukraine War, to the horror of the European establishment, who lambasted the party as ‘pro-Russian’. We have no illusions in this party, but the fact is that SMER and its leader Róbert Fico captured support from the poorest regions of the country by channelling an anti-establishment mood.

The rapid emergence of the Socialist Movement (MS) in various parts of the Spanish state (Basque Country, Catalonia, Valencia, Aragon, Castile and Madrid) is a fact to be celebrated by other communists in Spain and internationally. In underlining this important fact, the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) wishes to establish a dialogue and a fraternal exchange of views with the comrades of the MS, in order to clarify the tasks and tactics that lie ahead for the communist movement.

This article, marking 60 years since the end of the Algerian war of national liberation, appeared in Révolution, the paper of the French section of the International Marxist Tendency, in March 2022.

Last August, the Minister of Labour Adonis Georgiadis outlined the New Democracy government's new bill on labour and insurance issues, which will shred the most fundamental remaining protections for workers. In the words of the minister himself: “our goal is to make working relations more honest between us [i.e., workers and the bosses]”, explaining that much of what the bill codifies is already happening, informally. He put his intentions explicitly: to give intensifying exploitation of the working class full weight of the law.

With his party sinking in the polls, Rishi Sunak is looking to whip up a climate culture war. Workers must have no trust in either the Tories and their cynical claims, nor the liberals and their impotent demands. We must fight for revolution.

9 September marked the first All-Ireland meeting of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) which met in Dublin. Comrades came from around the country including Dublin, Belfast, Derry, Meath and Limerick, with a comrade attending from the international centre of the IMT, making a total of 15 attendees. Comrades were all filled with a mood of revolutionary enthusiasm, and after a day of political discussions comrades left with heightened spirits, ready to spread the ideas of Marxism and to build the Marxist tendency in Ireland!

Once hailed as Europe’s bulwark of stability, Germany is entering a period of deep turmoil. The era of economic growth and class peace is at an end. Now, Germany is experiencing an intense crisis, as all the pillars of its former ‘success model’ are crumbling, causing profound divisions in the ruling class and a ferment among the masses.

A new generation of communists is being forged by capitalism’s crises and catastrophes. “He who has the youth, has the future,” Lenin famously proclaimed. We call on radical young people to get organised and join us in the fight for revolution.