Since the beginning of this year A Free Retriever’s Digesthas completed its try-out period. It continues as a bimonthly digital revue, and is henceforth accompanied by this online blog.
The ‘Free Retriever’ project aims at presenting publications relevant to discussions within the proletarian internationalist milieu in general, and among the groups and circles who claim adherence to the internationalist communist left(s) in particular. ‘A Free Retriever’s Digest’ wants to provide comments, critiques and a space for discussion, both as a bimonthly digital revue and an online blog. Continue reading “‘A Free Retriever’ goes online”→
Over the month of June the political business of the German bourgeoisie has been dominated by the outburst of a long-smoldering conflict within its government apropos of issues of migration and refugee policies, which has put the historic party alliance between the CDU and its Bavarian junior partner CSU in jeopardy and has risked the fall of Merkel’s coalition government on the very threshold of its first 100 days in office.
» It was after four o’clock in the morning [on Friday, June 29] when the EU summit finally came to a conclusion document for a directive on migration. (1) The “principle” defended by Italy was enshrined: shipwrecked persons, migrants and refugees arrive, whatever their point of entry, in the EU and before the EU and not before the country of arrival, seeking refuge. The infamous Spanish model of the Detention Centers for Foreigners (2) is enshrined under the name of “platforms” and is possibly extended to Macedonia and Albania. Spain and the countries that organize the new detention centers will receive EU money. Macron stressed that the great success was that asylum had been “mutualized” and therefore has replied to the challenge posed by the German Home Secretary who was putting the German political apparatus in crisis and threatening to sweep Merkel along. (3) Continue reading “Has “German Europe” exhausted itself?”→
‘Nuevo Curso’ apropos of the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe (June 25, 2018)
1. The anti-immigrant revolt of the German petty bourgeoisie
» In December last year, we alerted on our Telegram channel that the CSU, the Bavarian party associated with Merkel’s CDU, was turning to the right in an increasingly nationalist discourse. In the context of the stagnation of the bourgeoisie in Germany, which – like the British, Italian or Spanish bourgeoisie at the time – had not yet found the ways and means to renew its political apparatus, the advance of identity politics, beyond the electoral progress of the AfD seemed significant to us. Significant because it pointed out that the nationalist revolt of the European petty bourgeoisie was beginning to condition even the heart of European continental capital. And this up to the point where the “migration question” – the center of all suspicions and fears of the Central European petty bourgeoisie – has come to fracture the most solid German party apparatuses this June.Continue reading “The political crisis in Germany and the tortuous road to a “European bloc””→
Breaking more than a year of radio silence on its web-site, and more than six years after its special edition “From October 1917 to the collapse of the USSR”, (1) the Forum for an internationalist communist Left has brought out a new issue of its revue “Controverses” in French language. AFRD intends to follow its comeback and welcomes this revival by adopting the presentation of its contents.
» It is not enough for the workers to oppose war, every war, to refuse to be led astray by the cry of national defense. They must also have the power and the means to prevent war. « (1)
The G.I.C. and the Economy of the Transition Period – Introductory Article
As a supplement to issue #03 of A Free Retriever’s Digest we publish a two-part article that introduces the major political–theoretical work of G.I.C., and attempts to clarify the main misunderstandings that still mark its reception. It is freely available for download here. The following presents its summary.
Both ‘Nuevo Curso’ (Spain) and the ‘International Group of the Communist Left’ (France, Canada) have reacted swiftly to the news on Tuesday May 8 of the (expected) withdrawal from the 2015 ‘nuclear agreement’ with Iran by the USA, putting out first statements on its significance and implications.
Origin and meaning of the ‘Fundamental Principles’
The work Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution (further: Fundamental Principles) of the Group of International Communists (GIC) is an important text of the communist Left on the economic problems of the transition period from capitalism to communism. The GIC describes the relevance of the Fundamental Principles as follows:
“As soon as the rule of the working class has become a fact in an industrialized country, the proletariat is confronted with the task of carrying through the transformation of economic life on new foundations, those of communal labor. The abolition of private property is easily pronounced, it will be the first measure of the political rule of the working class. But that is only a juridical act which aims at providing the legal foundation for the real economic proceeding. The real transformation and the actual revolutionary work then only begins.” (1)
In the foregoing, reference has been made to the misunderstandings that have arisen over time due to inadequate translations and summaries of the Fundamental Principles and unfamiliarity with the three preliminary studies. This section introduces the most important of these misunderstandings and corrects them with references to the 1935 version of the Fundamental Principles. Continue reading “The G.I.C. and the economy of the transition period (2)”→
