the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
December 7, 2025
The following is the wrap up to the Congress of Lutte Ouvrière, from December 7, 2025, published in the Lutte de Classe, #252.
What can we expect in the coming period? This is the question we pose in our congress texts on international relations. We address it in that particular paper and not in the one on the domestic situation because it is absolutely clear that neither the E.U. nor Macron decides anything. The obvious answer is that everything depends on how the economic crisis unfolds, particularly the possibility of a serious financial crisis, with the social reactions that could alter the conditions of our activism. And then there are the wars themselves.
Europe, in its western imperialist part, is currently experiencing only the images and the aftershocks. The year that is drawing to a close has shown how quickly the flames of war have spread from Ukraine to the Middle East, not to mention the numerous flare-ups from the Caucasus to Sudan. The destabilization of several African states, particularly those in the former sphere of influence of French colonialism, foreshadows further wars. This is all the more true given that not only has the situation failed to stabilize in the former “Françafrique,” but the rivalry between the imperialist powers has intensified, calling into question the colonial balance established at the Berlin Conference in February 1885.
It is worth noting that the countless links forged between the economies of different countries, which could, and should, give humanity a formidable foothold in controlling its economic life and social organization, are instead contributing to worsening the chaos. As Trotsky summarized at the beginning of the war that was becoming the Second World War, “the bourgeoisie itself sees no way out.” What seems evident in light of the past two or three years is that society has settled into a permanent state where crisis and war combine to create the image of a ship adrift, beyond the control of any one person. Not even, and especially not, those who govern society.…
Oh, the ship is still moving forward! Even talking about a crisis seems too strong a term. Certainly not for the unemployed and all those threatened with becoming so, and who know that they will! Certainly not for the majority of the working class! Certainly not for that entire segment of the planet—a large part, if not the majority—for whom obtaining food is a daily problem. But, at the same time, contrary to the legend of the 1929 crisis, the upper class isn’t throwing itself out of its skyscraper windows, and dividends are reaching record highs.
So, the crisis? What crisis?
War itself, or the threat of it, creates new markets. The President of the United States, a real estate speculator by trade, can see future beaches dotted with Club Med resorts as he looks at the ruins of Gaza … It takes the immeasurable cynicism of scoundrels like him to dare utter such phrases. Put yourself in the shoes of the people of Gaza! Incidentally, this kind of scoundrel in power is reason enough to take action.
Those with a like mind to the American president, but more directly interested in Ukraine than in the Middle East, have already factored into their calculations the possibility of making the Russians pay for, among other things, the reconstruction of the Mariupol opera house.
If you put yourself in the shoes of an arms dealer, then yes, war is a market. And besides, they can’t even keep up with the market, and that’s a characteristic of the situation. You can sell, but there aren’t enough products. “Austerity, a feast for shareholders,” headlines Le Monde diplomatique in September. You couldn’t be more realistic! So, what could the bourgeoisie possibly complain about? The bourgeoisie, the big one, the real one, the one that exploits tens, hundreds of thousands of workers in each of its corporations, the one that, by closing large companies or even simply by reducing staff, can ruin the existence of an entire city, an entire region. That is to say, the imperialist bourgeoisie.
It dominates the destiny of peoples just as much, it is in a position to make decisions that transform regions where thousands of women, men and children live into fields of ruins, it of which a certain comrade of the old generation said: “The bourgeois can close a business as easily as closing a snuff shop.” Certainly, today there are no more snuff shops, but there are still businesses that the bourgeois close.
So, we’re not going to attempt any predictions about future wars here. Dozens of general staffs are working on that, not to mention all the retired generals and admirals approached by television networks to offer their professional opinions on the coming widespread conflagration, about which they know very little, but above all to prepare the population for war, to accept budgets—whether voted on or not—and to fund them. Their message is clear: “Expect this and have as many children as possible, because in the future, they’ll be faced with it!”
Let’s just say that no one can even say at the moment who the protagonists will be, in case the various local and regional military confrontations lead to a general war culminating in a global conflagration, that is, World War III. The only thing we can say is that war has already begun in Russia, in Ukraine, and, for much longer, in the Middle East. It already dominates social life even where bombs aren’t falling, at least not yet. So, yes, war has already begun, and in the future, hundreds of historians will examine the question of when it actually started and what the official reasons were … As always, the answer will be given by the victorious side, with complete objectivity, of course! The vanquished will be the people who will pay the price and who are already paying it, from Odessa to Kyiv, from Palestine to Tehran.…
Meanwhile, the war is already allowing military commands to test weapons they haven’t yet mastered, or to familiarize themselves with new combat tactics. Drones, ubiquitous on the battlefield, have made a massive entry into arsenals. Oh! What a fascinating experiment the Israeli army is having, searching tunnels with drones! It’s worth noting, by the way, that the State of Israel hasn’t won this war, because it’s giving rise to generations who believe in revenge. In any case, drones are apparently already being used extensively by the American military against gangs in Haiti.
So, let’s return to the question: what crisis? Henry Kravis, co-founder and co-executive chairman of KKR, one of the three largest private equity investment funds (that is, capital investments in SMEs and very small businesses, generally unlisted), stated in an interview with Les Échos: “These periods of chaos have always been the best time to invest.” So where is the crisis for Henry Kravis? He adds: “Despite the political and economic instability, France remains fertile ground for private equity.”
An article in Le Monde on September 30, 2025, titled: “The Return to Grace of the Founder of Blackwater” and subtitled: “From Latin America to Africa, Erik Prince, a Close Associate of Donald Trump, Has Relaunched His War Business,” first allows us to observe that the aftermath of war is death and ruin for many, but it is also business. And indeed, since time immemorial, a highly profitable business, which translates into a reality of which we see a few images on television: corpses and wounded. Blackwater is a kind of private army, that notably earned its stripes during the war waged by the United States in Afghanistan. Le Monde began its article thus: “Erik Prince is back. From Haiti and El Salvador to Peru, Ecuador, and even the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), amidst the fight against drug trafficking, the expulsion of illegal migrants, the war against non-state armed groups, and the securing of mining sites in Africa, the founder and former CEO of the private security firm Blackwater has been making numerous public appearances since the re-election, at the end of 2024, of his closest ally in the White House, Donald Trump, of whom he is an ardent supporter.” The article is interesting because of the reality it describes. This Erik Prince is a former member of the elite U.S. Navy SEALs, heir—as Le Monde points out—to a wealthy family established on the shores of Lake Michigan, and who claims to lead “the most powerful private army in the world.”
And what motivates him to start his war business back up? It’s clearly not to intervene in Haiti or El Salvador, countries mired in immeasurable poverty. But, on the other hand, across the Atlantic, there’s the DRC with its extraordinary mineral wealth—”a true geological miracle,” as one geographer put it—and a multitude of major Western companies eyeing platinum, diamonds, cobalt, and copper, particularly in Katanga, “the country’s mining treasure trove.” Yes, but how can the security of mining operations be ensured in a country whose state is disintegrating? In countries like the DRC, poverty breeds corruption and the inefficiency of the state apparatus and its repressive forces: everyone is for sale. The bourgeoisie’s demand for security—and here we are also talking about the white, imperialist bourgeoisie—cannot be met by the state. It is to this demand that Blackwater responds: it recognized the need for a “mining police” tasked with collecting taxes from mining companies.
This is the need (the demand), and Blackwater proposes to provide the supply. Essentially, Blackwater is the bloodthirsty gang leader and ex-policeman Barbecue in Haiti, only bigger and more ambitious. This is senile imperialism reinventing medieval mercenary tactics!
Noting the influx into the DRC of a motley throng, composed of all those drawn by the prospect of making a fortune or, at the very least, finding work, the Le Monde report adds: “There’s no indication that these South Americans are here as part of Erik Prince’s contract. A part of the east not controlled by the M23, and Kisangani, has become a Tower of Babel with Slavic, South American, Turkish, Eastern European, and Israeli contractors … not to mention the Congolese armed forces. We don’t know who’s doing what.” This article contains traces of a trend that goes beyond the Blackwater case, hinting at a more general development.
Communist revolutionaries are certainly not defenders of the bourgeois state apparatus, neither in France, nor in the United States, nor in the DRC. They campaign for its destruction by and for the benefit of the working class, the proletariat, which produces everything and yet controls nothing.
But the inability of the imperialist powers to replace the former colonial powers with uncorrupted regimes does not replace the need for the army, the police, or an effective apparatus of repression to control the masses. Maintaining such an apparatus of repression is expensive. The appeal to the private sector arises in this context. The bourgeois states themselves were built over centuries, and their establishment represented considerable progress for humanity. By representing the interests of the bourgeoisie against the feudal order, they embodied progress.
Haiti, with its gangs, its police officers who are gang leaders in the mold of Barbecue, with its population preyed upon by both sides, is a more telling sign of the future than the bourgeoisie of supposedly more civilized imperialist countries. Besides, fundamentally, are there really so many differences between the two? Between the largest and richest bourgeois democracy and the others? Just think of January 6, 2021, the day before Biden’s inauguration, think of the motley but reactionary crowd that stormed the Capitol!
Someone wrote that France was at the same level on the eve of the French Revolution as it had been in the 13th century. Many phenomena, from epidemics like the Black Death to the Thirty and Hundred Years’ Wars, explain why the level of production and development, even after centuries, hadn’t changed so much. Despite this, the long process of building a state apparatus in France, between Philip the Fair and the French Revolution of 1789, was a historical advance. Today, this state apparatus, directly serving the upper bourgeoisie, also represents, more or less directly, all the privileged classes, including the most anachronistic. In Cameroon, for example, where the French army was sent to restore order, it was the kings and chieftaincies that were reinstated, as was the case almost everywhere in the colonies (see the Le Monde article on Paul Biya’s Cameroon).
The decay of bourgeois states, the proliferation, particularly in poor countries, of states corrupt to the core, incapable of effectively ensuring any form of protection for the bourgeoisie, is a step backward, one aspect of humanity’s retreat toward barbarism.
There was a time when, to understand the future evolution of society, one had to look to the most advanced imperialist countries. Today, it is society’s decay, the widespread rot, that most accurately indicates what society will be like, as the decadent bourgeoisie imposes this state of affairs upon us and will increasingly do so.
So, where do we fit into all this? It’s a grossly obvious statement to affirm that we have no control over this future and that we are fighting against it. But, at the same time, we trust the proletariat. We trust in its capacity to regain the initiative, and to take back, or more precisely, assume the leadership of society, for the simple reason that it is the only group in this society with the capacity and the strength to do so. And our trust in the proletariat ultimately rests on our trust in humanity.
Human history has never been a smooth, uninterrupted flow. Human society is not characterized by a glorious march forward. Trotsky often expressed the idea that “the historical crisis of humanity boils down to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.” This “crisis of revolutionary leadership” was not overcome during Trotsky’s lifetime. Nor has it been overcome since. The repeated betrayals by the proletariat’s leadership, followed by its disintegration, have corrupted the organizations of the workers’ movement itself. The organized movement has collapsed, but the proletariat remains, and so does its irreplaceable role in society. And it is the proletariat that we trust, not the various incarnations of its organizations. Furthermore, historical tasks cannot be measured on the scale of a human lifetime.
But, in the paragraph where Trotsky most insists on this crisis of leadership, he does so by railing against “all kinds of talk according to which the historical conditions are not yet ripe, are only the product of ignorance or conscious deceptions,” to insist: “The objective premises of the proletarian revolution are not only ripe, they have even begun to rot.”
This is and remains a profession of faith in the socialist future. Oh, not socialism like Stalin’s or his horde of imitators! But socialism in favor of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie’s power by the proletariat.
History bypassed the proletarian revolution, which has suffered catastrophic setbacks. The only revolution that was victorious for a time was transformed into an infamy before it was even swept from the stage of history. Little or nothing remains of its achievements.
The proletarian revolution did take place. Marx’s ideas and reasoning were embodied. And this is something even Stalinism cannot undo. The proletariat has shown that it is a candidate for power, for the leadership of society. This goes beyond the defense of an ideal or a humanist position: the proletariat has, historically, put forward its candidacy for power and shown that it is capable of seizing power long enough to demonstrate its legitimacy for the future. All that remains of this past are ideas, political stances, and it is from this foundation that the attempt must begin again. This first attempt came to nothing. But how many revolts have been attempted unsuccessfully during the various phases of class society? How many attempts by the bourgeoisie itself before finally attaining power? And all this to arrive at the world as it is under Trump or Macron and, behind them, under countless representatives of the capitalist class.
We have no particular revelations about this future of wars and destruction, except that, as we have been saying for years, capitalist society cannot be the future of humanity. The coming period will be more difficult, and war will undoubtedly reach us, because the proletariat is completely unable to defend itself against it. Let us remember that even a far more organized and politically powerful proletariat could not prevent the First World War! So the period will be what it will be, but we are tasked with remaining who we are: revolutionary communists, that is to say, people convinced that the proletariat, which has already seized power, holds the future in its hands.
Our perspectives, our program, must survive in the most material sense of the term. But “surviving” refers to our ideas, our program, and, far beyond that, our will to create a society that becomes truly humane.
To survive with our fundamental conviction that capitalist society cannot represent the future of humanity is to continue a fight that the oppressed, exploited majority of the population has always waged and will continue to wage until this fight loses its purpose.
A scientific author essentially stated that dinosaurs were the most highly evolved representatives of life for 160 million years. And, during this long reign over the planet, dinosaurs never accomplished what humanity, whose history is far shorter, has achieved and plans to do, such as venturing into space and going to Mars. Of course, we are in solidarity with all living things, but we still establish a hierarchy: the dinosaurs are extinct, and humanity, with its capacity to move forward, to reason, to progress, is not yet. It has the future ahead of it … if only it can get there!
What do we mean by Trotskyism today? To summarize it in a few sentences, it is first and foremost Trotsky’s understanding of Bolshevik politics after the October Revolution of 1917. Let us emphasize this point: this is not what Trotsky put forward at the beginning of his militant life, when he was wrong. It is obviously everything that constituted the contribution of Bolshevism, including on issues such as bureaucratization and fascism, which are to a large extent Trotsky’s own personal contributions. Our Trotskyism also means our solidarity with the positions taken by Trotsky, who was expelled from the USSR during his lifetime, such as his criticism of the Popular Fronts. But Trotsky was assassinated in 1940, and political life, and life in general, did not stop with his death.
For a number of major events, such as the Chinese revolution in the aftermath of the Second World War, Trotsky provided us with political insights. He helped us understand this revolution, which led to the Maoist regime, a regime he did not experience firsthand. Nor did he personally witness the people’s democracies imposed on Eastern European countries in the wake of the Second World War—that is, pseudo-communist regimes imposed by a conquering army, without any involvement from the population, or even in opposition to it.
Trotsky couldn’t write about it and guide our understanding. Nor did he experience Titoism, or later Vietnam or Cuba. Some of these events had global significance and scope, to varying degrees. For example, the impact of Titoism and Maoism was not the same. Except, of course, for the militants of the Fourth International, who went to build socialism in Yugoslavia, which at the time seemed less ugly to them than the USSR. As is often the case, what the proletarian revolution didn’t give them, they went and invented elsewhere.
The fact remains that we had to understand and interpret these upheavals, and we had to manage on our own, with our own heads and without Trotsky holding our hands. We did so, and we felt the need to put our reasoning in writing: on the nature of people’s democracies, on China, etc., because understanding what really happened in revolutions like those in Cuba or China is important for understanding what we want to build.
We therefore wrote about these analyses even before fully integrating them into our program, in 1970–1971. We maintained our analyses of the nature of the Soviet state, even after the Second World War, waged and won jointly by American imperialism and the Soviet Union, despite Yalta and the division of the world into two camps. These writings are part of our program; they must be disseminated and utilized.
We did not adopt state capitalist positions, even in their post-war variants. And as for our movement, without having truly and fully understood the nature of the people’s democracies from the outset, our ancestors had demanded the withdrawal of the Soviet army from these people’s democracies.
Even before the states established under the auspices of the Soviet bureaucracy became the bulwark against which the workers of Stalinallee in Berlin in 1953, and of Poland and the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, fought, our comrades of that time had adopted a position consistent with the one they would defend during the uprising of “those of Stalinallee.” Incidentally, contrary to the notion that the postwar period was devoid of revolutionary activity, Eastern Europe experienced a period of revolutionary unrest until the mid-1950s. From the workers of Berlin to the Hungarian workers, that represents three years of proletarian revolution.
Our positions were consistent, and in a way, so were those of other Trotskyist organizations, but their consistency led them to support the Stalinists! The consistency of our positions lies in our simple idea that only a revolution led by the working class, more or less controlled by it, deserves to be considered a proletarian revolution. And not this or that measure or consequence of it, such as the degree of nationalization, state control, or the nature of its economic decisions like planning.
It is the sum total of these texts that constitutes our program. For example, under the heading “The Case of Underdeveloped Countries in Political Rupture with Imperialism,” we discussed the possibility for nationalist movements to succeed in seizing power to break with imperialism, but not to overthrow it—that was not their objective. But this analysis could have been interpreted as a break with Trotskyism, with the idea expressed in The Permanent Revolution that, in the imperialist era, only a proletarian revolution could even accomplish the tasks of the national bourgeoisie and free it from imperialist control. This was not the case. It is also these situations and the contradictions they could entail that had to be analyzed and understood.
Therefore, transmitting and defending our positions, including and especially within our program, is our way of continuing to defend Marxism. If war draws near, we must protect ourselves. Of course, to make a revolution, one must first survive. But not at any price and not in any way: to survive, we must preserve our program and our ideas.