On 6 and 7 April, communists from across Ireland gathered in Dublin for the founding Congress of the Irish group of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT). We were joined by international visitors from the Revolutionary Communist Party in Britain and the international centre of the IMT. Across the two days 33 people attended from Dublin, Navan, Belfast, Bangor, Derry and Galway, making this by far the largest meeting of the IMT in Ireland to date.

Elections to India’s parliament are starting on 19 April. The reactionary BJP-led Modi government has been in power for two terms, in which time it has failed to meet any of its promises to the masses; it has sold swathes of public property to multinationals; stirred up chauvinist hatred towards minorities and women; and backed Israel’s war of slaughter in Gaza.

Capitalism is polluting the air we breathe, the water we drink and the very food we eat: all in the name of profit. Further evidence of this comes from a review published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on 28 February, evaluating the best available research on the effect of ‘ultra-processed food’ (UPF) on our health. This review included 45 studies and almost 10 million participants, and crucially did not include any research funded by the big food companies. The findings are categorical.

In June, the International Marxist Tendency will take the monumental step of founding a new Revolutionary Communist International (RCI), to provide communist workers and youth around the world with a bold rallying point in the struggle to overthrow capitalism. In doing so, the RCI will build on the immense revolutionary legacy left behind by the Third (Communist) International, founded by Lenin and the Bolsheviks as the world party of revolution. Register now for the founding of the RCI!

On the night of Friday 5 April, in a clear violation of international law and bourgeois institutions, President Daniel Noboa ordered his police to invade the Mexican embassy in Quito to arrest former Vice President Jorge Glas, who had been granted political asylum by the Mexican authorities.

On Sunday 31 March, the Turkish masses inflicted the biggest electoral defeat on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since he came to power more than 20 years ago. This was a vote against Erdogan rather than one for the bourgeois opposition, which inspired little enthusiasm. Nonetheless, these elections are symptomatic of a storm of anger that is wearing down Erdogan’s authority. His days could be numbered.

Revolución Comunista [Communist Revolution] is here! On the 23 March, during a Marxist School titled, “Lenin’s life and ideas”, Revolución Comunista was officially launched, a new organisation, which aims to organise communists in El Salvador and which has as its medium-term goal the founding of a Revolutionary Communist Party.

In June, the International Marxist Tendency will be launching a new Revolutionary Communist International, to boldly bear the clean banner of communism on every continent. In this article, Alan Woods explains the historic importance of this step, tracing the rise and fall of previous Internationals and showing the importance of the RCI in the struggle for communism today. Register now for our founding conference!

Our Danish comrades are making a big splash with their plans to found a new Revolutionary Communist Party. After decades of relative dormancy for the class struggle, we can truly say that the communists have arrived in Denmark! The reaction by the bourgeois political and media establishment to this news has ranged from bemusement to open fury. As ever, we welcome the free publicity!

Last week in Lenin in a Year, we delved into an important text that Lenin wrote amidst the 1905 Revolution: Two Tactics of the Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. The revolution, however, went down to defeat. In the wake of the counter-revolution, all kinds of pessimism and mysticism swept Russia. These moods even infected layers of the Bolsheviks, reflected in attempts to revise Marxist philosophy. This week we republish Alan Woods’ excellent introduction to Lenin’s 1908 work, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, in which Lenin launched a strident defence of dialectical materialism.

Establishment politicians have decried Israel’s killing of aid workers in Gaza, including several Britons. But the truth is that Sunak, Starmer, and the rest of the Westminster warmongers have blood on their hands. We say: overthrow their system!

Below, we publish an article sent to us by a young Israeli communist who has been living abroad. After refusing to serve in the IDF, this young comrade faced serious personal repercussions. But after being arrested at a Palestine solidarity protest, he was stripped of his Israeli citizenship and told he would no longer be able to return to Israel. This is a scandalous violation of the most elementary principles of democracy.

The following is the Resolution of Lucha de Clases – CMI Venezuela on the political and electoral situation, approved by its Central Committee. Future analyses will be published that add further detail to the position the resolution puts forward. We invite the most conscious layers of the workers’ and wider mass movement to read, analyse, circulate and discuss the content of the text. It is a contribution to the debate on what position consistent revolutionaries should take in the coming presidential elections and the kind of organisation we need to put the forces of the Venezuelan working people back on their feet.

Advances in artificial intelligence continue to make headlines, as AI has begun to play a role in everything from art and journalism to conspiracy theories and unemployment. While AI is clearly here to stay, it is equally clear that the capitalist class has no interest in using it to its fullest. Once again, capitalism’s brutal inefficiency and systematic misuse of such technology is profound evidence of the need for communism and economic planning.

The face of the capitalist political establishment in Ireland for the past seven years, Leo Varadkar, has resigned as leader of Fine Gael and from the Taoiseach position. Varadkar has been, without doubt, one of the most reliable servants of the Irish ruling class in the last decade. He was once the man they needed, but the times have now changed.

This May, the British section of the International Marxist Tendency is launching the Revolutionary Communist Party. We publish here a draft document that will form the basis for the central discussion at the founding congress, outlining the perspectives and tasks facing communists in Britain.

On 2 March 1921, sailors in Kronstadt took up arms against the young Soviet government. The rebellion was short-lived and crushed by 18 March. But its tale has survived much longer and has been told and retold with very little concern for facts and serious analysis. The present work will not rehash chronological details of the rebellion in depth, which readers can find in great detail in many other works. Instead, it will outline the underlying processes that gave rise to the rebellion, looking beyond mere appearances to its real character, and explain the actions taken by the Bolsheviks against it.

The global crisis of capitalism is pushing workers and young people in one country after another towards revolutionary communism! As a result, we’ve been receiving dozens of messages and requests to participate in the founding conference of our new International, with some of the most inspiring examples shared below. This new generation of communists burns with rage at the horrors and injustices of the capitalist system, and instinctively understands that to overthrow it we need to get organised!

When divisions among Russian Marxists between ‘Bolsheviks’ and ‘Mensheviks’ first emerged at the second congress of the RSDLP in 1903, they remained confined to secondary differences over organisational questions. Only with the 1905 Revolution did real political differences emerge, as Lenin explained in his brilliant pamphlet of that year, Two Tactics of the Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. More than anything else, war and revolution bring out political differences with crystal clarity.

The following is an open letter from our Portuguese comrades (Colectivo Marxista) to members of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), following the snap elections on 10 March, which saw the ruling left/centre-left alliance defeated. The PCP went from 332,000 votes in 2019 to a historic low of 202,000. The comrades draw some conclusions from these poor results, and offer a dialogue to members of the PCP about how to build the forces of Portuguese communism going forward.