In February this year the comrades of the German group, Gruppe Internationaler Sozialistinnen (GIS), and representatives of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party met in Berlin. After two days of discussion the GIS agreed to become the German affiliate of the Bureau. This important step was as inevitable as it was welcome as we have all been working together for a number of years and in the course of that time the GIS has come to be a defined force in German revolutionary politics. Groups do not join the Bureau, they help build it, and in so doing help to forge nuclei of a future revolutionary world proletarian party. We are confident that the GIS will bring another new element with clear ideas on how to strengthen and deepen the Bureau as a specific international and internationalist tendency within the proletarian political camp. The GIS was formally welcomed into the Bureau at the meeting of its European members in Parma in May. There they took part in a discussion on improving the organisation and effectiveness of the Bureau as an international force. We will publish the main document to come out of this meeting in several languages within the next few weeks. The English version will be published in Revolutionary Perspectives 47.

We are publishing here a translation of the lead article from No. 17 of the GIS journal Sozialismus oder Barbarei (Socialism or Barbarism) which the comrades intend to revamp and produce more regularly. The article was their expansion for the German situation of the themes in the Bureau's May Day statement which also appeared in the same issue. We publish both together here as demonstrations of the process which has brought us together. We have no illusions that the tasks that are before us are much greater than our current organisational strength but we are all agreed the new phase of the capitalist crisis will only lead to more attacks on the world working class. Against this background we will be working to make every struggle a conscious struggle, not just against the effects of capitalism as our comrades of the GIS underline in their article, but for a new society "without states and without classes".

The Gruppe Internationaler SozialistInnen publish Sozialismus oder Barbarei, and can be contacted at

GIS c/o Rotes Antiquariat - Rungestraße 20 - 10179 Berlin - Germany

or via gis.blogsport.de .