As the American bourgeoisie began its lavish preparations to inaugurate President Bush’s second term in the White House there didn’t seem to be much open worry in the administration about the state of the American economy. In fact, economic growth of 4.7 % in 2004 and a predicted 3.5 % growth rate for the coming year would appear to mean that everything is groovy in the present phase of expansion of the so-called business cycle, and therefore with the bourgeoisie’s capitalist system. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that, even considering the bourgeoisie’s own data on several key economic indicators, the U.S. is as stuck in the chronic economic crisis of capitalism as everybody else in today’s world.
The 1990’s were years of economic delusions for the American bourgeoisie. In the wake of the euphoria about the collapse of Stalinism and the campaign about the virtues of democratic capitalism, after the recession of 1991, for the rest of the decade the American bourgeoisie never ceased to show off its supposed economic success. The things that were said then about the “health,” “vitality”, etc. of capitalism say tons about the stupidity of the talking heads of the bourgeoisie. The starting of the new millennium four years ago brought a good reality-check to American capitalism. The “longest running economic recovery in American, history” –according to bourgeois mythology – suddenly ground to a halt. The catastrophic collapse in 2001 of the “casino economy,” symbolized by sky-high stock market indicators and the once celebrated “new economy” of dot.com and high technology “virtual” companies, brought an end to the much-repeated bourgeois fairy tale of a vigorous capitalism that has just demonstrated its superiority over the busted Russian “communism.”
Thus the Bush administration during most of its first term in office presided over the worst recession of the US economy since the onset of the present open crisis of capitalism in the late 1960’s. The pompous “new economy” created by the “internet revolution” came tumbling down like a castle of sand. The paper “wealth” created by years of frantic stock market speculation suddenly went up in smoke. The great economic miracles of the 90’s became the great busts of the new millennium with many of their “hot-shot” so-called “entrepreneurs” showing what they really were: ruthless bloodsuckers, gamblers and crooks. But these spectacular events were just the tip of the iceberg. At the root of the Enron and Martha Stewart “scandals,” among many others, what really is in play is a sick capitalism running out of options to handle its economic crisis.
According to the official version of the bourgeoisie the recession that officially started in March of 2001 supposedly ended in December of the same year. However, beneath even the enthusiasm of the official cheerleaders of capitalism, there is a certain level of consciousness that there is not much to brag about in the current ongoing “recovery.”.
The bourgeoisie can talk all it wants about the importance of present and future economic growth projections, but it cannot hide the fact that capitalism, whether in recession or recovery, can no longer bring about any improvements to the general economic and social conditions of the working class. On the contrary, every new cycle of recession-recovery, brings about a new level of deterioration in the proletariat’s living and working conditions, as the bourgeoisie tries to make workers bear the brunt of each new fall into the abyss of the chronic crisis of its system,.
The recession of 2001 put millions of workers on the street, as companies went bust or simply tried to squeeze more profits from fewer employees. Now in the phase of recovery, at the same time that the media was recently celebrating a supposed record-setting 2.2 million jobs created during last year, two remarkable facts around the issue of employment-unemployment have come to dampen the euphoria. First, the gains in job creation in the last year are not even enough to make up for all the jobs lost earlier in President Bush’s’ first term in office. In fact there has not been any growth in the total of workers with a job in the last four years –132.4 million when Bush took office in 2001 and 132.3 last December. Taking into account the population growth since 2001 –around 10 million – this means that total unemployment has surely increased, and only god knows what statistical tricks the Labor Department has had to pull to establish the rate of unemployment at 5.4%, significantly lower than the 6.3 % that existed at the height of the “recession.” Second, manufacturing companies, which shed more than two million jobs from 2000 to the end of 2003, added back only 96,000 jobs in 2004, which is said to be the weakest rebound in factory employment of any economic recovery on record in the United States. In truth, service industries have accounted for almost all the celebrated new jobs created in 2004, which speaks volumes about the depths reached by the economic crisis. More particularly this fact reflects the tendency of the most powerful economy of world capitalism to become a service economy, with more than 4/5 of the labor force employed in services (110.2 million in services; 22.0 million in manufacturing; and 2.2 million in agriculture).
In a recent television interview the Treasury Secretary John Snow predicted a steady economic expansion and “good job numbers for the foreseeable future.” The question is: what kind of jobs? According to a recent study in the New York region, which reflects what is going on in the rest of the country, the anemic new job creation was accompanied by an even more anemic development in salaries: the jobs created in the last four year paid 43% less than those created from 1996 to 2000! Besides, these new jobs are in many cases part-time, contract work or what they now call “seasonal work,” lacking benefits like pensions, paid vacation or health care. Moreover despite the record number of new jobs being created, for the unemployed worker it is becoming more and more difficult to find a new job. As of November, about 1.8 million, or one in five, unemployed workers were jobless for more than six months, compared with 1.1 million when the recession officially ended in November 2001. By other accounts since the start of the recession in March 2001, the average length of unemployment has risen from 13 weeks to 20 weeks.
According to last year’s growth figures the American economy is doing much better than any of its major competitors –except China. The countries of the Euro zone grew an average of 1.6%, Japan and Great Britain 3%, compared with a 4.7% for the U.S. However rather than being the expression of a healthy economy, American economic growth is very much like the growth of a cancerous tumor in a dying body. This positive growth figure is basically based on a frantic resort to the mechanism of credit which is filled with dangerous consequences both for the U.S. and world capitalism as a whole. For the U.S., this policy is the primary cause of the new record setting deficit in its current account and, in great measure, for the astronomical growth in the government budget deficit. In other words, the American bourgeoisie has fashioned its economic “recovery” on a mountain of public and private debt that is not being paid and will not be repaid.
There is among the dominant class a consciousness that this cheap money policy is unsustainable. It has re-ignited inflation – 3.3% last year. Thus the Federal Reserve has reversed its policy of near zero interest rates and has begun to move them upwards.
At the international level, the gigantic American debt is a very heavy negative weight for the world economy and a very dangerous time bomb. For one, it is world capitalism that has to cover for the deficits of the American bourgeoisie, and its aggressive policy of cheap dollar intended to jump-start its exports. This policy in particular is affecting in the first place the countries of the euro zone –against which the dollar value is at record lows – making more difficult their own economic woes.
As the capitalism’s chronic crisis more and more affects the most powerful economies of the world, what dominates the relations between national states is a ruthless competition and a tendency of each sate to look after number one, regardless of the consequences for the world economy. —Eduardo Smith
Despite the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars on the electoral circus in 2004, the American bourgeoisie is no better off today than it was before the election and continues to face severe political problems. The goal of any electoral circus under capitalism is twofold: to exert the full power of the democratic mystification and to put in place the most appropriate ruling team for the coming period.
This year, the goal of re-establishing the credibility of the democratic mystification was particularly important, given the clearly tainted electoral shambles of 2000, from which the candidate who lost the popular vote nevertheless emerged victorious, but whose authority and legitimacy was in question for four years. At the same time, the fallout from the deteriorating military situation in Iraq, both at home and abroad, has seriously undermined American imperialism’s political authority and increased its difficulties to respond effectively to challenges to its hegemony on the international level, creating a situation which required a readjustment of the ruling team..
The election has accomplished neither goal, leaving the capitalist class with a political mess as it faces the difficulties ahead. The failure to achieve its goals were the consequences of the social decomposition of capitalism on its ability to control and manipulate the electoral process. As we discussed in Internationalism 132, these effects included the difficulty encountered by the dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie in settling on a preferred political division favoring the election of John Kerry until very late in the campaign – perhaps too late – to facilitate its successful implementation. Another problem was its difficulty in being able to manipulate and control the electorate effectively, especially the Christian fundamentalist right, which seemed impervious to the political rhetoric of the campaign. Twenty million of the sixty million votes cast for Bush came from Christian fundamentalists who essentially ignored the central policy issues of the war in Iraq and the economy, and voted solely on the instructions of their clergy based on secondary and even tertiary issues like gay marriage and abortion.
A central characteristic of a successful electoral circus is the emergence of a social and political euphoria, largely manufactured and manipulated by the capitalist mass media. When a new president is elected for the first time, this euphoria is generally fed by a media campaign celebrating the dawning of a “new age” and a sense of national renewal in the period following the election, running through the inauguration, and continuing through at least the first three or four months of the new regime (the so-called “honeymoon period”). The honeymoon periods that accompanied the Kennedy victory in 1960 and the first term victories of Reagan and Clinton are examples of this phenomenon. This post electoral euphoria occurs even if the election was bitterly fought and the electorate sharply divided and even if the winner did not gain a majority in the popular vote, as in the case of both Kennedy, who received only 49.7% of the popular vote in 1960 and Clinton who got only 43% in 1992, due to the third party candidacy of H. Ross Perot that year. In the case of second term victories, the propaganda campaign generally focuses on the promise of national unity as the re-elected president, who will never have to face another election, is supposedly free to rise above political expediency and partisan politics and pursue policies that can leave his historic mark on the nation – his “legacy” as the bourgeois academics and journalists like to call it.
The most striking thing about the current period is the total absence of any political euphoria. Even in those parts of the country where Bush enjoyed heavy political support, the mood is quite subdued. For a good part of the country, the whole election seems like a bad dream, leaving people as if in a state of shock. This is true particularly in the large urban, industrialized states of the northeast, the Great Lakes region in the Midwest, and the far west where the campaign propaganda pushing for a change in the ruling team proved effective. The scenario that would have worked best in restoring the democratic mystification to full glory would have been a Kerry victory at the polls. The dominant bourgeois media campaigns had emphasized that the Bush administration had misled the nation into war, did not have a strategy to win the peace, was riddled with lying, cronyism and corruption, and an unprecedented effort was undertaken to mobilize “the people” to help rectify the wrong that had been done by a “stolen” election in 2000. From rock stars like Bruce Springsteen to everyday citizens, volunteers for Kerry were mobilized to travel to so-called swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania for door-to-door canvassing.
The opposition to Bush in the major metropolitan areas ranged as high as 75, 80, even 90 percent. The stage was set for a tremendous celebration of this exertion of “people power” to change America for the better. Had Kerry won, there would have been dancing in the streets in the major cities of America on election night, the democratic mystification would have gotten an incredible shot in the arm and at the same time the bourgeoisie would have gotten a new president, who was committed to continuing the war in Iraq, even if he said it was mistake to be there, who would have been better able to mobilize the population for future wars, which are sure to come, and would have made it more difficult for Paris, Berlin, and Moscow to oppose the U.S. openly – at least in the near term. But instead of a much need revitalization of the democratic myth, there was demoralization and shock.
The malaise is not confined simply to those who opposed Bush in the campaign. Even within the Bush camp, instead of political euphoria the post election period is characterized by recrimination and political upheaval. A majority of the cabinet has resigned, some perhaps because they are tired, but in other cases because of policy disagreements. For example, the dispute between Secretary of State Colin Powell and the neo-conservatives at the Pentagon over Iraq policy has been well documented. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson no sooner announced his resignation than he revealed policy disagreements with the president on a number of key issues. Ashcroft is out as attorney general, as a sacrificial lamb to critics from both the left and the right who felt that the Justice Department’s strengthening of the state’s repressive apparatus was clumsy and poorly handled, especially the attempt to exempt the U.S. from the Geneva Conventions and officially legalize torture. In late December, the administration attempted to mollify these critics by revising the controversial memorandum on torture and re-committing the US to abide by the Geneva Conventions. That Ashcroft’s departure was merely a gesture at silencing critics and not a substantive retreat from repression was demonstrated by the fact that his replacement is slated to be White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, who originally developed the controversial position in the first place.
The dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie are well aware of their problems and are not entirely powerless and despite their inability to achieve the appropriate political division of labor at the polls, are seeking to rectify or minimize the damage done by the electoral outcome. Despite Bush’s inclination to circle the wagons and surround himself with close supporters as cabinet members and advisers, considerable pressure is being exerted on the administration to modify its more extreme positions, and to actually move towards the very policies advocated by Kerry in the election campaign (such as beefing up military presence in Iraq in the short term and developing a disengagement plan in the longer term). At the same time, there are efforts to restore a certain discipline to the state capitalist apparatus, a good portion of which worked behind the scenes to defeat Bush’s re-election.
Sen. John McCain seems to most clearly represent the main faction of the bourgeoisie on this front at the current moment. On the one hand, McCain has supported the Administration’s bloodletting at the CIA, which has forced five top CIA directorate members to resign since the election in retribution for their leaking embarrassing information to the press during the final weeks of the campaign. McCain made it clear that such disloyalty from the intelligence community is totally unacceptable. But on the other hand, McCain has aggressively criticized Rumsfeld’s handling of defense policy and the war in Iraq, basically echoing the same charges and criticisms made by the Kerry campaign before the election. Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Nagel, second ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, shares McCain’s lack of confidence in Rumsfeld and openly called for his resignation. Retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded US forces in the first Gulf War, and was one of the handful of former generals to openly support Bush in the campaign, also voiced his displeasure with Rumsfeld. At the same time, Brent Scowcroft, a close friend and adviser to Bush’s father and a former national security adviser, has strongly attacked the administration’s Iraq policy and predicted that the January 30th elections in Iraq “won’t be a promising transformation, and it has great potential for deepening the conflict.” Scowcroft actually proposed the possibility that the best solution is for the U.S. to get out of Iraq now. Even Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, warned that “we are now digging ourselves out of a hole in Iraq.” The New York Times reported January 10th that Republican politicians, fearful that another four years of combat and body bags, will fuel growing popular discontent with the war, are pressuring the administration for a timetable for withdrawal – precisely the position of Kerry in the campaign, who called for beginning to pull troops out of Iraq over four years. According to the Times, secret strategy sessions at the Pentagon have been exploring the option of orchestrating the Iraqi government to be elected January 30th to request the U.S. to begin a phased withdrawal.
While Rumsfeld struggles to cling to his post and still has the support of the president, he has been forced to yield to the pressure by designating retired four star general Gary E. Luck to conduct a thorough, independent review of policy in Iraq and prepare recommendations for a policy shift. So, despite victory at the polls and the president’s insistence that his Iraq policy has received a popular ratification and that he will not announce a timetable for withdrawal, the Bush administration is experiencing strong pressure to move away from its often repeated policy of “staying the course” and confident predictions of victory in Iraq and towards the very policies that the Bush camp ridiculed during the election. All of these developments are unprecedented in the aftermath of a presidential re-election.
While imperialist policy is the central concern of the dominant fractions of the ruling class, Bush’s domestic agenda enjoys no honeymoon either. Despite obtaining 51 percent of the popular vote and insisting that he has a mandate for his domestic program, Bush faces tremendous opposition from the general population, from Democrats, and even from members of his own party. Public opinion polls not only show that a majority of the population thinks the war in Iraq is a mistake and not worth the cost in lives or money, but a majority also disapproves of key aspects of his domestic program, including particularly changes in social security. Even some Republican members of congress are sharply critical of his social security proposal. The administration’s plan to slash federal expenditures for Medicaid, forcing state governments to shoulder greater financial obligations, forcing them to raise taxes at the local level, has triggered a rebellion by governors, including Republicans. His plans to drastically cut appropriations for financial aid to college students at a time when tuition costs are soaring are also triggering opposition.
Despite failure to achieve their desired political division of labor, America’s rulers are the strongest bourgeoisie in the world and are moving rapidly to adjust the policy orientation of the administration to one that will more effectively serve its interests, especially at the imperialist level. However, with the failure of the electoral mystification to achieve any semblance of a fictional “political consensus” in society, the bourgeoisie will have increasing difficulties at the social level to control the working class. There is no significant support for the war in Iraq, especially within the working class, and even if the administration moves towards a policy of disengagement, the impatience of the workers and other strata with war-making will create tremendous difficulties for the bourgeoisie. As the need for other military incursions abroad arise, the Bush administration’s lack of credibility on war will take a heavy toll.
On the international level, there is a general trend towards a return to class confrontation, as the proletariat everywhere finds itself under increasing attack. This phenomenon will become more pronounced in the U.S. as the Bush administration accelerates its attacks on the working class’ standard of living, as a consequence of the global economic crisis and social decomposition of world capitalism which forces it to initiate more and more military interventions around the world to protect its super power status and to finance this on the backs of the proletariat. The attempt to “reform” the social security pension program poses the same risk for triggering a proletarian reaction as it has in various European countries where the bourgeoisie has been forced to cut such programs. Without the beneficial effects of the social and political euphoria that generally accompanies its electoral circus, the bourgeoisie faces the potential to confront an increasingly combative working class. Jerry Grevin
The following article, reprinted from the ICC’s territorial publication in France, was written a week prior to the December 26 election.
After the presidential elections of 31 October the Ukraine has faced a political crisis involving Leonid Koutchma’s and Viktor Ianukovitch’s pro-Russian fraction and that of the opponent Viktor Iushchenko, a reformer and declared supporter of an “opening toward the West”. This has taken place in the context of diplomatic tensions and threatening declarations by Russia, which the European countries and especially the US have met with harshness. The contestation around the manipulation of the October 31 and November 21 elections has then spread in the development of massive demonstrations in the Ukrainian capital, which ended in the occupation of downtown Kiev and the blockage of the access to Parliament by the demonstrators “until democracy wins”. The so-called ‘orange revolution’ has started, we are told by both Iushchenko’s supporters, and the media of the great democracies, which have glorified the ‘will’ of the Ukrainian people to ‘free’ themselves of the Moscow clique. Interviews, reports, and photographs have filled the pages of the press: “The people are no longer fearful”, “we’ll be able to speak freely”, “those who thought of themselves as the ‘untouchable’ are no longer so”, etc. In short, the hope for a better and freer life has supposedly opened up for the population and the working class of Ukraine, and, to show that democracy is advancing, a third round of the elections has been imposed for December 26, with the perspective for the electoral victory by Iushchenko!
Behind this barrage, the essential question has nothing to do with the struggle for democracy. The real issue is the ever growing confrontation among the great powers, in particular the US’s present offensive against Russia, which aims at getting Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence. It is important to note that Putin directed his anger essentially against the US. In fact, it is the US which is behind the candidate Iushchenko and his ‘orange’ movement. At the time of a conference in New Dehli on December 5, the leader of the Kremlin denounced the US for trying to “reshape the diversity of civilization through the principles of a unipolar world, the equivalent of a boot camp” and impose “a dictatorship in international affairs, made up of a pretty-sounding pseudo-democratic verbiage”. Putin has not been afraid of throwing in the face of the US the reality of its own situation in Iraq when, on December 7 in Moscow he pointed out to the Iraqi prime minister that he could not figure out “how it’s possible to organize elections in the context of a total occupation by foreign troops”! It is with the same logic that the Russian president opposed the declaration by the 55 OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) countries in support of the process taking place in Ukraine and confirming the organization’s role in monitoring the unfolding of the third round of the presidential elections of December 26. The humiliation the ‘international community’ inflicted on Putin by refusing to acknowledge his own backyard is aggravated by the fact that several hundred observers from not only the US, but also from Great Britain and Germany, will be sent.
Ever since the collapse of the USSR and the catastrophic constitution of the Community of Independent States (which was meant to salvage the crumbs of its ex-empire), Russia’s borders have been unrelentlessly under threat, both because of the pressure from Germany and the US, and the permanent tendency toward exploding, inherent to it. The unleashing of the first Chechen war in 1992, then the second in 1996 under the pretext of the fight against terrorism, expresses the brutality of a power in decline trying to safeguard its strategically vital position in the Caucasus at all costs. For Moscow the war was a matter of opposing Washington’s imperialist schemes, which aim at destabilizing Russia, and those of Berlin, which developed an undeniable imperialist aggressiveness, as we had seen in the spring of 1991, when Germany played a major role in the explosion of the Yugoslav conflict.
The Caucasus question is therefore far from a solution, because the US resolutely continues to advance its own interests in the area. It is in this context that we can understand Shevarnadze’s eviction in 2003 by the ‘roses revolution’, which placed a pro-American clique in power. This has allowed the US to station its troops in the country, in addition to those already deployed in Kirghizistan and in Uzbekistan, north of Afghanistan. This strengthens the US’ military presence south of Russia and the threat to Russia of encirclement by the US. The Ukrainian question has always been a pivotal one, whether during tsarist Russia or Soviet Russia, but today the problems is posed in an even more crucial fashion.
At the economic level, the partnership between Ukraine and Russia is of great importance to Moscow, but it is above all at the strategic and military levels that the control of Ukraine is to it of even greater importance than the Caucasus. This is because, to begin with, Ukraine is the third nuclear power in the world, thanks to the military atomic bases inherited from the ex-Eastern bloc. Moscow needs them in order to show, in the context of inter-imperialist blackmails, its capacity to have control over such great nuclear power. Secondly, if Moscow has lost all probability of gaining direct access to the Mediterranean, the loss of Ukraine would mean a weakening of the possibility to have access to the Black Sea as well. Behind the loss of access to the Black Sea, where Russia’s nuclear bases and fleet are found in Sebastopol, there is the weakening of the means to gain a link with Asia and Turkey. In addition, the loss of Ukraine would dramatically weaken the Russian position vis-à-vis the European powers, and particularly Germany, while at same time it would weaken its capacity to play a role in Europe’s future destiny and that of the Eastern countries, the majority of which are already pro-American. It is certain that a Ukraine turned toward the West, and therefore controlled by it and the US in particular, highlights the Russian power’s total inadequacy, and stimulates an acceleration of the phenomenon of explosion of the CIS, along with a sequel of horrors. It is more than probable that such a situation would only push whole regions of Russia itself to declare independence, encouraged by the great powers.
Therefore a life or death issue is posed to Russia in the near future. It is certain that Putin will do all he can to keep the Ukraine under his influence. At least, he will not let go of the prize without getting at least a share, even at the cost of mincing it up. This is why Russia is pushing the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine to secede, in this way contributing to chaos and the destabilization of the region. Russia is responding to the very logic of its American rivals, whose imperialist politics worsen the deadliest barbarism by the day.
By attempting to take control of Ukraine, the US is putting pressure on Russia in order to make it back off its frontiers and allow the US to expand its own sphere of influence. At the same time the US continues its politics of encirclement of Europe, which they initiated with the war in Afghanistan. In particular, the US aims at blocking Germany’s expansion toward the East, which is the ‘natural’ area of expansion for this country. We saw this at the time of the Third Reich, when the attention was turned to this area of the world, and we saw it at the time of WWI. If the German bourgeoisie makes its own the rhetoric of its American rival, which denounces Russia and its ‘neo-colonialist’ policy toward Ukraine, it is to be better able to gain the upper hand in the future. Therefore, it’s not a two-party game that is taking place in Ukraine, but rather a three-party one. This does not bode a bright tomorrow for the Ukrainian population, quite the contrary. In fact, if up to the present moment it has been lured by the Russian bourgeoisie, it is now three bandits that will sow chaos, with all the repercussions that such a situation may have at the regional and world levels.
It is for instance certain that this advance by the US will have an impact on the Ukraine, Russia, and the CIS, but also on the central Asian region. In addition, even if it is true that it is the great powers that are the first to sow disorder, we cannot neglect the capacity that regional powers such as Turkey or Iran have to contribute to aggravate the situation. Turkey and Iran will not stay inactive, and they will contribute to the dynamic of chaos. The tendency toward explosion and permanent civil war which prevails in this huge area and which is greatly aggravated by the war in Iraq will therefore get a further push because of this new center of the aggravations of imperialist tensions. Such a destabilization in turn, can only have serious consequences in a new acceleration of the tendency toward war by many countries, as new foci of tensions emerge. The US is at the lead, with its mad race to control the planet.
The democratic ‘choice’ in Ukraine has reduced the population to being pawns, manipulated by this or that rival bourgeois fraction, each of which is acting on behalf of this or that imperialist power. The ‘triumph of democracy’ will not fix the situation of misery of the Ukrainian workers. On the contrary, it will push them to mobilize in defense of the ‘democratic’ fatherland, in the same way as the preceding generations were led to defend the ‘socialist’ fatherland, and to accept the ‘orange’ sacrifices, which the future leaders of Ukraine will no doubt impose on them.
Let us remember that the ‘democratic’ Iushchenko did not fail to impose austerity on the working class when he was prime minister and banker of the very pro-Russian government he now denounces so adamantly. The clique that is getting ready to seize power has nothing to envy to the previous one, and its divisions promise no stability. The democratic perspective sows illusions as to the possibility to reform the capitalist system, to gradually transform it and make it ‘better’. It requires the working class to break its back in the face of the ‘superior’ interest of the state as opposed to the ‘inferior’ demands around food and the conditions for existence.
The perspective to create a world of ‘citizens’ within a democracy that is working at creating a happy humanity is an illusion which aims at destroying the consciousness of the necessity to do away with capitalism, a system that engenders more and more barbarism and chaos. Mulan 12-17-04
The blind violence committed by mobs is often fueled by the economic crisis, but the ruling class knows how to use it to its own benefit. What happened in Tlahuac was a desperate act by an interclassist mass which behaved with no perspective, pushed to react with vengeance by feelings of being manipulated and terrorized. Even though the lynching is directed against members of the repressive arm of the state, it does not mean that this violence expresses a conscious act. On the contrary, it is a manifestation of the irrational behaviors which capitalist decomposition causes. We highlight the desperate actions by members of the petty bourgeoisie and the marginal strata of society, but we note that elements of the working class also become trapped in this dynamic.
This dynamic is not the result of ignorance and backwardness alone. It is rather a manifestation of agonizing capitalism. This kind of irrational violence is not exclusive to the peripheral countries. In El Ejido in Almeria, Spain, in 2000, xenophobic fever affected the inhabitants who tried to lynch a group of immigrants. The ‘skinheads’ and the hooligans of the industrialized countries display similar characteristics.
The events of Tlahuac raise a deeper question than whether they were induced by guerrillas, or drug traffickers, or government provocation. They are an expression of desperation, immediatism, the lack of a perspective for the future. It is the practice of a mob of people who recognize that bourgeois institutions don’t offer any kind of safety , and decide to take justice in their own hands. They think that in this way they will find a solution to the problem, but they don’t see that the real problem is this system, which creates violence because of the insecurity resulting both from corruption and complicity, and exploitation and submission. Which violence is greater than the one exerted by the exploitation and poverty which capitalism imposes on the workers daily?
The events in Tlahuac are not an isolated case. It is rather a typical action, a product of capitalist decomposition. However, it’s important to notice that this kind of action is utilized by the bourgeoisie to its own advantage. Whether for its own incapacity or as the effect of the confrontation among its own fractions, the ruling class decided not to rescue its body-guards. Nevertheless, they use these events to liven up the confrontation and put pressure on the Fox and Lopez Obrador governments. This is also done to attack the consciousness of the workers, as they are invited to take sides in the dispute among fractions of the bourgeoisie.
The working class cannot be fooled. Workers need to understand that this is not a problem of so-called ‘civil society’. It is a problem that requires reflection and the ability to learn lessons from it. Workers need to see that the mobs, notwithstanding their apparently ‘massive’ action, are desperate and blind. This type of action prevents all possibility of a conscious act performed with a true sense of solidarity. A population turned into ‘vigilantes’ because it no longer trusts the police is not, under prevailing, capitalist conditions, an alternative. Far from being an alternative, it is a dangerous weapon, which the state repressive apparatus itself can use. Workers need to understand clearly that it is only the proletarian revolution that can bring an end to the sense of insecurity which capitalism gives us. Vania, December 2004
(Details of the attack can be found here:
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4038173.stm [9])
On February 26, 2005 the meeting in Toronto on class consciousness and the role of the revolutionary organization could not be developed in depth because the discussion got cut short due to time limitation. We would like to take this opportunity to explore further the topic of the meeting.
There were two presentations, one by NF, editor of Red and Black Notes, and the other by the IBRP. The first posed a point of departure for the discussion, laying out the materialist basis of class consciousness and raising the question of the role of the revolutionary organization in the process of coming to consciousness. The other presentation by the IBRP, on the other hand, was rambling, suffered from immediatist enthusiasm about the class struggle, filled as it was with anecdotes about recent struggles in Quebec, but did not lay out the position of the IBRP on class consciousness and the revolutionary organization. In this sense, it did not contribute to political clarification.
We think that the discussion posed by Red and Black contains elements that can advance the understanding of the topic. First, we salute the clarification contributed by the first part of the presentation as to the working class being the revolutionary subject. Our understanding of class consciousness cannot advance if we don’t first identify the class in society who bears a revolutionary consciousness. Red and Black used the materialist approach to effectively explain and demonstrate that it is the conditions of exploitation and oppression experienced by the working class that provide the fertile soil for its revolutionary consciousness to arise.
The presentation then ran into difficulty in trying to connect the development of class consciousness and the role of the revolutionary organization. The presentation said that revolutionaries could “assist” in this process, but it could not clarify what this meant. This reflects the difficulty the comrade is having in clarifying his position as he moves away from councilism, which minimizes and even denigrates the importance of the revolutionary organization in the revolutionary project. It reflects a difficulty perhaps to understand the relationship between revolutionary minorities and the class.
Unlike the trotskyist who intervened in the discussion to insist that it is essentially revolutionaries who were petty bourgeois and bourgeois intellectuals who bring revolutionary ideas from outside the proletariat and inject them into the working class, we do not make a separation between revolutionary minorities and the working class. Marx himself, whom the trotskyist might view as an ‘intellectual’, was always clear that his understanding derived from the living struggles of the class. Revolutionaries and revolutionary organizations are not separate from the class, but are secretions of the class, as it struggles to understand reality in order to change it.
Revolutionaries are the workers who come to understand the necessity for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism earlier than their class brothers. It is in this sense that we say they are the vanguard of the proletariat – they are in the forefront of the struggle to understand, to come to consciousness. For us the vanguard is not the general staff of the revolution that orders the workers around. It is the most class conscious workers whom the class itself secretes, and who fulfill the task for which they are secreted: to spread their understanding to their class brothers and sisters, to accelerate the process of coming to consciousness within the class, and to deepen, clarify, and elaborate the theoretical arsenal of the working class.
It is this dialectic process between the class and the revolutionaries that councilism does not understand and that trotskyism taints. This basic interconnectedness between class consciousness and organizations means that a proletariat that has not given rise to a strong revolutionary organization is not prepared for the revolutionary confrontation with capitalism. It means that there is a weakness in the development of revolutionary class consciousness within the class. A class that is struggling to come to consciousness gives rise to revolutionary minorities and organizations. These are the tools, the means the class gives itself to assure the acceleration, deepening, and extension of consciousness within the class. Internationalism.
Internationalism, New York, April 2005
— Internationalism
Imperialist intervention has continued to be the dominant factor in the national situation. As we have previously demonstrated this intervention is the result of a conscious imperialist strategy adopted in 1992 a unified by basis by all major factions of the American bourgeoisie as a response to the change historical circumstances following the end of the cold war. This strategy is designed to maintain US imperialist hegemony as the world’s only remaining super power and block the rise of a potential rival in Europe or Asia in a world in which decomposition has unleashed a tendency for each imperialist power to play its own card in the international arena. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are only the latest and most ambitious military initiatives by the American bourgeoisie pursuant to this strategy. The impact of the Iraq war in particular on the US national situation is a complete confirmation of what we said in the last congress, where we insisted that the war would exacerbate global instability, accelerate the challenges to American imperialist hegemony, and wreak havoc on the American economy.
On the imperialist level, this intervention has steadily accelerated instability in the Middle East, with the spread of terrorist violence to Saudi Arabia and most recently Lebanon, and eroded US political authority on a global level. Now the US is sounding the war drums against Syria, and Iran. Elsewhere in the world, confrontations against American hegemony abound, as major and secondary, and even tertiary powers, play their own cards on the imperialist terrain, emboldened by American preoccupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This ranges from imperialist inroads by European and Japanese rivals in Latin America, U.S. imperialism’s own backyard, to tensions with Russian imperialism over Ukraine and American inroads in the former republics of the Soviet Union, to North Korea’s nuclear gambit. Also it has had tremendous impact on the economic and political situation in the US.
On the political level on the domestic front, the war in Iraq has revealed that any illusions the bourgeoisie had surmounted what they referred to as the “Vietnam Syndrome” – a term they used to refer to the unwillingness of the working class, and the population at large to permit itself to be mobilized for war and to accept the death and mutilation of working class youth in the service of the imperialist appetites of American capital – were completely groundless. As we have noted previously, on the historical level, the proletariat, internationally and in the US, remains undefeated, and the bourgeoisie cannot mobilize the population to accept on a prolonged basis the economic, political, and physical (in terms of lives), sacrifice that long scale imperialist war requires. Furthermore, the ideological justification for imperialist war in this period manufactured after the 9/11 attacks and clumsily manipulated by the Bush administration, has been totally discredited, and consequently presents the bourgeoisie with grave problems in its efforts to mobilize the population to accept future wars. Despite Bush’s claims that his re-election constitutes a popular ratification of his Iraq policies, it is abundantly clear that Bush’s electoral triumph is a pyrrhic victory. All the bourgeoisie’s own data demonstrates that the majority of the population thinks that the war in Iraq is not worth the cost to fight it, in terms of the lives lost or the money expended. The various explanations for the war in Iraq – the purported link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, or the imminent threat posed by alleged weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Iraq – were all revealed as lies. As of March, the official statistics quoted in the mass media indicated that 8,000 soldiers had deserted from the military rather than face deployment in the war zone. Bush was re-elected president in spite of the unpopularity and discrediting of his Iraq policy, not because of it.
Decomposition has so seriously eroded the bourgeoisie’s ability to manipulate its own electoral circus that it has been unsuccessful in assuring the desired electoral outcome for the past two presidential elections. This has politically weakened the bourgeoisie by failing to readjust the political division of labor in order to make possible a shoring up of the ideological underpinnings for its imperialist interventions abroad, and by failing to reestablish the credibility of the electoral mystification. (For a full analysis of the election results, see Internationalism 132 [17] and 133 [18].) As we noted in Internationalism 133, a striking characteristic of the current period is the total absence of any post-election political euphoria. The dominant bourgeois media campaigns had emphasized that the Bush administration had misled the nation into war, did not have a strategy to win the peace, was riddled with lying, cronyism and corruption, and an unprecedented effort was undertaken to mobilize “the people” to help rectify the wrong that had been done by a “stolen” election in 2000. But instead of a much needed revitalization of the democratic myth, the election’s outcome was widespread political demoralization and shock.
The dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie are well aware of their problems and are not entirely powerless in the face of their inability to achieve the appropriate political division of labor at the polls. There are clearly efforts underway to rectify the damage done by the electoral outcome. Considerable political pressure has been exerted on the administration to modify its more extreme positions, especially on Iraq policy, and to actually move towards the very policies advocated by Kerry in the election campaign. At the same time there is a concerted effort to restore a certain discipline to the state capitalist apparatus, a good portion of which worked behind the scenes to defeat Bush’s re-election. This effort at political rectification within the bourgeoisie is reflected by:
In the pages of Internationalism we have developed an analysis of the impact of decomposition on the bourgeoisie’s inability to manipulate successfully the electoral circus to achieve a change in administration. We will not repeat this analysis here, but simply assert that nothing since November has refuted this analysis. More recently we have demonstrated in the press how the bourgeoisie is moving to mitigate the negative impacts of its botched election by pressuring the Bush administration to modify its imperialist policy, especially in Iraq, and actually implement policy orientations advocated by the Kerry campaign. It is necessary here, however, to consider a theory that has become quite fashionable in the liberal-leftist milieu and the mainstream bourgeois media, as an explanation for the 2004 election results. Various versions of this theory describe the existence of “two Americas” or refer to the “Great Divide” in American society. In one highly publicized variant, John Sperling talks about the supposed existence of two Americas, epitomized by the division between the Red states or “Retro states” and the Blue states, or “Metro states.” According to Sperling, the Retro states represent “Old America” and its “commonalities are religiosity; social conservatism; an economic base of extraction industries, agriculture, nondurable goods manufacturing, military installations; and a commitment to the Republican Party.” This Retro America encompasses the South, the Prairie states and the Rocky Mountain states.
By contrast, the Metro states represent the “New America” and the “New Economy, and “are loosely held together by common interests in promoting economic modernity and by shared cultural values marked by religious moderation; vibrant popular cultures; a tolerance of differences of class, ethnicity, tastes, and sexual orientation; and a tendency to vote Democratic.” Metro states include New England, Middle Atlantic, Great Lakes states, and the West Coast, plus Colorado and Arizona. Their economies are “productive” rather than extractive, based on manufacturing and services. With 65% of the US population, they pay the bulk of tax revenues to the federal government, “but some $200 billion a year of Metro taxes flow to Retro states and support the economic life of its small cities, towns, and rural areas.”
This fashionable theory totally obfuscates current political realities by attributing the political difficulties of the bourgeoisie to a clash between two rival factions of the capitalist class – the extractive, old, reactionary bourgeoisie versus the productive, modern, progressive bourgeoisie, and clearly supports the modern, progressive wing of the ruling class. It reinforces the bourgeois democratic myth by insisting that the election is the means by which the ruling class determines policy orientation, in a contest between rival economic interests within the ruling class who seek to gain control of the state apparatus in order to implement policies that favor their parochial economic interests. This is an historically outmoded view of how the bourgeoisie uses elections. In the ascendant phase of capitalism in the 19th century, different factions of the bourgeoisie would indeed vie for power in elections, seeking to gain control of the state apparatus to wield it to benefit the development of certain economic interests. But in the decadent phase of capitalism, which began in the early 20th century, with the completion and saturation of the world market and the resulting exacerbation of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, the rise of state capitalism has given quite a different character to the way state policy is determined and in the role that elections play in the political life of society. The real policy orientations of the state are decided behind closed doors, in the permanent state bureaucracy and the think tanks of the bourgeoisie, from the perspective of the global interests of the national capital. The parochial interests of this or that sector of the ruling class in this framework are subordinated to the interests of the state and the national capital as a whole.
The social decomposition of capitalism has given rise to the bourgeoisie’s difficulties in controlling the electoral process. This has been demonstrated by the difficulty and delay in the major factions of the bourgeoisie settling on an electoral strategy in the last presidential campaign until what proved to be too late to effectively pull it off, and in the rise of religious fundamentalism as a political phenomenon not easily controlled by the bourgeoisie’s traditional means of manipulating the electoral process. While used by Reagan in the early 1980s as an element in putting together his electoral base, Christian fundamentalism has increased dramatically in the US , to the point in which it played a critical role in the 2004 election, providing Bush with 20 million votes, considerably more than the 3 million vote victory margin in the popular vote. More significantly is the fact that these votes were largely influenced and controlled by the Christian fundamentalist clergy, largely on the basis of tertiary social issues like gay marriage and abortion, rendering this segment of the electorate impervious to the main ideological campaigns of the electoral circus.
The alarming rise of religious fundamentalism, whether in Christian, Islamic, or Jewish variants, is a consequence of social decomposition, representing a false response to a society without hope, a world characterized without a perspective for the future, by increasing despair, and fear.
The economic impact of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan has been devastating, perhaps even more than we predicted. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost so far around 300 billion dollars and there is no end in sight. It was just two years ago that the Bush administration predicted that Iraqi occupation and reconstruction would be largely self-sustainable, financed by the sale of Iraqi oil on the open market. However, 10 years of economic sanctions, American bombing, and Iraqi corruption, combined with damage inflicted during the war, and sabotage by the anti-US insurgency have totally exposed the futility of such illusions of self-sustainability. On the economic level, Iraq is a bottomless pit for the US. Reports of corruption and the disappearance of billions of dollars worth of American taxpayer financed equipment in Iraq are essentially accepted as routine at this point. The waste and corruption has meant that American military forces are poorly supplied with vital security equipment and mundane daily supplies. The scandal over the lack of armor plated humvees is well known. Family and friends of American military personnel take up collections to raise money to send bullet proof vests and even toilet paper to combat forces stationed in Iraq.
When the Bush administration took office in 2001, it inherited a budget surplus from the Clinton administration. Today the budget deficit has not only returned, but it has hit record highs. Ten years ago the Newt Gingrich-led conservative “revolution” in Congress promised the end of big government. Today conservative Republicans complain that the end of the end of big government has arrived and that it is the supposedly conservative Bush administration that has unleashed the return to a policy of big government. Today expenses are running totally out of control. Whether the economy is officially in recession or recovery, the ruling class can no longer bring about any improvements to the general economic and especially the social conditions of the working class. On the contrary, every new cycle of recession-recovery, brings about a new level of deterioration in the proletariat’s living and working conditions, as the bourgeoisie tries to make workers bear the brunt of each new fall into the abyss of the chronic crisis of its system.
The recession of 2001 put millions of workers on the street, as companies went bust or simply tried to squeeze more profits from fewer employees. Today while the bourgeoisie celebrates a supposed record-setting 2.2 million jobs created during last year, two remarkable facts relativize the significance of these new jobs: first, the new jobs are significantly less than the three million jobs lost earlier in President Bush’s’ first term in office. In fact there has not been any growth in the total of workers with a job in the last four years –132.4 million when Bush took office in 2001 and 132.3 last December. Taking into account the 10 million growth in population since 2001, this means that total unemployment has surely increased, despite the statistical tricks the Labor Department has had to pull to establish the rate of unemployment at 5.4%, significantly lower than the 6.3 % that existed at the height of the “recession.” Second, manufacturing companies, which shed more than two million jobs from 2000 to the end of 2003, added back only 96,000 jobs in 2004, which is said to be the weakest rebound in factory employment of any economic recovery on record in the United States. Service industries accounted for almost all the new jobs created in 2004, which speaks volumes about the depths reached by the economic crisis. More particularly this fact reflects the tendency of the most powerful economy of world capitalism to become a service economy, with more than 4/5 of the labor force employed in services (110.2 million in services; 22.0 million in manufacturing; and 2.2 million in agriculture).
Still another indicator of the economic deterioration of the living conditions of the proletariat can be seen in the wage level of the jobs created in the last four years—43% less than those created from 1996 to 2000. Besides, these new jobs are in many cases part-time, contract work or what they now call “seasonal work,” lacking benefits, such as pensions, paid vacations or health care. Moreover the despite the record number of new jobs being created, for the unemployed worker it is increasingly more difficult to find a new job. As of November, about 1.8 million, or one in five, unemployed workers were jobless for more than six months, compared with 1.1 million when the recession officially ended in November 2001. By other accounts, since the start of the recession in March 2001, the average length of unemployment has risen from 13 weeks to 20 weeks, or in other words the longer the “recovery” progresses the longer unemployed workers are going without a job – truly a “robust” recovery
There is among the dominant class a consciousness that the cheap money policy is unsustainable. It has re-ignited inflation – 3.3% last year. Thus the Federal Reserve has reversed its policy of near zero interest rates and has begun to move them upwards.
At the international level, the gigantic American debt is a very heavy weight on the world economy and a very dangerous time bomb. The aggressive cheap dollar pursued by the US is intended to jump-start American exports, but is endangering in particular the countries of the euro zone –against which the dollar value is at record lows. By making it more difficult to export European goods, it is exacerbating the economic woes faced by those countries.
The current media blitz in the US about social security “reform” is the latest installment in a quarter century of austerity attacks against the American working class. American capitalism has been implementing austerity measures since President Carter first began talking about the “economic malaise” during the period of double digit inflation in the late 1970s. The continuing economic crisis has pushed the bourgeoisie towards the brink of a qualitative breakthrough in the ferocity of austerity. Up to now, one of the strengths of American state capitalism was its ability to use the relative size of the private sector economy in the US and the lack of direct state ownership to impose austerity in a diffused manner.
For example, the lack of a state-run, centralized health care system meant that cuts in medical care were not announced and implemented nationally on a centralized basis but were introduced through thousands of employer-based medical benefit programs at different companies and economic institutions at different times, in different places, in different forms and guises. Likewise, instead of announcing a generalized reduction in wages across the economy, or even across an industry, wages were attacked at the level of individual enterprises and corporations, making it more difficult for the proletariat to respond in a unified and simultaneous manner. Today the bourgeoisie is finding it impossible to continue its avoidance of a frontal assault on the social wage. It is in this context that the current social security “reform” proposed by the Bush administration must be viewed.
The current proposed fiscal budget put forth by the Bush administration calls for the abolition or scaling back of a 150 programs that the government claims “don’t work”. The cuts include programs that are near and dear to core constituencies of the Bush administration, such as the abolition of the farm subsidy program, vital to the prosperity of the agribusiness sector. However, even if they cut these programs – and there is no guarantee about this, as the last time the Bush administration proposed cutting 100 programs, only 4 wound up falling under the axe – they would have a virtually insignificant impact on the budget deficit. These programs are small potatoes compared with the rest of the “social programs.” Most of the expenses of the state are on two issues, one the so called “entitlement” programs, such as social security, medicare and Medicaid, and the other, the military. In the face of the imperialist imperatives facing the US government in this period, it is inconceivable that military expenses are susceptible to cuts. In fact the Bush administration considers the homeland security and military expenses as “off budget” items, which are not included in the official budget proposals. This means that the bourgeoisie must move towards directly attacking the social wage head on, which is something they have carefully tried to avoid in the past.
While social security is part of the social wage – that part of the wages paid to the working class by the state in order to assure the social reproduction of the working class, in this instance to support the standard of living the disabled, elderly, retired workers, and the survivors of workers who have died, it would be inaccurate to assume that this is money that comes from the state; it is actually money confiscated from the workers’ own wages, collected, administered and distributed to the workers as part of state capitalism’s mechanism of centralizing economic life and tying the proletariat to the state apparatus. Historically workers always had the responsibility to support not only themselves (those on the job), but also their dependents – their children, their elders (who were too infirm to continue working) or their relatives who were disabled. They used part of their wages received from their employers to do so. However, in the Great Depression in the 1930’s unemployment in the US reached 30 percent and millions of workers were unable to support themselves or their dependents. Private charities were totally incapable of handling this social crisis, and state capitalist measures were introduced through the New Deal to stabilize the social situation and prevent potential future disasters. This was not some great reform, as the bourgeoisie likes to claim, but merely a restructuring of the way the working class had always supported its elderly and disabled in a manner that benefited the state. Social Security is actually paid for by the working class itself, not the state. Fifty percent of social security funds are raised by taxes on the wages paid in each pay period to the workers. The other 50% comes from a matching tax levied on their employers. As far as the employers are concerned, economically their tax contribution to Social Security is actually calculated as part of the wages, or labor costs, they pay for their workforce, part of their wage bill. Whereas the workers used to support their seniors by personally setting aside part of their earnings, under Social Security the state itself literally confiscates a part of the workers wages determined by law and distributes this money to the retired workers in the name of the state. While this guarantees that the senior citizens will be supported even in times of high unemployment, more importantly the state’s distribution of Social Security checks serves to tie the working class to the state – even if it is only to have access to part of their own wages that has been set aside.
The money paid into the social security system has never gone into individual retirement accounts, even if the government annually sends workers nearing retirement age a financial record of the amount of money they have paid into the system over the years. The social security checks of current retirees is paid from the taxes levied on the first $90,000 of wages of current workers and exempts the bourgeoisie from having to contribute significantly to the system. Most of the taxes collected goes into the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund (commonly called the Social Security trust fund). A much smaller amount goes into the Federal Disability Insurance Trust Fund. The social security checks distributed to the retired and the disabled each year are drawn from these funds. At the end of the year any money left over is required by law to be lent to the federal government; it is not allowed to accumulate in the trust fund. According to the New York Times, “The government issues interest bearing bonds to the trust fund and immediately spends the money for other purposes” March 8, 2005. These bonds are supposed to be redeemed when and if the social security trust fund does not have enough money to pay social security checks. In other words, the social security trust fund is actually comprised of current-year social security tax funds and a bunch of IOUs from the federal government.
Until the 1980s, social security taxes were low and generally very little money was left over at the end of the year.
To solve an alleged social security financial crisis during the Reagan administration, a special blue ribbon panel, headed by Alan Greenspan, who would convert his success on this panel into his nomination as head of the Federal Reserve, proposed to “save” social security by cutting benefits and raising taxes. This led to the accumulation of incredibly large surpluses in the trust fund, reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars each year, as baby boomers paid vastly more money into the program than was necessary to support their elders. These surpluses were each year turned over to the federal government and were used by the Reagan, and the first Bush administration to begin reducing budget deficits and by the Clinton administration to actually achieve a budget surplus. This money helped Reagan to fund the acceleration of the arms race in the 1980s that helped to bankrupt Russian imperialism, to fund wars and military adventures over the past two decades, and to compensate for tax cuts for the rich. Today it is estimated that there is approximately $1.7 trillion dollars in IOUs in the trust fund, and that this sum will rise to $5.3 trillion by 2018, when the trust fund will have to pay out more than it gets from tax revenues. However, despite Bush’s alarmist propaganda about 2018, “the interest earned on the fund will more than cover the shortfall and keep the fund growing until it reaches $6.6 trillion by 2028” (Denver Post, 3/9/05).
In other words, while the bourgeoisie is ranting and raving about the impending bankruptcy of social security as members of the baby boom generation near retirement age, the system is actually awash with incredible surpluses – except that these surpluses are being diverted to finance imperialist war and military expenditures. The Bush administration predicts the system will become insolvent by 2042, but the less politically motivated prediction by the Congressional Budget Office is that insolvency would occur 10 years later, in 2052 – when the oldest of the baby boomers would be 106 years old, and the youngest 88, i.e. when most of them would have already died and it would be their children who would be receiving their pensions. It is estimated that the shortfall in 2052 could be easily compensated for by an adjustment in federal spending of around 3 percent.
The debate in the bourgeois media over social security “reforms” proposed by the Bush administration focuses on the brouhaha over the diversion of a portion of workers’ tax contributions into private investment accounts, tied to the stock market. There is a lot of talk about fantastically high conversion costs to set up these accounts (estimated as ranging from $2 trillion to $6 trillion) and the supposed windfall profits to Wall Street investment brokers. But this debate obscures what is really at stake. The heart of the Bush plan is to alter the formula used to calculate benefits for future baby boom generation retirees who are 55 or younger today, which would slash guaranteed benefits by 25% to 45% over the coming decades. The real goal of the Bush administration is to avoid paying back those $6 trillion that will have been pilfered from the trust fund by 2028. In 1983, the American ruling class used the ruse of an impending social security crisis to raise the taxes on the working class and used that money not to pay pensions to retirees or to set it aside to pay the pensions of future retirees but to fund its aggressive imperialist policies. Now it wants to complete this massive social swindle by maneuvering to avoid repaying $6 trillion dollars confiscated from the working class back into the social security trust fund.
Whether the Bush investment accounts are ever implemented, the bourgeoisie is united in its view that social security can only be fixed by cutting benefits and raising taxes, as the New York Times, which is opposed to the investment accounts, has openly said in its editorial columns. Despite the bourgeoisie’s attempts to throw up a smoke screen around social security “reform” with talk of private investment accounts, the fundamental reason for social security reform is to cut the social wage of the proletariat. This frontal attack, while necessary for the bourgeoisie, is fraught with the risk of triggering a proletarian response, which is why they have delayed this type of attack for so long. When added to the accumulation of serious inroads on the proletarian standard of living, the potential for a proletarian response increases exponentially. Clearly there is unity within the bourgeoisie on the need to “reform social security, but the danger of provoking a working class explosion is one reason why there is so much hesitation within the ruling class on exactly how and how quickly to proceed. But there is also a concern that any clumsily orchestrated reneging on repaying the Treasury bonds to the social security trust fund, which are supposed to be backed by the “full faith and credit of the United States,” might jeopardize the confidence in and value of other Treasury bonds, much of which are held by foreign investors, like the Japanese and Chinese, who might transfer their funds to investments in Euros. This would create an economic calamity for the US. Even within the Republican party there is a hesitation to rush headlong into the investment accounts proposals, including Greenspan’s call for a go slow approach that would phase in the private accounts over a protracted period of time. However it is an open question for the ruling class as to whether they actually have the option to delay for too long.
The movement towards a service economy, which is a general phenomenon in the industrial countries, as the bourgeoisie looks to take full advantage of lower labor costs in underdeveloped countries, must be situated within the context of the war economy, which is at the very heart of the reason for the existence of state capitalism in the period of decadence. The emergence of US imperialism as the dominant world power in World War II was based essentially on its strength as an industrial powerhouse, one that was benefited from its geographical isolation from the major theatres of war and the protection that isolation afforded its manufacturing industries from attack. The entire American industrial apparatus was mobilized for war production, producing the steel, vehicles, munitions, food, clothing, etc. to support the war effort and destroy its imperialist rivals. On the surface, it might seem that the transition to a service economy, away from a manufacturing economy would jeopardize American military superiority. However, it is clear that American state capitalism is very conscious of its need to not only protect but to more fully develop its war economy. What remains of the manufacturing sector in the US is increasingly enmeshed in the war economy – in the production of weapons and other material for war and destruction.
In 1995, this policy was clearly laid out in a White Paper entitled “Technology Leadership to Strengthen Economic and National Security,” prepared for the White Hose Forum on the Role of Science and Technology in Promoting National Security and Global Stability. That report acknowledged that “since World War II, US military superiority has been based on our technological advantage,” and that there had been changes in American manufacturing industries. “Thirty yeas ago the US economy accounted for well over a third of the world’s total and was the leader in most manufacturing industries. By 1994, this figure had fallen to about a fifth of the world economy, with industries in Europe and Asia now fierce competitors.” The report went on to argue, “the technology base that propels the economy is in turn increasingly critical for national defense,” and proposed a strategy that would exploit “the technology base for both economic and defense needs.”
At the heart of this new strategy was a “dual-use technology policy” which reflected “the recognition that as a nation, we can no longer afford to maintain two distinct industrial bases. We must move toward a single, cutting-edge national technology and industrial base that will serve military as well as commercial needs. This ‘dual-use technology strategy’ will allow the Pentagon to exploit the rapid rate of innovation and market-driven efficiencies of commercial industry to meet defense needs.” There were three “pillars” to support this dual-use strategy: first, Defense Department support for research and development of computers and software, electronics, sensors and simulators; second, the “integration of defense and commercial production to enable industry to ‘dual produce’”; and third, initiatives to encourage “insertion” of “commercial technologies and products in the development, production and support of military systems.” What we have seen in the past ten years is not a weakening of American state capitalism, but a policy reorientation to better mobilize the productive capacities of the economy for the preparation for and the waging of modern warfare.
In discussing the impact of imperialist policy and the economic crisis, it is crucial to avoid the error of simply confining the analysis to the divisions within the bourgeoisie without focusing on the difficulties of the proletariat in the US to respond to the demands of the situation and the potential for the future. In part the difficulty of American workers to respond on their terrain is an expression of an historic weakness of the American proletariat, isolated geographically from its class brothers in Europe, characterized by a weaker Marxist theoretical history, all of which is accentuated by being trapped in the bowels of the worlds strongest and most sophisticated state capitalism. Since the onset of the open crisis at the end of the 1960’s, this historic weakness has not meant that the American proletariat has been absent from the class struggle, but rather a tendency for it to lag behind the development of class consciousness and class struggle elsewhere, particularly in Europe. Therefore, it is only a matter of time and circumstance for the same tendency towards the return to class confrontation that has been characterized by various struggles in Europe, no matter how tentative, to be echoed here in the US.
In this sense, it is clear that the bourgeoisie has taken full advantage of the disorientation ensuing from the collapse of Stalinism and the cold war, and the attendant reflux in class consciousness and class struggle to give prime attention to its imperialist interests for over a decade now. It was particularly successful in using the 9/11 attacks to develop a war psychosis campaign to obtain temporary acquiescence in its imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and to divert attention from the continued existence and steadily worsening of the economic crisis. While the working class has not suffered an historic defeat making it susceptible to permanent mobilization for imperialist war, the disorientation that followed the collapse of the Stalinist bloc and the end of the cold war, has made it very difficult for the proletariat to find its own terrain. For example, though the working class is clearly disenchanted with the war in Iraq and experiences the seriousness of the economic crisis in its daily life, there has not been a significant breakthrough on the level of class struggle. Working class opposition to the bourgeoisie’s imperialist war found no independent proletarian expression. Many workers participate in the massive mobilizations organized by the so-called “antiwar” movement, but these demonstrations were not on the class terrain of the proletariat. The antiwar demonstrations were massive one-shot deals, and not even part of an ongoing movement. They served the interests of the bourgeoisie by serving as safety valves for widespread discontent with the war, tied the demonstrators to the Democratic party, and actually hindered the development of any autonomous action within the proletariat. This movement assisted the bourgeoisie in sweeping the economic crisis and the attacks against the working class under the rug. The working class would have done more to undermine the bourgeoisie’s murderous policies by demonstrating its rejection of the ideology of sacrifice by accelerating its defense of its immediate economic interests. The fact that the Kerry campaign was largely successful in the industrial states in November is yet another demonstration of the degree to which the bourgeoisie was able to derail proletarian discontent with the war away from a working class terrain.
The bourgeoisie has waged a relentless ideological campaign to emphasize that there is one party, the Democratic Party, that cares about the workers and another, the Reupublican, which is the enemy of the workers. This ideological nonsense of course obscures the division of labor between the two major political parties which is designed to disarm the proletariat and help the bourgeoisie implement its austerity programs and defend its imperialist interests on the international level.
Thus far the bourgeoisie has been able to attack the standard of living of the proletariat and wage imperialist war with relative impunity. But the worsening of the economic crisis and the continuing challenges to American imperialist hegemony are combining to decrease the room for maneuver that the bourgeoisie has. The only way for the state to finance its imperialist interventions is to make the working class pay for it. We have already documented the steadily deteriorating condition of the working class, which more and more pushes it towards class struggle to defend itself.
We must be alert to developments within the class struggle in the US in the period ahead. We have a proletariat that has been disoriented and has allowed the bourgeoisie to attack it with impunity for too long, but a proletariat at the same time that is not historically defeated and is increasingly seething with discontent over the war in Iraq and the attacks on its standard of living. In this sense, the proletariat in the US is actually in the forefront of the world proletariat, as in no other industrial country does the proletariat openly confront the question of imperialist war and the deepening economic crisis simultaneously. The bourgeoisie increasingly risks the danger of provoking a social explosion, an explosion that holds great potential for the deepening of class consciousness and revolutionary intervention.
Internationalism, March 2005
Alaska Airlines has proposed a contract to its workers that, if signed, will cut their salaries by 20%, while United Airlines has succeeded in cutting wages by 25%.
On a different front, the number of American deserters from the Iraq war over the last two years has grown to 8,000, and is still growing.
Far away, across the Atlantic Ocean, in several European countries the working class has staged massive struggles, especially around the issue of the attacks on state-funded pensions (the equivalent of the American Social Security system). We can cite many examples of this kind, which show both a return of the class’ combativeness and militancy, and weakness in face of the bosses’ attacks, but if we do not have a method, a framework for understanding them, they will just appear as isolated snapshots that have no bearings on or relationship with history and with each other. Without a method, we will not be able to make any sense of them. It is then appropriate to ask these questions:
How to explain these apparently contradictory behaviors by our class, which in the first instance, seem to point to passivity and tremendous weakness, and in the other two reveal a determination not to settle and rather to fight back and even see through the bourgeoisie’s ideological campaigns? More importantly, how do we analyze and understand them?
The massive, worldwide struggles that began 1968 marked the return of the working class on the historic scene after the years of the counter-revolution. During those years, the working class had suffered a major historic defeat, as the ruling class succeeded in dragging it into the madness of World War II. Its revolutionary organizations survived only in the very small and dispersed numbers of their militants. 1968 marked the first great wave of class struggle out of the counter-revolution, which continued, with ebbs and flows, and waves of struggles in the 70’s and 80’s, until 1989. It was the first attempt by the working class to once again advance toward the revolutionary perspective after the years of the counter-revolution.
Various factors explain the failure of this first attempt. While the struggles of 1968 were massive and extensive, they came up against a lack of political maturation and theoretical depth. As important as they were in terms of developing the class’ consciousness of the dead-end of capitalism, there were yet important illusions in the possibility for reforms. They were also marred by councilism and anarchism, petty bourgeois contestationism, and a rejection of political organizations. The collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, resulting from the deepening of decomposition, as we have analyzed elsewhere in our press, marked the failure of the class’ first attempt at regaining its revolutionary perspective after the counter- revolution. The collapse of the Eastern bloc in turn had a severe impact on the combativeness and consciousness of the class. The ruling class was able to take advantage of this important disorientation in the working class as a whole, particularly by unleashing a tremendous campaign about the ‘end of communism’. This campaign aimed at discrediting the proletariat’s final goal, its history, and its class theory, and resulted in a significant, although temporary, loss of the class’ self-confidence and identity, and in the domination of inter-classist ideology.
The working class’ disorientation permitted the ruling class’ success in waging the first Gulf War in 1991. It was easy, at that time, to fall in the mistake of assessing the working class’ strength and overall historic perspective based on the state of confusion and disorientation of the class, and on its apparent passivity in the face of the war. It was rather common then to hear even revolutionaries express a loss of confidence in the class and disappointment as to the class’ final goal. In a similar way, it is also easy to fall into a euphoric over estimation of the struggles and the overall state of the class when the latter engages in massive confrontations, as in Argentina in 2001, or in France in 2003. The Marxist method, by contrast, strives to place events of a different nature in a historic perspective. In this sense, the retreat in consciousness and combativeness in 1989 and the massive confrontations of 2003, contradictory and disconnected as they appear to be, are part and parcel of the same tortuous, difficult, non-linear process the class experiences as it learns to face a very sophisticated class enemy which throws in its path serious obstacles and diversions. They are also part of the process by which the class comes to an understanding of the impasse of the capitalist system and of its own historic, revolutionary role.
The Marxist method does not base the analysis of the class struggle on an immediatist or empiricist approach, but by taking into consideration the overall historic conditions, which include an understanding of the maturation of the proletariat and the maneuvers of the bourgeoisie. When we use this method, then we are able to see that undeniable as the weaknesses and retreats of the working class are in the face of war and the ferocious attacks against its very conditions of life, they do not constitute, by any means, a direct ideological or historic defeat. On the contrary, we are able to see that the historic course is still open for the revolution.
As we have said, 1989 marked the beginning of an important retreat in class consciousness and a lull in its struggles. Since then, though, we have witnessed and are witnessing how the class is reawakening, although slowly and with great difficulties and hesitations. We have seen this most clearly in the massive mobilizations in France and Austria during the spring 2003 and summer 2004. We continue to see this in less spectacular, yet significant, events as well, from the desertions from the Iraqi war and a growing reluctance against military recruitment in the US, to the surging of a questioning minority in search of a political orientation. This last aspect in particular, is the most significant in the present period, which we have characterized as a’ turning point’. Contrary to the dynamic opened in 1968, during which consciousness arose following and almost as a result of the massive struggles, today we are seeing a reflection and a insistent questioning of capitalism’s perspectives, of the bleaker and bleaker future it has to offer, prior to the class’ engaging in the struggles. We are seeing a growing awareness of the degradation of the conditions of life, which the open crisis can no longer hide, as the class’ very conditions of life are threatened by growing unemployment, war, and, more recently, the brutal attacks against pensions and social security. These aspects will favor the development of consciousness in depth, as well as a rapprochement by the searching minorities with revolutionary organizations. It is clear that these conditions represent an advantage in relation to the struggles opened by 1968. The ICC has for some years recognized a ‘subterranean maturation’ of the class, which does take place at the very moments of apparent lull in the class struggle, and which today is more and more coming to the open in the voices of the minorities in search of political clarification.
Although the struggles of 2003 and 2004 in France and Austria were massive and in response to significant attacks, there is no decisive or contingent element that confirms the idea of a change in the development of the balance of forces between the classes. What the 2003 events tell us is that there is a real potential present in the development of the struggle, because they reveal a growing awareness that the attacks are worldwide, carried out by an exploiting class against the exploited class. They reveal the beginning of a regaining of class identity, and of a feeling of belonging to the same class.
It is doubtless that the nature of this turning point is not as spectacular as the one which marked the return of the class onto the historic stage in 1968; however, we can draw one important parallel. It is the underlying change in the view of the future. A specific and contingent aggravation of the crisis, with its accompanying windfall of brutal attacks on the conditions of life of the class, can well spark outbursts in the class struggle. However, it is not true that there is a mechanical link between the attacks and rising consciousness, or even combativeness. The current turning point is characterized by a questioning about the perspectives that capitalism offers to humanity. In 1968, the massive mobilizations were not just a response to the return of the crisis after the ‘boom’ years; they were above all the result of a growing disillusionment with post-war capitalism’s ability to offer a better a future, but with a comparatively low level of politicization. The present turning point is characterized by a change in spirit in the working class, the result of years of subterranean maturation in which the questioning as to what capitalism has to offer is becoming more and more the central preoccupation of the class.
This analysis and this method allow us to conclude that the present turning is the second attempt by the working class to advance toward the recovery of the revolutionary perspective since the return of the global economic crisis, the first attempt being 1968. This perspective has been maintained to date, because the class has not suffered a profound, direct or ideological defeat. Thus, what we call ‘turning point’ is not any specific point in time, but rather an ongoing process in a changing period.
Two generations of workers have now gone undefeated: the generation of 1968 and the present generation, a situation that the bourgeoisie has not confronted since the revolutionary wave that began in 1917 in Russia. The maturation of minorities since 1989 is characterized by much more fundamental questions about what the class is, how it struggles, what the role of revolutionaries is, what obstacles will have to be overcome, and, above all, the question about the validity of Marxism and the communist perspective. Whereas the generation of 1968 was distrustful of Marxism because of the weight of Stalinism and the organic break with the past of the workers’ movement, the present generation looks at the communist minorities for a political understanding and clarification. The present generation also confronts certain obstacles that the generation of 1968 did not confront: the context of decomposition and the fact that this time, contrary to 1968, the bourgeoisie will not be taken by surprise. The ruling class has elements against itself, too. Although better prepared to confront the working class, the effects of decomposition are working against it too. The crisis pushes it to more and more openly reveal the bankruptcy of its system. Similarly, the political disarray resulting from the collapse of the Eastern bloc forces the ruling class, particularly the American ruling class, to pursue imperialist confrontations. In the context of an undefeated working class whose consciousness is developing in depth, the present war has the potential of provoking a crucial understanding: there is no solution to capitalism’s contradictions. Without developing this point further, it is important to notice how, in the belly of the beast, in the country that was ‘attacked by terrorism’, the unease about the war is expressed in the number of deserters, but also of parents who oppose their sons’ and daughters’ recruitment and enlistment, which has grown from 58% in summer 2003 to 75% today, according to the bourgeoisie’s own public opinion polls. The bourgeoisie would like us to believe that there is nothing political in the decision to desert, and looks at this action as a shameful example of cowardice. In reality, the decision not to die for ‘your’ country is the proof of an underlying process of political maturation. The unwillingness to stand by the state is above all political: it expresses the budding assertion of a proletarian perspective, which poses itself in contradiction with the attempt by the ruling class to tie ideologically the workers to the state.
The working class is in the period of a turning point. Its hesitations are in significant ways linked to a growing awareness of the immensity of its historic task. Revolutionaries, the searching minorities, and the most class-conscious workers are called upon to take on the responsibilities the class has invested us with. We need to show the class the necessity to struggle and to develop the struggle. We need to show that the class’ strength lies in its solidarity. We need to show the bankruptcy of capitalism, and thus continue to fuel the deep, important reflection presently taking place in the class.
Ana, 25/6/05.
The pensions of American
workers face an unrelenting attack as part of the ruling class’ austerity
program aimed at lowering the standard of living in order to make the working
class bear the brunt of the deepening global economic crisis and to finance US
imperialism’s military interventions throughout the world. In Internationalism
No.134, we demonstrated how
the bourgeoisie has been siphoning off vast financial surpluses from the social
security fund over the years to finance its imperialist operations (“Report on
the National Situation: Social Security Reform – A Frontal Attack on the
Working Class [21]” Internationalism 134). We pointed out that in regard to its
proposed social security “reforms,” “The real goal of the Bush administration is to avoid paying back
those $6 trillion that will have been pilfered from the trust fund by 2028. In 1983, the American ruling class used the
ruse of an impending social security crisis to raise the taxes on the working
class and used that money not to pay pensions to retirees or to set it aside to
pay the pensions of future retirees but to fund its aggressive imperialist
policies. Now it wants to complete this massive social swindle by maneuvering
to avoid repaying $6 trillion dollars confiscated from the working class back
into the social security trust fund.”
Facing tremendous skepticism
within the working class and reluctance even from elements within the
bourgeoisie, who fear the economic impact if the government refuses to repay
the bonds issued to the social security trust fund, the Bush administration
continues to readjust its social security reform proposal. The most recent
version of this plan maintains the call for a partial privatization of social
security, with part of pension money deposited in privately administered stock
market investment accounts. But its most significant feature is to propose
changing social security from a pension fund that is supposed to support all
workers’ retirement, to a modified welfare fund, aimed at using the
contributions paid by more well paid workers to finance the retirement of lower
income workers. According to this plan, low income workers would receive 100%
of their current benefits, but workers earning higher wages would have changes
phased in that would lower their benefits by up to 65% (in the previous
proposal, the maximum cut was only 45%) in order to fund benefits for the
poorer workers.
The argumentation supporting this proposal emphasizes that higher paid workers don’t “:need” social security to support their retirements, because they receive money from their private pension funds usually managed through their employers. Never mind that workers have fought for these private pensions as part of the benefit package that comprises part of their wages, and have also put part of their savings into these funds, precisely because social security benefits are only sufficient to maintain a bare subsistence standard of living in retirement. Recent developments demonstrate the hypocrisy of this argument. The seriousness of the economic crisis has put these private pensions in jeopardy. For example, as part of its court-supervised plan to recover from bankruptcy, United Airlines was granted permission to abandon its seriously underfunded pension plan, which will now be taken over by the government sponsored Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), which is responsible for bailing out failed private pension funds. United Airlines employees will be lucky to receive 70% of the benefits they were entitled to. Other major airlines, also facing economic difficulties, are expected to follow United Airlines lead. Major companies in other industries may also follow suit. So serious is the failure rate of pension funds in the US, the PBGC is currently operating with a $23 billion dollar deficit. An estimated 50% of the top 100 private pension funds in the US are currently underfunded, and at risk for collapse.
So, the so-called “higher paid” workers, who are supposedly so comfortable, face up to 65% cuts in their federal social security pension benefits at the same time that their private company-based pension funds increasingly face economic disaster which will mean a loss or severe cut in benefits from that quarter as well. This double-whammy that the government is trying to ram down the throats of the working class is fraught with tremendous political risk for the bourgeoisie, as there is a risk that workers will respond to this frontal assault on their standard of living. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was forced in April to abandon his proposal to privatize state employee pensions because of near universal opposition from public sector workers. Despite making social security reform his number one domestic issue, Bush has made absolutely no headway, despite his so-called “mandate” at the polls last November. The inability of American capitalism to pay its wage bill, including pensions earned working class, in large part in order to pay for its imperialist military incursions, exposes both the economic bankruptcy of global capitalism and the fact that it offers humanity a future of death and destruction.
J. Grevin, 25/6/05.
The AFL-CIO is primed for a possible split at its upcoming quadrennial convention. A coalition of unions, led by the Services Employees International Union (SEIU) and including the Teamsters, Laborers, United Commercial Food Workers, and UNITE HERE are threatening to leave the federation if it does not adopt a broad set of “reforms” ostensibly designed to once again make the union movement a powerful force in national and international politics.
What are workers and revolutionaries to make of these events? Do they harbinger the possible revitalization of the unions as organs that could once again defend the interests of the working class and serve as weapons of the downtrodden in the 21st century quest for global justice?
From a revolutionary Marxist perspective, the answer is a clear no. Unions may have been the unitary form of working-class self-organization in the period of capitalist ascendance, when workers could come together to confront and win reforms from a still historically progressive capitalism, however, with the rise of capitalist decadence, when the system becomes a brake on the further development of the productive forces, the unions were transformed into weapons of the state to instill shop-floor discipline among the workers. They do so by pursing a capitalist agenda while pretending to speak the workers’ language. From the point of view of the theory of capitalist decadence, unions have been irretrievably lost to the working-class as a mode of organization. They are no longer proletarian institutions and no change of leadership or political direction can alter this fact.
If the working-class is ever to carry out its historic mandate to overthrow the capitalist system and build a world human community beyond capital, the union is just one of the capitalist institutions it will have to confront, defeat and ultimately surpass.
Nevertheless, this does not mean the recent turmoil in the AFL-CIO is not unimportant. These events ultimately need to be seen in the context of the overall political life of the bourgeois class. In many ways, the fact that the AFL-CIO might split is a reflection of the wider difficulties of the American ruling class to control and manipulate its political system.
What we are witnessing today with the unions is the complement of the turmoil and disorder that have infected the overall bourgeois political arena. From the botched election of 2000 to its hesitancy to rally behind a candidate in 2004, the American bourgeoisie is encountering increasing difficulty in coordinating its democratic mystification, of which the unions are a key element.
What we are seeing today is not the equivalent of 1995 when current AFL-CIO president (at the time president of SEIU) John Sweeney ousted Lane Kirkland in an effort to radicalize the union’s image in the eyes of the working class. SEIU’s program is not appreciably more radical appearing than other unions. While they do call for spending more money on organizing, consolidating unions, and confronting Wal-Mart, there is no visible plan to call for strikes, mass protests or other actions. On the contrary, most of SEIU’s program involves organizing more workers and consolidating smaller unions in order to have more influence in national politics. In other words, SEIU seeks to bring more and more workers into the union trap so as to increase their own weight in intra-bourgeois political scheming and bureaucratic competition.
This does not compare to the 1930s, the era of the CIO and its philosophy of mass industrial unionism, when the Roosevelt administration actively cooperated with the unions in order to gain greater control of the working-class and enroll more workers into these capitalist institutions as part of a long-term vision to quell class struggle.
Today’s turmoil in the AFL-CIO does not reflect some well-thought out strategy by the main factions of the ruling class. On the contrary, it reflects the very decomposition that is eating away at capitalist society and complicates the decisive historic action of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. SEIU and its allies are not threatening to break away from the AFL-CIO in line with any plan to radicalize the unions. Rather, their posturing has more in character with a selfish power move to improve their own union’s standing. In other words, they are considering jumping ship and going their own way. As the largest union in the country, the SEIU leadership probably think they can do better on their own than have to deal with the dead weight of the AFL-CIO and its regulations.
This tendency for “every man for himself” is reflective of the entire period of capitalist decomposition where the discipline of the state over the various factions of the bourgeoisie is beginning to break down. This is the exact process that is at work today within the AFL-CIO and workers should have no illusions about it.
The simple fact of the matter is that the American bourgeoisie is unable to keep its unions on the same page, very similar to the fashion in which it was unable to rally behind a clear candidate for President in 2004, leading to the debacle of a second term for George W. Bush. Today, SEIU sees the opportunity to grab more power for themselves and that is exactly what they are attempting to do, very similar to the way in which Bush and his team saw the opportunity to become President when the Florida vote came back so close, despite the fact that in 2000 most of the main factions of the bourgeoisie backed Gore.
One should not interpret these events as some indication that the democratic sphere or the unions have once again become relevant to the working class. Due to the very nature of the unions, it would be impossible for the working class to exploit this turmoil to its advantage. Moreover, the fact that the American bourgeoisie is experiencing difficulty to control its political apparatus does not mean that a total loss of control is imminent. In fact, it is not even certain that SEIU and company will leave the AFL-CIO. The possibility still exists that a back-door solution could be found, whereby SEIU’s program and the egotistical needs of its leaders are accommodated within the AFL-CIO.
Nevertheless, these events are significant as they mark a definite acceleration in the decomposition of the bourgeoisie’s political apparatus. Workers and revolutionaries need to be aware of this. They cannot allow themselves to be drawn into the increasing drama of bourgeois politics by allowing themselves to believe they have a stake in its outcome. Either way, split or not: the AFL-CIO and SEIU will both remain enemies of the working-class. This is an historic fact that no degree of reform or reorganization can change.
Henk, 25/6/05.
A century ago on June 27, 1905, in a crowded hall in Chicago, Illinois, Big Bill Haywood, leader of the militant Western Miners Federation, called to order “the Continental Congress of the Working Class,” a gathering convened to create a new working class revolutionary organization in the United States: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), often referred to as the Wobblies. Haywood solemnly declared to the 203 delegates in attendance, “We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism…The aims and objects of this organization should be to put the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.…this organization will be formed, based and founded on the class struggle, having in view no compromise and no surrender, and but one object and one purpose and that is to bring the workers of this country into the possession of the full value of the product of their toil.”
The IWW, however, never lived up to its lofty goals. It’s critique of capitalism never transcended a visceral hatred of the system’s exploitation and oppression, and never attempted to examine the nuances and intricacies of capitalist development and understand the significance of the consequent changing conditions under which the working class waged its struggles.
The rise of the IWW in the U.S. was in part a response to the same general tendencies that triggered the rise of revolutionary syndicalism in western Europe: “opportunism, reformism, and parliamentary cretinism.” [1] [23] The crystallization of this general international tendency in the US was conditioned by certain American specificities, including the existence of the frontier; the accompanying large scale immigration of workers from Europe to the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s; and the vitriolic clash between craft unionism and industrial unionism.
The Frontier and Immigration. The existence of the frontier and tremendous influx of immigrant workers were strongly intertwined and had significant consequences for the development of the workers movement in the US. The frontier acted as a safety valve for burgeoning discontent in the populous industrial states of the northeast and Midwest. Significant numbers of workers, both native-born and immigrant, alienated by their exploitation in the factories and industrial trades, fled the industrial centers and migrated westward to the frontier in search of self sufficiency and a “better” life. This safety valve phenomenon disrupted the normal and routine evolution of an experienced proletarian movement.
The differences between native-born, English-speaking workers (even if the latter were only second generation immigrants themselves) and newly arrived immigrant workers who spoke and read little or no English were used to divide the workers against themselves. These divisions were a serious handicap for the working class in the US because it cut off the native Americans from the vast experience gained by workers in Europe and made it difficult for class conscious American workers to be current with the international theoretical developments within the workers movement. This retarded the theoretical development of the workers movement in America, and hampered its ability to resist effectively against opportunist and reformist currents, and understand its political tasks.
Another consequence of the frontier tradition was the tendency towards violence in American society. The American bourgeoisie displayed no reluctance to utilize repressive force in its confrontations with the proletariat, whether it was the army, state militias, private militias (i.e., the infamous Pinkertons), or hired thugs that were deployed to suppress numerous workers struggles, even massacring strikers and their families. Such circumstances readily exposed the viciousness and hypocrisy of the class dictatorship of bourgeois democracy and the futility of trying to achieve fundamental change at the ballot box. This in turn triggered widespread skepticism among the most class conscious workers about the efficacy of political action, which was generally perceived as synonymous with participation in electoralism.
Craft Unionism vs. Industrial Unionism. The clash between craft and industrial unionism was a dominant controversy within the workers movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In essence this was a dispute about which type of unitary class organization best corresponded to proletarian class interests in the period of capitalist ascendancy, when capitalism was still historically progressive in the sense that had not yet reached its historic limits and continued to foster the further development of the productive forces. Since it was possible for the proletariat to wrest structural reforms and improvements in wages, and living and working conditions from the bourgeoisie in ascendant capitalism, this dispute over whether unions organized along narrow craft lines, confined primarily to the most highly skilled workers, or unions organized along industrial lines, uniting skilled and unskilled workers in the same industry in the same organization, was a substantive issue for the advancement of working class interests.
Craft unions regrouped in the American Federation of Labor, which accepted the inevitability of capitalism and the wage system, and sought to make the best deal possible for the skilled workers it represented. Under Samuel Gompers’ leadership the AFL presented itself as a staunch defender of the American system, and a responsible alternative to labor radicalism. In so doing, the AFL abandoned any responsibility for the well being of millions of unskilled and semiskilled American workers who were ruthlessly exploited in the emerging mass employment manufacturing and extractive industries.
Perhaps the most important current in the evolution of the industrial unionist perspective, particularly in terms of its direct impact on the founding of the IWW, was the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Embittered by their experiences in what literally amounted to open class warfare with the mining companies and the state authorities (both sides were often armed), the WFM became increasingly radicalized. In 1898, the WFM sponsored the formation of the Western Labor Union, as a “dual union.” A regional alternative to the AFL, it never really had any independent existence beyond the influence of its sponsor. While their immediate demands often echoed the same “pork chop unionism” wage demands of the AFL, by 1902 the long range goal of the WFM was socialism. The 1904 WFM convention directed its executive board to seek the creation of a new organization to unite the entire working class, which initiated the process that led to the founding convention of the IWW.
Despite the incipient syndicalist viewpoint that permeated the views of the founders of the IWW, particularly the idea that the socialist society would be organized along the lines of industrial unions, there were sharp differences between the IWW and anarcho-syndicalism as it existed in Europe. The men who gathered in Chicago in 1905 considered themselves adherents of a Marxist perspective. Except for Lucy Parsons, widow of the Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons who attended as an honored guest, no anarchists or syndicalists played any significant role in the founding congress.
Coming out of the founding convention, “every IWW official was a Socialist Party member.” [2] [24] In addition, the IWW’s general organizer from 1908-1915, Vincent St. John, made it clear that he opposed tying the IWW to a political party, and “struggled to save the IWW from Daniel DeLeon on the one hand and from the ‘anarchist freaks’ on the other.” [3] [25] IWW leaders regarded syndicalism as an alien, European doctrine. “In January, 1913, for instance, a Wobbly partisan called syndicalism ‘the name that is most widely used by [the IWW’s] enemies.’ The Wobblies themselves had few kind words for the European syndicalist leaders. To them, Ferdinand Pelloutier was ‘the anarchist,’ Georges Sorel, ‘the monarchist apologist for violence,’ Herbert Lagardelle was an ‘anti-democrat,’ and the Italian Arturo Labriola, ‘the conservative in politics and revolutionist in labor unionism.’” [4] [26]
In contrast to the decentralized vision of anarcho-syndicalism whose federationist principles favored a confederation of independent and autonomous unions, the IWW operated in accordance with a centralist orientation. While the IWW’s 1905 constitution conferred “industrial autonomy” on its industrial unions, it clearly established the principle that these industrial unions were under the control of the General Executive Board (GEB), the central organ of the IWW: The subdivision International and National Industrial Unions shall have complete industrial autonomy in their respective internal affairs, provided the General Executive Board shall have power to control these Industrial Unions in matters concerning the interest of the general welfare.” This position was accepted without controversy. The GEB alone could authorize an IWW strike.
The preamble to the IWW constitution adopted at the founding convention was clear in its commitment to the revolutionary destruction of capitalism. “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life…Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system…It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.” The organization was not clear, however, on the nature of this revolution or how it would be made. It wasn’t even clear if the revolution was a political or an economic act.
Despite their Marxist sympathies, the dominant view amongst the IWW’s founders held that for the workers the political struggle was subordinate to the economic, and that the organization should not be directly involved in politics, much to the chagrin of Socialist and Socialist Labor Party militants who sought to get the IWW to affiliate with their respective organizations. In the interests of unity, the convention formulated a convolutedly worded concession to socialists from both parties, by agreeing to the insertion of a political paragraph in the preamble to the IWW constitution, which read as follows: “Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as the industrial field, and take hold of that which they produce by their labor, through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party.” For most delegates this concessionary reference to politics was incomprehensible. [5] [27]
The opposition to politics derived from a theoretical misunderstanding of the nature of the class struggle and the proletarian revolution and the political tasks of the proletariat. For the IWW, “political” meant participation in bourgeois elections, which offered only propagandistic value in demonstrating the futility of electoralism.
This narrow definition of politics failed to understand the political nature of the proletarian revolution. What could be more political than the destruction of the capitalist state, taking control of the means of production, and the imposition of the proletarian revolutionary perspective over the whole of society? The proletarian revolution is the most audacious and thoroughgoing political act in all of human history – a revolution in which the exploited and oppressed masses rise up, destroy the state of the exploiting class, and impose their own revolutionary class dictatorship over society in order to achieve the transition to communism.
The political compromise embodied in the arcane wording of the political paragraph in the 1905 preamble was not sufficient to maintain the unity of the organization. By the 1908 convention, the anti-political perspective triumphed. The political clause was deleted from the preamble, DeLeon was barred from attending the convention on a credentials technicality, and his followers split with him to form their own IWW based in Detroit that was subordinate to the SLP. Eugene Debs, along with many other Socialist Party members, permitted his membership to lapse and withdrew from IWW activities. Haywood remained in the organization and in 1911 served simultaneously as a leading member of the IWW and a board member of the Socialist Party, until he was removed from the latter after membership in the IWW was deemed incompatible by the Socialists because of the IWW’s stance on sabotage and opposition to political action.
For the IWW the industrial union was an all-in-one organizational form. The union would not simply be a unitary organization what would serve as a mechanism for working class self defense and the form for proletarian rule after the revolution but it would also be an organization of revolutionary militants and agitators. According to its 1908 constitution, the IWW believed that “the army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” As we have pointed out in International Review 118, such a syndicalist vision that sees the possibility to form “the structure of new society within the shell of the old …springs from a profound incomprehension of the degree of antagonism between capitalism, the last exploiting society, and the classless society which must replace it. This serious error leads to underestimating the depth of social transformation necessary to carry out the transition between these two social forms, and it also underestimated the resistance of the ruling class to the seizure of power by the working-class.” [6] [28]
With this vision revolutionary syndicalism also confounded the two types of organization that have historically been secreted by the working class: revolutionary organizations and unitary organizations. They failed to appreciate the difference between the revolutionary organization that regroups militants on the basis of a shared agreement on, and commitment to, revolutionary principles and program, and a unitary organization of the class that unites all workers as workers on a sociological basis. This failure condemned the IWW to an unstable existence. The open door to membership that the organization maintained was literally a revolving door, through which perhaps as many as a million workers entered and just as quickly exited between 1905 and 1917.
Furthermore, the battle waged by the industrial unionists against craft and business unionism was increasingly anachronistic. The historic period changed in the early 20th century with the completion and saturation of the world market, which accentuated the effects of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, and ushered in the onset of capitalist decadence and the evaporation of the possibility of durable reforms. Under these changed conditions, the trade union form of organization itself, whether industrial or craft, became irrelevant to the class struggle and was absorbed into the capitalist state apparatus as a mechanism for working class control. The experience of the mass strike in Russia in 1905 and the discovery of soviets, or workers councils, by the proletariat in that country was an historical watershed for the world proletariat. The lessons of these developments and their impact on class struggle were the focus of theoretical work by Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Anton Pannekoek, and others in the leftwing of the Second International. In the real struggle of the proletariat, workers councils displaced the trade unions as the unitary organization of the working class. This new type of organization united workers from all industries in a given territorial area in the revolutionary confrontation with the ruling class and constituted the historically discovered form that the dictatorship of the proletariat would take. Unfortunately, all this theoretical work seemed completely lost on the IWW, which never understood the significance of the changed period or of the workers councils, and continued to laud “industrial unionism [as] the road to freedom.” [7] [29]
Moments of war and revolution are historically determinant for organizations that claim to defend proletarian class interests, a litmus test revealing their true class nature. In this sense, the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 revealed the betrayal of the major parties of the Social Democracy in Europe who rallied to the side of their respective bourgeoisies, turned their backs on the principles of proletarian internationalism and opposition to imperialist war, participated in the mobilization of the proletariat for the slaughter, and thereby crossed the class line to the camp of the bourgeoisie.
When war broke out in Europe, the Wobblies formally espoused principles of proletarian internationalism, and opposed the war. In 1914, the IWW convention adopted a resolution that stated, “…the industrial movement will wipe out all boundaries and establish an international relationship between all races engaged in industry…We, as members of the industrial army, will refuse to fight for any purpose except for the realization of industrial freedom.” In 1916, another resolution committed the organization to a program advocating “anti-militarist propaganda in time of peace, thus promoting Class Solidarity among the workers of the entire world, and, in time of war, the General Strike in all industries.” [8] [30]
However, when US imperialism entered the war in April 1917, the IWW lapsed into a centrist hesitancy and failed miserably to put its internationalism and anti-militarism into practice. Unlike the AFL, the IWW never endorsed the war or participated in mobilizing the proletariat for war. But neither did it maintain an active opposition to the war. Instead, antiwar pamphlets like The Deadly Parallel were withdrawn from circulation. IWW soapbox speakers stopped agitating against war. The majority of the General Executive Board, led by Haywood, regarded the war as a distraction from the class struggle and the more important work of building the union and feared that active opposition to the war would open the IWW to repression. [9] [31]
Individual militants who faced the problem of resisting conscription into the imperialist war were told that it was an individual decision, and received no organizational support. Many IWW leaders were correctly opposed to interclassist anti-war demonstrations and organizations and accurately argued that the IWW did not have sufficient influence within the proletariat to organize a successful antiwar general strike. However, they appeared equally unwilling to seek ways in which they could find a way to oppose the imperialist war on the working class terrain. In a letter to Frank Little, a leader of the antiwar faction on the General Executive Board, Haywood counseled, “Keep a cool head; do not talk. A good many feel as you do but the world war is of small importance compared to the great class war…I am at a loss as to definite steps to be taken against the war.” [10] [32]
When an IWW activist wrote to headquarters and urged that an emergency IWW convention be convened to decide how the organization would respond to US entry into the war, Haywood deflected the request: “Of course, it is impossible for this office…to take action on our individual initiative. However, I place your communication on the file for future reference.”
In an irony of history, it was the IWW that consciously chose not to actively fight against the war once the US had entered the conflict, and not the socialist parties that opposed the war, that was targeted for repression. Only the IWW, as an organization, faced indictment for a conspiracy to sabotage the war effort. In this sense the war provided a pretext for the bourgeoisie to crackdown on the IWW for its past activities and wild rhetoric. One hundred and sixty-five IWW leaders were indicted September 28, 1917 on charges of obstructing the war effort and conscription, and conspiring to sabotage and interfere with the normal contractual economic functioning in society. At the Great Trial of Wobbly leaders, the defendants pointed out that of the 521 wartime labor strikes, only three were organized by the IWW, the rest by the AFL and disowned the views of Frank Little. After their conviction, the bulk of the IWW’s leading centralizers were sent off to Leavenworth in chains and the organization fell under the control of decentralizing anarcho-syndicalists and went into decline.
There persists even today a romanticized image of the Wobbly organizer as a rugged, itinerant revolutionary, who hops freight trains and hoboes from town to town, propagandizing and agitating for the One Big Union – a proletarian knight in shining armor. This petty bourgeois model of the revolutionary as exemplary individual figure, so appealing to the anarchist temperament, is of no interest to the proletariat, whose struggle is not waged by isolated, heroic individuals, but by the collective effort of the working class, a class that is both an exploited and revolutionary class.
The Russian Revolution won many of the non-anarchists in the IWW to communism, including Big Bill Haywood, who fled to exile in Russia in 1922. While Haywood became disillusioned with the Russian Revolution, in part because he was disappointed that the revolution did not take a syndicalist form, he made a comment to Max Eastman that succinctly summed up the failure of the IWW’s revolutionary syndicalism: “The IWW reached out and grabbed an armful. It tired to grab the whole world and a part of the world has jumped ahead of it.” [11] [33]
The revolutionary syndicalists of the IWW were dedicated to their class, but their response to opportunism, reformism and parliamentary cretinism was completely off the mark. Their industrial unionism and revolutionary syndicalism did not correspond to the changed historic period. The world had “jumped ahead of it” and left it far behind.
J.Grevin, 18/6/05.
[1] [34] Lenin’s preface to a pamphlet by Voinov (Lunacharsky) on the party’s attitude towards the unions (1907).
[2] [35] Dubovsky, Melvyn, “We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World,” Chicago:Quadrangle Books, 1969 p.95.
[3] [36] Canon, James, “The IWW” p.20-21 cited Dubovsky p. 143
[4] [37] Conlin, Joseph Robert, “Bread and Roses Too: Studies of the Wobblies”, Wetport, CT: Greenwood, 1969, p. 9, quoting from William E. Walling, “Industrial or Revolutionary Unionis,” New Review 1 (Jan. 11, 1913, p.46, and Walling, “Industrialism versus Syndicalism,” International Socialist Review 14 (August 1913), p. 666.
[5] [38] Dubovsky, pp. pp83-85.
[6] [39] “What is Revolutionary Syndicalism?” International Review No. 118, p.23.
[7] [40] Ettor, Joseph, “Industrial Unionism: The Road to Freedom,” 1913.
[8] [41] Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Convention of the IWW, Chicago, 1916, p. 110.
[9] [42] Renshaw, Patrick, “the Wobbllies,” Garden City: Doublday, 1967 p. 217 citing letters, minutes and other IWW document in the US Circuit Court of Appeals, 7th District, October 1919.
[10] [43] Haywood to Little May 6, 1917 quoted in Renshaw, p. 217.
[11] [44] Conlin, Bread and Roses, p. 147, quoting Eastman, Bill Haywood, p. 14.
Everyone has seen the catastrophic images. Bloated corpses floating in fetid flood waters in New Orleans. An elderly man sitting in a lawn chair, hunched over, dead, killed by heat and lack of food and water as other survivors languish around him. Mothers trapped with their young children with nothing to eat or drink for three days. Chaos at the very refugee centers that the authorities told the victims to go to for safety. This unprecedented tragedy has not unfolded in some poverty stricken corner of the third world, but in the heartland of the greatest imperialist and capitalist power on earth.
When the tsunami hit Asia last December, the bourgeoisies of the rich countries blamed the poor countries’ political incompetence for refusing to heed the warning signs. This time there is no such excuse. The contrast today is not between rich and poor countries, but between rich and poor people. When the order came to evacuate New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf coast, in typical capitalist fashion, it was every person, every family for themselves. Those who owned cars and could afford gasoline, the price of which soared with capitalist price-gouging, headed north and west for safety, seeking refuge in hotels, motels and the homes of friends and families. But in the case of the poor, the elderly, the infirm, most were stuck in the path of the storm, unable to flee. In New Orleans the local authorities opened the Superdome arena and the convention center as shelters from the storm, but provided no services, no food, no water, no supervision, as thousands of people, the overwhelming majority of them black people, jammed into these facilities, and were left abandoned. For the rich who remained in New Orleans, the situation was far different. Stranded tourists and VIPS who remained at five star hotels adjacent to the Superdome lounged in luxury and were protected by armed police officers who kept the “rabble” from the Superdome at bay.
Rather than organize distribution of food and water supplies stockpiled in the city’s stores and warehouses, police stood by as poor people began “looting” and redistributing vital supplies. Lumpenized elements undoubtedly took advantage of the situation and began stealing electronics, money and weapons, but clearly this phenomenon began as an attempt to survive under the most dehumanizing conditions. At the same time, however, shot-gun wielding police officers provided security for employees sent by a luxury hotel to a nearby pharmacy to scavenge for water, food and medical supplies for the comfort of wealthy hotel guests. A police officer explained that this was not looting, but the “commandeering” of supplies by the police, which is authorized in an emergency. The differentiation between “looting” and “commandeering” is the difference between being poor and rich in America today.
The failure of capitalism to respond to this crisis with any semblance of human solidarity demonstrates that the capitalist class is no longer fit to rule, that its mode of production is mired in a process of social decomposition – literally rotting on its feet – that it offers humanity a future of death and destruction. The chaos that has consumed country after country in Africa and Asia in recent years is just a taste of the future that capitalism has in store even for the industrialized countries, and New Orleans today offers a glimpse of that bleak future.
As always, the bourgeoisie has been quick to offer up all manner of alibis to excuse its crimes and failures. The current crop of excuses whine that they are doing everything they can; that this is a natural disaster, not a man-made disaster; that no one could have anticipated the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history; that no one anticipated that the levees holding back the waters would be breached. Critics of the administration, both in the U.S. and abroad, blame the incompetence of the Bush regime for turning a natural disaster in a social calamity. None of this bourgeois claptrap is on target. All of it seeks to divert attention from the truth that it is the capitalist system itself that is responsible.
“We’re doing everything we can” is rapidly becoming the most repeated cliché in the bourgeois propaganda stockpile. They are doing “everything they can” to end the war in Iraq, to improve the economy, to improve education, to end crime, to make the space shuttle safe, to stop drugs, etc, etc.. There is nothing else or nothing more they could possibly do. You’d think the government never made policy choices, never had the possibility to try any alternatives. What nonsense. They are pursuing policies they consciously choose – with clearly disastrous consequences for society.
As for the natural vs. man-made argument, sure, Hurricane Katrina was a force of nature, but the scale of the natural and social disaster was not inevitable. It was in every aspect manufactured and made possible by capitalism and its state. The growing destructiveness of natural disasters throughout the world today is arguably a consequence of reckless economic and environmental policies pursued by capitalism in the relentless pursuit of profit, whether it’s the failure to employ available technology to monitor the possibility of tsunamis and to warn threatened populations in a timely manner, or whether it is the denuding of hillside forestlands in third world countries which exacerbate the devastation of monsoon-related flooding, or whether it is the irresponsible pollution of the atmosphere with the unleashing of greenhouse gases which worsens global warming and possibly contributes to aberrations in the world’s weather. In this case, there is considerable evidence that global warming has led to increases in the water temperature and the development of a greater number of tropical depressions, storms and hurricanes in recent years. When Katrina hit Florida it was only a Category One hurricane, but as it hovered over the 91 degree waters of the Gulf of Mexico for a week it built itself up to a Category Five storm with 175 mile an hour winds before it hit the Gulf coast.
The leftists have already begun citing Bush’s ties to the energy industry and opposition to the Kyoto Protocols as being responsible for the Katrina disaster, but this critique accepts the premises of the debate within the world capitalist class – as if implementation of the Kyoto agreement could actually reverse the effects of global warming and the bourgeoisies of the countries that favored the Kyoto Protocols are really interested in revamping capitalist production methods. Worst still, it forgets that it was the Clinton administration, which, even though it postured as pro-environmentalist, that first rejected the Kyoto agreement. The refusal to deal with global warming is the position of the American bourgeoisie, not simply the Bush administration.
In addition, New Orleans, with a population of nearly 600,000 and nearby suburbs with even more people, is a city that is built in large part below sea level, making it vulnerable to flood waters from the Mississippi River, from Lake Pontchartrain, and from the Gulf of Mexico. Since 1927, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers developed and maintained a system of levees to prevent the annual flooding of the Mississippi River, which permitted industry and farming to thrive beside the river, and allowed the city of New Orleans to grow, but which stopped the flood waters from bringing the sediment and soil that naturally replenished the wetlands and marshes of the Mississippi delta below the city towards the Gulf of Mexico. This meant that these wetlands, which provided natural protection to New Orleans as a buffer against sea surges became dangerously eroded and the city more vulnerable to flooding from the sea. This was not “natural”; this was manmade.
Nor was it a force of nature that depleted the Louisiana national guard, a large percentage of which has been mobilized for war in Iraq, leaving only 250 National Guard troops available to assist the police and fire departments in rescue efforts during the first three days after the levees broke. An even greater percentage of Mississippi guardsmen has also been deployed in Iraq.
The argument that this disaster was unanticipated is equally nonsense. For nearly 100 years, scientists, engineers and politicians have debated how to cope with New Orleans’ vulnerability to hurricanes and flooding. In the mid-1990s, several rival plans were developed by different groups of scientists and engineers, which finally led to a 1998 proposal (during the Clinton administration) called Coast 2050. This plan called for strengthening and reengineering the existing levees, constructing a system of floodgates, and the digging of new channels that bring sediment-bearing water to restore the depleted wetland buffer zones in the delta, and had a price tag of $14 billion dollars to be invested over a ten year period. It failed to win approval in Washington, on Clinton’s watch, not Bush’s. Last year, the Army Corps requested $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans, but the government approved only $42 million. Yet at the same time, Congress approved $231 million for the construction of a bridge to a small, uninhabited island in Alaska.
Another refutation of the “no one anticipated” alibi is that on the eve of the hurricane’s landfall, Michael D. Brown, the director of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Administration) bragged during television interviews that he had ordered the creation of an emergency contingency plan for a worst case scenario in New Orleans after the tsunami in South Asia, and that FEMA was confident they could handle any eventuality. Reports out of New Orleans indicate that this FEMA plan included a decision to turn away trucks carrying donated bottled-water, refusing delivery of 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel transported by the Coast Guard, and the severing of emergency communication lines used by the local police authorities in suburban New Orleans. Brown even had the nerve to excuse inaction on rescuing the 25,000 people at the Convention Center, by saying that federal authorities hadn’t become aware of those people until late in the week, even though news media had been reporting on the situation on television for three or four days.
And while Mayor Ray Nagin, a Democrat, has been vituperative in his denunciation of federal inaction, it was his local administration that made absolutely no effort to provide for the safe evacuation of the poor and elderly, took no responsibility for the distribution of food and water, provided no supplies or security for the evacuation centers, and abandoned the city to chaos and violence.
Millions of workers have been moved by the deplorable suffering in the Gulf coast and outraged by the callousness of the official response. Especially within the working class, there is a tremendous sense of genuine human solidarity for the victims of this calamity. While the bourgeoisie parcels out its compassion based on the race and economic status of the victims, for most American workers no such distinction exists. Even if racism is often a card that the bourgeoisie utilizes to divide white and black workers against themselves, and various black nationalist leaders are trying to serve capitalism in this way by insisting that the crisis in New Orleans is a black vs. white problem, the suffering of poor workers and the underclass in New Orleans today is abhorrent to the working class. The Bush administration is undoubtedly a poor ruling team for the capitalist class, prone to ineptitude, empty gestures and slow motion response in the current crisis, and this will add to its increasing unpopularity. But the Bush administration is not an aberration, but rather a reflection of the stark reality that the US is a declining superpower presiding over a "world order" that is sinking into chaos. War, famine and ecological disaster is the future that world capitalism is taking us towards. If there is any hope for the future of humanity, it is that the working class of the world will develop the consciousness and understanding of the real nature of class society and take in hand its historic responsibility to push aside this anachronistic, destructive capitalist system and replace it with a revolutionary society controlled by the working class, in which genuine human solidarity and the fulfillment of human need, is the guiding principle.
Internationalism Sept. 4, 2005
This leaflet was distributed by the ICC at the mass demonstration in Washington, DC against the war in Iraq. The leaflet offers a revolutionary Marxist perspective on the reasons for the war, in contrast both to the official government explanation and the confusions and obfuscations offered by the leftists, who function as the extreme leftwing of the bourgeoisie.
Internationalism.
The working class knows that the war is not worth the money or lives being spent on it. In addition to the 1,900 American lives lost, thousands upon thousands of Iraqis have been killed, maimed and left homeless. All the official explanations for the war in Iraq have been exposed as lies – there are no weapons of mass destruction, there was no link between the 9/11 terrorists and Iraq, Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to any other nation. The Bush administration has lost all credibility, all political authority.
There are plenty of explanations and slogans offered by anti-war activists about the causes of the war. At today’s demonstration you will hear speaker after speaker berate you with variations on the following:
Whatever kernels of truth exist in each of these explanations, they all obscure the reality that the war in Iraq is the inevitable consequence of a globally decomposing capitalist system and the increasing difficulty of US imperialism to maintain its hegemony in an increasingly chaotic world.
In 1989, when Russian imperialism collapsed and the cold war came to an end, the politicians and the capitalist media promised us a new world order, a future of peace, prosperity, and democracy. Billions of dollars previously spent on the arms race would be transferred to social programs and the world would be a better place. Fifteen years later the new world order has become a new world chaos. There is no peace, no prosperity, and the forces of state repression and dictatorship are on the rise. The Cold War, with its disciplined blocs, led respectively by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. superpowers, where secondary and tertiary powers subordinated their interests to those of the bloc, looks increasingly like the “good old days” for the world capitalist class. The collapse of Russian imperialism was a pyrrhic victory for American imperialism, more a reflection of the decomposition of the global capitalist system than a triumph for American power. With the collapse of the blocs, the glue that kept the lesser powers in line disappeared, and every country more and more began pursuing its own imperialist interests, “every man (or nation) for itself,” producing a situation of increasing chaos on the international terrain.
In 1992, U.S. imperialism officially adopted the strategic goal of preventing the rise of any rival bloc or rival power in Europe and Asia so that it would remain the only superpower in the world and this goal has guided U.S. foreign policy ever since, whether Republicans or Democrats have occupied the White House. It is this strategy which explains U.S. imperialism’s increasing number of military excursions throughout the world – to send a warning and block any potential rival, including America’s onetime allies, to remind them that the U.S. is the only superpower in the world. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was not a greedy attempt to boost oil profits for U.S. corporations – far more has been and will be spent on the war and occupation of Iraq than will ever be compensated for by Iraqi oil production. It’s not a policy error, or the result of Republican or Bush administration stupidity, but a conscious decision supported by all factions of the ruling class, except for the extreme rightwing isolationists. The invasion of Iraq was the lynchpin in the American geopolitical strategy to keep European imperialisms from making inroads in the Middle East. Coupled with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and new American alliances with former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus, it meant growing U.S. control of one of the most strategically important areas in the world.
For the ruling class the real problem with the war in Iraq is that the greatest military machine in the history of the world is now bogged down in a quagmire, and is increasingly unable to unleash necessary military operations in other imperialist theatres. This would have happened no matter who was president, because it is a central characteristic of capitalist decomposition that every action that American imperialism takes to improve its situation only winds up exacerbating the problems even more. However, the Bush administration’s clumsiness and ineptitude both on the level of the propaganda and ideological explanation for the war (the Democrats prefer justifying military interventions on the basis of human rights) and the squandering of the considerable “patriotic” sentiment that followed the 9/11 attacks, and its tactical handling of the invasion on the ground has made things even more of a mess. The deteriorating military situation and growing unpopularity of the war raises serious problems for the ruling class because it makes it increasingly difficult for the U.S. to have available fresh, deployable troops or to drum up support for further military ventures which are a vital necessity to defend U.S. imperialist interests.
Since this war and all the wars that capitalism has in store for us in the years ahead are inexorably linked to capitalism’s drive to survive, to maintain a world of exploitation and profit, the way to end war is not to change policies, or to change presidents, but for the working class to change the world, to understand its historic responsibilities and potential, to develop the consciousness and unity necessary to destroy capitalism and consign it to the historic rubbish pile, and replace it with a society based on the fulfillment of human need and the construction of a genuine human community – a workers’ revolution.
Internationalism, September 24, 2005
The events of the past four years have amply confirmed the analysis that the ICC advanced in 2001 about the nature and political impact of the terrorist attacks on September 11th.
As readers will recall, four years ago in these pages, we compared the terrible events of 9/11 to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and pointed out that “there is considerable evidence that the bourgeoisie was not taken by surprise by the attacks in either case and that the bourgeoisie cynically welcomed the massive death toll in both cases for purposes of political expediency in order to implement its imperialist war aims, and other long range political objectives” (Internationalism 120). We argued that, while the bourgeoisie might not have known the exact targets of the attacks that came on 9/11 or that the results would be so catastrophic, they had ample knowledge that such attacks were coming and permitted them to ocurr in order to mobilize the population for war, to overcome the vestiges of what the bourgeoisie calls the “Vietnam syndrome” – the unwillingness of the population, particularly the working class, to rally behind the state for full scale imperialist war.
At the time our critics accused of us of falling prey to conspiracy theory and paranoia. However, our analysis has been confirmed by the data revealed in countless books, journalistic articles, and investigation commissions, etc. in the last few years.The latest revelation is that the CIA knew that Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, was in the US, was being trained as a pilot, and was preparing a terrorist attack, but decided not to inform the FBI. Furthermore, this information was subsequently given to investigators for the highly acclaimed 9/11 Commission, but was suppressed by the Commission and was never made public until quite recently. However critical the Commission’s report was of the “intelligence community,” this particular item was too damaging to be allowed to see the light of day. And as recently as mid-September, the New York Times reported that despite the government’s protestations that no one could have ever imagined that terrorists would hijack planes and turn them into missiles, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had been informed in 1998 that al Qaeda planned to hijack American jetliners and crash them into American landmark buildings and structures.
Our alleged conspiracy theories and paranoia notwithstanding, there is no longer any factual dispute that the American capitalist state was aware in advance that attacks were coming, knew who the specific leaders were, and was aware that they were in the US. For the bourgeoisie and their media, the debate is about how such terrible errors, poor judgments, lack of communications, incompetence, etc. could occur. For us, as revolutionary Marxists, the question has been to understand the political purposes behind the government’s policy to permit the attacks to occur. We have seen clearly that these attacks were used to attempt to mobilize the population for war, to make possible an unprecedented strengthening of the repressive apparatus of the state, and to provide pretext for the launching of imperialist war in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are more dictated by the needs of maintaining American hegemony than combating terrorism.
As we anticipated in 2001, the patriotic fever whipped up by ruling class in the aftermath of 9/11 quickly subsided and doomed the bourgeoisie’s expectations that it had finally overcome its dreaded “Vietnam syndrome” that had hampered its imperialist designs since the 1960s. For a moment the bourgeoisie did indeed seem to have cause to celebrate in 2001. All the flag waving and propaganda campaigns gave them momentary hope that they would be able to mobilize the working class for sustained imperialist war. However, this has proven an illusory accomplishment, as opposition to the war in Iraq continues to grow.
As we pointed out in the National Situation Report (Internationalism 135), “the war in Iraq has revealed that any illusions the bourgeoisie had surmounted what they referred to as the “Vietnam Syndrome” – a term they used to refer to the unwillingness of the working class, and the population at large to permit itself to be mobilized for war and to accept the death and mutilation of working class youth in the service of the imperialist appetites of American capital – were completely groundless. As we have noted previously, on the historical level, the proletariat, internationally and in the US, remains undefeated, and the bourgeoisie cannot mobilize the population to accept on a prolonged basis the sacrifice, economic, political, and physical (in terms of lives), that long scale imperialist war requires. Furthermore, the ideological justification for imperialist war in this period manufactured after the 9/11 attacks and clumsily manipulated by the Bush administration, has been totally discredited, and consequently presents the bourgeoisie with grave problems in its efforts to mobilize the population to accept future wars. Despite Bush’s claims that his re-election constitutes a popular ratification of his Iraq policies, it is abundantly clear that Bush’s electoral triumph is a pyrrhic victory. All the bourgeoisie’s own data demonstrates that the majority of the population thinks that the war in Iraq is not worth the cost to fight it, in terms of the lives lost or the money expended. The various explanations for the war in Iraq – the purported link between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, or the imminent threat posed by alleged weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Iraq – were all revealed as lies.”
The problem for the bourgeoisie is not that the Bush administration has waged war in Iraq – the bourgeoisie was and is united on the necessity for this invasion, not because of the greed for oil or to fight terrorism, but to serve the far more significant geo-political strategic goal of preventing the rise of any rivals in Europe or Asia and reasserting US hegemony. The real problem for the bourgeoisie is that the administration’s bungling of the war has frittered away the ideological gains of 9/11 and has made it more difficult to launch future military interventions that will be necessary for US imperialism.
This problem is compounded by the fact that the bourgeoisie, both here in the US and throughout the world, is now confronted by two generations of undefeated workers – the generation of ’68 and their children, who have now grown to young adulthood. While the official bourgeois “anti-war movement” lies largely dormant between its annual huge mobilizations and hence is not really a “movement” but an event organizer, we have begun to see signs of members of the working class taking actions against the war effort – including protests by mothers and spouses of soldiers, and spontaneously organized protests by working class parents demanding that military recruiters not be permitted to recruit cannon fodder in high schools across the nation.
Four years after 9/11, the fact that the bourgeoisie knew in advance about terrorist attacks and permitted them to occur is an established fact and despite the patriotic campaigns of of the post-9/11 period it is still abundantly clear the proletariat is not defeated and continues to resist being mobilized behind the war ideology of the capitalist class.
JG
Last spring, in our report on the National Situation (see Internationalism No. 134 [21]), we described the serious political problems confronting the American ruling class in the wake of their botched attempt to elect John Kerry president and to realign American policy in Iraq. This failure to effectively control the outcome of the election was a reflection of a number of factors flowing from the phenomenon of the social decomposition of the capitalist system, including the difficulty of the main factions of the bourgeoisie to align behind Kerry until quite late in the electoral circus and the impact of Christian fundamentalist right, which appears impervious to conventional political propaganda and manipulation. Instead of a much needed revitalization of the democratic myth, which would have accompanied a Kerry victory as a correction to the “stolen” election of 2000, the outcome of the 2004 was not political euphoria but widespread political demoralization and shock.
However, we also pointed out that “the dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie are well aware of their problems and are not entirely powerless in the face of their inability to achieve the appropriate political division of labor at the polls. There are clearly efforts underway to rectify the damage done by the electoral outcome. Considerable political pressure has been exerted on the administration to modify its more extreme positions, especially on Iraq policy, and to actually move towards the very policies advocated by Kerry in the election campaign. At the same time there is a concerted effort to restore a certain discipline to the state capitalist apparatus, a good portion of which worked behind the scenes to defeat Bush’s re-election.” We were able to cite examples of this political rectification that included the shake-ups in the cabinet and the CIA, sharp criticism of Rumsfeld’s handling of the war in Iraq from prominent Republicans such as McCain, Nagel, Schwarzkopf, Scowcroft, and even Gingrich; the removal of Paul Wolfowitz, the primary neo-conservative architect of the administration’s war policy; and Rumsfeld’s reluctant decision to appoint retired General Gary E. Luck to conduct an independent review of Iraq policy as a prelude to an impending policy shift.
Since the spring, however, the Bush administration has backed away from this process of political rectification and has reaffirmed its “stay the course” orientation and reverted to its gross exaggerations of the success of its policies in Iraq. Bush’s refusal to follow through on a change of course poses tremendous political difficulties for the ruling class, major factions of which see the need for some sort of strategy of progressive disengagement to rescue US imperialism from a deepening quagmire in Iraq and allow it to be capable of initiating further military operations in defense of its imperialist interests in the period ahead. The dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie reject any notion of immediate withdrawal, but there is a growing undercurrent pushing for a disengagement strategy. One academic has proposed a plan featuring a progressive scaling down of American groundforces in Iraq in favor of a longer term commitment of a smaller numbers of mobile troops, stationed in Iraq or aboard ships in the Gulf area and capable of providing strategic air support to Iraqi troops. This would have the benefit for American imperialism of drastically reducing the mounting American death toll and still permit a long term American military presence in the region.
The dismay of significant sectors of the ruling class about the Bush administration political regression is reflected in rising criticism even from Republicans and an escalation of anti-Bush media campaigns over the summer and collapsing administration popularity. The president’s approval ratings have dropped below 40%, to levels similar to those of Nixon shortly before he was forced to resign in 1974 and Clinton when rightwing Republicans attempted to impeach him in 2000. The Bush administration’s inability to cope with the protest by Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a young soldier killed in Iraq, who was practically elevated to sainthood by the media as she stood vigil outside the president’s Texas ranch during his August vacation and demanded that the troops be brought home now. The only thing that took Sheehan out of the limelight was Hurricane Katrina, which was an even greater political disaster for the president, as even many Republicans and supporters of the war in Iraq were flabbergasted by the administration’s ineptitude. The incredible media campaign exposing the failures of the Bush administration can only be explained in the context of the efforts by elements of the bourgeoisie to ratchet up the pressure on the administration to modify Iraq policy. In this sense these campaigns are similar to the campaign surrounding the Monica Lewinsky scandal and effort to impeach Pres. Clinton, which, as we reported at the time, was more a reflection of an intra-bourgeois dispute over whether to play the China card or the Japan card in the Far East than some kind of puritanical, moral outrage about Clinton’s sexual activities and lies.
These media campaigns signal a serious effort to force the president to return to the more responsive behavior of last winter. Unlike traditional parliamentary democracies, there is no such thing as a vote of no confidence in the US system that would permit the calling of an early election and the fine-tuning of the ruling team for the bourgeoisie. It is only 10 months since Bush supposedly won a mandate at the polls, but he is increasingly a liability for the ruling class, which is stuck with him for the next three years. On the historic level, the American bourgeoisie has very limited options regarding regime change – assassination (as in the case of Kennedy) or impeachment (leading to forced resignation, as in the case of Nixon), both of which are incredibly traumatic to the body politic and result in the vice president succeeding to the presidency. In the case of Nixon, it should be remembered that Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in the midst of a corruption scandal and replaced by Gerald R. Ford, as a prelude to the Nixon impeachment/resignation, in order to assure an acceptable replacement. The prospect of a Dick Cheney presidency seems unlikely to mollify administration critics within the bourgeoisie. Whether the Bush administration will succumb to growing political pressure and change course, or whether more extreme options will be needed, remains to be seen. However, if we suddenly see a concerted campaign in the media and on Capital Hill directed against Cheney’s conflict of interest deals with Halliburton or some serious doubts about his health and his continued ability to fulfill his governmental obligations, we might be excused if we suspected that a replay of the Agnew/Nixon scenario was unfolding before our eyes.
When the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, the bourgeoisie predicted the dawning of a new world order of peace, prosperity and democracy, and promised that the end of the cold war would mean shrinking military budgets and more funds devoted to social programs. In comparison to the growing chaos that has become the reality of the present period, the relative stability of the cold war era looks increasingly like the good old days for humanity. As the only remaining superpower, US imperialism is intent on maintaining its global hegemony and preventing the rise of any potential rival power or rival bloc. To this end, it has repeatedly been forced to exercise military power to send a warning and a reminder to its erstwhile allies and potential rivals. Each of these military ventures, however, only exacerbates the difficulties of American imperialism, and increases the pressure for it to take military action yet again. This chaotic spiral into war and devastation can only be answered by the class struggle.Jerry Grevin
The exchange of views below continues a discussion with Red and Black Notes on the vitally important question of class consciousness and the role of the revolutionary organization. As readers will recall, in Internationalism 134 [51] we published a letter to R&BN commenting on a joint public forum they held with the Internationalist Workers Group, the Canadian affiliate of the IBRP, last winter. We publish below R&BN’s response to our letter, followed by some further comments that we offer in an effort to deepen the discussion on consciousness and revolutionary organization.
The meeting to which Internationalism’s letter refers took place in Toronto on February 26, 2005. It was the second such discussion between Red & Black Notes and the Internationalist Workers’ Group. Last year, two meetings were held in Montreal and Toronto on the role of the trade unions. Public meetings and discussions between revolutionaries are to be encouraged as they provide a valuable place for the exchange and debate of ideas. In addition to the speakers, the meeting in Toronto drew participants from Autonomy and Solidarity, the International Communist Current, the Socialist Project, the North-Eastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists, the International Bolshevik Tendency and the New Democratic Party, as well as several unaffiliated individuals.
Space considerations prevent answering all of the points Internationalism raises; however, some clarification is necessary here, particularly on the relationship between organization and class. Red & Black Notes has never used the term councilist as a form of self-identification, even though that label has often been applied by it, and it has printed materials by groups considered to be councilist.
As I mentioned in my speech, my primary political education was as a Trotskyist, and as a member of the International Bolshevik Tendency from 1988 to 1995. I began publishing Red & Black Notes in 1997 as an attempt to reconsider some of my previous politics, and also to make contact with others with similar politics. Reading Red & Black Notes from its inception to the current issue, readers will note a definite evolution.
When I left the IBT, my belief was that Trotskyism made sense, but that it somehow didn’t work in the “real world.” In the course of re-examining my political theory, I came to reject that interpretation, and also the Trotskyists’ obsession with, in their words, “the crisis of leadership of the proletariat. As a result, where the Trotskyists put a plus on the leadership question, I put a minus. A comrade from the Communist Workers Organisation referred to Red & Black Notes at this point as a kind of “libertarian Trotskyism.” In a sense this was true, since I had not entirely broken with the methodology of Leninism.
So what is ‘councilism?’ The term councilist has always sounded like a pejorative to my ears. I don’t know anyone who uses the term except its opponents (unlike say, left communist, or council communist which many embrace). I have never seen those organizations which are labeled as councilist, such as Echanges et Mouvement or Daad en Gedachte use this term. Organizations which use the expression, such as the International Communist Current, often argue it is a product of the degeneration of the Dutch-German communist left tradition. The degeneration is seen in the view of these organizations analysis of the Soviet Union, and also on the need for organization.
As I tried to explain in my presentation, I tend to view organization as intimately linked to the question of class consciousness. How an organization views the development of class consciousness usually indicates the kind of organization its members see as necessary. For the Leninists, workers can never achieve more than trade union consciousness on their own, and therefore an organization is necessary to lead them. I reject such a view as it contradicts the essence of Marxism - the revolutionary capability of the working class. For the organization such as Echanges et Mouvement, class consciousness develops out of the experiences of the working class, but they believe the only task for the organization is to circulate information and develop program.
While the circulation of information and the promotion of workers ideas are very important, an organization of revolutionaries can do more... While workers will make their own history, they are not entirely free to make it as they choose, but neither do they make it from scratch. It’s a romanticization to suggest that the every member of the class remembers the heroic traditions of class struggle, but neither do they disappear with every new generation. It is not always necessary to reinvent the wheel.
As Gilles Dauvé noted in his critique of the ultra-left (reprinted in the new edition of Spontaneity and Organization), the task is neither to seek to be leaders of the class, but neither to shy away from it. It is the experience of the class which creates class consciousness, and ultimately the class which will create the mass organizations necessary to overthrow capitalism. But the revolutionary grouping can assist in that process, by being the memory, by developing theory and aiding in the clarification of the struggle.
Fischer.
As readers of Red and Black Notes and Internationalism may have noticed, a discussion has developed on the role of the revolutionary organization and its relationship to the class. This is a central and difficult, controversial issue that has been hotly and long debated within the workers’ movement. It is vital that the discussion continues for the benefit of clarification. This is why we would like to carry the discussion further and approach some points on councilism that Fischer, the editor of Red and Black Notes, raised, as well as other points.
The defeat of the revolutionary wave that started in Russia in 1918 and spread throughout Europe in the following years, provided a lethal weapon for the bourgeoisie worldwide, which it used to poison the consciousness of the working class. The establishment of state capitalism via Stalinism was equated to communism and even among some of the revolutionaries who had supported the Bolshevik party, a position formed that viewed the party, the revolutionary organization itself as inevitably leading to the suffocation of the revolution by becoming more and more integrated into a stratified political formation. In this view, it is the nature of ‘party organization’ itself that is in conflict with the unitary form of organization of the class, the councils. In this view, the councils have a revolutionary nature, while the party has an essentially conservative nature, which inevitably leads to the defeat of the revolution. In its most extreme, yet logical conclusion, this view sees the Bolshevik party as responsible for the defeat of the revolution. Hence, the theorization, by some groups, that the Bolshevik party had never been a communist organization, its origin and nature being rather bourgeois. In fact, some even theorized that the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. In yet other variations, we see sometimes a total and sometimes a hesitant rejection of organization. It is this rejection of the party as a necessary organizational and political organ of the class that ‘councilists’ reject. While ‘council communism’ is claimed as part of the workers’ movement, in that it has not rejected the necessity of the party, ‘councilism’ refers specifically to the denunciation and rejection of the idea of ‘party’.
Notwithstanding the nuances and variations, the origin of the confusion regarding the role of the party is the same: it is the confusion about the relationship of the party to the class. The rejection, hesitant or outright, of the party springs from this confusion, and it is because of this confusion that assigning a role for the party becomes impossible.
We agree with Fischer’s rejection of the Stalinist distortion of Lenin’s conception of the party and consciousness, which the Stalinists proclaim to be Leninist, when in fact Lenin himself recognized that he had bent the stick too far in the debate with the economists on the importance of the revolutionary organization and the ability or inability of the proletariat to go beyond trade union consciousness on its own. Fischer wrote in Red and Black Notes #21:
“For the Leninists, workers can never achieve more than trade union consciousness on their own, and therefore an organization is necessary to lead them. I reject such view as it contradicts the essence of Marxism – the revolutionary capability of the working class. For the organizations such as Echanges et Mouvement, class consciousness develops out of the experiences of the working class, but they believe the only task for the organization is to circulate information and develop program. While [this is] very important, an organization of revolutionaries can do more.”
We agree with the rejection of this Stalinist view, which assigns a passive role to the working class, and even denigrates it, while it glorifies the idea of an all-knowing elite. For us, the working class is the revolutionary subject. For us, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the task of the workers’ councils, not of the party. However, this is not the same as assigning to the party the role of ‘spectator’, or some kind of ‘paternal guardian’ that watches over its children, the workers, to make sure they make no mistakes. In this sense, we agree with Fischer that the role of a revolutionary organization is more than informing and developing a program.
In addition, we agree with Fischer’s earlier idea that the “…organization is intimately linked to the question of class consciousness.” But we need to clarify in what ways the organization is intimately linked to the class and its consciousness. This clarification will allow us to assign an organic, truthful role to the organization. From what Fischer says, he seems clear as to the ‘intimate relationship’ between the class and its consciousness, and between the class and its mass organizations, the councils. But he still has problems understanding the relationship between the class and the party. While Fischer is clear that the councils and class consciousness are both a product, a secretion of the class, the party does not enjoy the same kind of intimate relationship with the class. Somehow, the party feels alien, separated from the experience, the consciousness, the creation of the class. For example, while Fischer makes an attempt to assign a greater role to the party than the one Echanges et Mouvement assigns to it, the party is still emasculated, relegated to ‘the memory’ of the class, the developer of theory, the helper in the clarification of the struggle. Since the party is not viewed as part of the class, its secretion, it is still given a relatively passive role. This is a concession to ‘councilism’ as described above.
At the same time, though, Fischer agrees with Gilles Dauve’s vision, which he quotes from Spontaneity and Organization, that “…the task [of the party] is neither to seek to be leaders of the class, but neither to shy away from it.” The problem with this formulation is that it is not at all clear. Instead, it reveals a contradictory vision of, on the one hand, a sideline role for the party, and, on the other, of ‘leaders of the class’. This formulation says and clarifies nothing. Is a revolutionary a leader? Or does he stand on the sideline? The shyness about being ‘leaders’ stems from the scars of Stalinism and from the ideological confusion arising from associating Stalinism with communism, and the Bolschevik party with the ‘general staff’ of the class.
Our conception is that we do not shy away from ‘being leaders’. Instead, we seek to be so. But what do we mean by ‘leaders’? What are ‘leaders of the class’? For us, ‘leaders’ does not mean the ‘intelligentsia’ ruling over the class; neither does it mean being the ‘general staff’ of the class, giving orders. ‘Leaders’ are the most conscious revolutionaries who are internationally regrouped in a centralized organization, the party, to aid the class clarify the goals and methods of the struggle. While their tasks are not identical to those of the councils, they are dedicated to the class’ revolutionary transformation of the world, and to the process leading to the class’ self-emancipation. This is why their interests and aims do not diverge from those of the class.
The first task for the class is that of advancing its combat. The class does so by unifying and extending its struggle. It has historically created the means to do so through organizing bodies, the sovereign general assemblies and committees of elected and revocable delegates, the soviets, or workers’ councils. In addition to this bodies which help the class unify and extend the struggle, the class also has secreted the means to attain the clarification of the goals and methods of the struggle: the party. But the party does not do so ‘from the outside’, or from ‘the sidelines’. It is not some sort of reference library that lectures or teaches from the outside. Neither is it afraid of intervening. On the contrary, the party is totally involved with the development of the class struggle and class consciousness, and it does intervene to point out the general course of march. There is no separation between the practice, the daily struggle of the class, and theoretical deepening, even though these two aspects of the life of the movement do not always coincide in time. It sometimes happens that the class is ahead of the party in the understanding of the methods of the struggle, as in the case of the April Theses in 1917 when Lenin appealed to the class as a whole when the party did not understand that proletarian revolution was on the agenda, and sometimes it is not, and so on. In no way, though, does this absence of coincidence prove the party unnecessary or its existence a superimposition over the class. For the party to ‘aid in the clarification of the struggle’, as Fischer correctly formulates, it has to have an active role, a leadership role, both at times of lull in the struggle and otherwise. This is why the class itself has given rise, historically, to ‘the party’.
The very last point in our Basic Positions of the ICC, printed in the back of every ICC publication, is devoted to our activity:
“Political and theoretical clarification of the goals and methods of the proletarian struggle, of its historic and its immediate conditions.
Organized intervention, united and centralized on an international scale, in order to contribute to the process which leads to the revolutionary action of the proletariat.
The regroupment of revolutionaries with the aim of constituting a real world communist party, which is indispensable to the working class for the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a communist society.”
This is what the class has secreted its political, revolutionary organization for. It is its own creation, an integral part of it, the product of its rise in class consciousness. It does not exist, as the Stalinists and Trotskysts claim, because the class cannot achieve more than just trade union consciousness, and therefore it needs an ‘injector of consciousness’ from the outside. Rather, the revolutionary organization has always been the class’ own creation.
Ana
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/economic-crisis
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/17/189/us-presidential-elections-2004
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/17/253/us-elections
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1951/russia
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1952/ukraine
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/putin
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1954/yushchenko
[9] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4038173.stm
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1848/mexico
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/32/decomposition
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/correspondance-other-groups
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/29/class-consciousness
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/international-bureau-revolutionary-party
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left-influenced
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/node/126
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/133_aftermath.html
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/134_report_national_sitn.html
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/19/union-question
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftn1
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftn2
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftn3
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftn4
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftn5
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftn6
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftn7
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftn8
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftn9
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftn10
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftn11
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftnref1
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftnref2
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftnref3
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftnref4
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftnref5
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftnref6
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftnref7
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftnref8
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftnref9
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftnref10
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/135_iww.html#_ftnref11
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/revolutionary-syndicalism
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/de-leonism
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/hurricane-katrina
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[50] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/911
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/inter/134_correspondence.html