It is 40 years since the events that took place in the city of Vitoria, where, in 1976, in the context of falling wages due to the economic crisis there were important workers’ movements throughout the country, and in Vitoria there were increasingly massive General Assemblies which elected a committee of revocable delegates. It was when a General Assembly was taking place in the Church of San Francisco that police unleashed repression against the workers gathered there. The then government minister, Señor Fraga Iribarne, founder and president of the Partido Popular (the People’s Party) until his death, and honoured ‘democrat’, ordered the police to fire upon the workers, causing five deaths with many injured.
There was an overwhelming response by workers to these events, throughout the country there were solidarity demonstrations and massive assemblies. In Pamplona this ranged across the entire city. This expressed a mass struggle, united in demands and refusing to return to work until all their demands were met. The state had to partially concede.
In his first parliamentary speech on the occasion of the proposal of the investiture of Pedro Sánchez, Señor Iglesias (leader of Podemos) used this anniversary to endorse proposals for a “democratic renewal” and “social justice”. However, in 1976, workers were confronted by a post Franco government that was carrying out the democratic transition which was organised with the international help of the old democracies of the then US bloc (Germany and France), in order to contain the enormous discontent and struggles. A year later the Moncloa Pact showed the unity of the whole bourgeoisie in its attack upon the proletariat under the ideological cover of democratic reform.
If there is a relationship between Vitoria in 1976 and the massive assemblies of 15M in Spain in 2011, with the dynamic of mass struggle[1] (despite those of 2011 not having a clearly proletarian identity); there is none between these events and Iglesias’s party[2].
Before you read the article we would like to make some critical remarks about it. It was written when the ICC section in Spain had not yet been formed[3]. Inexperience and difficulties in assimilating our positions influence the article. Today, 40 years later, we think the following points are completely correct:
That said, the article has passages that reveal an overestimation of the immediate possibilities of the proletariat.
Thus, for example, it says “and, next time, the police stations, barracks, post offices and telephone exchanges”. This overestimation of the possibilities of the situation suggests an almost pre-revolutionary moment. The international situation of the proletariat did not justify such propositions since the struggle had strongly declined following the explosive events in France 1968, Italy 1969 and Poland 1970, something that is ignored when it says, on the contrary, that “Today, in all parts of the world the workers are striking against the conditions which the crisis is imposing on them and those strikes, even when suppressed, resurge with greater fighting spirit every time.” This sees things in a very formal way, the proletariat was very far from the levels of consciousness and the politicisation of its struggles necessary for the posing of such aims.
Furthermore it affirms that there was “the means to develop our unity, consciousness, and organisation through the experience of this period of struggle”. If it is true that there was an impressive unity and proliferation of assemblies, there was nevertheless much less of a clear conscious understanding of the necessity for the world proletarian revolution and the means for making this happen. But this same unity of the working class was not the same everywhere; there was a significant and powerful weight of sectoral, regional and other divisions. The assemblies had not taken on all the consequences and implications of their function in the class, and the committees of delegates were occupied and manipulated by the unions and forces of the extreme left of the bourgeoisie.
The inexperience and difficulties of the assimilation of class positions to which the young sections of the ICC clearly adhered, is seen in the article’s understanding of the October 1934 workers’ insurrection in Asturias as a “revolution”. Despite the enormous combativity displayed by the Asturian miners, the movement remained strictly within regional limits and was more the fruit of a provocation that forced the miners to insurrection than a conscious action they decided upon. At the same time, the world situation was an accumulation of physical and ideological defeats of the class, the triumphant counter-revolution, the preparation of the second imperialist slaughter which impeded the struggles taking up a revolutionary perspective. In reality, the Asturias insurrection has to be seen in the same light as the Austrian Social Democrats’ provocation of workers in that country in February 1934 which lead to a terrible defeat. Their Spanish colleagues, lead by Largo Caballero who had the nerve to present himself as the “Lenin of Spain” (when in the Primo de Rivera dictatorship he was a state councillor to the dictator), leading the workers into a trap and leaving them there by sabotaging all attempts at solidarity in Madrid and other places[4].
Rosa Luxemburg said that “self-criticism, cruel and relentless criticism that goes to the root of evil is life and breath for the proletariat”. The honest highlighting of these errors gives us clarity and conviction in the struggle.
The bourgeoisie has not concealed its anxiety about the strength displayed by the working class during the first three months of this year. The language used by the press and the statements made by public personalities give us an idea of the extent of that anxiety. For the Primate Cardinal “. . . days of uncertainty for Spain are drawing near”; for Ricardo de la Cierva (a bourgeois commentator) “. . . the horizon is so black that I can’t see any more.” Informaciones (a Spanish periodical), faced with the avalanche of strikes, asks itself: “Are we facing an attempt that is basically revolutionary?”
Our strikes have shaken the country: all its regions and all its branches of production. The cities of Salamanca and Zamora, where ‘nothing ever happens’, have witnessed strikes in the construction and metal industries; even the blind went on strike and demonstrated in the streets.
Not even before the war has there been such a general movement. In January alone there have been more strikes than in all of 1975. Such a gigantic generalisation must serve to make us aware of the strength which we have, make us see that in this strength lies the road leading to the end of capitalist exploitation, which every day grows more unbearable.
That is the first lesson to draw, a lesson that has been present, more or less clearly, in the recent struggles. The building workers and others in Pamplona, Vitoria, Elda, Vigo, and Barcelona organised the strikes through assemblies, which were unified through a committee of delegates together with a general city assembly; they looked for the solidarity of all workers on the streets and backed by that accumulated strength and their autonomous organisation, they occupied the city, closing bars, offices, banks, and public departments.
To speak of communism, to speak of working class emancipation, is no longer considered utopian. We know that the day of revolution is still far off, but we know that on our way there, we have something very solid on which to lean: the experience of our brothers in Vitoria, Pamplona, Vigo, and other cities. That experience contains the means to unite us, the means to confront bourgeois power, to destroy it and to liberate ourselves. This experience forms part of the real resurgence of the proletariat throughout the entire world and takes up the revolutionary torch which set fire to Europe through the years 1917-21, and whose zenith saw the creation of the soviets in 1917 in Russia and the workers’ councils in Germany in 1918.
It’s essential to deepen these experiences, to generalise them to all places, and to ensure that such experiences should have a conscious organisation forged by the workers themselves. Clearly, the means are:
The road is long and difficult, but we are not starting from scratch; we have the experience of two centuries of workers’ struggle behind us. Today, in all parts of the world the workers are striking against the conditions which the crisis is imposing on them and those strikes, even when suppressed, resurge with greater fighting spirit every time.
If we have the means to develop our unity, consciousness, and organisation through the experience of this period of struggle, it is also true that the bourgeoisie is powerful and has many ways of defeating us, dividing us, and stopping our advance forward.
We have to have a very clear consciousness of the methods the bourgeoisie is going to use to defeat our struggle. We can sum them up under two headings: repression and democracy. In less than two weeks, the pre-democratic government of Fraga assassinated more workers than the fascist government of Carrero Blanco did in two years!
Faced with the uncontrollable strength of the workers’ struggles in Vitoria, Elda, Vigo, Pamplona, etc., there was no other response open to the capitalists than to resort to the most savage repression - and a fascist government would have done the same as a democratic one, or a ‘workers’ or ‘revolutionary’ one. Capitalism - under all its state forms - always speaks the same language. History provides us with too many examples: in 1918 the Social Democrat, Ebert, bloodily defeated the workers of Berlin, assassinating Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; in 1921 the Bolshevik government used aerial bombardment to end the Kronstadt workers’ insurrection[5]; in 1931 the Swedish Conservative government killed nine workers in Adalen; in 1933 under the Spanish Republic, the progressive Azaña waded in blood at Casas Viejas while the fascist (today a democrat) Gil Robles drowned the workers’ revolution of the Asturias under the barbarity of the Spanish Foreign Legion. After the massacre of the Second World War, the killings continued: Italy in 1947 under the Christian Democrats; Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 under ‘Communist’ governments; Poland in 1970; twelve miners killed during a miners’ strike in South Africa in 1972; Argentina under the military regime, workers killed in Córdoba and Tucumán …
The crimes committed in Vitoria, Elda, etc are not the work of an ‘ultra’ faction of the bourgeoisie as OICE[6] says in Revolución number 7, but the conscious and necessary response that capitalism, under whatever form of government, makes and will go on making to the proletarian menace. Carillo would have done the same as Fraga!
But repression is not enough if the working class continues to advance through every struggle and learns from each defeat. The reform of the institutions of the bourgeois state is essential in order to contain the workers’ struggle, to divide it, and to imprison it within objectives which, far from destroying the system, consolidate and conserve it.
The events in Vitoria have not made the Government abandon its policy of reform.
They have not brought a crisis to the dreadful ‘bunker’[7]. The Council of Ministers made the following declaration:
“In consequence, the government (after the events in Vitoria) is disposed to act not only with the object of firmly maintaining public order, but also to create the objective conditions which permit a real social peace . . . particularly distressing are events such as those in Vitoria which are clearly intended to delay the programme of reforms which the Spanish people want and which the government is not prepared to renounce.”
It is no contradiction to combine democracy with murder. Bloodbaths are not a monopoly of the fascists. All factions of capital use the same weapons against workers’ rebellions.
But although it is a necessity for the Spanish bourgeoisie to defeat in blood and fire all independent workers’ struggles, it must at the same time create the democratic political institutions it needs (like unions, parties, universal suffrage and other ‘liberties’) to avoid frontal confrontations like those at Vitoria by forcing the workers’ struggles against exploitation into meaningless channels.
The vote, the unions, and the parties have a function: to contain the class, to erode its initiative, to confine it within the factory and the nation, diverting the horizon of its struggle towards ‘socio-political’ reforms such as the self-determination of the people, self-management, and anti-fascism. These are all weapons which the politicians of capital use to prevent us from becoming conscious that the only solution possible for our problems is to finish with exploitation once and for all.
Faced with a government incapable of controlling the situation, and whose only real language is crime, detention and provocation, the Democratic Opposition of the Right (liberals, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats) got together with the Left and extreme Left in the same endeavour - to channel the strike movement towards democratic reforms.
In an article appearing in Mundo Diario (a Stalinist-backed paper) entitled ‘The Urgent Need for a Political Pact’, Solé Tura, mouthpiece of the Catalonian Communist Party, drew the following conclusions from the struggles in Vitoria, Pamplona, and Sabadell: “You have to be blind not to see that we are on the point of losing the big opportunity for establishing and stabilising a democracy in our country.” He ended with the following proposal for immediate action: “Either we quickly reach an accord which encompasses the opposition and the consistent reformists to bring into being a democratic alternative, or we will very quickly reach a limit, and beyond that limit things are going to turn out very difficult for all, that is to say for the country.”
What could be clearer? A party which pretends to be ‘proletarian’ and ‘communist’ measures struggles in terms of the interests of the ‘Nation’, which can only mean the owners of the ‘fatherland’: the capitalists.
The small groups to the left of the CP are more cautious, since they speak in the name of the ‘working class and the people’; but their intervention is still more criminal because they present the same reforms which the CP and the bourgeoisie defend, as ‘great victories for the working people’; at least the CP has the nerve to speak openly in the name of the bourgeoisie and the nation:
ORT, MCE and PTE[8] in a joint declaration, after much snivelling about the assassinated workers and shouting about how evil and fascist Juan Carlos is, conclude the necessity for: “. . . a real unity of the democratic forces to fight in a consistent way for democracy against fascism, against the disunity and bourgeois vacillations of the Junta and the Plataforma.”
Liga Communista[9] in their paper Combate number 40, criticise Ruiz Giménez and Tierno Galván (bourgeois radical democrats) for not going to the pro-amnesty demonstration in Madrid on January 20th, adding: “. . . the thousands of demonstrators didn’t need their presence to defend the amnesty, and other democratic aspirations of the masses which they (Giménez and Galván) don’t know how to defend consistently.”
Since the bourgeoisie don’t know how to fight for the democracy which they need, LC will attend to the matter by telling workers that they should help the bourgeoisie out.
For the ‘ultra-leftist’ OICE, the balance sheet of Vitoria reads as follows: they attribute the criminal acts to a phantasmal ‘ultra’ faction of the bourgeoisie, and end up considering the workers’ self-defence of their demonstrations and assemblies as provocations and adventurism; they consider the class as ‘immature’ for the ‘democratic rupture’ as for the ‘socialist rupture’; finally they seize the chance to advertise themselves as a ‘beacon’ for the workers, attributing to themselves the ‘honour’ of having directed the struggle.
This ‘anti-capitalist’ and ‘left communist’ organisation doesn’t say a word about the importance that this fight has for the advance of the workers’ movement; nor does it draw the lessons by pointing out successes and errors so that the class can prepare itself for future struggles; nor does it see the fight within the world situation and the general struggle of the class. Not one word of all this; its total obsession is to show that the OICE is ‘responsible’, and that it didn’t fall for any ‘provocations’.
If we have reviewed the reactions of the groups of the Right, Left and extreme Left to the events in Vitoria, this has not been to expose then, and once having done so offer our merchandise as the best.
All comrades who want to engage in a permanent collective and organised struggle against capital must regroup themselves into a political organisation where we will forge a clear communist programme and a coherent intervention in the class struggle.
The problem we have to consider is whether those organisations of the Left and extreme Left who put themselves forward as the ‘vanguard’ of the proletariat really are useful instruments in the fight for communism.
For us the answer is no. For neither in the programme, nor in the organisation, nor in the consciousness of these groups can we find anything of use to that fight. Their programmes are never about communism and the practical means for achieving the consciousness and organisation necessary to create it. On the contrary, they call for ‘liberties’ (some call them democratic, others political), for a ‘workers’ trade union, for self-management, for workers’ control . . . in other words a minimal programme for the reform of capitalism, when we know from historical experience and from the experience of the democratic countries that this programme is not a ‘step forward’ but a dead-end which weakens us, divides us, and leads us to defeat.
Their organisations are models of bureaucracy and hierarchy, where all political discussion by militants is curtailed with a thousand excuses: the need for ‘unity’, the danger of falling into ‘ultra-leftism’, ‘dogmatism’ or ‘purism’ … But their main danger lies in the recipes they serve up about how the workers should struggle. These recipes are always based on a division between economic struggle and political struggle. In effect, the Left in general and the extreme Left in even more confusing jargon have insisted that the recent struggles are economic (in January Camacho[10] never stopped repeating this everywhere). The funny thing is that they utilise the same logic as the Right, which says “. . . economic strikes, yes; political strikes, no” (because they are managed by Moscow . . . or by the French CGT). The Left rejects the ‘accusation of politicisation’ by separating, in the face of all reality, the economic from the political with the exactitude of a medieval scholastic. The Left does this because, according to them, the only politics the workers can have are the politics of the bourgeois opposition . . . and that’s the end of the discussion!
Who can believe, they ask themselves, that the class can struggle politically in an autonomous way? And the extreme Left too dusts down the poorest texts of Lenin in order to justify the same old counterrevolutionary idea that in the end the workers can only arrive through their struggles with a ‘trade union’ consciousness.
Nobody denies that consciousness has to make its own way, and that in the majority of cases strikes begin for economic reasons. What we absolutely insist is counterrevolutionary is the haughty denial that consciousness is enriched by action; the posing of unbridgeable barriers between economic and political consciousness when all evidence shows that these moments constitute a permanent and continuous progression.
“. . . when they try to take exact account of the strikes, of the co-ordination, and other forms by which proletarians make into reality before our eyes their organisation as a class, some are invaded by a real terror, others show a lofty scorn.”
“Do not say that the social movement excludes the political movement. There has never been a political movement which was not at the same time social.” (Both quotes from Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy)
It has been said that the dead of Vitoria have to be blamed on the role of the ‘bunker’ which led the workers to slaughter by continually provoking them. The workers only wanted the re-instatement of the twenty two sacked men of Forjas; the challenging attitude of the police and their exacerbation of violence provoked the tragedy; it was all a shady manoeuvre by the bunker to block democratisation. In fact the Government followed the events step by step and the order to fire came from the Civil Governor of Alava, who previously consulted with the Government. In Zamaraga, where the tragedy happened, a conversation by radio transmitter was intercepted between the Chief of Police and the Governor in which the latter specifically said that the former need not have any fear of shooting.
The Governor of Alava doesn’t have any fame as an ultra-rightist; he is a man who has the complete confidence of Fraga and was appointed by him. Neither did the Civil Guard - the refuge of the ultras - poke their noses into the conflict at all.
Another cause which has been pointed out has been the intransigence of the Alava business men and their obstinacy in not negotiating with the workers. Forjas Alaves as and other isolated companies came to an agreement to concede a very substantial part of the demands, with the clear aim of dividing the workers and negotiating company by company. But the workers didn’t allow this manoeuvre to succeed. They demanded that they should be given an overall settlement without dismissals or detentions. This was a political decision in which they put the unity of the class before negotiation and rewards (which they could see as pretty insecure). In the assemblies there were some very heated discussions about this and in the end the position of ‘all or none’ triumphed. In Forjas Alavesas, the board conceded everything: the factory assembly decided to go back to work but the joint assembly asked them to reconsider their decision and to continue to strike. The workers of Forjas accepted this.
This is very important. It means putting class unity before negotiation, before possible economic gains within a factory; it means understanding the political nature of the struggle for our demands (direct confrontation against capital and its state); it means recognising the power of the joint assembly of factories in struggle, the expression of the general movement of the class.
When people talk about the ‘bunker’ or of the irresponsibility of the Alava businessmen, they are inventing scapegoats. They see the savagery of the fascist wing of capital, but they draw a veil over the savagery of its democratic wing. Finally, they are hiding the fact that our class interests clash directly with the whole of capitalist order and that faced with our struggles, any bourgeois regime will employ the same criminal methods.
Vitoria is an example of a conscious and organised struggle by the proletariat against bourgeois power. It shows that in Vitoria workers grasped that our demands couldn’t be satisfied within capitalist institutions (agreements, negotiations, unions …), so it is necessary to prepare ourselves to face the inevitable confrontation with capital and its state.
The creation of scapegoats has a purpose: to make us believe that a trade unionist, economist struggle is viable and disrupted only by a reactionary and bunkerite element against whom we have to direct all our forces. At the same time those who put forward this line try to hide the revolutionary content of the struggle in Vitoria and try to prevent us from facing reality. And this reality is that if we generalise our struggle and unify it autonomously in genuine class organs, the whole of the repression will fall upon us. It is therefore imperative to pose the issue of the organised and conscious defence of our assemblies and demonstrations.
Solidarity with Vitoria cannot be reduced to protest against the government’s crimes; we have to understand how we can become united with the struggle of the Vitoria workers in support of their conscious and autonomous confrontation with bourgeois power.
In some places like in Navarre and Tarragona, there was a class response, while in others - Euzkadi, Catalonia - the dead were made use of by the Left to defend their democratic-nationalist alternative, confining the struggle to whimpering about the crimes.
It can be said that Madrid was a case apart. The exhaustion of the recent general strike weighed heavily on the workers there. There were places where symbolic stoppages of five minutes were made, while in other concerns (Torrejón, Intelsa and Kelvinator in Getafe …) workers struck and went out onto the streets in an attempt to extend the fight, but without success.
In Navarre, the atmosphere was already combative when news arrived from Vitoria. That same Wednesday, May the 3rd, the textile industry was paralysed and 300 factories were on strike for the Collective Agreements of Navarre, a measure intended to favour workers in smaller enterprises. In this action the ‘Council of Workers’[11] (controlled by representatives of the Workers’ Commissions (CCOO)) found itself overtaken by the workers who had elected an assembly of factory delegates. That very Wednesday afternoon, after news from Vitoria had arrived, 160 factory delegates had been meeting, and they decided to propose a general strike to their assemblies. On Thursday morning, they began to close factories, particularly in the area of the Landaben Polygon industrial estate. The main decision, which was taken in almost all the assemblies, was to go out into the streets, to extend the strike, to paralyse the city.
Pickets and demonstrations, called particularly by the workers of the following factories: Superser, Torfinosa, Perfil en Frio, Immanesa, were bringing other factories out into the street and closing shops and bars. As in the general strike of 1973, they again sang:
“Through the streets goes a song
Worker raise your fist,
Leave the machines, come out of the factory,
Go to the streets with a single cry: Revolution! Revolution!”
After building huge barricades and engaging in hard clashes with the cops, the workers reached the centre, where the commercial and banking employees joined them unanimously. The most repeated cries were “We are workers; join us!” “Solidarity with Vitoria!” “Brothers of Vitoria, we shall not forget you!” The workers’ districts were mobilised with everybody coming out into the streets. This happened especially in Rochapea, San Juan and Chantrea. The other Navarran towns were also united; Lesaca, where the workers of Laminaciónes, having paralysed the town, set off on the road to Irún (the border town with France), although the Civil Guard dispersed them with shots. In Estella, Tafalla and Tudela there were total strikes. The movement lasted until the end of the week. To curtail it, the management put forward new economic offers to be considered at the Collective Agreements. On the other hand, the ‘Council of Workers’ put forward their demand for the re-instatement of those sacked in the Potasas conflict of 1975, which the management - cornered by the situation - agreed to negotiate on.
These concessions shortened the struggle, in the same way as the mopping-up work of the Workers Commissions (controlled not by the CP, but by the ORT and the MCE) which stressed the need for, ‘conserving strength’ for the single day of struggle called for all Euzkadi (the Basque Country) to celebrate the 8th of March. That day there were hardly any strikes in Navarre.
In Tarragona: in the refinery plant employing 3,000 workers, workers put forward a class response. On Thursday, the atmosphere was effervescent, but nothing concrete came of it. However, on Friday, some workplaces started to come out, and drew people to them, everybody joining in less than an hour into an assembly where workers proposed making a march into the centre (around six miles away) to try to bring out all the factories in the industrial zone. There were opinions against this, but in the end two-thirds of the meeting decided to go forward. The attempt failed and very few factories joined them. There were groups of workers who asked the demonstrators to hold a meeting in the Ramblas which they could go to after coming out of work. Also many people from the Buenavista neighbourhood joined them. In the Ramblas there were intermittent clashes the whole evening and a Morrocan worker was killed by the police who used the maximum savagery possible.
The Tarragonan experience shows that things may not turn out well at the beginning, but that the only way to go forward is to begin to move. The factory with the highest level of consciousness must not concentrate its strength on struggle in that particular factory; its higher consciousness must lead it to take up the task of generalising and extending working class action. In almost all the zones there were examples of factories that were the motive force for the movement: Kelvinator in Getafe, Superser in Pamplona, Standard in Madrid, Duro-Felguera in Gijón, Caf in Beasíń.
In Euzkadi, all the unions and political organisations joined in a call for a day of struggle for March 8th. It was followed by some 500,000 people. A success in numbers, but a failure from the point of view of the conscious struggle of the working class. How is it to be explained, for example, that a worker from Basauri was killed on Monday and nobody lifted a finger on the following day to protest against the crime?
One-day struggles mean a whole series of things for the workers’ movement which it is necessary to criticise and demystify.
1. In the first place, to stop for 24 hours and on the following day to return to work as if nothing had happened, serves to accustom the workers to the idea that their weapons of struggle (the strike, the demonstration) are means for pressuring the bourgeois state, not means for liberation which go on reinforcing our unity and weakening our enemy, until there is a violent confrontation.
2. In the second place, one-day struggles are demonstrations of force on the part of the parties of the Left against the state and other traditional factions of the bourgeoisie; they have the object of convincing the ruling factions that they should take note of the Left’s capacity for mobilisation and recognise that there is a role for the Left in the political game of the bourgeoisie. Although using methods different from parliamentary politics, they have the same end: to use the workers’ struggle in conflicts between one faction of capital and another.
The meaning of the one-day struggles held in the whole of Euzkadi was the same, with a propaganda which placed the emphasis on the fact that the dead were Basques, assassinated by Spanish centralism.
The Left of the whole country has made use of the dead to attempt to convince the population about the need for democracy. Thus, there were numerous funeral processions, protesting against the ‘violence of a government’, and demanding the coming of another - a ‘democratic’ one - which would ‘end all types of violence!’
March 1976
[1]. See our international leaflet ‘From Indignation to hope’ in WR 353 and at https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201203/4766/statement-social-m... [1]
[2]. See the article in this issue of WR and an earlier in Acción Proletaria (our territorial publication in Spain) on the Podemos hoax https://es.internationalism.org/ccionline/201406/4033/podemos-un-poder-d... [2].
[3]. There was a nucleus formed by elements that came together in 1973 and who participated in a process of discussion that lead to the formation of the ICC in 1975. This nucleus separated itself from this process in 1974 due to activist and workerist differences. A new group of militants made contact with the ICC in 1975 and, after a series of discussions, was definitively integrated in September 1976.
[4]. See our book (in Spanish) 1936: Franco and the Republic massacre the proletariat. An online version can be found at https://es.internationalism.org/booktree/539 [3]
[5]. The crushing of the Kronstadt workers’ was indeed a decisive step in the transformation of the soviet state into an instrument of capitalism, but we don’t think this was the culminating point of the counter-revolutionary process that would make the Russian state fit without qualification into a list of capitalist states. See for example https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200001/9646/1921-pro... [4]
[6]. Organización de la Izquierda Comunista de Espańa, Revolución was its publication, was an organisation of the so-called extreme left, which, in reality, is the left of capital, and, while adopting some of the positions of the Communist Left, in reality, perverted them and used them in its role of containing the autonomous movements of the proletariat and leading it into a dead end. Proof of this was their position according to which there are other fractions of the democratic bourgeoisie under which capitalist exploitation would be tolerable.
[7]. With this expression the article refers to those years in which a part of the state tried to stay anchored in Francoism.
[8]. ORT, Organización Revolucionaria de Trabajadores; MCE Movimiento Comunista de Espańa; PTE, Partido de los Trabajadores de Espańa, were three leftist organisations.
[9]. A Spanish Mandelite Trotskyist group
[10]. Camacho (1918-2010) was the organiser of the diversion onto the union terrain with the initiative for Workers Commissions created in the struggles with the capitalist approach of a permanent organisation during the times of Franco. From here was born the CCOO union of which he was general secretary for many years.
[11]. An organ of the Francoist vertical union that was still active at that time
The arguments by both sides in the UK’s Referendum on membership of the European Unions are limited. They make outlandish claims on the benefits of Leaving or Remaining while warning of the dangers of their opponent’s policy in a perpetual pantomime of “Oh no it isn’t! Oh, yes it is!”
Yet it’s clear from the start that there can only be one winner, and that’s the British ruling capitalist class. We have been asked to examine every issue with one thought uppermost in our minds: “What is best for Britain?” To look at the effect on jobs, prices, benefits, pensions, family income, the prospects for businesses big and small, security, immigration, sovereignty, terrorism, anything you can think of is supposed to be looked at in terms of the UK’s membership of the EU. And ‘what is best for British capitalism’, as soon as it is considered in an international context, means ‘what is best for British imperialism’.
The fact that workers are exploited by the capitalist class means that their interests are not the same. Many groups and parties pretending to speak on behalf of the working class have recommendations on how to vote. The Labour Party says that Remaining provides jobs, investment and ‘social protection’. Many leftists are campaigning against EU membership on the grounds that the ‘bosses’ EU’ is against nationalisation, demands austerity, and attacks workers’ rights. In reality one of the main attacks on the working class in Britain today lies in the propaganda around the referendum and all the illusions in the democratic process and the EU that all the lying campaigners of the bourgeoisie are trying to foment.
So, what is agreed by the Leave and Remain campaigns – what will benefit British business, what is good for the British capitalist state – is the shared basis of an ideological campaign which could have a disorienting effect on a working class that is already confused about where its interests lie and what capacity it has to change society. However, the differences between the In and Out campaigns are not all just theatre (although there is a lot of that) as there are, and have been for decades, real divergences in the ruling class on membership of the EU.
The dominant faction of the British bourgeoisie sees the benefits of the UK’s membership of the European Union at the economic, imperialist and social level. Big businesses from the FTSE 100, the vast majority of manufacturing industry, big banks and other financial institutions, multinational corporations, much of local government, organisations representing lawyers and scientists, all recognise the importance of access to an EU market of 500 million people, the deals that the EU is capable of doing, the fact EU trade with the rest of the world is about 20% of global exports and imports, the investment that EU countries attract, and the necessity for the UK to be part of the EU as part of its imperialist strategy. Outside of Britain the main factions of a number of major capitalist countries also see the importance of the UK’s continuing EU membership. In Europe itself, leading figures in Germany, France, Spain, Netherlands, and Sweden have expressed themselves in favour of Britain remaining.
Outside Europe it is significant that US President Obama is among those who support the UK continuing in Europe. The question of Britain’s relationship with the US is not simple. During the period of the two big imperialist blocs led by the US and the USSR Britain was an integral member of the western bloc, a loyal ally to the US. It was during this period that the EU’s predecessors, the European Coal and Steel Community, and its successor, the European Economic Community were founded, also, effectively, part of the US-led imperialist bloc. But, with the collapse of the eastern bloc, and the corresponding breakdown of the western bloc, British capitalism’s imperialist and economic interests implied different emphases in policy. At the imperialist level Britain has tried to pursue an independent orientation, while, at the same time, sustaining alliances with other powers when the situation has demanded it. At the economic level almost half of British trade is with the EU, while 20% of UK exports go to the US. In an article we published in WR 353 in 2012 (“Why British capitalism needs the EU”) we said that “examination of Britain’s international trade shows that its economic interests have their main focal points in Europe and US. This helps to explain the actions of the British ruling class in recent years […] While it would be an error to see a mechanical relationship between Britain’s economic and imperialist interests it would also be a mistake to deny any such link. Analysis of the economic dimension reveals some of the foundations of Britain’s strategy of maintaining a position between Europe and the US.” For the US, the UK is still a Trojan horse in the EU, a potential means to undermine the possibility of Germany strengthening itself as a rival to the US. For the UK, Germany is part of an important trading partnership, but also a potential imperialist antagonist.
But what about those campaigning for Britain to leave the EU? Who are they? What do they represent? Economically we have heard the managers of hedge funds favouring Brexit, along with, typically, smaller businesses and individual entrepreneurs. If there were nothing else to consider then this would be easy to explain. The law as it stands benefits hedge funds, but they are understandably inclined to rail against any form of regulation that might obstruct their pursuit of profit. With smaller businesses, their size might just be the result of a lack of competivity, but that doesn’t stop them blaming the EU, or the UK government, or the local council, or the practices of bigger businesses. Anything could be the target of their frustration, when quite possibly what they suffer mostly from are plain ‘market forces’.
However, politically, the factions of the bourgeoisie that support Brexit are notable by their variety, and are not obviously tied to any particular social group or strata. There are the extreme right parties from UKIP to the BNP, the eurosceptics of the Conservative Party, and, from the left, an array of Stalinists and Trotskyists. Here are a strange set of bedfellows with a wide range of rhetoric and hypocrisy. That the likes of Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith, who’ve been at the heart of government since 2010, part of a party that’s been in power for more than 60 of the last 100 years, can stand behind banners saying “Let’s Take Back Control” is a fine example of Doublespeak from these longstanding functionaries of a long-established part of capitalism’s political apparatus. However, there is something else that the Leave factions have in common, and that is their attachment to the rhetoric of populism, the pose of standing against the ‘establishment’, a hankering after a mythical past, and battlers against an exterior threat . In a period of growing social decomposition, populism is an increasing phenomenon. In the US there is the Tea Party and Donald Trump, in Germany there is AfD and Pegida, in France there is the Front National, and, from the left, there is Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. Closer to home, in the 2015 UK General Election, the Scottish National Party’s populist campaign was at the root of the removal of nearly all Labour’s Scottish MPs.
The classic example of the marriage of two career populists was at an Anti-EU meeting where Nigel Farage of UKIP introduced a speech from George Galloway from the Respect party (“one of the greatest orators in the country” and “a towering figure on the left of British politics”). Galloway explained that “We are not pals. We are allies in one cause. Like Churchill and Stalin…” The comparison was telling. Galloway sees the link up of left and right as being like an imperialist alliance in a war involving death and destruction on a massive scale. He is not wrong. Farage and Galloway do represent forces for imperialist war and destruction, but then so do all other factions of the ruling class. The more immediate problem posed by the rise of populism is this: while it is evidently a phenomenon that can be used by the bourgeoisie, there is the danger that it can escape the control of the main political parties and cause problems for the usual political manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie.
We don’t intend to speculate on the result of the coming Referendum. It is hard to see which factions of the bourgeoisie would benefit from a Leave victory which would seem to pose difficulties for British capitalism. But the British bourgeoisie is the most experienced in the world and would seem likely to be able to ensure a Remain victory, or at least be able adapt to any other result.
What’s important for the working class is to see that the campaign around the EU Referendum is completely on the terrain of the ruling class. There is nothing to choose from the alternatives on offer as they both start and finish with the continuation of British capitalism and the demands of its imperialist drive.
For the working class the possibilities for social change do not lie in capitalism’s democratic process. For the struggle of the working class to be effective it needs to be conscious. At this stage, when workers have little sense of class identity, they need to be able to withstand the propaganda campaigns of all the different factions of the bourgeoisie. Forty years ago, in 1975, there was an earlier referendum on EU membership. Like today there was agreement between the main factions of the main parties, but also, in the No camp you could see the shared approach of right-winger Enoch Powell and left-winger Tony Benn. At that time the campaign was one aspect of the work of the Labour Party in power, trying to convince workers that they should abandon their struggles and put their faith in a party of the left. Today the working class is not struggling at all on the same scale as it was in the 1970s and 1980s, but, with a perspective for a world based on relations of solidarity rather than exploitation, it still has the potential to transform society.
Car 9/4/16
(Second letter from the ICC to Tampa Communist League)
We welcome the publication of DP’s response to our letter to the Tampa Communist League1 and hope that this debate can continue in a fruitful (and fraternal) way. We will keep this reply fairly succinct but hope by doing so to concentrate on the main issues raised in this debate. We are responding more or less in the order the topics were covered in your letter, but for us the last two questions – the relationship between activity and period, and the principal lessons of the Russian revolution regarding party and power – are probably the most important ones for further debate.
The letter is a response from an individual comrade and we don’t know the content of the discussions about the question of the party within the group – it would be very positive if at some point an account of these discussions could also be published. But DP says that the group as such has added a new “unity point” on this question, i.e. “In order to triumph in the class struggle the proletariat must organise into a world-wide political party around a programme that expresses its exclusive class interest”.
There is certainly much in this condensed formulation we can agree to: that the working class cannot triumph without a political party; that this party has to defend a distinct programme; that it must be international. But we still take issue with the formulation “the proletariat must organise into a political party”. When this formulation appeared in the 19th century workers’ movement under the impulsion of the marxist current, it was a definite expression of the necessity for the working class to engage in political struggles up to and including the seizure of power. It was thus to become a point of demarcation from those, like the anarchists, who rejected both the immediate political combat and the goal of political power. But the formulation “constitution of the proletariat into a class, and thus into a political party” (Communist Manifesto) also expressed certain ambiguities of the period, not least the fact that there was not yet a clear distinction between the unitary organisations of the class, open to all workers, irrespective of their beliefs or opinions, and the political organisation organised around a clear programme (made up of members who join because they agree to the political principles of the organisation) . The First International, for example, combined both these aspects. But as the class struggle matured this distinction became much sharper: in the Second International, between the socialist parties and the trade unions, in the Third, between the communist parties and the soviets. For us, this was one of the signs that the organisation question is posed differently to the working class in different epochs, in particular, when it enters what the Third International referred to as the “epoch of proletarian revolution”. It is in this epoch, when there is no longer any possible cohabitation between reformists and revolutionaries in the same organisation, that it becomes evident that the party is the organisation of the communist minority within the class.
Nevertheless, the theoretical bases for what became clarified in “revolutionary practice” can already be found in the Communist Manifesto, which affirms that communists are not saviours from on high, not a self-appointed elite, but merely the most determined and theoretically advanced minority of the class, an expression of its historical struggle which is also an active factor in its development. This vision is one of a class in movement, one in which consciousness necessarily develops in an uneven way, given the enormous weight of the dominant ideology. The communist minority is indeed in the “avant-garde” when it comes to political clarity, but its aim is always to generalise this clarity as widely as possible. By the same token, the communist programme is not developed by the politicised minority in isolation from the class struggle: the latter learns from the struggle and seeks to draw out its most significant lessons and in doing so to clarify the perspectives for the future.
We don’t think there is anything elitist in this view. Nor do we think that there is any contradiction between aiming at the highest level of political clarity and the culture of debate, the confrontation of ideas, the testing of hypotheses in relation to practical experience. On the contrary: class consciousness, theoretical clarity, can only develop in this way. The search for truth for a clear perspective, is not something that is “imported” from outside or imposed onto the class from above, it is the result of a process of collective and individual reflection which can only move forward through debate and the exchange of ideas., But debates in a movement that aims to apply the scientific method are not a simple exchange of opinion – they seek to achieve a higher synthesis and this includes the intransigent critique of false conceptions2.
DP’s reply refers to “modern Leninist groups” without specifying which organisations or political tendencies are meant. It looks to us, however, as if it is talking about the organisations of the left of capital, such as the Trotskyists, whose ideas about organisation are bound to be hierarchical and monolithic, simply because these are natural to all bourgeois organisations. Although in the CLT’s points of unity you talk about the left of capital, it is not very specific and we are not sure whether you would include “modern Leninist groups” in this category.
The fact that bourgeois organisations function like bourgeois organisations is evident enough, but this does not mean that authentically proletarian organisations cannot be affected by manifestations of bourgeois ideology such as elitism and monolithism. Some indeed – such as the Bordigists – positively theorise such conceptions, while others are affected in a more subtle and perhaps more insidious way. But all of us - not just the revolutionary minority but the entire working class - are bound to be affected in one way or another because in a class society “the dominant ideas are the ideas of the dominant class”; and this means a permanent struggle against the infiltration of such ideas and practices. And this too is part of the theoretical combat, the fight for a higher level of clarity, specifically on the questions of organisation and of morality (we note that both DP’s reply and the points of unity both refer to the question of ethics and we welcome this – it’s a discussion we could take up at a later date).
On the question of the minimum and maximum programmes, we don’t agree that the 1880 programme of the Parti Ouvrier can be a model for us, however interesting it is as a historical document. It’s true that Marx wrote it along with Guesde, but if we are not mistaken, it was Guesde’s interpretation of the demands it contained, especially the economic ones, which led to disagreements between the two of them later and to Marx exclaiming that “moi, je ne suis pas marxiste”. For Marx, the economic demands were based on real possibilities and could be won under capitalism though the immediate struggle, whereas “discounting the possibility of obtaining these reforms from the bourgeoisie, Guesde regarded them not as a practical programme of struggle, but simply ... as bait with which to lure the workers from Radicalism.” The bourgeoisie’s inevitable rejection of these reforms would, Guesde believed, “free the proletariat of its last reformist illusions and convince it of the impossibility of avoiding a workers ’89.”3. This bears a strong resemblance to the manipulative methodology behind Trotsky’s “transitional demands” and Marx was right to reject it.
The political part of the text, on the other hand, while containing some very concise formulations about the goals of the revolution, is less than clear about the political means to achieve them: on the one hand, even though this was nearly 10 years after the Commune, the programme still holds out the hope that the working class can gain power through parliament. And at the same time it uses terms like “Commune” and “the general arming of the people” which imply that this whole programme is to be implemented once the class itself has already taken power.
Not then an example of clarity which we can import wholesale, but one to be seen in its historical context. This again raises the question of periodisation – for us the transition from the ascendant to the decadent period – which has a considerable bearing on whether the demands put forward in a political programme correspond to the possibilities of the period. For us, the measures which should be contained in the programme of a communist party in a genuinely revolutionary situation must be based on a clear understanding that the bourgeoisie is no longer fit to rule and that all its political institutions, including its most democratic, are thoroughly rotten, and need to be destroyed from top to bottom; and by the same token that capitalist social relations have reached a total impasse and are a blockage on the development of man’s productive powers. This is why there is no alternative to replacing them with communist social relations. Even if this entire social-economic transformation cannot be implemented the moment the working class takes power, the measures it takes must tend in this direction. On both counts (political and social-economic) we think we are talking about implementing the maximum programme: the communist revolution.
In our previous letter we referred to the question of the communist fraction, which was not taken up in DP’s reply. But we think that it is an indispensable element in understanding the role of communists in periods when the formation of the party is not yet on the immediate agenda. Historical experience indicates that parties are born when the class struggle is in the ascendant, and that they are not the product of the incremental growth of this or that group. They tend to appear as the coming together of different groups and tendencies, but the more advanced fractions play the most decisive role in his process, and are the best means to ensure that the party will be formed around a clear programme. This is why, for us, the development of a coherent theoretical outlook - a specific task of a communist fraction or fraction-like organisation - is indeed crucial. And we do think that centralisation, as opposed to federalism or localism, is the means that proletarian organisations use to develop their theoretical unity. For us this does not mean an unthinking conformity imposed by a minority from above. Rather it implies the commitment of the whole organisation to achieving a coherent outlook on world events and the perspectives for the future. From our point of view, centralisation is a principle in the workers’ movement, since it implies the precedence of the whole over its parts, and theoretical rigour is our main weapon against the fog of bourgeois ideology. We also think that there can be no separation between this search for theoretical unity and the defence of principles, since the latter are precisely the conclusions forged by marxist theory on the basis of the historic experience of the class. It follows that principles can only be defended consistently if they are built on very firm theoretical foundations – they are not just a collection of points but are linked to each other, intertwined, bedded into a framework. But rather than continue with this train of thought now, perhaps we can refer comrades to the article based on one of the reports to the 21st ICC congress, “The role of the ICC as a ‘fraction’”, which provides a short history of the fractions in the workers’ movement4. As always, we would welcome your comments.
Finally, with regard to the question of the party taking power, there is obviously a connection here to the question of whether the party is a minority or not. If you consider that the party, however “massive” its influence, will only regroup a minority of the class, then it is all the more logical to oppose such a minority taking or holding power. But even if the party organised a majority in the class or could obtain a majority in the soviets, we would still be opposed to the notion of the party taking power, whether or not shared with other parties or with the soviets themselves. First, because it undermines the historical advance made by the workers’ movement, referred to above, which made it possible to see that the unitary organisations and the political organisations have distinct though complementary tasks. A confusion about these tasks weakens both types of organisation - this is surely a key lesson from the Russian revolution And second, because the idea of the party forming a government or taking power reveals a vestige of parliamentary conceptions which go against the principle of instant revocability of delegates. Bourgeois parties form a government when they have a majority in parliament and can carry on governing for the next four or five years, until the next election. But when delegates to the ‘higher’ councils are subject to constant recall by base assemblies, today’s majority is tomorrow’s minority, and there is no basis for declaring that this or that group is “in power”. In fact, this is precisely the strength of the principle of revocability, that it allows the organisations of the class to express the real evolution of its consciousness.
As we approach the centenary of the October revolution (which will no doubt be accompanied by a flood of propaganda from right and left, aimed at distorting its real significance), we think that a discussion about the lessons of this gigantic experience of our class is as important as ever. We have tried here to outline some of the lessons we draw regarding the relationship between party and soviets; and vital though this is, it does not exhaust the question. In particular, there is a whole wealth of debate and contributions on the question of the transitional state, particularly in the work of Bilan and the Gauche Communiste de France, much of which we have published in our series on communism. However, for the moment, we want to suggest that a fruitful way of continuing this discussion would be for you to send your comments and criticism of two texts in particular: ‘On the party and its relations with the class [8]’ and ‘Party, councils and substitutionism [9]’
Obviously, in sending your comments of our own efforts, we would be greatly interested in hearing from you about what you consider to be the principal lessons of the Russian revolution regarding the relationship between party and class.
We look forward to further debate
Very fraternally, the ICC
1 communistleaguetampa.org.
2 See our text on this question: The culture of debate: A weapon of the class struggle [10]
3 From Bernard H. Moss, The Origins of the French Labour Movement, 1830-1914, 1976, p.107, cited in the introduction to the programme on the Marxist internet Archive [11].
If we are to believe the media bombardment that has been assaulting us in recent months, we are on the eve of an earthquake that will shake to the core the traditional scenario of the last thirty years, in which the People’s Party of the right (PP) and the Socialist Party (PSOE) have succeeded each other alternately in power without anyone finding anything to complain about. This political chessboard is disturbed today by the eruption of ‘emergent forces’, and in particular by the most recent: Podemos. But Podemos represents nothing new.
Its political programme and its ideology are the classics of Stalinist regimes[1] defended by the so-called Communist parties (in reality virulently anti-communist) and their leftist acolytes of all stripes (Trotskyists, base unionists, anti-globalisation movements)[2], who are the main supporters of this pantomime of ‘new politics’. The specificity of Podemos which justifies the stunt it has pulled for Spanish capitalism is that the troops of Iglesias (its leader) fulfil a special mission, very important for both the Spanish and the world bourgeoisie, which is to erase the footprints of the movement of May 15 that shook the streets four and a half years ago.
Four years ago, huge crowds took to the streets and squares not only in Spain but also in Greece, the USA, Israel, etc. “This movement of indignation has spread internationally: to Spain, where the then Socialist government imposed one of the first and most draconian austerity plans; to Greece, the symbol of the crisis of sovereign debt; to the United States, the temple of world capitalism; to Egypt and Israel, focus of one of the worst and most entrenched imperialist conflicts, the Middle East.” There were attempts, still timid and embryonic, at international solidarity: “In Spain solidarity with the workers of Greece was expressed by slogans such as ‘Athens resists, Madrid rises up’. The Oakland strikers (USA, November, 2011) said ‘Solidarity with the occupation movement world wide’ In Egypt it was agreed in the Cairo Declaration to support the movement in the United States. In Israel they shouted ‘Netanyahu, Mubarak, El Assad are the same’ and contacts were made with Palestinian workers.[3]
This internationalism, expressed spontaneously even in an embryonic way in the strongest moments of the Indignados movement, is something very dangerous for the bourgeoisie which justifies its domination of the proletariat by the existence of a supposed community of interest between exploiters and the exploited of each country.
From its origins, Podemos has been characterised by what they call a “transversal” discourse, that is to say, addressing both the ‘disadvantaged’ and business leaders to whom the they have not ceased to send reassuring messages. But this supposed ‘transversal’ community is also the one invoked by the fraternal party of Podemos, the Greek Syriza party, to justify its compliance with the requirements of the European Union, which underpins an intensification of the attacks against the living and working conditions of the Greek workers. Instead of solidarity towards the victims, Iglesias, Errejon and the others solidarised with their executioner, Tsipras.
In this patriotic assault, the ‘podemists’ have distanced themselves from proposals to send soldiers into the areas occupied by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq on the grounds that “they might be killed”. We have seen that, in contrast to their initial call to send troops into the areas occupied by the Islamic State (in Syria and Iraq), they then claimed that “Spanish soldiers could be killed.” The ‘argument’ of the man with the ponytail[4] is a very effective weapon to inject the poison of nationalism, and attempts to trap workers in the small and narrow world of the ‘Spanish nation’.
No matter that the Syrian or Iraqi workers and peasants will be massacred? No matter that the population of Raqqa, the ‘capital’ proclaimed as the bastion of the Islamic State, is subject to the threefold terror of its ‘Islamist rulers’, the bombing of Russia, US and France and also of the Assad militias? No matter that these territories will be transformed into a black hole where it becomes simply impossible to live? None of this we should worry about, according to the ‘national philosophy’ and jingoism of Mr. Iglesias! The only thing that matters is that no ‘compatriot’, no Spanish national can go to die there!
It is for this reason that the ‘podemists’ have joined as ‘observers’ the anti-jihadist pact signed by both the parties taking part in the invasion of Iraq (the Popular Party), the invasion of Afghanistan (PSOE) and by the candidates for the invasion of any country that would be made under the banner of the Spanish flag. It is for this reason that Podemos has promised Rajoy[5] all the necessary support to deal with terrorist attacks, as it has already done for the victims of the recent attack in central Kabul[6].
One of the most repeated slogans of the movement of May 15 was “our dreams do not fit in your ballot box!” Indeed, the Indignados movement arose with a strong tendency to reject bourgeois politics, elections,[7] etc etc. In the movements of 2011, there began to be emphasised, with still many weaknesses and hesitations, a fact that, today, that is to say four years later, seems strange: “These people, the workers, the exploited who have been presented as failures, idlers, incapable of taking the initiative or doing anything in common, have been able to unite, to share initiatives and to break out of the crippling passivity to which the daily normality of this system condemns them (...) It was the first step towards a real politics of the majority, far from the world of intrigues, of the world, lies and dodgy manoeuvres that is characteristic of the dominant politics. A politics that addresses all the issues that affect us, not just the economy or politics, but also the environment, ethics, culture, education or health.”[8]
By contrast bourgeois politics advocates the isolation of each one of us; it argues that we must each consider ourselves as our own master faced with problems which have a social character and must search for their solution through the individual act of voting in favour of professional politicians – a procedure which, over time, only results in greater atomisation and greater resignation.
The evolution of the trajectory of Podemos is very significant. In its early years, to strengthen the illusion of continuity with the movement of May 15, they reproduced and plagiarised the appearance of the assemblies and public debates to understand the causes of our sufferings, possible alternatives to offer, etc. But today, the so-called ‘assemblies’ of Podemos have become an undisguised knife fight between the different competing tendencies on the electoral lists.
Furthermore, the debates are today reduced to an approval of the list of recipes defended as a simple electoral programme of variable geometry, depending on the electoral needs of Iglesias and those of his gang.[9]
The organisation of Podemos’ ‘internal’ functioning is not in contradiction with its role, as the representatives of the wing most critical of this group would have us believe. It is in reality fully in line with the mission assigned to this party by the entire bourgeoisie: to convince the workers that any protest movement, any questioning of the control by the networks established by the democratic state to channel indignation about the future capitalism has in store for us, is inevitably doomed to die and finish up in their nets. Its ultimate aim is to convince us that it is useless to think we can fight against the system, because in the end the capitalist system will always recuperate this fight and entangle it in the institutions of the bourgeois state.
The movement of the Indignados in Spain, like those which arose in the following months in the United States or in Israel, or other expressions of weariness towards this capitalist system that turns human beings into vulgar commodities, failed to overcome the trap set by the bourgeois state, and particularly by those factions most able to sabotage any movement that puts capitalism into question. This does not mean that the possibility of a reflection, of a searching to learn the lessons of the causes of the weakening of these movements, does not exist - even in a latent form - in the dynamics of the current situation. The stimulants for this reflection are not missing. Capitalism is sinking every day into an abyss of growing misery for huge masses of the population, into multiplying outbreaks of war and terror, into a spreading scenario of ecological disaster. The exploiting class will always need, and will always be willing to pay handsomely, someone who proclaims at every street corner that the emperor is not naked, he only needs new clothes, like the ones Podemos, Syriza, Bernie Sanders in the USA or the ‘Corbynistas’ in Britain are willing to cut and tailor for him.
Paolo, 13 December 2015 (Acción Proletaria, organ of the ICC in Spain)
[1]. As we have already criticised in the previous issue of Acción Proletaria. See our article in Spanish: http: //es.internationalism.org/accionline/201406/4033/podemos-un-poder-del-estado-capitalista
[2]. In fact, a large part of the workforce of the ‘podemist’ grouping is made up of militants from the ‘anti-capitalist left’ formed from the remnants of leftist organisations in the 1980s and from the umpteenth ‘left’ split from the Spanish ‘Communist’ party.
[3]. Extract from our leaflet distributed internationally on the balance sheet of the 2011 movements: “2011. From indignation to hope,” published on our website March 30, 2012 https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201203/4766/statement-social-m... [1]
[4]. A reference to Iglesias.
[5]. Spanish prime minister and leader of the People’s Party.
[6]. Perpetrated by the Taliban in the diplomatic quarter and which killed four Afghan policemen and two Spaniards, after which the Spanish government declared it was “an attack against Spain.”
[7]. It is not for nothing that the assemblies in the squares defiantly refused to follow the call for their dissolution during the “day of reflection” on 21 May.
[8]. Extract from the ICC international leaflet cited (the last passage is not included in the English version).
[9]. Of some 380,000 supporters that Podemos claims, only 15% took part in the primaries and only 4% mobilised for the adoption of its platform.
It may be that the recent terrorist attacks in France and Belgium are an expression of the difficulties facing “Islamic State” in the ground war in Iraq and Syria, but sudden murderous attacks on the population of the central countries of capitalism are fast becoming a fact of life, just as they have been for many years in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan and numerous other countries caught up in today’s expanding war zone. In sum, the terrorists have “brought the war back home”, and even if Daesh is being militarily weakened in the area of its “Caliphate”, there are plenty of signs that the influence of this or similar groups is spreading to Africa and elsewhere. This is because the conditions which give rise to modern terrorism continue to ripen. Just as al-Qaida was pushed into the background as Enemy Number One by the rise of IS, so new gangs can emerge, and not necessarily Islamist: it looks as if the two most recent atrocities in Turkey were carried out by a wing or offshoot of the “Kurdish Workers’ Party”.
We live in a civilisation, the capitalist mode of production, which has long ceased to be a factor of progress for humanity, its most exalted ideals exposed as utterly degenerate and corrupt. As early as 1871, in the wake of the Paris Commune, Marx noted the cooperation of the great national rivals France and Prussia in crushing the uprising of the exploited, and predicted that in the future the call to “national war” would become no more than a hypocritical excuse for aggression and robbery, in the advanced capitalist zones at any rate. In 1915, in her Junius Pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg insisted that from now on, in a planet dominated by huge imperialist powers, national war was everywhere a mere cover for imperialist appetites. The world wars and super-power conflicts that dominated the 20th century proved her absolutely correct.
And since the collapse of the great power blocs at the end of the 80s, war, the most overt expression of capitalist competition and crisis, has become ever-more irrational and chaotic, a situation highlighted by the carnage in Syria, which is being reduced to rubble by a host of armies and militias which are both at war with each other and which vie for the support of the many imperialist vultures flying over the region – the US, Russia, France, Britain, Iran, Saudi Arabia…
The irrational ideology of Islamic State is a clear product of this broader insanity. In the period of the blocs, opposition to the dominant imperialist powers tended to take on more classical forms of nationalism – the ideology of “national liberation” in which the aim was to develop new “independent” nation states, often with a sprinkling of “socialist” verbiage linked to the support of Russian or Chinese imperialism. In a period when not only blocs but national entities themselves are fragmenting, Islamic State’s pseudo-universalism has a wider appeal; but above all, in a period of history which constantly bears the threat of an end of history, of a collapse into barbarism under the weight of war and economic and ecological crisis, an ideology of the apocalypse, of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, becomes a real lure for the most marginalised and brutalised elements of bourgeois society. It is no accident that most of the personnel recruited for the attacks in France and Belgium come from the ranks of petty criminals who have taken the path of suicide and mass slaughter.
Terrorism and imperialist war
Terrorism has always been a weapon of despair, characteristically of layers in society who suffer the oppression of capitalist society but who have no future within it, of the “small bourgeois” ruined by the triumph of big capital. But 19th century terrorism was usually aimed at symbols of the old regime, at monarchs and other heads of state, and rarely targeted gatherings of ordinary citizens. Today’s terrorists seem to try to outdo each other in their cruelty. The Taliban faction which carried out the Easter attack on a park in Lahore claimed that it was “targeting Christians”. In reality it was targeting a children’s playground. Not just Christians but Christian children. And no matter to these gallant apostles that the majority of those killed were Muslims anyway. In Paris, people who like to listen to rock music, dance and have a drink were considered worthy of death in the IS communiqué lionising the attacks. But even these putrid “religious” justifications don’t stretch very far. Hitting a metro or an airport is aimed first and foremost in killing as many people as possible. This is because terrorism today is, overwhelmingly, no longer the expression of an oppressed, if non-revolutionary, class in its resistance against capitalism. It is an instrument of imperialist war, of a fight to the death between capitalist regimes.
It is sometimes claimed, in justification of suicide attacks by Palestinians in Israel for example, that the suicide belt is the poor man’s drone or dive bomber. This is true - or at least morally true - only if you recognise that the “poor man” recruited for the cause of Daesh or Hamas is not fighting for the poor but for a rival set of exploiters, whether a local proto-state or the bigger imperialist powers that arm them and cover them diplomatically or ideologically. And whether carried out by semi-independent groups like Daesh, or directly by the secret services of countries like Syria and Iran (as in the case of a number of attacks on European targets in the 1980s), terrorism has become a useful adjunct of foreign policy to any state or would-be state trying to carve out a niche on the world arena.
This doesn’t mean that acts of terrorism aren’t also used by the more respectable states: the secret services of democratic countries like the USA and Britain, not leaving out Israel of course, have a long tradition of targeted assassinations and even false flag operations in the guise of overtly terrorist factions. But returning to the comparison between the suicide belt and the sophisticated fighter-bomber, it’s true that the model for the terrorists is less the clever liquidation of this or that troublesome individual by the CIA or Mossad, and more the awesome destructive power of the cannons and aircraft of established armies, of weapons that can pulverise entire cities in a matter of days. The logic of imperialist war is the systematic massacre of entire populations – and this is something which has accelerated visibly over the last hundred years, with its progress from World War One, fought primarily between armies in the field, to the vast numbers of civilians carpet bombed or exterminated in death camps during World War Two, and on to the potential World War Three with its threat of the annihilation of the whole human race (a threat which has not at all disappeared in the new phase of chaotic militarism).
“Your armies kill our children with your planes, so we give you a taste of your own medicine, we kill your children with our suicide bombs”. This is the oft-heard justification of the terrorists on their pre- or post-atrocity videos. And again this shows how faithfully they follow the ideology of imperialism. Far from addressing their anger at the real perpetrators of war and barbarism, the small class of exploiters and their state systems, their hatred is directed at entire populations of entire regions of the world, all of whom become legitimate targets, and they thus play their part in reinforcing the false unity between exploiter and exploited which keeps the whole rotten system creaking on. And this attitude of demonising entire swathes of humanity is fully consistent with the dehumanising of particular groups who can then be subject to pogroms and terrorist bombings in the areas where you operate most commonly: Shia heretics, Christians, Yezidis, Jews, Kurds, Turks….
This ideology of revenge and hatred is echoed most clearly in the discourse of the right wing in Europe and America, who (while keeping their options open about blaming the Jews for the world’s ills) tend today to see all Muslims or Islam itself as the real threat to peace and security, and who brand every refugee from the war-torn zones as a potential terrorist mole, thus justifying the most ruthless measures of expulsion and repression against them. This kind of scapegoating is another means of papering over the real class antagonisms in this society: capitalism is in a deep, irresolvable economic crisis, but don’t investigate how capitalism functions to the benefit of the few and the misery of the many, blame it all on a part of the many, thus preventing the many from ever uniting against the few. It’s a very old trick, but the rise of populism in Europe and America reminds us never to underestimate it.
The democratic state is not our friend
But the spread of terrorism, of radical Islamism and its Islamophobic and populist mirror images should not blind us to another very important truth: in the countries of the capitalist centre, the main force safeguarding the system is the democratic state. And just as the democratic state is not averse to using terrorist methods, directly or indirectly, in its foreign policy, so it will use every terrorist attack to strengthen all its powers of social control and political repression. In Belgium, in the days after the Brussels attacks, the police powers of the state were dramatically reinforced: a new law was set in motion, increasing the possibility of raids and telephone-tapping, and introducing a closer following of “dubious” financial funding. As always, there was a very obvious presence of the police and army on the streets. Lessons were learned from the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, which initially gave rise to spontaneous gatherings expressing anger and indignation, requiring a major effort of media and politicians to make sure all this was contained in the framework of national unity. This time there were clear calls by the police for people to stay at home. In sum, trust the democratic state, the only force that can protect us from this horrible menace. The media, meanwhile, urged the population to get used to the new daily ambiance of fear. Of course there was much debate about the apparent incompetence of the Belgian security services which ignored a number of clues prior to the attacks. But the net result of the investigations into such failings will be to find ways of improving surveillance and supervision of the whole population.
Increasing the powers of the police state may help this or that ruling class in the incessant war between bourgeois factions and nations, but it will also be used against the population and the working class in particular in any future social explosions provoked by the crisis of the system, just as laws against terrorist groups who “hold democracy in contempt” can be used against authentically revolutionary political groups who put in question the whole capitalist system, including its democratic fireguards. But above all, just as the Islamist or nationalist ideology of the terrorists serves to bury the real class conflicts in every country, so the call for national unity behind the democratic state serves to prevent the exploited and the oppressed in any country from recognising that their only future lies in solidarity with their class brothers and sisters across the planet, and in the common struggle against a putrifying capitalist order.
Amos
On hearing of a strike by nurses demanding better staffing levels at Europe’s largest hospital, Charité, in Berlin last July a junior doctor in London said “They should do that here”. Now the junior doctors are striking here in England in a dispute over a contract that involves both a pay cut and problems of staffing levels. The government claim that they have offered a pay rise, but it’s one which will leave doctors thousands of pounds worse off due to a cut in out of hours pay. The claim that this is about 7 day working is equally outrageous, when the junior doctors have always covered nights and weekends, and rightly fear that increasing the weekend workload without increasing the number of staff would put patients at risk. In February secretary of state for Health, Jeremy Hunt, announced that the new contract would be imposed from August as negotiations had broken down.
The question facing junior doctors now, as with any sector of workers, is how to struggle. The BMA has escalated strike action from one day to two days in March and again on 6-8 April, and on 26-28 April will call an 18 hour strike without emergency cover – emergencies will be seen by other doctors. It is also launching a judicial review of the government decision on the contract – junior doctors have raised tens of thousands of pounds for this.
The problem here is that judicial review is clearly not an action that workers take collectively, but an appeal by citizens to the state and in the case of ongoing strike action nothing but a sideshow, a distraction to make it appear the BMA is doing something for junior doctors. Strike action, on the other hand, is the classical weapon of working class struggle and the plan to withdraw emergency cover sounds really militant – although other BMA members will be covering. Nevertheless, the strikes are protest strikes in support of union negotiation, with the BMA website at pains to explain who may and may not join the strike, insisting that participation in the strike is an individual decision, and laying out how to picket legally (a maximum of 6) with a view to public support. And the rules on who can strike are indeed byzantine. If teachers have faced a situation where those in one union are told to cross a picket line of those in another, there are some doctors in the position of being told they can strike on Wednesday 6th, when they are formally employed by the NHS, but not on Thurs 7th when part of the same job is formally for Public Health England, for instance. Here we can see the BMA is doing its best to rob the strike action of all collective solidarity and turn it into another protest by citizens.
Is this because junior doctors, however highly educated, are very inexperienced in class struggle? Last time they struck in 1975 the overwhelming majority were destined for a petty bourgeois position either as GPs running a small business or consultants with a private practice. After 40 years of pressure on NHS costs that is no longer the case, and while some will find more scope for business as NHS providers, or in the NHS bureaucracy, or both, others will be salaried workers. In this situation their union, the BMA, prides itself on representing all doctors whether employees or employers. Whatever is unusual about the BMA, it is containing this struggle just like any other union.
Calling workers out on strike for one or 2 days now and then as a demonstration to support or demand negotiation has been typical of struggles in the recent past, such as the electricians in 2011-12 or the teachers’ strike over pensions on 28 March 2012; and before that the CWU used exactly the same tactic with postal workers. It is a tactic that gives the unions great control, even at the expense of anger by the workers and in spite of the efforts they make to break out of this control. For instance when electricians and students held separate demonstrations on the same day a large group of electricians tried to get through to link up with the students instead of marching tamely off to Parliament. They were kettled and blocked. Similarly, while most unions would not emphasise that striking is an individual decision they achieve the same thing by emphasising the need to obey the law on picketing. So to struggle as part of the working class, rather than just being a bit of walk-on street theatre, means to come up against the unions. And as the electricians’ demonstration showed, if the unions cannot maintain control and keep them isolated, the police will be there to do it for them.
The electricians who tried to get through to link up with a student demonstration showed another aspect of what it means to struggle as part of the working class – solidarity with other sectors, linking up with them, because their struggle is our struggle. When workers are isolated, as electricians, as postal workers, as junior doctors, they are very weak – even the massive and very militant miners’ strike in 1984-5 was fatally weakened by being isolated in one sector. Strikes that spread across many sectors – France in 1968, Poland in 1980 – were much more powerful. The question of extending a struggle to link up with other workers is not just a useful tactic; it goes to the heart of what the working class is as the class that collectively produces in capitalism. And it is illegal. So a good citizen may withdraw his or her labour from a particular boss with whom there is a contract of employment, but may not legally try to extend that struggle to others who are equally affected by the dispute. Workers in Port Talbot are not the only ones who are affected by the decisions of Tata Steel: a much greater number of workers in the supply chain also find their jobs at risk because they are all associated in various aspects of the production of goods that goes far wider than even a huge multinational. This is the basis for the working class, when it sees itself as a class, to develop the power of solidarity, and also to develop a perspective for society as a whole which is in total contradiction with capitalism’s war of each against all.
Going back to the example of the junior doctors, their dispute has an impact on all those who rely on the health service, which is recognised but distorted in the totally false ideology of defending the NHS. So we have seen pickets with posters “hoot if you heart the NHS”, as we have in many struggles in the health service, just as the miners called for support to British coal. It is a trap that keeps workers tied to their employer, their sector, their isolation from other workers. And it is clearly not true. Striking health service workers do not love the NHS, they are on strike against it because they are being exploited by it. What they ‘love’ is not the real NHS with all the cuts and cost savings, but the idea of a health service that gives them adequate resources to look after patients well and do a job they love. There is no perspective for such a health service in capitalism.
The issue of what it means to struggle as a part of the working class is not just a question for junior doctors, but for all of us. And it does not stop at being able to recognise the traps and obstacles put in place by unions, government, media or police, it also carries the perspective of a new society: “Class identity is not … a kind of merely instinctive or semi-conscious feeling held by the workers … It is itself an integral aspect of class consciousness, part of the process whereby the proletariat recognises itself as a distinct class with a unique role and potential in capitalist society. Furthermore, it is not limited to the purely economic domain but from the beginning had a powerfully cultural and moral element: as Rosa Luxemburg put it, the workers’ movement is not limited to “bread and butter issues” but is a “great cultural movement”…”[1] Alex, 7.4.16
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201203/4766/statement-social-movements-2011
[2] https://es.internationalism.org/ccionline/201406/4033/podemos-un-poder-del-estado-capitalista
[3] https://es.internationalism.org/booktree/539
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200001/9646/1921-proletariat-and-transitional-state
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/spain
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/false_choices.jpg
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/node/3131
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/node/2659
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/131/culture-of-debate
[11] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201601/13786/report-role-icc-fraction
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/correspondance-other-groups
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2062/tampa-communist-league
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/brussels_bombs.jpg
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/terrorism
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/nhsprotest.jpg
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201601/13787/report-class-struggle