Who were the first victims of the terrorist attacks in the centre of London on July 7 2005? Like the ones in New York in 2001 and Madrid in 2004, the bombs were deliberately aimed at workers, people crowding the tubes and buses on their way to work. Al Qaida, which has claimed responsibility for this mass murder, says that it has acted in revenge for “British military massacres in Iraq”. But the endless slaughter of the population in Iraq is not the fault of working people in Britain; it’s the responsibility of the ruling classes of Britain, America – not to mention the terrorists of the so-called ‘Resistance’, who play their own daily part in the killing of innocent workers and civilians in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. The architects of the war on Iraq, the Bushes and the Blairs, are meanwhile left safe and secure; what’s more, the atrocities committed by the terrorists provide them with the perfect excuse to launch their next military adventure, just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of September 11.
All this is in the logic of imperialist war: wars fought in the interest of the capitalist class, wars for the domination of the planet. The vast majority of the victims in such wars are the exploited, the oppressed, the wage slaves of capital. The logic of imperialist war stirs up national and racial hatred, turning entire peoples into “the enemy”, to be insulted, attacked and annihilated. It turns worker against worker, making it impossible for them to defend their common interests. Worse, it calls on workers to rally behind the national flag and the national state, to march off willingly to war in defence of interests which are not theirs, but the interests of their exploiters.
In his statement about the London bombings at the meeting of the rich and the powerful at the G8 Summit, Blair said: "It's important however that those engaged in terrorism realise that our determination to defend our values and way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people."
The truth is that Blair’s values and Bin Laden’s values are exactly the same. Both are equally prepared to cause death and destruction to innocent people in pursuit of their sordid aims. The only difference is that Blair is a big imperialist gangster and Bin Laden is a smaller one. We should reject utterly all those who ask us to take the side of one or the other.
All the “world leaders’” declarations of solidarity with the victims of the London bombings are pure hypocrisy. These are the leaders of a social system which over the last century has wiped out tens of millions of human beings in two barbaric world wars and countless other conflicts from Korea to the Gulf, from Vietnam to Palestine. And contrary to all the illusions peddled by Geldof, Bono and the rest, they are the leaders of a system which by its very nature cannot “make poverty history” but condemns hundreds of millions to increasing misery, and is busy poisoning the planet in defence of its profits. The solidarity the world leaders want is a false solidarity, the national unity between classes which will allow them to unleash new wars in the future.
The only real solidarity is the international solidarity of the working class, based on the common interests shared by the exploited in every country. A solidarity which cuts across all racial and religious divisions and which is the only force which can oppose capitalism’s logic of militarism and war.
History has shown the power of such solidarity: in 1917-18, when mutinies and revolutions in Russia and Germany put an end to the carnage of the First World War. And history also showed what a terrible price the working class paid when this solidarity was again replaced by national hatred and loyalty to the ruling class: the holocaust of the Second World War. Today capitalism is again spreading war across the earth. If we are to stop it engulfing us all in chaos and destruction, we must reject all the patriotic appeals from our rulers, fight to defend our interests as workers, and unite against this dying society, which can offer us nothing but horror and death on an ever-growing scale.
International Communist Current, 7th July 2005
All sorts of political animals label themselves as anarchists. They can range from leftists who are hardly distinguishable from Trotskyists, except perhaps for their antipathy for the idea of a political party, to real internationalists who are seriously trying to defend the interests of the working class. An example of the latter is the KRAS group in Russia. At several political conferences in Russia, when the subject of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ came up, the comrades of the KRAS had no hesitation about ranging themselves alongside the marxists of the ICC in denouncing the various justifications for this war from Stalinists, Trotskyists, and anarchists, all of whom used the slogan of anti-fascism to justify support for the ‘democratic’ (and Stalinist) camp.
In recent weeks the ICC has begun a thread on the libcom.org discussion forums (go to Forums/Thought), entitled ‘1939 and all that’. In it we have argued in favour of the activity of the communist left during the second world war, which involved intervening in the most difficult and dangerous circumstances to defend an internationalist position against both imperialist blocs.
The discussion on this thread has been very revealing. While a number of individual comrades have intervened to defend the ICC and the communist left, the reaction from the majority of anarchists has been one of total outrage. For the left communists, the patriotic ‘Resistance’ was the bourgeoisie’s force for mobilising the most combative workers into the imperialist war. It was a direct appendage of the Allied armies. For the outraged anarchists, on the other hand, the Resistance must be defended at all costs and is even hailed as constituting an anti-capitalist threat to the bourgeoisie. The most extreme expression of this position was put forward by a French anarcho-syndicalist (L’agite) who says he prefers “the fucking Stalinists who were in the Resistance and who killed cops and fascists rather than the pseudo-intellectual wankers of the left communists who never did anything…”. As we said in one of our replies: “So let’s speak plainly: L’agite, the anarchist, “prefers” the Stalinist resistance officers who at the time of the so-called Liberation issued the call “chacun a son Boche” – “everyone kill a German” – and led the chauvinist hysteria against German proletarians in uniform, the shameful witch-hunts against French “collaborators”. He “prefers” the Stalinist hit-men who, during this orgy of nationalism, arrested internationalists like our comrade Marco in Paris – known not for “doing nothing” but for carrying out revolutionary propaganda against the war - and accused them of being agents of fascism and demanded they be shot. He “prefers” the Stalinist partisans in Italy who did shoot members of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy on exactly the same pretext. ….”
And apart from those who sympathise openly with the ICC, very few of the anarchists’ posts seem even slightly troubled by such open declarations of support for patriotism. The concern of most of these posts has been to make trivial and irrelevant digs at the ICC, or – in some of the more honest cases – to openly admit that they think that it was necessary to fight for the democratic states in this war.
We will come back to the implications of this debate on another occasion. But as we said on the post quoted above, “these are not speculative questions about the past. The bourgeoisie still uses the ideology of the Second World War as a justification for its wars today. In the Bush/Blair justification for the war in Iraq, for example, Saddam was the new Hitler and not invading Iraq would have been a form of “appeasement”. Or, if like the SWP or Galloway you line up with another set of gangsters, then the Islamic terrorists and nationalists in Iraq are “the Resistance”. Clarity about internationalism in 1939-45 is a starting point for clarity about internationalism today”.
Recently we published an article on our website welcoming the statement put out by various anarchists condemning the London bombings. In it we said: “In the midst of all the statements on the bombings in London, most of which are only notable for their varying levels of hypocrisy, we have become aware of two statements, both from the libertarian and anarchist milieu, that attempt to defend a class position. One is from the libcom.org website, the other from the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation (ZACF) of South Africa.
The ZACF begin by declaring that they “stand foursquare with the working and poor people” who were the targets of the bombings, while the libcom.org statement deplores “the horrific attacks on innocent people this morning in London”. They then deal with the question of terrorism: “Terrorist actions are completely at odds with any struggle for a freer, fairer society and never help oppressed people in any part of the globe. Instead violence against civilians is a tool of states and proto-states every bit as brutal as the ones they profess to oppose” (libcom.org); “…we are unrepentant in our bitter opposition to terrorism in all forms, whether driven by state or sub-state opportunism” (ZACF)”.
Our article also cites the libcom.org statement’s declaration of solidarity “with all people fighting exploitation and oppression in all its forms, from opponents to the occupation of Iraq here to those in Iraq who are opposing both the occupying forces and the ultra-reactionary Islamists that the Occupation helps strengthen”.
However, our article makes a number of criticisms about the libertarians’ difficulty in defining a real class perspective on terrorism and war; and the thread about 1939, and another one dealing with the Iraqi Resistance, pose serious questions about the depth of the libertarians’ opposition to the current imperialist conflict.
We know that the ‘official’ leftists trumpet their support for the Iraqi Resistance. As we wrote in an article published in WR 275 “Last November Tariq Ali speculated whether guerrilla warfare would turn into “an Iraqi National Liberation Front”. According to his leftist co-thinkers that wish has come true. The Weekly Worker (15/4/4) has announced that “the situation has been transformed. The entry of previously uncommitted forces - Shia Islamist forces with real mass support and roots - into open armed opposition has produced a real confrontation of the masses themselves with the coalition. The real war of national liberation has begun”. The World Socialist Web Site cheers a “broad and popular movement” and a “heroic and justified nationwide uprising against colonial repression”. And although WW (22/4/4) is concerned about “the influence of clerical and reactionary elements” and WSWS warns of attempts to divide the “resistance”, there is no mistaking their enthusiasm for “a movement of Iraq’s urban poor and most oppressed” (WSWS) dying in the cause of Iraqi nationalism”.
Furthermore, the leftists themselves make the link between Iraq today and the second world war Resistance movements: at WSWS (7/4/4) you can read that “The Iraqi resistance against US occupation is just as legitimate as the struggles waged by the French resistance against German occupation in the 1940s and the liberation struggles that swept the colonial countries in the 1960s and 1970s.”
In the same article in WR, we also noted that there is a pseudo-communist organisation, the Internationalist Communist Group, which justifies the defence of the Iraqi Resistance in the most ‘proletarian’ language. “In their French publication (Communisme no 55) they …begin by stating that “the proletariat in Iraq has given an example to its brothers throughout the whole world in refusing to fight for its oppressors”, that workers have “refused to die for interests that were not their own”. And it’s certainly true that Iraqi workers showed little enthusiasm for dying on behalf of Saddam’s army when the US Coalition first invaded. But it is criminally false to identify this response with the subsequent active mobilisation of Iraqi proletarians behind the ‘resistance’ with its reactionary capitalist agenda. This is exactly what the GCI does. They conflate the desertions and demonstrations of the unemployed that have undoubtedly taken place with the bombings, acts of sabotage and armed expressions of the military conflict, and claim that in all this “you can see the contours of the proletariat which is trying to struggle, organising itself against all fractions” while minimising the influence of the “Islamists or pan-Arab nationalists” on this alleged proletarian movement”.
The GCI, with its fascination for ‘exemplary’ violence, has long had an influence in anarchist circles. Just as some anarchists may be directly influenced by the arguments of the Trotskyists and other leftists, they may also fall for the GCI’s more radical language. Either way, there are reasons to believe that the anarchists will have a hard time standing up to these different siren songs in favour of the ‘heroic people’s war’ in Iraq.
Recently there appeared on the libcom.org forums a statement by a group calling itself the Islamic Jihad Army; posted by one of the forums’ regular contributors, avowedly a “pro-situationist” element. It was submitted without much comment, and neither has it given rise to many replies. This statement is certainly different from the usual al-Qaida rants against Jews and Crusaders and exulting in the slaughter of all “infidels”. It is addressed to the people of the world; it calls for worldwide protests against the war and recognises that many in the west oppose the war. It even ends by saying: “And to the American soldiers we say, you can also choose to fight tyranny with us. Lay down your weapons and seek refuge in our mosques, churches and homes. We will protect you. And we will get you out of Iraq, as we have done with a few others before you.
Go back to your homes, families, and loved ones. This is not your war. Nor are you fighting for a true cause in Iraq. ….”
There is no doubt that many Iraqi workers are not taken in by the hateful, racist ideology of al Qaida etc. But the ‘Islamic Jihad Army’ group, far from expressing the real needs of those workers, is still functioning to recruit them into the imperialist war. As its name implies, its standpoint is either “Islam” or “our country”, not the working class, and its methods are not the methods of the class struggle. Even if this group is not involved in the many acts of indiscriminate terror (or those directly aimed at certain groups, like Shia Muslims or Christians) which kill more Iraqi civilians than occupying troops, still they are not fundamentally distinct from factions like Zaqawi’s Al Quaida in Iraq. This can be seen from the militarist video that accompanies its statement on certain websites; these show the group brandishing their guns and engaging in roadside attacks on US army vehicles “in the name of Allah”. Of course, the class struggle does, at a certain stage, involve armed actions. But they assume their proletarian nature from the context of the movement in which they take part – for example the self-defence squads organised by strike committees, or the militias organised by the workers’ councils. And contrary to the sophisms of the GCI and others, the chaos and violence ravaging Iraq is not an expression of the class struggle; on the contrary, it is the product of an imperialist war of a new kind. It is a kind of warfare specific to the extreme decomposition of world capitalism, a sort of international civil war which links the ‘intifada’ in Palestine to the Iraqi resistance, conflicts in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Chechnya, and the July 7 London bombers. The fact that many of the actions in this war are carried out by apparently uncontrolled gangs and warlords does not alter its imperialist character; and on a global level, these actions cannot escape the context of the growing conflict between capitalist states: at any time the uncontrolled terrorist groups can become direct agents of this or that imperialist power. We can see this from the statement of the Islamic Jihad Army, which thanks the governments of France and Germany for their stance on the Iraq war and calls on us to boycott the dollar in favour of the Euro. It also echoes the more crude anti-Semitism of al-Qaida by attributing to Zionism an exaggerated position in global affairs. It thus tells us we must “put an end to Zionism before it puts an end to the world.”
As we said in response to the GCI, there have been proletarian reactions in Iraq since the invasion – massive desertions from the army, strikes, demonstrations by the unemployed. But the mobilisation of Iraqi workers behind the resistance goes in a completely opposite direction. And any expression of proletarian politics in Iraq, far from lining up with the religious/nationalist partisans, would have to insist on this irreconcilable opposition between the terrain of the class struggle and the imperialist terrain of the resistance. This is precisely the same conflict that emerged at the end of the second world war, between for example the mass strikes of the Italian workers in 1943, who raised the slogan “down with the war”, and the actions of the anti-fascist partisans which sought to drag the most militant workers back into the trap of the war ‘for democracy’. Then as now those who blur the lines of this conflict are acting as recruiting sergeants for imperialist war.
Needless to say the defence of an internationalist position in Iraq today would be extremely dangerous because the balance of forces is not in favour of the class front, but of the imperialist front. Internationalist workers in Iraq they would certainly face not only imprisonment and torture at the hands of the occupying forces but also summary executions by the jihadists who control large parts of the country. All the same, one internationalist statement coming out of Iraq would be worth more to the cause of real liberation than a thousand roadside bombs.
The question remains: where do those who call themselves anarchists stand on this issue?
Amos, 3/9/05.
Since the end of the period of reconstruction after the Second World War, the capitalist world has continued to slowly, but inexorably, sink into economic crisis.
In the first part of this article we are going to show the reality of this evolution up to the end of the 20th century.
The second part will try to show that capitalism has entered into a new, more serious, phase of economic recession compared to those that preceded it.
The bourgeoisie is not unprepared. At a time when the economic crisis is again ready to undergo a sharp acceleration, our rulers are trying to corral the working class onto a false terrain: to fight against the liberal or market economy, in the case of continental Europe, or against its “worse excesses”, as in the case of the “Anglo-Saxon” economies. This is to consciously hide from the workers the reality that the great director of the capitalist economy and thus of the attacks against the working class is the capitalist state itself. Within the lines of the European Constitution we can read that states must reform “the excessively restrictive conditions of employment legislation, which affect the dynamic of the labour market” and promote “ diversity in the forms of working contracts, notably regarding hours of work.”
The rejection, or acceptance, of the Constitution will not modify this policy one iota. The proletariat is thus being asked to forget the latest recessions and also the financial crash of 2001-2002, all the massive attacks, all the deterioration of its conditions of life since the open reappearance of the world economic crisis at the end of the 1960s and especially since the beginning of 2000. The working class is paying a heavy tribute to bankrupt capitalism, leaving aside the massive attack on retired workers and the dismantling of health care. The bourgeoisie is once again cynically trying to convince the proletariat that if it accepts more sacrifices then all will be better tomorrow, living conditions will improve and unemployment will fall. Here again the lies have only one aim: to make the working class accept and pay in misery and exploitation for the catastrophic plunge of capitalism into its own economic crisis.
The recessions of 1967, 1970-71, 1974-75, 1991-93 and 2001-2002 were successively longer and more profound, and this was in the context of a constant decline in the rate of average growth of the world economy. The growth of world Gross Domestic Product has also followed this same downward tendency, going from more than 4% in the 1950s to less than 1% at the beginning of 2000. Following the collapse of the economy which hit the world at the end of the 1920s and beginnings of the 1930s, capitalism drew a maximum of lessons. Since then, and especially after the Second World War, capitalism has organised itself in order to try to prevent a sudden collapse of its economy. We thus see a strengthening of the role of the state in all national economies. The development of state capitalism throughout the world has also been key to the militarisation of society and the disciplining of the working class. On top of this, the bourgeoisie provided itself with international organisms such as COMECOM for the old Eastern Bloc and the IMF for the Western Bloc, responsible for limiting any violent jolts in the economy. In the same sense, and unlike the period before the Second World War, the bourgeoisie strengthened the role of the central banks, which now played a direct role in economic policy through control of interests rates and the money supply.
Despite what the bourgeoisie tells us, the evolution of the economy is slowly but surely in decline. State capitalism can certainly slow down this process but it cannot prevent its inexorable development. Thus, since the 1960s, economic recoveries have been always more limited and periods of recession more profound. The capitalist world is sinking into a crisis. Beyond their particularities, Africa, Central America, the old Russian Bloc and the greater part of Asia have plunged into a growing economic chaos. For some years now the effects of the crisis have hit the United States, Europe and Japan directly. In the United States the rate of growth by decade between 1950-1960 and 1990-99 has gone from 4.11% to 3% and for the same period in Europe from 4.72% to 1.74% (source: OECD). The growth of world Gross Domestic Product per inhabitant from 1961 to 2003 has gone from practically 4% to less than 1%. After the period of reconstruction following the Second World War (the “golden years” for the bourgeoisie) the world economy has progressively taken the road of recession. If this period has been intercut with periods of recovery (though shorter and shorter, nevertheless real), it is quite simply because the world bourgeoisie has resorted to mounting debt and the use of ever-growing budget deficits. The main world power, the US, is the clearest example. It has gone from a budgetary surplus of 2% in 1950 to a budget deficit today approaching 4%. Thus the total debt of the United States, which has increased slowly from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1980s, has, in twenty or so years, undergone a real explosion. It has doubled from fifteen thousand billion dollars to more than thirty thousand billion. The United States has gone from the main financier of the planet to the world’s most indebted country. But it would be totally wrong to think, despite the specificities of the world’s major power, that this tendency doesn’t correspond to the global evolution of the capitalist economy. At the end of the 1990s, Africa reached more than 200 billion dollars of debt, the Middle East also; Eastern Europe’s debt is more than 400 billion dollars; Asia and the Pacific region (including China) more than 600 billion; the same for Latin America (source Etat du monde 1998).
If we take industrial production, the reality of the slowdown of world economic growth since the end of the period of reconstruction is still more marked.
From 1938 to 1973, or in 35 years, industrial production of the developed countries increased 288%. During the following 22 years, its growth reached only 30% (sources OECD).
The slowdown in world industrial production appears here very clearly. The working class is inevitably forced to pay for this reality. If we look at the five most economically developed countries in the world, we can see a particularly striking evolution of unemployment. This has gone from an average of 3.2% from 1948-1952 to 4.9% in 1979-1981, to end up in 1995 at 7.4% (source: OECD). These figures are those of the bourgeoisie and they tend to consciously underestimate this reality for the working class. Further, since 1995, unemployment has only continued to develop over the whole of the planet.
In order to slow down its plunge into crisis, it isn’t enough for the bourgeoisie to provide itself with new institutions at the international level, or to pile up a mind-boggling debt to artificially maintain some life in a saturated world market. It has also been necessary to try to halt the progressive fall in its rate of profit. Capitalists only ever invest in order to obtain a profit on the capital invested. This is what determines its famous rate of profit. From 1960 to 1980 the latter fell from 20% to 14% for Europe, to rise as if by magic to 20% in the United States and to more than 22% in Europe at the end of the 1990s. Should the working class believe in miracles? Two factors could explain this increase: the growth of workplace productivity or the increased austerity inflicted on the workers. But the growth of productivity at work has been eroded by half over this period. It is thus by attacking the living conditions of the working class that the bourgeoisie has been able to restore, for the moment, its rate of profit. The evolution of wages as a percentage of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in Europe perfectly illustrates this reality. In the years 1970-1980 this rose more than 76% to fall to at least 66%. It is well and truly the aggravation of exploitation and the development of workers’ misery that lie behind the momentary restoration of the rate of profit in the 1990s.
In the second part of this article we will examine more closely the present aggravation of the world economic crisis.
T, 24/8/05.
Since the bomb attacks of the 7th July the British government has used every available opportunity to boost the image of the state as the only thing which can protect the population from attack. The media were simultaneously calling for ‘national unity’ whilst decrying the forces of ‘Islamic terror’ present in our midst. The massive media barrage was repressive in itself, as it sought to overwhelm the population’s consciousness, and it undoubtedly contributed to the huge rise in racist attacks that followed the bombings. With the general fear in the population on their side, the chance arose to increase the repressive apparatus.
New laws have been proposed, including:
Another strand of the state’s response has been, under the guise of ‘greater integration’ and ‘creating stronger links’, to urge the ‘Muslim community’ (something which doesn’t exist in a class-divided society) to police itself better. This has been the spearhead for a campaign to recruit more Asian police officers, and for members of the said community to inform on each other.
We have also had the response at the street level: the shooting at Stockwell station of Jean Charles de Menezes on the 22nd July. Since the shooting it has become very clear that this was a planned execution. Almost all of the initial ‘facts’ about this incident have been shown to be lies. The overwhelming message was clear: this is an example to everyone else - we will shoot whoever we want.
As with the repressive measures introduced after the 9/11 attacks, this strengthening of the state will not only be aimed at rivals in imperialist conflicts, but at the social force opposed to all imperialist conflicts: the working class and its revolutionary minorities. History shows us that this is the traditional response of the bourgeoisie faced with a situation of ripening discontent. Already ‘anti-terror’ laws have been used to restrict demonstrations and strike actions – something which will increase, especially as the economic and social conditions in Britain deteriorate, and the working class becomes a more overt threat to the interests of the capitalist economy and the state apparatus which exists to protect it.
Graham, 02/09/05
On Friday 22nd July, at 10:00 in the morning, the police shot down a 27-year old Brazilian electrician, Jean-Charles de Menezes, with five bullets fired at point-blank range and in cold blood. This young worker’s crime, for which he has been summarily executed, was simply that of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and perhaps (since one always has doubts about the official version) to have run away from a group of threatening policemen who had mistaken him for someone else. This didn’t happen in a favela of Rio de Janeiro, and the gunslinging police officers were not members of the "death squads" who are given a free hand by the authorities, in Brazil and other Third World countries, to "clean up" the "anti-social elements" (whether petty criminals or political opponents). It happened in London, the capital of the "most democratic country in the world", and the policemen were the "bobbies" famous all over the world for their good nature, operating under the orders of the world’s most prestigious police agency: Scotland Yard.
Needless to say, this crime has provoked a certain emotion among the spokesmen of the ruling class: the Financial Times has spoken of "a potentially dangerous turn" taken by the security forces. Obviously, London police chief Sir Ian Blair has "regretted" the "error" and presented his condolences to the victim’s family. Needless to say, an enquiry has been opened to "establish the truth". It is even possible that a police officer or two will be sanctioned for having failed to distinguish between a Brazilian Catholic and a Pakistani Muslim. But those responsible for the crime are not the trigger-happy gunslingers. If they killed young Jean-Charles, it is because they had orders to "shoot to kill".
There is no lack of explanations, delivered with all the subtle hypocrisy so characteristic of the British ruling class: According to Sir Ian Blair, "There is nothing gratuitous or cavalier going on. There is no shoot to kill policy, there is a shoot to kill to protect policy".[1] [7] His predecessor, John Stevens, who no longer has to watch his language, spoke out more brutally a few months ago: "There is only one sure way to stop a suicide bomber determined to fulfil his mission -- destroy his brain instantly, utterly. That means shooting him with devastating power in the head, killing him immediately."[2] [8] Nor is it just the police who have adopted this language; the thoroughly "left-wing" Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone has justified the shooting in the following terms: "If you are dealing with someone who might be a suicide bomber, if they remain conscious they could trigger plastic explosives or whatever device is on them. Therefore overwhelmingly in these circumstances it is going to be a shoot-to-kill policy".[3] [9]
Let there be no mistake, the argument about "suicide bombers determined to fulfil their mission" is a deceptive pretext: when British troops shot down innocent Irish citizens because they thought they were terrorists, it is not because the real IRA terrorists were suicide bombers (suicide being moreover forbidden by the Catholic church). In reality, the capitalist state, in Britain as in all the "democratic" countries, has always used terrorist attacks like those of 7th and 21st July in London as an excuse to strengthen its repressive apparatus, to put in place measures that are generally considered the preserve of "totalitarian" regimes, and above all to get the population used to their existence. This is what happened after 9/11 in the USA, or after the bomb attacks in France in 1995 attributed to the Algerian "Groupes Islamistes Armés". According to the ruling class’ propaganda, you have to choose: either accept an ever more stifling police presence at every moment and everywhere, or else "play the terrorists’ game". In Britain today, this all-powerful police presence has reached new extremes: they now have not only the right, but orders to kill anyone who may appear "suspect" or who fails to obey their summons. And this in the country which invented the law Habeas Corpus in 1679, banning arbitrary arrest. Traditionally in Britain, as in all the "democratic" countries, you could not be imprisoned without charge for more than 24 hours. In Britain today, there are already people imprisoned in Belmarsh prison (near London), and held without trial.[4] [10] Now, they can be shot on sight in the street!
For the moment, the official targets are "suicide bombers". But it would be a terrible mistake to think the ruling class will stop there. History has shown over and over again that whenever the capitalist class feels threatened, it doesn’t hesitate to trample its "democratic principles" underfoot. In the past, these principles were a weapon in its struggle against arbitrary rule and aristocratic domination. Once it had taken undivided power over society, it kept them as ornaments, especially to deceive the exploited masses and make them accept their exploitation. During the 19th century, the all-powerful British bourgeoisie could afford the luxury of offering asylum to political refugees from defeated revolutions all over the Continent, such as the French workers fleeing the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871. The bourgeoisie is not threatened by "Islamic terrorism". The main victims of this criminal terror are the workers taking the Tube to work, or the office-workers of the Twin Towers. And thanks to the perfectly justified horror that it inspires among the population in general, "terrorism" has provided an excellent pretext for a whole series of states to justify their imperialist adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.
No, the only force that can threaten the bourgeoisie is the working class. For the moment, the workers’ struggles are far from being an immediate menace to bourgeois order, but the ruling class knows perfectly well that the inexorable crisis of its system, and the ever more violent attacks that it will have to make on the workers, can only push the latter to more and more widespread struggles, to the point where they will threaten the power of their exploiters. When that happens, it is not the "terrorists" who will be shot down like dogs, but the most militant workers and revolutionary elements (who will be described as "terrorists" for the occasion)[5] [11], and communists. And there won’t be any Habeas Corpus.
These are not idle speculation, or predictions from a some crystal ball. This is how the bourgeoisie has always behaved whenever its vital interests are threatened. The treatment normally reserved for Third World or colonised populations by ALL the "democratic" countries, is applied to the proletarians as soon as they revolt against their exploitation. In 1919, in a Germany governed by the Social-Democratic Party, in other words the party of Gerhard Schröder, the counterpart to Tony Blair’s Labour Party, thousands of workers were massacred for having stood up, after the 1917 revolution in Russia, against bourgeois order. As for revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, they were assassinated by soldiers who had arrested them on the pretext that they were "trying to escape". The disgusting assassination at Stockwell station should not only be denounced. All the usual whining liberals who moan about the "damage to democratic freedoms" can do as much. Above all, it should serve as a lesson to the workers in Britain and everywhere in the world to understand the real nature and the real methods of their class enemy, the capitalist class. These are the "death squads", that the bourgeoisie is preparing today all over the world, that the working class will have to confront tomorrow.
ICC, 25th July 2005
[1] [12] Guardian.co.uk, 24th July
[ [12]2 [13]] [12] News of the World Sunday March 6th, 2005 page 13 "Forget Human Rights. Kick Out The Fanatics" by Sir John Stevens, former Metropolitan Police Commissioner
The slaughter of 55 workers and the wounding of 700 hundred more on the 7th July followed by the attempted bombings of 21st July have confirmed the fears of millions that they risk being blown to bits on the way to or from work. The slaughter and the debilitating fear are the terrible price paid by the working class for the deepening of the impact of decomposition in the heartlands of capitalism. London, the oldest capital city of capitalism, has become part of the carnage that has spread around the globe and which is fuelled by the imperialist chaos in Iraq. It is a glimpse of the future that capitalism has in store for humanity.
In Baghdad many hundreds have been killed with equal brutality since July 7th. Children, drawn out by the offer sweets from American soldiers; men and women trying to find food to survive; young men forced by poverty and hunger to join the Iraqi police; the hundreds of Shias crushed to death during a religious procession in Baghdad, where the panic had been fuelled by earlier mortar attacks on the march. The deaths caused by the occupying armies are carefully concealed behind the bombings of the ‘resistance’, but estimates of the total killed are rising towards 100,000.
The London bombings have been followed by an ideological assault by the state and its hired hacks. The working class is being subjected to endless 'revelations', 'breaking news' and pointless speculation; all of which leave it confused and very threatened. The only consistent messages from this propaganda barrage are that there is a real possibility of more attacks by Islamic extremists and that only the state can protect us. The arrest of the four alleged bombers of July 21st is a spectacular ‘victory’ intended to drive home the point.
The execution of the Jean-Charles de Menezes, his head ripped apart by numerous bullets, has also contributed to this horrendous spectacle, although he had nothing to do with terrorism.[1] [18] On the one hand it has rammed home the message that the state is ready to “shoot to kill to protect”, along with terrifying speculation on what would have happened if the police had hesitated to shoot if their victim had not been ‘the wrong man’. On the other hand the leaked revelations that the initial police report was nothing but a pack of lies have given the bourgeoisie plenty of scope to continue the campaign, complete with London Mayor Ken Livingstone defending Sir Ian Blair as a ‘reforming’ chief constable who should be supported against those who leak against him. Whatever else the enquiry finally comes up with, we can be sure it will include the need for more resources to the police and their intelligence.
The British state has undoubtedly gained some immediate benefit from the bombings with the idea that the police and secret police are all that stand between us and chaos, that democracy is the only defence against terror, that there needs to be national unity behind our way of life. And at the same time, the ruling class can also find advantages in the increase in terror, suspicion and hatred within the population, leading to a significant increase in attacks on people perceived as ‘Muslims’: all this can be used to heighten divisions within the working class and divert attention away from any serious questioning of the present social order But there is without doubt another dimension at work here: the bourgeoisie’s growing loss of control, the fact that the chaotic imperialist barbarity that has been pulling apart any form of civil society in Iraq is now spreading directly to Britain and other countries in the heartlands of capitalism.
This point was underlined by the International Herald Tribune a week after the first attacks: “If it is confirmed, as the British police have indicated, that the London bombers were suicide terrorists of British nationality, then…something very new has hit Europe, the sort of suicide attacks heretofore believed to be a problem for Israel and Iraq, and, in one spectacular instance, on Sept 11 2001, the United States” (15/7/2005).
The trail of bloodshed and destruction from New York, through Madrid and to London has brought the effects of the decomposition of capitalist society into the very centre of the capitalist system.
The destruction of the Twin Towers by suicide bombers in September 2001 marked the opening of a new phase in the growth of barbarism and chaos. This terrible massacre was used as a pretext by US imperialism to launch a much more direct military offensive to try and maintain its world leadership. However, as we have repeatedly shown, this was not a matter of choice: the US has no other option than to impose its leadership through brutal military might, leading to the inevitable response from its rivals.
The slaughter of nearly 200 workers and the injuring of many others in Madrid marked a further deepening of decomposition. The fact that the instability generated by the war in Iraq spilled over into Western Europe expressed the acceleration of chaos. The anti-US fraction in Spain used the bombings in Madrid to achieve a new imperialist orientation. Contrary to what the left says, this is not a turn towards peace or an expression of the will of the people, but simply a change in imperialist strategy that will reinforce violence and chaos as much as the previous strategy.
The London bombings of July 7th marked yet another step in the descent into imperialist barbarism. They showed that within one of the main countries of capitalism there are more and more elements reduced to such despair that they can see no future but death; a future where their own self-destruction is the consciously planned means for the slaughter of as many of their fellow human beings as possible. It is the negation of a virtue that has been celebrated throughout human history: the sacrifice of oneself for one’s fellow human beings.
The attempted bombings on the 21st demonstrated that this was not a one-off event, but the opening up of a spiral of such events carried out by 'home grown' cannon-fodder using the same methods as in Baghdad. We are seeing a fusion between the chaos that finds its strongest and most enduring expression in the Middle East, and the advancing decay of social life in the heartlands of capitalism, especially in Britain. This link was confirmed in the days and weeks after the bombings by a number of horrific random murders which show that the streets and transport systems of Britain are becoming increasingly dangerous places: a young black man in Liverpool killed with an axe after being subject to racist taunts; another young man, who had just lost a friend in the July bombings, stabbed to death on a London bus because he tried to stop someone throwing food at passengers; a young woman shot dead while holding a baby as thieves raided a christening service in south London. The suicide bombers are only a more ‘politicised’ form of this growing cult of violence and death.
To fully understand the implications of these events we need to go back to the analysis of decomposition.
In the 1980s the ICC identified a number of apparently irrational developments within capitalism:
The effort to understand these events led the ICC to develop the analysis of the decomposition of capitalism.[2] [19] The collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 prompted a further development within the framework of the marxist analysis of the decadence of previous modes of production. We recognised that the present phase of decomposition “is fundamentally determined by unprecedented and unexpected historical conditions: a situation of temporary ‘social stalemate’ due to the mutual ‘neutralisation’ of the two fundamental classes, each preventing the other from providing a definitive response to the capitalist crisis” (“Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism”, International Review 62. Reprinted in International Review 107 [20]). Many of the elements we identified then can be seen in the recent events:
“All these signs of the social putrefaction which is invading every pore of human society on a scale never seen before, can only express one thing: not only the dislocation of bourgeois society, but the destruction of the very principle of collective life in a society devoid of the slightest project or perspective, even in the short term, and however illusory.” (ibid).
Following the attacks in New York, the bombing in Bali, the Beslan siege, the war in Iraq and then the Madrid bombings last year, we made an important development of this analysis: “Fifteen years later, the rise of so-called “Islamist” terrorism presents us with a new phenomenon: the disintegration of the states themselves, and the appearance of warlords using young kamikazes, whose only perspective in life is death, to advance their interests on the international chessboard.
Whatever the details – which still remain obscure – of the attack in Madrid, it is obviously linked to the American occupation in Iraq. Presumably, those who ordered the attack intended to ‘punish’ the Spanish ‘crusaders’ for their participation in the occupation of Iraq. However, the war in Iraq today is far from being a simple movement of resistance to the occupation conducted by a few irreconcilable supporters of Saddam Hussein. On the contrary, this war is entering a new phase, that of a kind of international civil war which is spreading throughout the Middle East. In Iraq itself, there are increasingly frequent confrontations not only between the ‘resistance’ and US forces, but also between the ‘Saddamites’, Wahhabite Sunnis (the sect which gave birth to Bin Laden), Shiites, Kurds, and even Turkmen. In Pakistan, a discreet civil war is in progress, with the bomb attack against a Shiite procession (40 dead), and a large-scale military operation in progress as we write in Waziristan. In Afghanistan, all the reassuring declarations about the consolidation of the Kabul government cannot hide the fact that the latter’s writ runs no farther than Kabul itself, and that only with difficulty, while civil war continues to rage throughout the southern part of the country. In Israel and Palestine, the situation is going from bad to worse, as Hamas has started to use young children to carry its bombs. In Europe itself, the resurgence of violence between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo is a sign that the wars in ex-Yugoslavia have not come to an end, but have merely been smothered temporarily by the massive presence of occupying troops.
“We are no longer faced here with an imperialist war of the ‘classic’ sort, but with a general disintegration of society into warring bands. […] This tendency towards the disintegration of capitalist society will in no way hinder the strengthening of state capitalism, still less will it transform the imperialist states into society's protectors. Contrary to what the ruling class in the developed countries would like to make us believe – for example by calling the Spanish population to vote ‘against terrorism’ or ‘against war’– the great powers are in no way ‘ramparts’ against terrorism and social decomposition. On the contrary, they are the prime culprits. Let us not forget that today’s ‘Axis of Evil’ (Bin Laden and his kind) are yesterday’s ‘freedom fighters’ against the ‘Evil Empire’ of the USSR, armed and financed by the Western bloc. And this is not finished, far from it: in Afghanistan, the United States used the unsavoury warlords of the Northern Alliance to topple the Taliban, and in Iraq the Kurdish peshmergas. Contrary to what they would like us to think, the capitalist state will be increasingly armoured against external military threats and internal centrifugal tendencies, and the imperialist powers – whether they be first-, fourth-, or nth-rate – will never hesitate to use warlords and terrorist gangs to their own advantage.
“The decomposition of capitalist society, precisely because of capitalism’s worldwide domination and its vastly superior dynamism in transforming society compared to all previous social forms, takes on more terrible forms than ever in the past. We will highlight just one of them here: the terrible obsession with death weighing on the young generations. Le Monde of 26th March quotes a Gaza psychologist: ‘a quarter of young boys over 12 have only one dream – to die as a martyr’. The article continues: ‘The kamikaze has become a respected figure in the streets of Gaza, and young children dress up in play explosive waistcoats in imitation of their elders’.
(“Bombing in Madrid: Capitalism sows death”, International Review 117)
The London bombings fully confirm this and demonstrated that this new phenomenon is not confined to the peripheries. The “general disintegration of society into warring bands” is now finding expression in the heartlands, and the warlords can now find those willing to defend their interests within the terrain of their enemy.
Fundamentalism: the product of capitalist decomposition.
The bombings in London have been used to try and divide the population, and the working class in particular, by developing suspicion and hatred against the Muslim community. Behind the soft words about the wonders of British ‘multiculturalism’ the state has spread the idea that the ‘Muslim community’ contains a dangerous threat to the whole of society. According to Tony Blair “it is not a clash of civilisations - all civilised people, Muslim or other, feel revulsion at it. But it is a global struggle and it is a battle of ideas, hearts and minds, both within Islam and outside it...its roots are not superficial, but deep, in the Madrassas of Pakistan, in the extreme forms of Wahabi doctrine in Saudi Arabia, in the former training camps of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; in the cauldron of Chechnya; in parts of the politics of most countries of the Middle East and many in Asia; in the extremist minority that now in every European city preach hatred of the West and our way of life.
“This is what we are up against. It cannot be beaten except by confronting it, symptoms and causes, head-on. Without compromise and without delusion.” (Speech to the Labour Party national conference 16/7/05).
There are many analyses of the growth of Islamic fundamentalism around. The crude version, peddled in the mass media and by populist politicians, is that it is a clash between democracy, with its virtues of freedom and equality, and those who hate it. A more sophisticated version, peddled by the left, such as the SWP and Respect, is that the actions of the ‘West’, usually meaning the US and Britain, have built up a ‘swamp of hatred and despair’ that leads young men to see suicide bombing as the only way to get even. In this case, ‘analysis’, partly based on the truth, soon gives way to justification. Such explanations are essentially attempts to get workers to choose one imperialist faction over another, no matter how many crocodile tears are spilt over the dead and injured.
The growth of Islamic fundamentalism is a particular expression of some of the tendencies identified in the analysis of decomposition. In particular, it brings together the disintegration of imperialist struggle into factional gangsterism and the individual’s loss of hope: “To the ruined petty bourgeois, to the slum dwellers with no hope of a job, even to elements from the working class, it offers the mirage of a 'return' to the allegedly pure state founded by Muhammad, which supposedly protected the poor and prevented the rich from making too much profit. In other words, this state is presented as an 'anti-capitalist' social order. Typically, Islamist groups assert that they are neither capitalist nor socialist, but 'Islamic', and fight for an Islamic state on the model of the old Caliphate. But this whole argument makes a mockery of history: the original Muslim state existed long before the capitalist epoch. It was based on a form of class exploitation, but, like western feudalism, had not perfected the enslavement of man to profit in the way that capitalism has, nor could it have done within its historical limitation. Today, however, whenever radical Islamic groups take control of a state, they have no alternative but to become the overseers of capitalist social relations and thus to strive for the maximisation of national profit. Neither the Iranian mullahs nor the Taliban could escape from this iron law.
This perverted 'anti-capitalism' goes along with an equally perverted 'Muslim internationalism’: the radical Islamic groups of the world claim to owe no allegiance to any particular nation state and call for the unity of all Muslim brothers across the world. Here again both these groups and their bourgeois opponents portray them as something unique - as an ideology and a movement that transcends national frontiers to form a fearsome new 'bloc', threatening the West in a similar way to the old 'Communist' bloc. In part, this is because they are virtually inseparable from the international criminal networks: gun-running (which now almost certainly includes the trade in 'weapons of mass destruction' - chemical and nuclear means) and the drug trade. Afghanistan in particular is a pivotal link here… Within this, bin Laden's 'imperialist warlordism' might be seen by some as a new offshoot of 'globalisation' (i.e., transcending national barriers). But this is true only in so far as it expresses a certain tendency towards the disintegration of the weakest national units. The 'global' Muslim state can never exist, for it will always founder on the rock of competing Islamic bourgeoisies. This is why, in order to fight for this chimera, the 'mujahadeen' are always obliged to join in with the imperialist great game, which remains one of competing national states.
“The 'holy war' proclaimed by the Islamic gangs is really a cover for the old unholy war fought by competing imperialist powers.” (‘The resurgence of Islam: a symptom of the decomposition of capitalist social relations’, International Review 109).
What is most significant about Islamic fundamentalism is not its specific characteristics but what it shares with capitalism as a whole. In the final analysis it is not Islamic fundamentalism that produces despair and terror, but the despair and terror created by rotting capitalism that produces Islamic fundamentalism. In other parts of capitalism such despair and terror take other forms, such as the Japanese cult that released poison in the Tokyo underground. The Middle East is at the centre of the current deepening of decomposition because the loss of hope in the future and the imperialist barbarism that characterise capitalism as a whole coexist particularly strongly in this geographical area, reinforce each other and take the particular form of the suicide bomber. The suicide bomber is thus not the essence of Islamic fundamentalism but of decomposing capitalism.
Why was Britain the target of the first suicide bombings in Western Europe? As we have seen, those who want the working class to take sides in this imperialist struggle offer their reasons: For Blair there is the clash between democracy, freedom and its enemies. For the leftists there is the anger stirred up by Britain’s foreign policy and its link to the US above all else. For the Islamic fundamentalists themselves there is the Jihad against the ‘crusaders’ and the corrupt, godless West. For marxists, there are two aspects: imperialist strategy and the social situation, both of which have to be understood in the context of decomposition.
Following the collapse of the blocs in 1989, Britain’s imperialist policy has been to defend its interests by playing the US against Europe, since it wishes to be dominated by neither. It had some success in this during the Balkans war in the 1990s, but more recently has come under immense pressure. This was increased after the bombing of the Twin Towers and forced the British bourgeoisie to lean more towards the US than previously: “British policy has continued to be to position itself between the US and the European powers but, today, the point of equilibrium has moved… The tack to the US is the adaptation of the existing policy to new conditions” (‘British imperialism between a rock and a hard place’, World Revolution 280). The main part of the British ruling class backed the war with Iraq but with varying levels of concern over how close to get to the US. The Hutton and Butler inquiries that came out of the war were a means to put pressure on Blair not to get too close to Washington; they were never intended to get rid of him. However, Britain has been increasingly drawn into the chaos now reigning in Iraq and the unease within the ruling class has grown. The execution of the British hostage Ken Bigley was a sign that Britain had become a target. Fundamentalist websites warned that Britain would pay. The London bombings only confirm the fact shown in every war over the last fifteen years, that the main targets of war, the first victims, are ordinary people, workers above all, whether the killing is done in the name of ethnic cleansing, the defence of democracy, or Jihad.
One aspect of British imperialist strategy that the bourgeoisie is particularly discreet about is its part in the development of Islamic fundamentalism. In the 1980's the British secret service, along with the CIA, poured money into funding the jihadis against the Russians in Afghanistan. Then the likes of Bin Laden were ‘freedom fighters’, ‘heroes for freedom’. Jihad was not a word to strike fear into the population with, but something ‘noble’ to be encouraged and financed. As long as this ideology could recruit cannon fodder for the killing fields of Afghanistan it was financed. When the Russians withdrew at the end of the 1980s, we caught a glimpse of the dragon’s teeth they had sown, as these ‘noble gentlemen’ laid waste to those parts of Afghanistan that had not already been destroyed. And still the 'democratic West' gave money to the warlords in order to use them to defend their own interests.
The lessons taught by the CIA and MI5 in the ’80s were put to good use in the ’90s in the terror unleashed by the fundamentalists of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and Armed Islamic Groups (GIA) in Algeria. 50,000 were slaughtered, including the mass throat-slitting of train passengers and entire villages. The leaders and members of these extremist Islamic groups found sanctuary in England, and were allowed to go about their business: “As long as these individuals presented no threat to British National security, MI5 and MI6 were more than happy to have them here because they were a ready source of intelligence about what became known as 'political Islam’. From 1991 Algeria was embroiled in bloody civil war...Although the conflict spilled over into France, the British authorities embarked on a bold experiment by allowing opposition activists into the country” (The Observer 17/7/05). These fundamentalists were not simply a source of information; they were also a means to put pressure on French imperialism and other imperialisms in the Middle East and elsewhere. Thus, whilst Blair and the rest of the bourgeoisie warn of the dangers of 'evil extremists', it is they that gave birth to the warlords who today have turned on them.
It is no accident that it was in Britain that fundamentalist ideology was able to inspire the first suicide bombings in Western Europe. British capitalism has been the most affected by the last 30 years of crisis and has been unable to escape the disintegrating effects of decomposition. Since the late 1970s unemployment has increased and remained high, albeit hidden behind a mass of statistical manipulations. In some parts of the country generations have grown up with no prospect of any real work. Above all this has weighed on young people. The 1970's saw the development of the punk ideology of ‘no future’; the 1980s saw riots in several major cities, animated by the disaffected and despairing young. Twenty years later, the angry ideology and the open anger has gone, or rather has been turned inwards with significant numbers of young people raging against each other and life itself in a culture of violence where only gang loyalty links people together.
The ethnic minorities have fared even worse, enduring the highest rates of unemployment and the worst living conditions. Whole sections of society have been marginalised. Muslim communities have been ghettoised, especially in the North of England where there has been a deliberate policy of keeping communities separated and thus stoking up tensions. For the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie of Asian origin this has generated despair and hopelessness, which have spilled over into parts of the working class, especially the youth faced with unemployment.
The immediate response of the British ruling class to the bombings was to make a show of unity. This marked the start of a conscious campaign to draw the working class behind the ‘nation’ and forget any struggle for its own interests. The campaign also allowed Blair to try and quell some of the anxiety within the bourgeoisie at being drawn into the quagmire of Iraq. Beginning on the day of the bombing, there has been a sophisticated media campaign to rubbish any idea that the bombings have anything to do with Iraq. The 'unity' this has produced between the main political parties is an expression of the common understanding that the bombings express a very serious problem for the British state.
This 'unity' is unlikely to be long-lived as regards imperialist strategy because the bombings have accentuated the fears within the British bourgeoisie about the impact of the war. Despite all the talk of 'national unity' it is clear that the bombings express the weakness of British imperialism rather than its strength. And those in the British bourgeoisie opposed to the war are infuriated by the terrible problems that these bombings are generating and will generate for the control of its political life.
One expression of this concern, of the anger of a part of the ruling class, came only a week after the bombings in a report from a group of former senior Foreign Office, military, political and intelligence personal entitled Riding Pillion for Tackling Terrorism is a High-risk Policy. This refuted the claim that the bombings had nothing to do with Iraq: “There is no doubt that the situation over Iraq has imposed particular difficulties for the UK, and for the wider coalition against terrorism. It gave a boost to the Al-Qaeda network's propaganda, recruitment and fund raising, caused a major split in the coalition, provided an ideal targeting and training area for Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists, and deflected resources and assistance that could have been deployed to assist the Karzi government and to bring Bin Laden to justice. Riding pillion with a powerful ally has proved costly in terms of British and US military lives, Iraqi lives, military expenditure, and the damage caused to the counter-terrorism campaign”. The recent leaked letter written in May last year by Sir Michael Jay, head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, expressed the same concern that British foreign policy would aid recruitment by ‘extremist’ organisations.
This situation can only increase the tension within the British ruling class. It sharpens the dilemma that British imperialism has had to endure for many years: the attempt to play the US against Europe has ended with Britain being squeezed between the two.
The immediate impact on the working class has been one of shock and disorientation. The war in Iraq has become ever more unpopular as ‘liberation’ has turned into nightmare, and there is real reflection in the class about the nature of the war. The bombing will initially hold back this reflection because of the terrible fear and uncertainty that has been generated. However, this is not likely to last very long. The initial response has not been marked by the nationalist and patriotic fervour that swept over the US after 9/11. Rather there is a sense of shock and very real fear. The ruling class has tried to use this to boost the image of the state as the only thing that can defend the population both against terrorism and a racist backlash. The fast pace of the campaign, with arrests and revelations announced daily, has reinforced the image of the state as the protector of the weak.
There has been much talk in the media about the spirit of the Blitz and the Second World War, of defending our way of life against the terrorists and so on. However, today we are not in the very depths of the counter-revolution, and people are not willing to be dragged to war. People are scared, confused, and disoriented. This is partly because the working class is only just beginning to find its path again and its sense of itself. They go to work because they have to, not because they are mobilised for democracy against terror. Amongst a minority there is active reflection on the situation they face, a situation that can take in the war as well. More widely there is a hidden, subterranean, development of consciousness underway, that may reveal itself unexpectedly as the attacks develop. This is the difference between a period of defeat and today.
The propaganda of the bourgeoisie has sought to calm the situation and to pacify workers and prevent them from acting and thinking on their own behalf. It portrays the authorities as being in control of the situation. This is their main concern, not the safety of the population.
The action of some of the London tube drivers was potentially very significant. On Thursday 21st the Bakerloo line and Northern Line were shut down because drivers refused to take the trains out after the bomb scares. But the RMT union soon got on top of the situation, stressing the need for armed police on the trains, for functioning radios in the drivers’ cabs etc. Bob Crow, the RMT leader, said that the union would defend any driver who refused to drive, thus isolating the workers action. So the unions managed to nip in the bud any general class thinking and action and turn it into a sectional aspect of civil defence.
The deepening of decomposition in the very centres of world capitalism shows how important if is for the proletariat to rediscover its class identity – which ultimately means seeing itself as a class with the only answer to this growing bloody chaos. The strike by workers at Gate Gourmet in early August, and the solidarity strike by workers at BA, are not only an inspiring example of what working class identity and solidarity are; they also showed that despite all the campaigns about ‘national unity’ after the bombings, workers are still ready to defend their interests as workers.
These bombings have raised the stakes for the working
class not only in Britain but also internationally. They show that if the class is unable to
develop its struggle to the level necessary to challenge capitalism, the future
will witness the heartlands plunging into the levels of chaos previously only
seen in Bosnia, Iraq or Africa.
World Revolution, 3/9/05.
[1] [21] See the statement on our website: “Execution at Stockwell, London: Today’s democratic ‘shoot to kill’ policy prepares tomorrows death squads”. However, his death isn’t really a problem since we have now been told that was an illegal immigrant.
[2] [22] See: “The decomposition of capitalism” in International Review 57.
On 17 August, to deafening media coverage, the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was begun. Despite the widespread portrayal of distressed settlers being forced to leave, this was generally presented as ‘a step towards peace’.
The plan to withdraw from Gaza is the work of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who has been praised by all the world’s leaders, from Bush to Schroeder, from Chirac to Blair. And behind their hypocritical sermons in favour of peace, each one of them was hiding their own imperialist interests. And despite all the criticisms of Sharon by the Israeli right – Sharon’s own Likud party as well as the religious parties – the retreat from Gaza serves Israel’s own imperialist interests very well.
The Israeli withdrawal from this tiny strip of land, home to a million and a half Palestinians, involves a mere 7,000 settlers. The Israeli state has paid a very high price, in both economic and military terms, for maintaining its presence in this tiny morsel of territory, which has no particular strategic value. Now the withdrawal will turn the Gaza Strip into an immense prison. In a context of terrible poverty and social chaos, the different armed Palestinian factions, both those of the Palestinian Authority and of Hamas, will vie to impose their rule. Meanwhile the Israeli army will keep the whole territory under close surveillance, intervening as and when necessary. The population of Gaza will continue to live in an atmosphere of instability, violence and despair, providing more and more new recruits to religious radicalism and terrorism
This fake step towards peace is summed up in the scorched earth policy of the Israeli state – destroy everything before you leave: houses, farms, irrigations, etc.
The essential aim of Sharon’s plan is to give an impression of good will, of peaceful intentions, that masks the Israeli state’s real offensive in the West Bank. Over the last 25 years, the Israeli-Jewish population of the occupied territories has more than tripled, and has now reached around 250,000 people. The number of Israelis installed in neighbourhoods built on the annexed municipal territories around East Jerusalem has risen fivefold in the same period, and now stands at around 200,000. Meanwhile the Sharon government has placed a whole series of settlements and towns on the ‘right’ side of the anti-terror Wall, starting with Gush Etzyon and followed by Kafr Abbuch and Nablus in the north, passing by Jerusalem west and east, and going as far as Hebron and Rahiya in the south. The whole West Bank is now carved up by this wall separating Israeli and Palestinian populations. Presented as a means of protection it is in reality a spearhead for the expansionist policy of the Israeli state. While recognising, on the express demand of the Bush administration, the existence of “Israeli population centres” on the West bank, it enables Sharon to put forward the real aims of his policy: “The government will do all it can to strengthen Israeli control over all the territories destined to be integrated into the State of Israel in the eventuality of a diplomatic accord”. Right now, behind the smokescreen of the withdrawal from Gaza, permission has been granted for around 640 housing units to be built, whereas at Gival Tal, a small colony near Alfei Menaske, no less than 1000 units have started to be constructed (Courrier Internationale 28.7.05). The Israeli bourgeoisie needs to control the West Bank to maintain its imperialist offensive; it is a geo-strategic axis of prime importance. This is the frontal zone with Jordan, but also with Lebanon and Syria (along with the Golan Heights). The permanent imperialist conflict between Israel and Syria makes the West Bank a vital stake in the game, and the sharpening of US/Israeli tensions with Iran can only make the situation worse.
For its part the Palestinian bourgeoisie, even though the Palestinian Authority has been weakened and divided after the death of its historic leader Arafat, can only react with increased violence to defend its own interests. Despite the current softening of tone by the most radical elements of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, such as Hamas, these factions will also be pushed into an increasingly warlike stance. The West Bank threatens to become a vast powder-keg, where both the Israeli and Palestinian populations will be subjected to growing violence and desperation. Such is the reality of peace in decomposing capitalism.
Tino, 24.8.05
After the July bombings in London, Tony Blair explained everything by referring to an “evil ideology”, and his government tried to deny that there was any connection between the London attacks and the war in Iraq. Many people were not convinced. In an ICM opinion poll (Guardian 19/7/5) 64% thought that the government’s decision to go to war in Iraq bore some degree of responsibility for the London bombings. In a Daily Mirror poll 85% thought there was a connection between government foreign policy and the July 7 attacks. Politicians’ expressions of sympathy have been treated with caution.
The groups and individuals of the extreme left – calling themselves socialists, Trotskyists or just Respect – tapped into this suspicion and blamed Blair and the invasion and occupation of Iraq for events in London. “Bush, Blair and their allies are ultimately responsible for the deaths in London” (Workers Power). “If the British government continues on the course Tony Blair has set, these will not be the only innocent people to suffer” (Socialist Worker). “The blood of the victims of the London bombs stains [Blair’s] hands, and is mixed with the blood of Fallujah’s dead” (Socialist Resistance). In the simple words of John Pilger in the New Statesman “The bombs of 7 July were Blair’s bombs”.
This opposition to the Blair government’s foreign policy is based on its association with the US. As with substantial other groupings within the ruling class, the leftists think that the relationship with the US is too close. As Andrew Murray, chair of the Stop The War Coalition, said “All roads lead back to the government’s uncritical identification with the US neoconservative agenda” (Guardian 27/7/5). Socialist Worker (13/7/5) criticised “the disastrous consequences of hitching this country to George Bush’s wars in the Middle East” and thought that “By associating this country with the US puppet regime in Iraq … Blair increases the threat to everyone who lives here.”
While a Guardian editorial (20/7/5) politely suggests that “it could still be useful to draw up a timetable for ending the occupation”, the leftists’ demand for “Troops out of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East now” only differs in terms of scale and timing. A major section of the British bourgeoisie is convinced that British imperialism should pursue an independent line, in particular, one not tied up with a US policy from which British capitalism gains little. ‘Troops Out’ can only be a measure proposed to capitalist governments, which they will adopt if it serves their interests and ignore if it doesn’t. Reform of foreign policy will never be in the interests of the working class. In all this the leftists show their commitment to the nationalist framework of capitalism.
Having made the link between the London bombings and the war in Iraq, the leftists show how they support massacres and indiscriminate murder.
The conflict in Iraq does not consist in isolated skirmishes but, as the leftists tell us, it’s like the London bombings every day. As an informed individual was reported saying in The Times (4/1/5) “I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people”. He thought that “People are fed up after two years without improvement” and that “People are fed up with no security, no electricity, people feel they have to do something.” The individual in question was General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, director of Iraq’s new intelligence services, a leading figure in the ‘US puppet regime’. For this eminent bourgeois figure it is logical for suffering humanity to turn to the nationalist cause, to an Iraqi capitalism free of foreign influence. You would not expect someone in his position to consider that workers have material interests, class interests that are not going to be met by a ‘foreigner-free’ regime any more than they are in occupied Iraq. The leaders of the Iraqi resistance have pretensions to becoming a future Iraqi government; the vast majority of the 200,000 are, as in any capitalist military force, disposable foot-soldiers, doomed to die in a nationalist campaign from which they have nothing to gain.
George Galloway (Socialist Worker 13/8/5) wrote that “The height of treason is to put the people of this country at risk of attack and to send young men and women, recruited from the dole queues, to kill and be killed on a lie”. Yet it is the same nationalist lies that leftists use against the ‘people who are fed up’ in Iraq - in order to kill and be killed. They agree with Iraq’s intelligence director that workers must forget their class interests and follow the nationalist path of their exploiters. Workers Power call for “Victory to the Iraqi resistance” where Galloway is more flowery: “These poor Iraqis - ragged people, with their sandals, with their Kalashnikovs, with the lightest and most basic of weapons - are writing the names of their cities and towns in the stars, with 145 military operations every day, which has made the country ungovernable.”
But, having made the connection between the war in Iraq and the bombs in London, at a critical moment there is denial. To take a typical example, Workers Power describes the situation in the Middle East over the last 15 years - the Gulf War, the sanctions against Iraq, the violence of Israel - and insists: “These actions give rise to heroic guerrilla wars of resistance and national liberation but also to desperate and self-defeating acts such as the London bombings.” To make sure you get the message they say “We do not for one minute confuse indiscriminate attacks against civilians, whether carried out in London or Iraq, with this justified Iraqi resistance to the occupation forces”.
Yet what could be more ‘desperate and self-defeating’ for workers than to line up in the cause of Iraqi nationalism behind a faction of the bourgeoisie? Whether it’s trading under the name of ‘government’ or ‘resistance’ the interests of Iraqi capitalism are in conflict with those it exploits, oppresses and wants to die in its name. And ‘indiscriminate attacks against civilians’ are one of the main weapons in any capitalist military campaign, as the Iraqi ‘insurgents’ have very amply shown.
When Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida deputy, said, after the London bombings, that “you spilled blood like rivers in our countries and we exploded the volcanoes of wrath in your countries” he was, like any other bourgeois propagandist, lumping all classes together. The video of suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan, recently broadcast, is in the same vein, with a naïve faith in democracy: “Your democratically elected governments perpetuate atrocities against my people and your support of them makes you responsible”. When Blair wants people to rally behind ‘British values’ he’s making a classic call for national unity. Everything put forward by the leftists shows that their activities are equally determined by the same nationalist framework, and are implacably opposed to the struggle of the working class.
Car 31/8/5
As with the Bam earthquake which killed tens of thousands in Iran two years ago, as with the Tsunami which left hundreds of thousands dead in the Indian ocean region in December, so in New Orleans, in Mississippi and Alabama, the capitalist system has turned a natural disaster into a social disaster.
The nightmarish scenes unfolding in the USA make this clearer than ever. This is not something that can be explained away by vague talk of underdevelopment and global poverty. This catastrophe, whose toll of death and destruction cannot yet be calculated, is happening in the richest, most powerful nation on earth. It is proof that the present social order, for all its technological and material resources, can only drag humanity towards its ruin.
In every single one of its aspects, the disaster unleashed by Hurricane Katrina is an indictment of capitalism and class society.
In the origins of the disaster. The catastrophe that has all but destroyed the city of New Orleans, a unique memento of all that is best in American culture, has been predicted for a long time. An environmental study of the destruction of the wetlands around New Orleans – which could have provided protection against the massive water surges that engulfed the city – concluded that the city could be devastated by an ‘ordinary’ hurricane, let alone a force five storm. In 2003, the US government reversed its previous policy of ‘no net loss’ of wetlands, opening the door to massive ‘development’ and get-rich-quick commercial building. Warnings were also made about the perilous state of the levees built to protect the city. Again studies were made into this, but again the state had other priorities. As the Times-Picayune reported on September 2: “That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.”
And this is not even to begin on the subject of global warming: there is growing evidence that the heating up of the world’s oceans – the product of capitalism’s inbuilt need for unrestrained ‘economic growth’ – is at the root of the increasingly extreme weather conditions being felt all over the planet. The US government can hardly bear to acknowledge that this problem even exists, let alone take measures to counter it.
In the fiasco of the ‘evacuation’ before the storm, which reveals a complete lack of planning and a total failure to provide resources to the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of society. All that the local and national state could do faced with the coming storm was to tell people to flee. Not a thought was given to how the poor in New Orleans and in the rest of the region were actually to get away, given that they didn’t have enough cars, or the money to pay for train or bus tickets. Even more telling was the abandoning of whole hospitals and old peoples’ homes. The sight of elderly patients left to die in the open air, as those around them desperately tried to help, provided some of the most heart-wrenching images from the disaster. This is the price of being old and poor in the 21st century.
In the farce of ‘rescue’ after the storm. For days, those who were left behind have been enduring hellish conditions, in the streets, in the ruins, in the Superdome where they were told to take shelter, lacking food, water, protection from the sweltering heat and basic sanitation, while the mighty US ‘authorities’ seemed incapable of reaching them either by land, sea or water. The administration itself called the delay “unacceptable” but has so far offered no explanation. And once again, social class determined survival, as can be seen by the contrast between the conditions imposed on the Superdome refugees and a privileged group housed at the Hyatt Hotel. “Gordon Russell of the New Orleans Times-Picayune noted pointedly that these hellish conditions “stood in stark contrast to those of people nearby in the restricted-access New Orleans Centre and Hyatt Hotel, where those who could get in lounged in relative comfort.” A line of state police armed with assault rifles drove the crowds of homeless refugees back from the entrance to the facility”. Later these same police ensured that these VIPs were given precedence over other survivors when it came to being evacuated; and it turned out that most of them were officials of the mayor, Ray Nagin.
On the other hand, when it came to evacuating the Superdome, no sign of such generosity. According to the World Socialist Website: “While Bush was conducting his tour, the death toll in New Orleans continued to mount rapidly. Mass evacuations have begun at the Louisiana Superdome, the largest emergency shelter for displaced people, after the arrival of a huge National Guard convoy escorting trucks loaded with food and water and hundreds of buses. But the buses dumped many of the refugees only a few miles away, at a cluster of overpasses on Interstate 10 where thousands of homeless people were gathered in the broiling sun. At least a half dozen deaths were reported among the overpass refugees” (3.9.2005).
In the future economic and ecological consequences of the disaster: The task of ‘rebuilding’ the region – an area larger than the UK and with some of the poorest areas in the US – has been much talked about already, but the US was already sliding inexorably into open economic crisis before the storm, and the disaster is already showing clear signs of making it worse. This has so far been expressed in the sharp rise in oil prices which is resulting from the huge blow to supplies: the storm has ripped a hole into the oil infrastructure with 30 oil rigs lost, another 20 broken from their moorings, and the refinery network shut down. This helped the oil companies make a fast buck – their share prices rose in the immediate aftermath of the storm. But the longer term effects of these oil price rises on the world economy are already causing real concern to the bourgeoisie’s economic experts.
The hurricane is also threatening further ecological calamities: the coastal area was already known as “cancer ally” before the storm because of the concentration of the refineries and chemical plants. Now this has been mauled by the storm and could lead to whole areas of New Orleans and elsewhere being left uninhabitable. Commentators spoke of a “witches’ brew” of toxic waste being carried by the flood waters, greatly increasing the danger of disease for the stranded survivors.
In the diversion of social resources into war: A point made over and over again by the victims: the USA can mobilise its army to invade a country thousands of miles away, but not to rescue other Americans? The gruesome priority given to war over the protection of human life was expressed in the fact that funds to pay for the Iraq adventure were withdrawn from budgets aimed at improving New Orleans’ defences; and massive amounts of equipment and manpower from the National Guard were also siphoned off to Iraq, which must partly explain the slowness of the rescue efforts.
In putting private property before life: And how many of the troops that could have been spared were sent in to restore ‘law and order’ rather than bring help to the needy? Certainly the forces of repression arrived well in advance of the forces of aid. They were accompanied by a huge media campaign about looting, shooting, and raping. No doubt criminal gangs were trying to take advantage of the situation, no doubt desperation drove some into irrational and destructive acts, but the cynicism of the ruling class reached new heights as it launched a systematic media campaign to turn attention away from the failure of the State, at every level, onto those desperately trying to survive in the ruins of New Orleans. Suddenly the victims were to blame for their own sorrows, and instead of sending any help the ruling class had the pretext for sealing off New Orleans, abandoning rescue efforts and sending guns, armoured cars and troops instead of water and food
Let’s be clear: the majority of ‘looters’ were ordinary people facing starvation and utter misery, taking what they could from abandoned stores; in many cases they unselfishly shared out the goods they found. Web logs based on first hand experience recounted innumerable acts of basic human solidarity, by those who had themselves lost everything towards others whose age, injuries or illness put them in an even worse state. And while the overall impact of the disaster was to create chaos, there were real efforts by people to organise impromptu aid on the spot. On TV there were images of ‘looters’ giving out food. A group of doctors at a conference on HIV organised a clinic in one of the affected areas. In the hospitals health workers have worked to maintain care faced with terrible circumstances. Thus, we can see that whilst all the ruling class can offer is crude stunts and repression, it has been the working class and the dispossessed who have put solidarity with those suffering above their own safety.
Much scorn has been poured on Bush and his cronies, both inside and outside America, for his inept speeches, empty gestures, and slow-motion response to the disaster. And certainly this new crisis is adding to the woes of an administration which was already becoming increasingly unpopular. But ‘anti-Bushism’ is utterly simplistic and can easily be recuperated by the other bourgeois parties in the USA, and by America’s imperialist rivals. The excesses of the present gang in the White House – its incompetence, corruption, irrationality and callousness – only reflects the underlying reality of US capitalism: a declining superpower presiding over a ‘world order’ that is sinking into chaos. And this situation in turn reflects the terminal decay of capitalism as a social system which rules the whole planet. We are living under a mode of production whose continuation threatens the survival of the human species. However much they may criticise Bush or America, the rest of the ruling class has no alternative to the blind march towards destruction through war, famine and ecological disaster. Hope for humanity does not lie with any faction of the exploiting class, but with those who are always the first victims of the system’s wars and disasters: the exploited class, the proletariat. Our solidarity, our indignation, our collective resistance, our efforts to understand the real nature of the present system – these are the seeds of a society in which labour, science and human creativity will be no longer be in the service of war and profit, but of life and its enhancement.WR, 3/9/05
The solidarity shown by the workers at BA and Gate Gourmet is an example to the whole working class. The article below, written by the ICC shortly after the strike by BA workers, draws out the main lessons of this action. These deserve to be studied and understood by everyone who really wants to defend the working class. The weeks since then have provided a lesson of a different kind, but one that is equally important and worthy of study. It is an example of how the ruling class works together against the working class.
The bosses of Gate Gourmet have played the card of financial realism. They point to their losses in recent years and the predicted loss of some £25m this year and argue that without job cuts and changes in working practices the company will have to go into administration. They have also taken the offensive, attacking “outdated and inefficient work practices” (Gate Gourmet website) where workers are paid “a full day’s pay for half a day’s work” (ibid). They have victimised the most militant workers and gone to court to try and stop all picketing at their premises. This has bought accusations of bringing American work practices into Britain, ignoring the fact that British Airways created the whole situation by outsourcing the provision of meals in order to cut costs in the late 1990s. In fact the attacks have nothing to do with nationality and everything to do with the economic situation. As we show in our article, the reality is that every company is under intense and unsustainable pressure as the economic crisis of capitalism gets worse. They can only survive by doing each other down and, above all, by increasing the exploitation of the working class by cutting wages and worsening working conditions. In this situation making a deal with the bosses almost always means accepting something a little bit worse than the time before. Since the job of the union is to make these deals they inevitably end up on the same side as the bosses, working hand in glove with them. This can be seen clearly in the actions of the TGWU.
Before the unofficial action the TGWU was engaged in protracted talks with Gate Gourmet: “Talks have been ongoing with Gate Gourmet for many months in order to improve the business. During this time the T&G, has played an active role in meeting the business needs” (TGWU website). Following the strike they suddenly discovered that “Gate Gourmet had planned this action for some time” (ibid). When the workers took action to defend themselves and their fellow workers at BA showed real, practical solidarity, the union denounced their ‘unlawful’ action, and, in the words of Tony Woodley, head of the TGWU, took “appropriate action” to end the strike (letter from the TGWU to BA quoted in the Guardian 19/08/05) - although this is not mentioned on the union’s website. With the BA workers going back to work and the Gate Gourmet workers sacked the union began to sound militant. The bosses at Gate Gourmet and BA were warned of further action if workers were victimised. At the same time the union continued “working hard to find a settlement” (ibid), even though Gate Gourmet was adamant that 600 or more workers had to go. The workers are now isolated from real solidarity, stuck on a hill while the lorries of Gate Gourmet thunder past. Fake solidarity, the solidarity of the phrase, of the fiery resolution and the passionate union boss’s speech takes its place. Tony Woodley has launched a campaign for the legalisation of solidarity “within the framework of the law…subject to regulations on balloting and notice that regulate other industrial disputes”, although, of course “This is not to argue in favour of the sort of ‘wildcat’ action taken last Thursday” (“Solidarity will have to be legalised” by Tony Woodley in the Guardian 16/08/05).
Behind the company and the union bosses stand the government and the state. The government has not taken sides, other than to regret the ‘disruption’ caused, while letting it be known that it is working ‘behind the scenes’ for a settlement. The courts dispense words of wisdom about protecting lawful business and the right to protest. This pretence of impartiality and concern for law and order hides the fact that such law and order is the ‘law’ and ‘order’ of the ruling class. Throughout its history the working class has only made real progress when it has challenged the domination of the ruling class. Its real struggle has always been outlawed and its militants always portrayed as thugs and bullies. The Labour MPs now expressing support are happy to do so because they know that the real potential of the workers struggle has been defeated.
The bosses, the unions and the state have come together to defeat the workers. They want the working class to learn the lesson that class struggle, initiated and controlled by the working class, is futile and that only the unions can defend them. The working class, on the contrary, must draw an entirely different lesson. That lesson is simply: Know your enemy. North 31/08/05
Download and distribute this leaflet in PDF [27]
The media – the public voice of the state and the ruling class - have been venting their fury against the Heathrow strikers. How dare the workers there put class solidarity above the profits of the company? Don’t they know that things like workers’ solidarity and class struggle are out of date? All that sort of thing went out of fashion in the 70s didn’t it? According to an executive from one of BA’s rivals, quoted in the Sunday Times (13 August): “In many ways aviation is the last unreformed industry…It is like the docks, the mines or the car industry were in the 1970s”. Why won’t these Jurassic workers get wise to the fact that the principle of today’s society is ‘every man for himself’, not ‘workers of the world unite’?
It’s strange though how this ‘new’ philosophy of freedom for every separate individual doesn’t prevent the bosses from demanding absolute obedience from the wage slaves. Some media voices, it is true, have been a tad critical of Gate Gourmet’s overt shoot-to-kill methods: when the food workers held a meeting to discuss how to respond to a management ploy aimed at their jobs, the meeting was locked in by security goons, and 600 workers – even those off sick or on holiday – were sacked on the spot for taking part in an unofficial action, some of them by megaphone. This is pretty high handed, but it’s just a more open expression of a management attitude that is increasingly widespread. Workers at Tesco are facing the abolition of sick pay for the first three days off – other companies are looking with interest at this new ‘reform’. Warehouse workers are being electronically tagged to make sure that not a second of company time is wasted. The present political climate – when we are all supposed to accept any amount of police harassment in the name of ‘anti-terrorism’ – will only increase the bosses’ arrogance.
These attacks are not down to this or that set of bosses being especially ‘greedy’, or adopting ‘American-style’ methods. The growing brutality of attacks on workers’ living and working conditions is the only way the capitalist class can respond to the world economic crisis. Wages must be kept down, productivity kept up, pensions slashed, unemployment pay reduced, because every firm and every country is involved in a desperate struggle to out-sell its rivals on a glutted world market.
And faced with these attacks, the solidarity of the workers is our only defence. The baggage handlers and other staff at Heathrow who walked out when hearing about the mass sackings showed a perfect understanding of this. They themselves have been subjected to the same kinds of attacks and they have been involved in similar struggles. The immediate effectiveness of their strike immediately revealed the power of the workers when they take united and determined action. It is the only basis for forcing the bosses to reinstate the sacked workers, and it will make airport bosses hesitate about launching similar attacks in the near future. Isolated in one category, workers are easy prey for the ruling class. The moment the struggle begins to spread to other workers, the picture is transformed.
But there’s an even more important meaning to workers’ solidarity.
In a society that is disintegrating all around us, where ‘every man for himself’ takes the form of terrorist bombs, racist assaults, gangsterism and random violence of all kinds, the solidarity of the workers across all trade, religious, sexual or national divisions provides the only antidote to this system, the only starting point for the creation of a different society, one based on human need and not the hunt for profit. Faced with a system sinking into generalised warfare and self-destruction, it is no exaggeration to say that class solidarity is the only true hope for the survival of the human race.
That this is by no means a vain hope becomes clearer when you look beyond the borders of Britain. Over the past two years, there has been a growing revival of workers’ struggles after years of disarray. In the most important of them – the French workers’ struggles against attacks on pensions in 2003, the German car workers’ fight against redundancies – the element of solidarity has been fundamental. These movements confirm that the international working class has not disappeared and is not defeated.
Naturally the media have been trying to hide the significance of the solidarity actions at Heathrow. They started talking about the family ties between the food workers and the baggage handlers and other airport staff. These do exist but while the majority of the food workers are from an Indian background, the majority of the baggage handlers are ‘white’. In short, this was authentic class solidarity, cutting across all ethnic divisions.
The news broadcasts also tried to undermine the sympathy that other workers might feel for the airport employees by shining a spotlight on the sufferings of passengers whose flights were disrupted by the strike. When you’ve spent the best part of a year sweating away at a job of work, it’s certainly no joke to find that your holiday plans have been thrown into chaos as well. Explaining their actions to other workers and the population in general is a task that all workers have to take on when they go into struggle. But they also have to resist the hypocritical media blackmail which always seeks to make them the villains of the piece.
If the ruling class doesn’t want us to recognize class solidarity when we see it, there’s another truth it tries to obscure: that workers’ solidarity and trade unionism are no longer the same thing.
The methods used in this struggle were a direct challenge to the union rule book:
- the Gate Gourmet workers decided to hold a general meeting in their canteen in order to discuss the latest management manoeuvre. This was an unofficial assembly, held on company time. The very idea of holding general meetings where you discuss and take decisions goes against all official union practices;
- the other airport staff equally ignored these official guidelines by striking without ballots; and they further defied the union rulebook by engaging in ‘secondary’ action.
These kinds of action are dangerous for the ruling class because they threaten to take workers beyond the control of the unions, which have now become the ‘official’ – i.e. state-recognised - organs for keeping the class struggle under control. And in the recent period, there has been a steady increase in ‘wildcat’ actions of this type: the last major dispute at Heathrow, numerous strikes in the post; and at the same time as the latest Heathrow struggle, there were unofficial strikes among the bus drivers of Edinburgh and at the Ford foundry in Leamington Spa.
In the case of Heathrow, the TGWU succeeded in keeping a lid on the situation. Officially, it had to repudiate the unofficial walk-outs and urge the workers back to work. But with the help of ‘revolutionary’ groups like the SWP, the T and G has managed to present the struggle as being about ‘union busting’, identifying the victimisation of militant workers – which was certainly part of Gate Gourmet’s strategy – with an attack on the union. This makes it easier for the rank and file union reps – most of who genuinely think that they are acting on behalf of their fellow workers – to keep the struggle inside the union framework.
But what’s brewing underneath these appearances is not a struggle to ‘defend the unions’, but increasingly massive movements in which workers will confront the trade union machine as their first obstacle. In order to build the widest possible class solidarity in and through the struggle, workers will face the need to develop their own general assemblies open to all workers, and to elect strike committees answerable only to the assemblies. Militant workers who understand this perspective now should not remain isolated, but should begin to get together to discuss it in preparation for the battles of the future.
WR, 15/8/05.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/wr286-supplement-london-attacks.pdf
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/mobilisations-people
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/london-bombings
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-ii
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/intervention
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/anti-fascismracism
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_stockwell.html#sdfootnote1sym
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_stockwell.html#sdfootnote2sym
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_stockwell.html#sdfootnote3sym
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_stockwell.html#sdfootnote4sym
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_stockwell.html#sdfootnote5sym
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_stockwell.html#sdfootnote1anc
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_stockwell.html#sdfootnote2anc
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_stockwell.html#sdfootnote3anc
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_stockwell.html#sdfootnote4anc
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_stockwell.html#sdfootnote5anc
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_carnage.html#_ftn1
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_carnage.html#_ftn2
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/107_decomposition
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_carnage.html#_ftnref1
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_carnage.html#_ftnref2
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/58/palestine
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/hurricane-katrina
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/287_heathrow_leaflet.pdf
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle