The American ruling class continues to grapple with the political mess created by its botched election in 2004, which kept the wrong team in power and failed to achieve a corrective adjustment in imperialist policy. The disagreements within the ruling class focus on how best to handle the quagmire in Iraq, so that the U.S. will be able to continue to intervene militarily throughout the world in order to oppose challenges to its continued dominance as the sole superpower in the world. The problem that the bourgeoisie has with Bush is not that he took the U.S. to war under false pretences – no one in the ruling class has any problem with or reluctance about lying. Indeed lying and manipulation is the mainstay of ruling class politics. No, the problem the capitalist class has is that the war has dragged on and on, turning into a quagmire and the population in general, and the working class in particular, is clearly aware that the government has been lying and support for the war has collapsed. This squandering of the political capital gained by the US government in the wake of 9/11 threatens to exacerbate the difficulties that the ruling class will face in launching new military excursions in the future, to which all factions of the bourgeoisie are committed on a strategic level.
Despite the strident polemicizing of the Bush administration against its critics, the intra-bourgeois dispute over Iraq is not a clash between advocates of immediate withdrawal and others who favor “staying the course,” but an important argument over how best to begin a partial withdrawal of American forces, which will reduce American casualties and ease growing political impatience at home.
The corruption and political scandals that are daily undermining the political authority of the Bush administration reflect this discontent within the bourgeoisie over the administration’s refusal to modify significantly its disastrous Iraq war policies, which place American imperialism in the precarious position of being severely hampered in its ability to unleash new military interventions necessary to bolster its imperialist hegemony around the world.
The dissatisfaction with Bush has led to mounting criticism not only from the Democrats, but even from significant sections of the Republican party itself. Week after week, the media reports results of still another new public opinion poll that shows Bush’s popularity has fallen to yet another new low. The last two months have been catastrophic for the administration. The highlights of the political pressure campaign include, but are not limited to a series corruption and Iraq-related scandals:
· The indictments of Republican lobbyist Abramoff, accused of “selling” access to administration officials for campaign contributions.
· The indictment of House Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, on money laundering charges and his removal from the leadership position in Congress.
· Indictment of I. Lewis Libby, Chief of Staff for Vice President Dick Cheney for lying to investigators and misleading the federal grand jury investigating the CIA leak case. The name of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame in order to discredit her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson who had criticized publicly the administration’s misuse of intelligence data about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
· Continuing investigation into the Wilson case, which may yet lead to the indictment of White House Deputy Chief of Staff and administration political strategist, Karl Rove.
· Denunciation of a “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal” that usurped control of American foreign policy by Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of state under Colin Powell at the State Department from 2001-2005. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, charged that the “dysfunction within the administration was so grave that ‘if something come along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.”(NYT Oct 21, 2005)
· Bi-partisan Congressional support for a legislative ban on torturing prisoners proposed by Republican Sen. John McCain, which the White House threatens to veto, and which Vice Pres. Cheney has been leading the fight against. Cheney insists that CIA agents be exempt from the torture prohibitions. This criticism focuses on Bush’s open flouting of democratic and humanitarian mystifications that undermine U.S. political authority.
· International uproar over secret CIA prisons operating in Eastern Europe.
· A call by the New York Times for the president to break with Vice President Dick Cheney’s influence on Iraq policy and suggestion that Cheney’s activities for the remainder of the presidents term be confined to ceremonial duties, such as representing the president at funerals and other such meaningless events
· Passage by the Republican controlled Senate of a resolution designating 2006 as “a period of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty” and requiring the president to report regularly to congress on progress in Iraq. The resolution stopped short of setting a deadline for troop reduction, but as the New York Times noted, “the proposal would never have gone to the floor if members of President Bush’s party had not felt the need to go on the record, somehow, as expressing their own impatience with the situation.”
· Republican Doug Forrester’s complaint that he lost the gubernatorial race in New Jersey because of the president’s unpopularity.
· Publication of a New York Times Op-ed piece by Richard N. Haass, former director of policy planning the State Department from 2001-2003 under President Bush and currently president of the Council on Foreign Relations, arguing that “America needs a new vision for a new world” and complaining that under Bush the US is confronting serious foreign policy questions in Asia and Europe and “right now Washington is trying to answer them without a compass.” (NYT Nov. 8, 2005). Haass calls for a doctrine of “integration,” which would be “based on a shared approach to common challenges,” which would require that the US “cooperate with other world powers to build effective international arrangements and to take collective actions.” In other words, he suggests retreat from the unilateralist approach pursued both by Clinton and Bush in recent years.
· A storm of controversy unleashed by a hawkish Congressman John Murtha, Democrat from Pennsylvania, a war hero veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam wars, and previously a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, who delivered an emotional appeal in Congress lambasting the Bush administration’s handling of the war and calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq over a six month period. While rightwing Republicans initially denounced Murtha as a defeatist calling for surrender to terrorists, Murtha actually called for a tactical withdrawal of US troops into bases in neighboring countries over six months, where they could be used in precision raids to support Iraqi government troops against the insurgents, and not for immediate withdrawal. He argued that the presence of US troops in massive numbers and their daily patrols was exacerbating tensions, fanning resistance, and making them unnecessary targets.
· A recently published article in the New Yorker by Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to Bush’s father, Pres. George H.W. Bush, in the early 1990s, renewing his criticisms of the administrations foreign policy originally made public last winter, and triggering speculation once again that Bush is acting contrary to advice from his father, who served as director of the CIA earlier in his career.
· Other items, not linked directly to the war in Iraq, but aimed at the same goal of exerting pressure on the Bush to retool his administration and revise his policies for the next three years include:
· A watchdog report by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission condemning the administration for failure to implement the policy recommendations proposed by the commission to improve American intelligence gathering and security procedures. Both Democratic and Republican members of the commission cited Hurricane Katrina as example of the Bush administration’s refusal to improve communications for first responders in emergency situations.
· The unprecedented failure of Harriet Miers nomination for Supreme Court, who was forced to withdraw her nomination even before Senate confirmation hearings were convened, due primarily to criticism from the right of the Republican party – a terrible political humiliation for the administration.
· A warning from Linda Chavez, a Republican who directed the United States Commission on Civil Rights under President Reagan called upon her fellow Republicans to abandon any strategy for stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment to achieve electoral victory in the Congressional elections in 2006 and the presidential election in 2008. As she put it, “immigrant bashing is not a winning strategy.”
· Revelations by the Washington Post that the unanimous conclusion of six lawyers and two analysts in the Justice Department that the Republican-led redistricting of Texas congressional districts was illegal and unconstitutional in disenfranchising minority voters and essentially rigging election of Republicans, was overruled by political appointees supervising in the Justice Department.
The Bush administration responded initially to the growing pressure by launching a new offensive defending its disastrous policies, denouncing critics as defeatists, cowards, and unpatriotic, a tactic which has already begun to backfire. Meanwhile the Iraqis are feeding the flames. Despite the administration’s rejection of proposals to reduce troop levels as “cut and run” and “outright surrender” to terrorism, 100 Iraqi Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish leaders meeting in Cairo under the auspices of the Arab League signed a declaration calling for U.S. withdrawal according to an undetermined timetable after the December elections. Interestingly, the document included language acknowledging the legitimacy of resistance to foreign invaders, opening the door to integration of the terrorist insurgents the U.S. seeks to kill and destroy into the new Iraqi state apparatus.
There are signs that the administration is beginning to see the writing on the wall. Despite the vituperative attacks against critics calling for a timetable for troop reduction and withdrawal as traitors, the White House has begun hinting that it might begin reducing troop levels after the upcoming Iraqi parliamentary elections, down to a level of 80,000 within sixth months. The President unveiled a new “plan for victory,” which the administration claims has been secretly guiding American policy for some time but has only been recently declassified so it could be made public. Even Bush’s supporters, however, can’t find anything particularly new in the plan or responsive to criticism. The bourgeoisie is stuck with George Bush for three more years and a lot is at stake. We can expect a further ratcheting up of the pressure on the Bush administration to modify its policies. But none of this should be mistaken for a fight between doves and hawks. It is rather a fight between hawks and hawks, on how best to pursue their hawkish objectives.
JG
An article like this has never appeared before in the pages of Internationalism. But this is a special situation, quite unprecedented in the 35 years that Internationalism has been published. Readers may have noticed that articles signed “EF” or “Eric Fischer” no longer appear in the pages of Internationalism, and have not for some time. In fact several readers have inquired if EF is still in the ICC. The answer is yes, he continues to be a militant of the ICC but under very difficult and tragic health circumstances and is no longer able to write for the publication.
For the past few years, the comrade has suffered from an early onset of Alzheimers disease, a condition which especially affects his short term memory. This is a degenerative disease and while medications temporarily slowed the rate of degeneration, there is no hope for recovery. He is on100% disability and no longer able to work. His situation is particularly dismaying because he is comparatively young (57 years old on his next birthday), and has a strong thirst for life.
In the face of this great adversity, EF has demonstrated a revolutionary courage that has inspired many comrades. Four and half years ago he attended what we knew would be his last ICC congress in Europe. He discussed with comrades from many countries about the nature of his disease, how his condition would inevitably worsen, and his desire to maintain his militancy in the communist organization and to contribute as much as he can for as long as he can. As he put it, “I have been a revolutionary since I was 19 years old and the class struggle is important for the future of humanity. I may be losing my memory, but the last thing I will forget is that I am a revolutionary.”
Rather than surrender to the disease and succumb to depression and demoralization, comrade EF consciously grappled with the serious question of how a communist revolutionary should face such an affliction. And in this he has been supported firmly by his partner, F, who has confronted this disease with him and supported his efforts both in medical treatment and in the struggle to maintain his political activity. In addition to maintaining his communist militancy, the comrade also participated in various Alzheimers support groups and fundraising efforts to support research and treatment. He also continues to write poetry, a lifelong interest. In New York, the section continues to meet with him to read and discuss political texts, which is a central aspect of militancy and an important part of his life. He also participates in the work of mailing out the subscriptions to readers.
The comrade’s situation has given concretization to the meaning of solidarity between militants in a revolutionary organization. Last Spring, the 16th Congress of the ICC discussed EF’s situation and sent a letter to him expressing its profound solidarity. In part the letter said:
“the [Congress’s] discussions on the organization’s activities made clear to all of us, if it was not so already, how important has been our difficult struggle in recent years to understand what it means to be a militant in this epoch. We understand far better than we did before the fundamental, critical importance of solidarity among the comrades. We understand better also, how important is the confidence of the organization and its militants in the possibility and necessity of the proletarian revolution. We want to express to you our immense respect for the example that you have shown in your own participation in the organization, despite your illness…. If the ICC is able to act as a pole of reference, then it is not just because of the political positions we defend, but also because of the example that we give of what it means to be communists. And in this sense, the whole congress wants to salute the example that you give us, in confronting your illness, of what it means to be a communist militant…We are proud to be militants with you in the ICC.”
At the National Conference of Internationalism in March 2005, comrade EF made an intervention as the conference drew to a close that deeply moved all the comrades present with his reaffirmation of revolutionary commitment and expression of confidence as a revolutionary in his class, in himself, and in his comrades. Fighting tears, the comrade said:
“I always wanted to be a revolutionary and that’s what I want to do with my life. Thank you for that. I want to die that way. I remember being in another organization where if you couldn’t do something they would kick you out. The ICC is different. I have troubles with my life, my brain doesn’t work the way it use to. But this work has given me meaning in life. Since I was a young kid I wanted to be a revolutionary. I may not be able to do what I could before, but I want to contribute whatever I can. I told my wife I want to be with the ICC as long as I can. It’s been the most important thing in my life for a long time. I want to participate in this for as long as I can.”
Reflecting the solidarity felt by everyone present at the conference, one of the comrades responded, “There is no question about your commitment or your seriousness. No matter what happens, even if you are lying in a coma unable to move, you will always be one of us. You will always be with us and we will always be with you. You will always be a comrade of the ICC. No matter what. Someday, when the history of the workers revolution is written, there will be a chapter about your struggle. You will be remembered.”
Any readers wishing to send messages of solidarity to Comrade Dick, may send a webmail message [2] to Internationalism at the ICC’s website, Internationalism.org.
Here are two poems by our comrade.
Forgetting is only the flip side of remembering
But that being said just how do we collect memories
And how do we take the edge off painful dreams
Which reflect in fantasy fashion
Our dreams unfulfilled.
And our hopes and plans that have come to naught
As the challenges which we encounter are the ones
Which we have come to own and to take seriously
Fighting the odds to make
Progress and perhaps win.
The challenges undertaken in true pursuit
And in honorable circumstances without shame
To take up the hopes for tomorrow and beyond
And working toward realization of hope
And joyful freedom as a great endeavor.
Left only with piece parts of a life
That had unsuspected twists and turns
Requiring a tune-up now and then
I keep trying to live out my life
With dignity and hope but sometimes
It is hard to keep trying to live productively
As the illness I have wears me down
In small increments from day to day
And I fight the best way I can
With medicines and doctors’ visits
As well as exercising routinely
But by now I doubt that
There will be a magic bullet
To make me whole again in my lifetime.
When I got the diagnosis
I had mixed feelings
First of all, I recognized that my problems
Lately, were not a sign of horrid
Hallucinations confronting me daily
But a medical condition which
Over time picks out brain cells and
Lets them die as if it was a war of attrition
Going on in my head where I can’t
See exactly what’s going on, but
The evidence is clear that by now
I am losing cells in my head
Which I would have much preferred
To have remained perfectly healthy.
The American unions have been in the news often lately. The decision by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and several other unions to split from the AFL-CIO and set-up the new “Change to Win Federation” has many commentators predicting a new burst of union activism, as the split will supposedly force both sides to compete with one another and thus organize more workers and step-up their political activity.
Whatever the results of this split, it is clear that it will not benefit the working class at all. While trade unions were originally working-class institutions as they emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries to win concrete reforms from a still expanding capitalist system, this is not the case today. Ever since capitalism became a decadent social system in the early part of the 20th century, the unions everywhere have been integrated into the state apparatus as the capitalist system’s shop-floor police against the working class. This is true no matter what policy, focus or direction the union’s leaders claim to embody. Whatever ideological gleam they use to mask their role as capitalist institutions, there is no mistaking the fact that today the unions serve the interests of the ruling class.
As the unions’ role in the architecture of the capitalist state is to “speak the language of the working class” in order to prevent the proletariat from developing its own critique of the capitalist system, confronting their lies and exposing their nature is one of the most important tasks revolutionaries face today. The attempt to rehabilitate the image of the unions comes at a time when the deepening economic crisis and growing attacks on the working class standard of living are pushing workers to defend themselves. Recent strikes at Northwest Airlines, Boeing, and Philadelphia transit, and the current strike threat in New York City transit are notable examples of this trend. This revival in class struggle makes it all the more important that workers are clear on the nature of the unions.
As Marx pointed out, “the ideas of the ruling class tend to be the ruling ideas of the epoch.” It is thus very difficult for workers and even many revolutionaries to consciously articulate the reality of unions today. Nevertheless, many workers, even if they do not yet openly identify the unions as part of the enemy class, express a certain intuitive indifference, suspicion or even hostility towards the very institutions that are supposed to speak in their name. This is not surprising when one considers the nearly century long record the unions have of sabotaging workers’ independent struggles, mobilizing society for war, and forcing austerity on the working class.
Despite the recent political audacity of union figures like SEIU president Andy Stern or Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., today the unions face the same crisis of legitimacy with their members that politicians suffer with the public as a whole. Just as voter turnout reaches record lows, participation and activity levels for union members are bottoming out. While there may always be a hard-core of “union activists,” members either who are enrolled behind the union ideology or who covet a possibly lucrative career in the union’s bureaucracy themselves, the majority of union members do not participate in union activities and many ignore its political recommendations.
As a result, the unions have been spending boatloads of members’ dues money on member opinion research, ostensibly to figure out how to best reach to members, get them “involved” and mobilize them for politics. While the unions paint these efforts as attempts to learn how best to mobilize workers, in reality they are just seeking more effective ways to sell the myth of bourgeois democracy and the idea that unions are the workers’ voice in that system.
Not surprisingly, the results of these studies are usually the same. Workers tend to reject the idea of the union as a political entity and tend only to look at it as a source of peripheral benefits such as health insurance and retirement benefits. Like the population as a whole, union members are growing more and more indifferent towards bourgeois politics and many have long given up on the idea that the unions are a real vehicle for change. Therefore, to the extent that members pay dues, many of them without choice, they tend to see fringe benefits as the only real advantage to union membership. Alas, for the unions, most members tend to rate the union’s performance in delivering these benefits less than satisfactory.
All this indicates that underneath all the rhetoric and confusions, workers are growing increasingly disillusioned with the unions. While this is generally not expressed in a very conscious way right now, there is clearly a certain subterranean maturation of class-consciousness taking place, evidenced by the growing tendency among workers to reject unionism as a source of social and political change.
Due in part to the erosion of their legitimacy, but also due to the increasing tendency towards “every man for himself” in the arena of bourgeois politics, some unions have launched broad campaigns to “organize” more workers and bring them into the union fold. A chief example of this is the SEIU’s campaigns to organize more service sector workers. In fact, in the last decade, SEIU has won National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections to represent such peripheral sectors of the labor force as childcare and homecare workers in a number of states. SEIU has painted these campaigns as part of a broad strategy to “organize the unorganized” and gain recognition for workers that have previously been ignored and even regarded as not part of the working class.
In reality though, the unions’ efforts have accomplished little other than increase it dues base. It has generally been able to win these elections as NLRB rules state that it only needs to win a majority of votes cast to represent these workers in collective bargaining negotiations. As generally only the most ideologically mobilized workers cast ballots, the unions have generally walked away with these elections. However, once the elections are over, the unions then claim the right to collect dues from all workers in that sector, many of whom do not even know they are now in a union.
As many of these workers receive payment from the state to care for family members as an alternative to the expense of putting them in nursing homes or day care centers, the unions have generally been able to negotiate modest raises in the first contract. However, imagine the surprise these workers have when they receive their paychecks only to learn that the raise has been cancelled out by mandatory dues reductions.
In reality then, the recent campaigns by SEIU and other unions to “organize the unorganized” has been of no benefit to the workers themselves. Most still work for close to minimum wage, receive few if any benefits and work more hours than they are actually paid for. On top of all this, they now have to pay dues to a union few recognize as their own and many find illegitimate. While there is generally an initial upsurge in “appreciation” for the union after the initial contract, the unions generally find themselves in a rut shortly afterwards unable to communicate with its “members” or mobilize them for political action.
Therefore, far from the recent bourgeois propaganda regarding the revival of unionism today and all the academic chatter about “increasing union density” as a prerequisite for progressive change, what we are really witnessing is a subterranean maturation of class-consciousness, whereby many workers are slowly and subtly but clearly coming to reject the unions as a vehicle of political change. While many continue to look to the unions as a source of fringe benefits, they are increasingly tending to look to them only for that reason, and many do not like what they find. In the period ahead, as capitalism’s economic crisis deepens, it is likely the unions will be increasingly unable to offer these benefits, accelerating their crisis of legitimacy and making them ever less relevant in more and more workers’ eyes.
Nevertheless, exposing the unions for what they are - institutions of capitalist discipline- will remain a priority for revolutionaries in the period ahead. As they claim to “speak the language of the working-class” while in reality seeking to sabotage its independent struggle, exposing their lies will be more important than ever in a context where the historic course is open to more and more decisive class confrontations and in which the unions will likely radicalize their discourse in an attempt to keep more workers under their sway.
Moreover, as the decomposition of the capitalist system increases, and the bourgeois political structure fractures, it is likely that we will see more and more radical sounding talk from certain unions. Revolutionaries must be on guard for this and continue to patiently, but clearly, expose the nature of unions today. Nothing less than the success of the proletariat’s struggle to build a truly human community is at stake.
Henk
A common tactic in the capitalist onslaught against pensions and medical benefits is the attempt to create “multi-tier” systems, in which new employees receive lower benefits or pensions, whether this takes the form of decreasing the value of benefits received by new employees or requiring them to pay in higher contributions to medical insurance or pension funds. Veteran workers are bribed with the promise that the cuts won’t affect them, but only the unknown persons who will be hired in the future. The unions traditionally help ram through these “deals,” hailing their efforts at having saved the benefits of the currently employed workers as “victories”. This tactic divides the workers against themselves, pitting the interests of longer employed workers against newer workers, the older generation against the younger – a recipe for disaster for working class unity – allowing management to divide and conquer.
It was precisely this attempt to divide the workers that was at the heart of the recent struggle in NYC transit. The Metropolitan Transit Authority, controlled by the governor, and to a lesser extent by the mayor, sought to increase the age of retirement for new hires, from the current 55 to 62 and to require that new hires would have to pay 6 percent of their wages into the pension fund. The 55-year-old retirement age (after 25 years service) had long been in place out of recognition of the extremely harsh working conditions under which transit workers toil in the 100 year-old subway tunnels, with foul air and fumes, rat infestation, and general lack of sanitary facilities. The government proposal would not have effected the retirement age of any currently employed workers.
But the transit workers were definitely NOT buying this bit of divide and conquer flimflam. On behalf of a working class that has been enduring a full scale attack on its pensions, transit workers essentially drew a line in the sand and refused to accept any change whatsoever in the pension. They struck to protect the retirement pension of workers who are not yet on the job, what they called “our unborn” – their future, unknown colleagues. As such, this struggle became the clearest embodiment of the movement to reaffirm working class self-identity and solidarity to date. It not only had a profound impact on the workers who participated in the struggle, but upon the working class in other sectors as well. The transit workers struck out of a sense of class solidarity with the future generation, those who were not even hired yet. It resonated with many workers in many industries, who can see that someone had finally stood up and said, “Don’t mess with pensions!”
The strike by 33,700 transit workers that paralyzed New York City for three days during the week before Christmas was the most significant workers’ struggle in the U.S. in 15 years. It was important for a number of interrelated reasons: 1) the international context in which it occurred; 2) the development of class consciousness amongst the strikers themselves; and 3) the potential impact of the strike on other workers. The significance of this strike should not be exaggerated; it cannot be compared to strikes in the 1980s which challenged the authority of the capitalist trade union apparatus that serves to control and derail workers struggles and posed the question of extension of the struggle to other workers. However, in the context of the difficult conditions in which the working class struggles today, it’s significance must be clearly understood.
Though it remained firmly under control by a local union leadership dominated by leftists and base unionists, the transit strike reflected not only rising working class combativeness, but also more importantly significant strides in the development of a renewed sense of working class self-identity and self-confidence, and understanding of class solidarity, uniting workers across the boundaries of generations and workplaces. The transit workers undertook this struggle even though they knew it was in violation of New York State’s Taylor Law, which prohibits publicly sector strikes and automatically penalizes strikers two-day’s wages for every day on strike, which means they would lose 3-days salary for each day on strike (one day for the day not worked and two-days penality). The city further threatened to seek a civil fine of $25,000 against each worker for going on strike, doubling each day -- $25,000 for the first day, $50,000 for second day, $100,000 for the third day. With such stiff penalties threatened by the bourgeoisie, the decision to strike was not taken lightly by the workers but represented a courageous act of militant defiance.
The New York transit strike occurred in a context of an international tendency for the working class to return to open combat in defense of its class interests after a reflux in class struggle that has lasted nearly a decade and a half, since the collapse of the two imperialist blocs that had been in place since the end of World War II. In 1989, the collapse of the Stalinist bloc led by Russian imperialism, which was followed by disintegration of the rival western imperialist bloc, led by the U.S. and increasingly chaotic events on the international stage, opened up a period of disorientation for the working class on an international level. The changed historic conditions, the unrelenting propaganda barrage by the bourgeois state, including its mass media, proclaiming the death of communism, the triumph of capitalist democracy and the end of classes, took its toll on the proletariat. The process of clarification that had been going since the late 1960s became disrupted and gains in class consciousness had receded. This was particularly problematic in regard to the understanding that the trade unions which had once been organizations for working class self defense had long since been integrated into the state apparatus of decadent capitalism and now served as the shopfloor cops for capitalism, and in regard to the search for new forms of struggle that would enable workers to take the class struggle into their own hands. So deep was this reflux in class struggle and so thorough was the ideological attack of the ruling class, the working class showed signs of a loss of self confidence in itself as a class and a difficulty in even recognizing its own identity as a class.
However, the seriousness of the global economic crisis and the consequent escalation of attacks by the ruling class on the workers’ standard of living made it inevitable that this terrible period of proletarian disorientation could not last forever. In 2002 we began to see a turn in the international class struggle, which was characterized not by dramatic outbreaks of militant struggles, but rather by the beginning of a difficult, hesitating attempt to return to the historical center stage. The primary task posed by these nascent struggles in many countries was not the extension of struggles across geographic and industrial sector lines, but the reacquisition of consciousness at the most basic levels, of class self-identity and solidarity.
This process has been well underway in the U.S., as the examples of the grocery workers struggle in California, the struggles at Boeing and Northwest airlines, the transit strike in Philadelphia, and the graduate assistants strike at New York University demonstrate. What makes the New York transit strike so significant in this process is not simply that it is the biggest, most impactful strike in the sense that it paralyzed the largest city in America for 3 days, but on the level of progress in the development of class consciousness that it reflects.
As we have said, the main issue in the strike was the defense of workers’ pensions, which are under incredible attack by the bourgeoisie everywhere in the world but especially in the U.S. In the U.S. government social security pensions are minimal and workers rely upon their company or job-related pension funds to maintain their standard of living in retirement. Both types of pensions are in danger in the current situation, the former through the Bush administration’s efforts to “reform” social security, and the latter through outright financial default and efforts to reduce pensions payments. Since the collapse of the Enron corporation, in which thousands of employees lost their entire pensions, countless American corporations have reneged on their pension obligations. Most recently, in the face of corporate bankruptcy, major players in the airline industry defaulted on their pension funds. The federal government agency that assumes responsibility for these failed corporate pension funds can guarantee workers only 50% of what they would have normally been entitled to receive. So many pension funds have gone under, this agency is operating with an anticipated $24 billion deficit.
The automobile industry, with bankruptcies threatening at General Motors and Ford, has also put pension funds in jeopardy.
The reaffirmation of the working class’s ability to see and comprehend itself as a class could be seen on many levels and in many manifestations in the transit struggle. Clearly the central issue itself – protection of the pensions for future workers – embodied this aspect. This was not just on an abstract level, but could be seen and heard on a very concrete level as well. For example, at a picketline at a bus depot in Brooklyn, dozens of workers gathered in small groups to discuss the strike. One worker said he didn’t think it was right to strike over the pensions for future workers, for people we don’t even know. His co-workers countered by arguing that the future workers affected by accepting the cuts in the pensions, “could be our kids.” Another said it was important to maintain the unity of different generations in the workforce. He pointed out that in the future, it would be likely that the government would try to cut the medical benefits or pension payments to “us when we retire. And it will be important for the guys working then to remember that we stood up for them, so they will stand up for us and keep them from cutting our benefits.” Similar discussions occurred elsewhere around the city, clearly and concretely reflecting the tendency for workers to see themselves as a class, to look beyond the barriers of generation that capitalism seeks to use to divide them against themselves.
Other workers driving by the picket lines honked their horns in solidarity and yelled cheers of support. In Brooklyn, a group of teachers at a nearby elementary school expressed their solidarity by discussing the strike with their students and brought their classes of students ranging in age from 9-12 years old to visit the picket line. The kids brought Christmas cards to the strikers with messages like, “We support you. You are fighting for respect.”
The children were assigned by their teachers to interview the strikers, and the kids asked the workers what kind of jobs they did and why they were striking.
The day
after the strike was over, one of our comrades boarded a city bus and
had a conversation with the driver that illustrated the strides made
in this struggle. After he paid his fair he told the driver, a
35-year old Latino worker, “You guys did the right thing.”
The
driver responded, “But we didn’t win. We went to back to work
without a contract.”
“But what really matters is what you did. You said don’t fuck with pensions, workers need to stick together, no matter what. It’s an important example for other workers,” said our comrade.
To this the driver replied, “Yeah, it’s true. It was important that we stood up for the working class.”
The transit strike became a point of reference for workers in other industries. Alongside the displays of support and solidarity mentioned above, there were countless other examples. Non-transit workers were welcomed at the picket lines. In one instance, a group of striking NYU graduate assistants visited the picket line in Brooklyn, introduced themselves and discussed strike issues and strategies with the workers. In countless workplaces around the city, other workers in other industries talked about the importance of the solidarity being exemplified on the defense of pensions. Among municipal workers, many of whom had gone for 3 or more years without a new contract, the transit workers adherence to the slogan of “no contract, no work” showed the importance of struggle.
So strong was the sympathy for the strikers that the capitalist media’s own surveys showed that Roger Toussaint, the president of the transit workers union, scored a higher approval rating than the mayor of the governor on the first day of the strike. The existence of $1.02 billion Metropolitan Transit Authority surplus made management’s hard line appear particularly harsh and ruthless to other workers. The bourgeoisie countered with an all out campaign on day two of the strike to demonize the strikers. The tabloids, like the Post and the Daily News, called the strikers “rats” and “cowards.” Even the liberal New York Times denounced the strike as “irresponsible” and “illegal.”
The theme of “illegality” was picked up by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki. Pataki declared that the strike was criminal and that no negotiations would occur until the strikers returned to their jobs. Bloomberg echoed this stance, denouncing strikers as “thugs” and “criminals.” The billionaire mayor suddenly championed the cause of poorer workers who were being inconvenienced by the strike, supposedly suffering at the hands of the striking, comparatively well paid transit workers. For his part, Toussaint denounced the mayor and governor for their outrageous accusations, and championed the transit workers against the “insults.”
Television news reports focused on the hardships inflicted by the strike on people trying to carpool to work or walking over the city’s East River bridges to get to work in Manhattan. But even after this media barrage, the city’s rulers knew working class solidarity with the strike remained strong. A local judge threatened to jail union leaders and fine individual strikers for defying a court injunction to stop the strike and return to work, but Mayor Bloomberg urged that the court should increase the fines, and not jail the union leaders, which would make Toussaint “a martyr” and risk provoking sympathy strikes by other public sector employees.
The illegality of the strike itself triggered considerable discussion within the working class throughout the city, and around the country as well. How could it be illegal for workers to protest by withdrawing their labor? asked many workers. As one worker said in a discussion at a school in Manhattan, “It almost seems like you’re only allowed to go on strike, if you won’t have any effect.”
Many workers were painfully aware that the union’s new, militant leadership had capitulated three years ago to a contract that gave 0% raise the first year, and 3% in the second and third years. The union was thus pressured by the rising militancy and anger of the workers to act more militantly in the current situation. While the base unionist/leftist led Transit Workers Union Local 100 clearly controlled the strike, employed militant rhetoric and adapted the language of solidarity to maintain firm control of the strike, the role of the union was nonetheless to undermine the struggle and minimize the impact of this important strike. Early in the strike the unions abandoned the demand for 8% annual wage increases for three years, and focused entirely on the pension. The union meeting that voted on the strike authorization permitted no discussion or debate but was conducted as a union rally, featuring a demagogic address by Rev. Jesse Jackson.
The collusion between union and management was revealed in a post-strike report in the New York Times. All the vicious name-calling between the union and government officials was a sham. While the mayor and the governor were stridently screaming that a return to work was a precondition for the resumption of negotiations, secret negotiations were in fact underway at the Helmsley Hotel, and the mayor secretly accepted a proposal by Toussaint to have management withdraw the pension demands in exchange for an increase in worker contributions to their medical care coverage to compensate the government for the cost of maintaining the pensions for future workers.
This union-government orchestrated end to the struggle is of course not surprising, but simply a confirmation of the anti-working class nature of the trade union apparatus, and in no way undercuts the significance of the important gains made in the development of class consciousness. It reminds us of the important tasks that remain ahead for the working class in breaking free of the union straight jacket and taking control of the struggle into their own hands.
– Internationalism, December 2005
The massive mobilisation of students in France against the attacks of the Chirac/Villepin/Sarkozy government which wants to impose the “Contrat Première Embauche”[1] [4] (CPE) by force, is part of the present resurgence of the international proletarian struggle. This movement is nothing like previous inter-classist movements of young students. It is part of the struggle of the whole working class. From the outset, this movement has been firmly on a working class terrain, against economic attacks, against the “no future” that capitalism promises the younger generations. The students in struggle have been able to put to one side their own specific demands (such as the reform of the system of LMD diplomas) and instead have put forward a common demand of the whole working class: “No to the CPE! No to precarious work, to lay-offs and unemployment!”.
The movement’s strength lies above all in the growing and active SOLIDARITY in the struggle. The students (and the high school students) have understood that unity is strength, and have closed ranks to put into practice that old slogan of the workers’ movement: “All for one, and one for all!”. This is how they have been able to draw in behind them the teachers and office personnel who have held their own general assemblies (“assemblées générales” or AG). The students in the universities have opened their AG to their own parents and other workers, and even to pensioners (at Paris 3 Censier in particular). They have asked them to speak and to help with their “ideas”. A kind of “suggestions box” has been carried around in the street, in the AG, in supermarkets, at workplaces, on the Internet, etc. This is how the most conscious and determined battalions of the movement have been able to make solidarity come alive and widen their struggle to take in the whole working class!
The day following the 7th March demonstration mass student general assemblies spread throughout the universities of Paris and the provinces: Villepin,[2] [5] the “man of iron”, stuck to his hard line; the CPE was voted in by the National Assembly because it was out of the question that the “street should rule” (as the ex-prime minister Raffarin said in 2003, when he pushed through his reform of the pension system in order to throw old wage slaves into poverty after enduring 40 years of exploitation!) The students have not given in. The lecture halls where the AG are held have been filled to overflowing, the spontaneous demonstrations have multiplied, especially in the capital. The students have lifted the media blackout and forced them to break their law of silence and lies.
The ten days from the 8th March to the 18th have “shaken the world” of the French ruling class. The students have increasingly organised in one direction and one only: SOLIDARITY and UNITY with the whole working class.
In the capital this dynamic has spread out from Censier, which has been in the vanguard of the movement towards the extension and the centralisation of the workers’ counter-attack.
In the AG the workers who were “passing by” have been welcomed with open arms. They have been invited to participate in the discussions, to contribute their own experience. All those who have taken part in the AG in Paris and in several other provincial towns (notably Toulouse) have been astonished by the capacity of the young generation to place its creativity at the service of the class struggle. At Censier especially, the richness of the discussion, the sense of responsibility of the students who have been elected by the strike committee, their ability to organise the movement, to run the assembly, to allow all those who want to expresses their point of view to do so, to convince others and to unmask the saboteurs through the confrontation of arguments in the discussion has fully confirmed the vitality and the strength of the young generations of the working class.
The students have constantly defended the sovereign character of the AG, with their delegates who are elected and revocable (on the basis of mandates and the giving back of mandates), by open votes in the assembly. Every day a different team (including both unionised and non-unionised students) chairs the discussions.
In order to be able to share out the tasks, to centralise, to coordinate and to keep the control of the movement, the strike committee of Paris 3 – Censier has decided to elect different commissions: Press, “Animation and Reflection” to think about wider issues, Welcome and Information etc.
It is thanks to this real “democracy” in the AG and the centralisation of the struggle that the students have been able to decide on what action to take, with their principle concern being how to spread the movement to the workplace.
The students have clearly understood that the success of their struggle is in the hands of the wage workers (as one of the students said during a meeting of the Île de France Coordination of 8th March “if we remain isolated, they’ll make a meal of us”). The more the Villepin government refuses to budge, the more determined the students become. The harder Sarkozy[3] [6] hits the more angry the workers get and the more the “voters” grumble.
The wage workers most accustomed to the class struggle (and the less stupid fractions of the bourgeoisie) know that this confrontation carries with it the threat of the mass strike (and not the general strike put forwards by certain unions and the anarchists) if the ruling “rabble” remains caught up in its present irrational “logic”.
This dynamic towards the movement’s extension, towards the mass strike, has appeared since the outset of the students’ mobilisation and has been expressed throughout the country, through large delegations to workers near the places of education.[4] [7] They have come up against the unions’ “blockage”[5] [8] and the workers have remained shut up in their workplaces without being able to discuss with the student delegations. The “little Sioux”[6] [9] of the Paris universities have been very imaginative in finding means to overcome the union blockage.
In order to mobilise the workers, the students have proved rich in imagination. Censier have used a cardboard box called the “box of ideas”. In some universities (such as Paris Jussieu), they have had the idea of taking to the street, to address passers-by about the reasons for their anger, and asking for ideas for the “box” because “all ideas are worth looking at”. This has been particularly the case in relation to the workers who have passed by or who have come to show their solidarity, who the students have asked to place their ideas in the “box” in order that they can try to put them into practice. Thanks to their experience, they have been able to sort out the “good ideas” (which go in the direction of strengthening the movement) from the “bad ideas” (which weaken and sabotage the struggle in order to leave the students open to repression, as we saw with the idea of “occupying the Sorbonne”).
In many universities, and especially those at the forefront of the movement, the students have opened the lecture halls where the AG are held to wage workers, the unemployed, and even pensioners. They have asked them to pass on their experience of the workplace. They are eager to learn from the older generations. And the “elders” have been eager to learn from the “youngsters”. As the “youngsters” have gained in maturity, the “elders” have rediscovered their youth! This osmosis between the generations has given a whole new impetus to the movement. The struggle’s greatest strength, and its finest victory, is the struggle itself! It is the solidarity and the unity of the whole working class in all its generations and in every sector.
This victory has been won not in parliament but in the university lecture halls. Sadly for the government, its spies in the AG have understood nothing. They have been unable to give Mr Villepin any “ideas”. The Villepin/Sarkozy/Chirac infernal trio have run out of “ideas”. They have thus had to show the true face of bourgeois democracy: repression.
The student movement is far more than a simple protest against the CPE. As a teacher from Paris-Tolbiac University said at the 7th March demonstration “The CPE is not only a real and specific economic attack, it is also a symbol”. It is indeed a symbol of the bankruptcy of the capitalist economy.
This is also an implicit response to the police “errors” (which in the autumn of 2005 caused the “accidental” death of two young innocents denounced as “ burglars” by a “citizen” and chased by the cops). Putting a pyromaniac (Sarkozy) in charge of the Interior Ministry has demonstrated the bourgeoisie’s inability to draw the lessons of its own history: it has forgotten that police “errors” (amongst others, the death of Malik Oussékine in 1986[7] [10]) became factors in the radicalisation of the workers’ struggles. Today, the repression of the students of the Sorbonne who only wanted to hold an AG (and who did not burn books as the mendacious Mr de Robien has tried to claim) does nothing but strengthen the students’ determination. All the bourgeoisie and its hired media hacks have been endlessly spreading lies about the students being “hoodlums” (or “rabble” to use Sarkozy’s gentlemanly term for the youth of the suburbs).
But the lies have been too gross, and the working class has not been taken in. The violence of the hoodlums of the bourgeoisie has revealed the violence of the capitalist system and its “democratic” state. A system that has thrown millions of workers onto the street, which has reduced pensioners to poverty after exploiting them for 40 years, a system that imposes its “law and order” with police truncheons. Mr Villepin continues to play deaf, and has demonstrated the truth of the old joke: “dictatorship means ‘shut your mouth’, democracy means ‘talk all you like – we’re not listening’”. But the Villepin/Sarkozy/Chirac trio has gone one better: they’ve invented the slogan “talk all you like and shut your mouth”.
And as they hang on to power these gentlemen have enjoyed the “solidarity” of the media, and above all of its prime instrument of ideological intoxication: the TV news. The media’s ignoble pictures aim to stir up an exhibitionist fascination for pointless violence, to manipulate the crowds, and to corrupt the workers’ consciousness. But the more the TV piles it on to intimidate and paralyse the working class, the more they turn our stomachs (to the point where they even disgust the electorate of the Right).
It is precisely because the new generations of the working class and its most conscious battalions hold the key to the future, that they have refused to fall for the provocation of the police state (and the imprisoning forces of the unions). They have refused to use the pointless and desperate violence of the bourgeoisie, of the young rioters in the suburbs, or of a few over-excited “anarchos” and “leftists”.
The children of the working class who are in the vanguard of the student movement are the only ones who can open up a perspective for the whole of society. This perspective, the working class can only develop thanks to its historical vision, to its confidence in its own strength, thanks to its patience and also its humour (to use Lenin’s words). It is precisely because the bourgeoisie is a class with no historic future that the Villepin clique is panicking and can only use the same pointless violence of “no future” as the young rioters.
Mr Villepin’s determination not to give way to the students’ demands (the withdrawal of the CPE) shows one more thing: the world bourgeoisie will never give up power through the pressure of the ballot box. If it is to get rid of capitalism and to build a real human world community, the working class will be obliged, in the future, to defend itself by force against the violence of the state and all the hangers-on of its repressive apparatus. But proletarian class violence has nothing whatever to do with the methods of terrorism or with the riots in the suburbs (as the bourgeoisie’s propaganda would have it, to justify its policing, its repression of the workers, of the students and of course, of real communist militants).
In order to try and push through its economic and police attacks the bourgeoisie has laid mines around the counter-attack against the CPE. First, they counted on the university and school holidays to disperse the students’ anger. But the students are no goody-goody choirboys (even if some of them still go to church, or to the mosque). They kept up their mobilisation and have reinforced it since the holidays. Obviously, the unions have been present in the movement from the outset and have done their utmost to infiltrate it.
But they never foresaw that they would completely lose their grip in most of the university towns.
In Paris for example, more than a thousand students gathered outside Paris 3 Censier to go together to the demonstration. When they discovered that the CGT[8] [11] had already unfurled their banners at the front of the demonstration in order to lead it, the students used all sorts of transportation and the vitality of their own legs to get to the front of the unions. At the head of the demonstration, they unfurled their own banners, emblazoned with unifying slogans: “University and school students, unemployed workers, workers of the private and public sectors, temporary workers, all in the same struggle against unemployment and insecure work!”.
The CGT was made to look ridiculous. It found itself tailing the students behind a multitude of banners: “CGT Engineers”, “CGT RAPT”,[9] [12] etc., etc. Behind each of the CGT’s enormous red banners were to be found a handful of militants, completely disoriented. To beef up their troops, the cadres of the Stalinist party of Maurice Thorez (who after World War II asked the striking miners and Renault workers to go back to work and to “roll up their sleeves” because “strikes are a weapon of the monopoly trusts”) tried to shout a few radical slogans. They tried to drown out the students with their loudspeakers. The cadres of the CGT and the FRENCH “Communist” Party tried to stir up their troops by getting them to sing the Internationale. The old Stalinist dinosaurs only made themselves look still more ridiculous. Many demonstrators and passers-by on the sidewalks roared with laughter. You heard comments like “It looks like Spitting Image”.[10] [13]
That same night the leader of the CGT Bernard Thibault said on TV: “it is true that there was an unforeseen aspect to the demonstration”.
The unions have unmasked themselves with their own manoeuvres. And Mr de Robien has still not understood this with his “indignation” at the acts of vandalism by the “students” at the Sorbonne (waving a few books torn up by the bourgeois specialists in manipulation) and his pretence that “the students’ revolt is being led by a tiny minority”. Mr Robien has put his glasses on the wrong way round. It is indeed a small minority that runs, not the movement, but the whole of human society. A minority that produces nothing but exploitation and repression against the great majority of the productive class.
The unions, CGT and FO,[11] [14] have not gotten over their nasty surprise on 7th March. This is why some of the more intelligent TV journalists have been saying that “the unions have been humiliated”. They have also been humiliated by the students spontaneous demonstrations on 14th March. Incapable of restraining their fury against their “humiliators”, against the workers who have shown their active solidarity with the students during the demonstration of 16th March, the unions have ended up revealing in public, and in front of the cameras, their complicity with the troops of Mr Sarkozy.
In Paris, the stewards provided by the CGT (linked to the Stalinist party) and by FO (founded after World War II with CIA funding) were at the head of the demonstration, hand in hand, facing the CRS.[12] [15] Suddenly, the union cordon disappeared as if by magic to let a few petty “kamikazes” who had infiltrated the demonstration move off towards the Sorbonne in order to play cat and mouse with the cops. All those who saw the new scenes of violence first hand have said that it was thanks to the unions’ march stewards that Villepin/Sarkozy could get out their truncheons and fill up the Black Marias.
Above all, the constant TV images of violent confrontations that have followed the Paris demonstration have been used to generate fear before the demonstration of 18th March. There are many workers and youths who intended to take part and who may now give up for fear of this violence.
The TV news anchormen have been able to announce the good news: the movement is “dying down” (according to the TV news on 16th March).
Those who want the movement to die down are the accomplices of Sarkozy, the forces of union control. And the working class is beginning to understand this. Behind their “radical” and hypocritical talk, the unions want to save the government’s skin.
The Stalinist party and its CGT deserve their place in the pantheon of Jurassic Park (alongside the brontosaurs of the UMP).[13] [16] If until the unions have been unable so far to play their part as social firemen, it’s because the pyromaniacs Sarkozy/Villepin set fire to their banners on 16th March.
And if the workers have come to support the students in struggle, it is because they have seen the unions in their workplaces contributing to the media blackout of the mass general assemblies.
Since the 7th March demonstration, the unions have dragged their feet, they have twisted and turned in every way imaginable to paralyse the workers. They have carried out all sorts of manoeuvres in order to divide and dissipate the workers’ anger. They have tried to sabotage the students’ movement. They have radicalised their language – very late in the day – by “demanding” the withdrawal of the CPE before opening negotiations (this does not mean that they have stopped negotiating behind the workers' backs). They have even threatened a “general strike” in order to make the government “give in”. They have openly declared that they do not want the workers to mobilise in solidarity with the students. Their backs are to the wall, and now they have tried to slip the ace of trumps out of their sleeves: by using a few over-excited kids to keep the violence going.
The only way out of this political crisis for the French bourgeoisie, is to clean up the façade of the republican state. And this present is being offered to Mr Villepin on a sliver platter by the PS/PCF/Greens[14] [17] who have all united to “put their case” against the CPE to the Constitutional Council.[15] [18] This “helping hand” from the PS may let the government may let the government off the CPE hook by appealing to the “12 wise men”:[16] [19] then it could stick to the Raffarin formula “it’s not the street that rules”, with the addition that “it’s the 12 pensioners of the Constitutional Council who do”!
In wanting to “power-cleanse” the Sorbonne students (and their comrades who had come to bring them food) Mr Sarkozy has opened a Pandora’s box. And the Villepin/Sarkozy government have pulled out of this box of “black ideas” the workers’ “false friends”: the unions.
The world proletariat can therefore thank the French government. By brandishing the scarecrow of Le Pen[17] [20] at the last presidential elections, the red-white-and-blue ruling class has managed to put in power the world’s most imbecile Right-wing. A Right-wing that has adopted policies worthy of a “banana republic”!
However this movement plays out, it is already a victory for the whole working class.
Thanks to the new generation, the working class has succeeded in breaking the unions “blockage” of class solidarity. Every sector of the proletariat, especially the new generations, have lived through a rich experience that will leave a profound mark on their consciousness.
This experience belongs to the world proletariat. Despite the blackout of the “official” media, the “parallel” media, “untamed” cameras and other “free” radios – as well as the revolutionary press – will make it possible for the world proletariat to make this experience their own. For this is only one episode in the world wide struggle of the working class. It is part of a whole series of struggles that have taken place since 2003 and that have confirmed that the working class throughout the industrial countries are overcoming the retreat that they have suffered due to all of the campaigns unleashed by the bourgeoisie after the 1989 collapse of the Eastern bloc and of all the regimes that claimed to be working class and socialist. One of the essential characteristics of these struggles has been the revival of solidarity between workers. Thus in two of the most important countries in the capitalist world – the United States and United Kingdom – this solidarity has lain at the origin of workers’ struggles. Just before Christmas 2005, the New York transit workers went on strike not for themselves but in order to preserve for young workers who would be hired in the future the same retirement benefits that they enjoy today. Similarly the strike, during several days in the autumn of 2005, of the baggage handlers at London Heathrow airport, was in solidarity with the workers in the catering sector who were the victims of an brutal attack by their employer Gate Gourmet.
These strikes were particularly significant of an unfolding tendency towards the development of struggles that has not stopped since the end of the 2003 movements for the defence of pensions in France and in Austria, which saw its biggest street demonstrations since World War II. The same tendency found expression in 2004 in Germany in the car workers’ struggle (at Daimler-Chrysler and at Opel especially) which clearly posed the question of workers’ solidarity against lay-offs. The same tendency was once again confirmed in Spain, in December 2005, at SEAT in Barcelona where the workers fought outside of and against the unions who had signed “the deal of shame” behind their backs to lay off of 600 of their comrades.
The students’ movement in France is therefore part of a struggle that is developing on a historical scale and whose final outcome will allow the human species to escape the dead-end of capitalist barbarism. The young generations who have engaged in the struggle on the terrain of the working class today have opened the door to this future. We can have confidence in them: all over the planet, they will continue preparing a new world freed from competition, profit, exploitation, poverty, and bloody chaos.
Clearly, the road that leads to the overthrow of capitalism will be long full of difficulty and dangers of every kind, but it has begun to be cleared.
International Communist Current, 17th March 2006
[1] [21] Whose main measure is to allow employers to fire their workers without notice or motive during the first two years of the contract.
[2] [22] French Prime Minister.
[3] [23] Nicolas Sarkozy, Interior Minister in charge of the police who has made himself famous in particular by declaring his intention to "power-cleanse” the suburbs of their “rabble”.
[4] [24] In Tours, for example, the students used university equipment to print off 10,000 leaflets calling for solidarity with the movement, which they distributed at workplaces around the town.
[5] [25] A play on the word “bloquer" – in other words picketing the universities.
[6] [26] An untranslatable expression referring to the supposed guile of the Red Indians.
[7] [27] A student killed by the police during protests against the “reform" of the universities.
[8] [28] Confédération Générale du Travail: the trades union still dominated by the Stalinist French “Communist” Party.
[9] [29] RATP is the Parisian transport system.
[10] [30] In France, a nightly satire on the TV news called “Les Guignols de l’Info".
[11] [31] Force Ouvrière.
[12] [32] Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (riot police).
[13] [33] Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (sic!). The governing party of Jacques Chirac.
[14] [34] i.e. by the Socialist Party, the French "Communist” Party, and the Greens.
[15] [35] The idea is that the Constitutional Council should find a face-saving way out for the government by declaring the CPE “unconstitutional”.
[16] [36] i.e. the Constitutional Council.
[17] [37] Leader of the fascist Front National, who came second to Chirac in the first round of the presidential elections.
As we went to press, the situation in New York City transit remains unresolved. The tentative agreement which ended the 3-day strike that paralyzed New York before Christmas was narrowly rejected by a 7-vote margin out of more that 22,000 votes cast (more than 11,000 workers did not vote). The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) responded to the contract rejection with a provocation, proposing an offer even more onerous than the original one they had quickly abandoned at the beginning of the first round of negotiations, declaring an impasse and requesting that the state impose binding arbitration. The state public employees labor relations board put this request for binding arbitration on hold for two weeks, and directed the two parties to resume negotiations. There are indications that both management and the union leadership may wait out the uproar and push the rejected contract through in another ratification vote. Meanwhile workers, who already lost wages for the 3 days they did not work in December, are now receiving legal notice from the MTA that they will forfeit an additional 2 days wages each day they were on strike, for a total of six days wages. These wages will be deducted from their checks during March.
As we noted in our statement on the MTA strike published on the internationalism.org Website, this “was the most significant workers’ struggle in the U.S. in 15 years,” because of its international context, the development of class consciousness exhibited by the striking workers, and the potential impact of the struggle on other workers (the importance of solidarity, resistance to further attempts to slash pensions). Events since December confirm the validity of this analysis.
The transit struggle occurred in an international context in which the working class worldwide is going through a process of returning to class struggle after a decade and a half of disorientation since the collapse of the imperialist bloc system that had prevailed since the end of World War II. The deepening global economic crisis and the escalation of attacks on the working class standard of living has pushed the proletariat into action in an increasing number of countries, including the U.S. As we noted in December, “The primary task posed by these nascent struggles in many countries was not the extension of struggles across geographic and industrial sector lines, but the reacquisition of consciousness at the most basic levels, of class self-identity and solidarity.”
This process was clearly demonstrated in the transit strike, by the clarity by which workers refused to accept the time-honored management-union tactic of trading the erosion of wages and pensions for future workers in exchange for wages for currently employed workers. Instead they willingly defied the repressive New York State Taylor’s prohibition of public sector strikes and imposition of mandatory forefeiture of two days’ wages for each day of strike, and waged the struggle to defend the pensions of the next generation of workers.
The contract rejection reflects the confluence of several factors. First many workers clearly understood the sell out by the union, which originated the crucial proposal that led to the tentative agreement: offering to have workers contribute 1.5% of their wages to help finance medical benefits if management withdrew the demand to have future workers contribute 6% of their wages to the pension fund. In this instance the union proposed to trade the wages of the currently employed workers to finance the pensions of future workers, which is just as unacceptable as the original proposal. Management actually bragged that the tentative agreement was better for them financially over the life of the three year contract than their original plan to have new employees contribute to the pension fund, as it traded the 6% of the salaries of the relatively few new workers that would be hired each year for 1.5% of the wages of the entire 34,000-member workforce.
Second, many workers were angered by the bourgeoisie’s unrelenting propaganda campaign which tried to drive home the message that struggle does not pay. Over and over the media broadcast the message that the strike had been lost, that the workers were losing more by striking in terms of the Taylor law fines and 1.5% payment for medical benefits than if they had accepted management’s offer.
Third, a minority faction on the executive board played opportunistically to this disenchantment with the contract settlement by campaigning for a “no vote.”
Like all “votes” under capitalism, the contract referendum was a no-win proposition for the workers. No matter what the result the workers would inevitably be screwed: ratification would validate a 1.5% salary cut; rejection would leave the workers in the current predicament of being without a contract, with the momentum for struggle definitively broken, and little perspective to improve the contract. This explains why fully one-third of the workers chose not to vote.
The current confluence of events, including the unrelenting MTA propaganda against the contract which attempted to minimize any notion that workers had “won,” and the factional disputes within the union, ironically opened the door to questioning the credibility of the unions, which had not really been posed during the struggle in December. It did so by exposing very clearly the nature of the union sell-out, originally presented, as always, as a union “victory” by union leadership, and by exposing the dead-end offered by union dissidents. Having eked out a triumph in the ratification vote, the dissidents had nothing to offer, no strategy, no tactics, just posturing. It won’t be surprising if union and management stall for a while and then resubmit the same agreement for another vote. Workers have to take struggles into their own hands and go outside the union straight jacket to advance their struggle.
Meanwhile the example of the transit workers resistance to attacks on theis pensions has resonated with other workers in all sectors, especially the public sector. Municipal union leaders in New York have expressed worries that their members will now become increasingly difficult to control, as the threat of the Taylor Law prohibiting strikes has proven ineffective in staunching the militant will to struggle. This is particularly significant as contracts for public sector workers come up for negotiation in the months ahead, in New York, in other cities around the U.S. and even in other countries, where the transit struggle has stood as a shining example of workers’ solidarity.. -JG, 25/3/06.
To illustrate the lengths to which the so-called “democratic” bourgeoisie will go in using repression against the working class for defending itself against its class interests, we publish this excerpt from a letter sent by the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York City to 34,000 transit workers who went on strike for three days in December. The workers have already been docked three days wages for the days they were not a work. In addition, this letter notifies them that they an additional two days wages for each day of the strike (six in total) will be deducted from the March pay checks. And it seems like only yesterday that the American ruling class used to denounce Russia for denying workers the right to strike. -- Internationalism Re: Notice of Taylor Law ViolationYOU ARE HEREBY NOTIFIED that it has been determined by the Chairman, Executive Director and the President, New York City Transit Authority and Manhattan and Bronx Surface Transit Operating Authority that you committed a violation of Section 210 of the Civil Service Law (Taylor Law) by engaging in a strike which commenced on December 20, 2005 and continued through December 22, 2005. Therefore, in accordance with Section 210 (2)(f) of the Taylor Law, a deduction will be made from your compensation of twice your daily rate of pay for each of the three days or part thereof that you committed a violation of Section 210 of the Taylor Law. This penalty will be deducted over two ore more consecutive pay periods commencing with the payroll checks issued in March. Pursuant to
paragraph (g) of Section 210 (2) of the Taylor Law, you have the right to
object to the determination by filing an objection with the Chief Executive
Officer. Such objection should be
addressed to Chief Executive Officer, MTA New York City Transit, c/o Office of
Labor Relations, at 2 Broadway, 13th floor, Taylor Law Review Unit, |
George W. Bush is worried about the future. He thinks there are too many of us living too long and if we live to too ripe an old age we’re going to break the government’s piggy bank, draining all that money out for social security pensions and medicare. Having failed last year to slash the living daylights out of the social security system, now he’s ordered the creation of a special commission to investigate the impact of the impending retirement of millions of baby boomers. What the pension crisis shows unequivocally is that capitalism is mired in economic crisis, is bankrupt and offers no future for humanity. It is no longer fit to rule.
In response to growing global economic crisis, the capitalist state in every country pursues policies designed to make the working class bear the brunt of the crisis. This includes above all a concerted effort to slash to the bone the social wage—that portion of the cost of reproduction of the working class paid directly by the state. In nation after nation the ‘welfare state’ is being dismantled wholesale, cutting the standard of living to make the working class bear the brunt of the economic crisis. In the U.S. the government and its media deprecate these “benefits” by talking about the need to trim “entitlements” from the federal budget, as if we were spoiled children with inappropriate expectations of what we’re entitled to.
At the same time that the government is trying to rid us of our false sense of entitlement, contributory pension plans at the workplace, both in the public and private sectors, are under fierce attack. The pension crisis is so serious that a recent New York Times editorial reported, “traditional corporate pension plans are disappearing” (NYT Feb. 5, 2006). In the troubled airlines industry, company after company has been permitted by the state to simply abandon financial obligations for their pension plans as part of their bankruptcy court settlements. Pension plans in the auto industry, at GM and Ford, will soon follow suit. Of course the state has an entirely less charitable and forgiving attitude about permitting financially strapped workers to walk away from their financial obligations, as evidenced by the recent federal legislation tightening up personal bankruptcy policies.
So serious is the trend towards collapse of private pension funds, that the federal agency that bails out these failed pension plans and assumes responsibility for payments to retirees (paying perhaps 25% of what workers were legally entitled to) has paid out so much, and is now operating with more than a $24 billion deficit. IBM has announced a freeze on its pension plan, and, like the government and other private companies is trying to put the onus for retirement income on workers themselves by pushing employees to open up 401(k) retirement saving account, which have now become the norm. But this is an impossible solution. Since the standard of living is so much under attack, American workers and other strata are increasingly forced to live beyond their means, accumulating massive personal debt to the point where in 2005 for the first time since 1933, there was a negative savings rate. According to the Times, 401(k)’s are “now the main retirement plan for 42 million Americans, about half the work force.” However, at the same time, “half of the people with 401(k)’s have saved less than $20,000; and about one-third of households have saved nothing for retirement” (NYT Feb. 5, 2006).
In a nutshell, the message is work until you drop. This applies especially to the poorest sections of the working class, whose life expectancy is well below the national average.
Remember the ‘leisure society’? Not so long ago we were being told that with the increase in automation we would all have much more leisure time. Unfortunately things don’t work like that under capitalism, which can only squeeze profit from living labor power, and which uses technological developments to intensify its exploitation. Far from having a laid-back leisure society, we have seen massive global unemployment on the one hand, and a brutal lengthening of the working day on the other. The current attempt to lengthen working lives is just another prong of this same attack.
None of it is justified on the criterion of human need. If we could end the gigantic waste of human labor power that capitalism pours down the drain of unemployment, of military production, and a whole host of useless unproductive activities (advertising, bureaucracy, etc…); if new machines could be used to reduce the burden of work rather than speed it up – then there could be massive reductions in the working day, or the working week, or the working life. And if, in Marx’s words, labor was transformed from “a means of life to life’s prime need”, to a truly creative activity, there would in any case be no more need for this rigid separation between work and leisure and work and retirement.
All this, however, can only come about through the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a world communist society. This in turn will only become a real possibility through a vast development of class struggle and of class consciousness. But the capitalist crisis and the attacks on workers’ living standards provide the material foundations for this development. The attempt to ‘reform’ pensions, in particular, has already led to large-scale mobilizations of workers in France and Austria, and the recent strike by transit workers in New York shows that the same could happen in the U.S. These attacks are directed against all workers: they can thus help workers see the need for a united response. They are being spearheaded by the state: they can thus help workers see that the state is not their protector but the boss of all the bosses, their principal enemy. And they are an assault on our very future: they can thus help workers see that they must make their own future.
In 1880, when Germany’s ‘Iron Chancellor’ Bismarck introduced a national insurance system, he said: “Whoever has a pension for his old age is far more content and far easier to handle than one who has no such prospect” and will “put up with much more because he a has pension to look forward to”.
What the pensions crisis is showing is that workers have less and less to look forward to from capitalism.—Internationalism
Canada’s recent federal election has brought the Conservative Party, under Stephen Harper, to power for the first time in 13 years and sealed the collapse of the Liberal regime mired in corruption scandals. The bourgeois media and political pundits across Canada have been buzzing with anticipation of what changes the new Conservative government will bring to a nation proud of its international reputation for “tolerance,” “openness,” “peace,” and a generous social welfare system.
The ruling Liberal minority government was forced to call the election in December 2004 when it lost a vote of confidence in Parliament after the NDP(New Democratic Party) refused to support its budget proposal following the publication of the Gomery commission’s report into the Quebec “sponsorship” scandal. This report detailed the involvement of high-level Liberal Party figures in a corruption scheme that saw large sums of money diverted from a federal program to promote federalism in Quebec into the hands of Liberal Party hacks.
The Liberal Party, already mired in Quebec corruption scandal, narrowly won a minority victory in the last election during the summer of 2004, and clung to power with the support of the left NDP, as it beat back several attempts by the newly united and energized Conservative Party – with occasional help from the separatists of the Bloc Quebecois—to bring down the government. Faced with a need to rejuvenate its electoral mystification after 13 years of Liberal rule, growing corruption scandals undermining the government’s legitimacy, and a need to stabilize the government, the Canadian bourgeoisie clearly saw the necessity to change the ruling team, even if it did not see the need for a drastic change in either international or domestic policy.
In order to accomplish this, the Canadian media went to work making sure to stoke enough anger over the corruption scandal to bring the Liberal government down, but at the same time instill enough fear over an unchecked Conservative government (the only other party capable of winning enough votes to form a government) to make sure they did not win enough of a mandate at the polls to enact the most radical elements of their domestic agenda.
In the months leading up to the election, the media and the various opposing parties ran a two-prong scare campaign, which on the one hand fed the anger over the corruption scandal, while on the hand warned sober-minded Canadians that a Conservative government could mean greater restrictions on the right to an abortion, an end to the recognition of gay marriages, the returns of the death penalty, further attacks on the national health system, the possible secession of Quebec, increased subservience to the U.S., and Canadian participation in American imperialist adventures.
Even the media in the United States got into the act, welcoming a new Conservative government as a step toward repairing the two countries’ relationship, which had become severely strained under the Liberal governments of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin and the Bush administration.
The result of the media campaign would seem to be just what the Canadian state ordered: a minority Conservative government –a new ruling team with a new face, but lacking the national mandate necessary to enact its most radical domestic program.
Despite the campaign hype, the ascension of the Conservative Party to power will not change the historic situation of the working class in Canada, nor will it significantly alter the dynamic at work in the international relations between capitalist states, which is pushing even the Canadian bourgeoisie to increasingly go its own way, to look out for its own interests and formulate its own imperialist policy distinct from its erstwhile allies.
Immediately after being sworn in as Prime Minister it became clear that Stephen Harper possesses little desire to see his nation’s imperialist interests subsumed to the U.S. One of his fist acts in office was to call for the construction of a fleet of military icebreakers to patrol the Northwest Passage –the series of straits and bys surrounding Canada’s Arctic islands that link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans—in order to defend against the incursion of military submarines from other nations, especially the U.S.!
While this may seem like a minor issue in the scope of the imperialist confrontations rocking the globe today, the Northwest Passage is expected to become an increasingly important shipping lane, as global warming melts the ice cap that currently engulfs much of the area for the better part of the year. Canada’s current attempt to assert its sovereignty over these waters represents a clear effort to send a message to all other nations that it will defend these waters in the future, with force if necessary. Harper’s announcement was immediately met with a public rebuke from the U.S. ambassador, who forcefully stated his country’s case that the Passage is international waters.
In fact the row over the Northwest Passage represents a continuity with, and the latest entry, in a growing list of Canadian provocations against the U.S. that began under the Liberal regime. From the dispute over fishing rights in the Dixon Entrance, to Canadian protests against the U.S.’s alleged violation of the NAFTA treaty by imposing duties on softwood lumber; from vocal public outcry over the acquittal of U.S. fighter pilots who “accidentally” bombed Canadian troops in Afghanistan while high on speed, to Martin’s refusal to participate in the Bush administration’s plan for a continent-wide “ballistic missile shield,” the Canadian government has taken an increasingly provocative stance against its southern neighbor in a way that has gotten the attention of an American bourgeoisie, until recently basically content to ignore Canada.
As a result, the U.S. has fired back, banning imports of Canadian beef on several occasions over fears of Mad Cow disease, loudly criticizing Canada’s supposedly lax immigration policies that have allegedly allowed terrorists to infiltrate the continent, and going public with a plan to require Canadian citizens traveling to the U.S. to present passports by 2007. Canada has not allowed these slights over the border to pass without retaliation. Harper has announced plans to arm Canadian border officials in response to the growing number of “criminals” crossing into Canada from the U.S. Moreover, crossing into Canada is no longer a simple affair for many American tourists, who now often have to undergo extensive questioning at the border.
While Harper has announced plans to cooperate more closely with the U.S. in the “war on terror,” strengthen and re-equip the Canadian military and take a more active role in Afghanistan, this should not be seen as a major reversal from prior Liberal policies. In fact, any increased “cooperation” with the U.S. will in reality only serve as an umbrella under which the Canadian state attempts to strengthen its own hand and play its own imperialist card. In this sense, Harper’s plan to take Canada out of the Kyoto environmental accords is not a capitulation to U.S. pressure, but an attempt to assert Canadian independence against both the U.S. and Europe.
On the domestic level, the new Conservative government is unlikely to take the country in any dramatically new direction either. In fact, the major issues affecting the working class-that the media focused on during the campaign to stoke fears about what might have happened under Conservative rule --were actually policies first formulated by the Liberal regime. Chief among these is the dire warning about the progressive dismantling of Canada’s previous comparatively generous social wage system, primarily through cuts to the country’s expensive national health care system that the Conservatives would supposedly implement. However, what this propaganda fails to explain was that this attack on the healthcare system, and on other elements of the social wage in general, was already well under way under the Liberals. Harper’s policies, and those of his provincial protégés in Alberta, are little more than advanced expressions of the logic rooted in the very nature of the global capitalist economic crisis itself that forces the bourgeoisie to progressively attack the living and working conditions of the working class throughout the world. Canada is no exception.
The Canadian media was to some degree successful in lining the Conservatives’ policy on healthcare to the ideology of the “right-wing movement” in the U.S., through the themes of “privatization” and “neo-liberalism,” further feeding fears that the Conservative government would accelerate Canada’s assimilation with the U.S. Nevertheless, these policies do not differ in any fundamental way from what a Liberal or NDP government would be compelled by the very logic of capitalism to do: attack the living standard of the working class.
On the social level, the excitement about abortion, gay marriage and crime was used to maximum effect during the election campaign to divide and distract the working class from class issues. On crime, Harper has announced plans to “crack down” on gun crime and other violent offenses that are becoming increasingly more common in Canada’s large cities. These are the same cities hailed as safe, multi-cultural utopias in American leftist Michael Moore’s film “Bowling for Columbine.” In fact, Winnipeg’s violent crime rate is about the same as New York City, while Toronto has witnessed several high profile shootings involving youth, and Vancouver is becoming a central hub for violent Sikh and other Asian gangs.
While growing crime clearly reflects the effects of capitalist social decomposition, it is without doubt that the Canadian state’s attempts to strengthen its repressive apparatus will do little to make the cities safer. In fact, they will only give the state more tools to crack down on the working class, when the later begins to respond to capitalism’s attacks on its own class terrain.
When all is said and done, the recent
Canadian elections mean no qualitative change for the condition of the working
class in that country. Moreover, while the Canadian bourgeoisie may have
succeeded in reviving its electoral mystification for the short term, it
remains in a very difficult predicament. Canada, even more so than the U.S., is
a very divided nation, as the election showed. While the Conservatives won a
plurality of the vote, and were thus able to form a government, the majority of
Canadians voted for “left of center” parties. Moreover, the Canadian
bourgeoisie itself is very divided along linguistic and regional lines, and the
specter of Quebec’s secession is a serious threat to the country’s very
geographic integrity. All this makes the situation for the current Conservative
government very precarious. Nevertheless, due to the global nature of the
capitalist crisis, it will have no choice but to continue most of its Liberal
predecessor’s main policies, attack the social wage, continue to forge an
independent imperialist policy and challenge the domination of its southern
neighbor. - Henk, 24/3/06
The following report on Internationalism’s March 10 public meeting is extracted from a lengthier posting on the Commie Curmudgeon blog (nomorebigwheels.blogspot.com)
March 13. This past Friday night, I was faced with a somewhat difficult choice – go help the people of the New SPACE with their/our table at the Left Forum, or go to an open ICC Meeting in Brooklyn instead. A couple of weeks ago…I said that I would not be able to do the latter. But as it turns out, after giving it some thought…I went to the ICC meeting after all. And I am glad that I made that choice – I think the ICC meeting provided a lot more good information, and was overall a far more interesting (and intellectually intense) experience, than I would have been likely to get attending those sessions of academic-leftist schmoozing, networking, and/or star-gazing that comprise the Left Forum…
…The specific subject of this meeting was the Meaning of the New York City transit strike. This extended into some lively discussion about unions in general, the increase of workers’ solidarity (especially separate from, or one might say in spite of, the official dealings of the trade unions), and the possiblities for workers to further build “consciousness” at a time when the true nature of capitalism is becoming more blatant and brutal as capital tries to defend itself against increasing crises (which the ICC maintains are actually part of capitalism’s decline)...
At a later point, we discussed the issue of what kinds of workers’ groups might best contribute to future radical or revolutionary struggle, and I was pleased to hear my ICC comrades say that real revolutionary groups or organizations would probably have to be temporary entities specifically springing up to meet a high moment of struggle or revolutionary challenge. They would not be permanently established worker’s groups, such as “anarchist unions,” which almost always end up falling into the same role as trade unions, especially during times when the struggle has subsided, functioning in ways that at best compromise (if not work directly against) their supposed revolutionary purpose. (This, by the way, is not a quote, but my own summary of the dialogue. Maybe the ICC can say this better/more forcefully.) I might add that this is the sort of viewpoint that I have been leaning toward more myself, after trying for some time to work with the idea of traditional revolutionary syndicalism - especially anarchosyndicalism - which I have found less and less convincing in recent years. These syndicalist unions are certainly preferable, at least in principle, to trade unions, but I’ve arrived at the opinion that neither form of established workers’ union will ever provide a good means by itself to radically challenge the system, especially not in the present age.
Toward the close of the meeting, I asked a little about the idea of capitalist decadence. This is the idea that capitalism is not simply going through one crisis in a never-ending series of crises but is actually in long-term decline as a result of certain built-in contradictions in the system that were discussed by Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, etc. This idea was raised in the ICC’s formal presentation during the meeting, because it is a significant part of their critique, along with their idea of a newer phase of capitalist decomposition, which is a later and even more critical stage in capitalism’s decline.
I wondered whether the ICC sees the decomposition of capitalism as following a sort of timeline, and whether they shared the idea with some proponents of decadence theory that there will be a specific moment of final collapse which revolutionaries should be preparing for. (I believe that Loren Goldner subscribes to this idea to some extent, focusing especially on the impending crises from the unprecedented explosion in dependence on fictitious capital and world debt.) And, as I’d correctly surmised, the ICC isn’t about to specify a deadline or moment of ultimate collapse but does see the danger of a sort of timeline running out, due to the present condition of capitalist decomposition, if there is no genuine socialist revolution – the danger being that, as mentioned by Rosa Luxemburg (which was based on something said earlier by Engels), without achieving socialism, we will enter a state of total barbarism.As I told the ICC, I find the notion of capitalist decadence, as well as decomposition, to be very intriguing, but I can’t say that I’m 100 percent behind it yet. Certainly, I see signs of deterioration and regression everywhere as well as impending crises…. There is a passage in Chapter 15 of Marx’s Grundrisse which the ICC cites as a major source for this theory of decadence…. However, I have spoken to other people, who are far more versed in Marxian theory than I am, who say that they wouldn’t interpret that passage in the same way at all. Personally, the idea of capitalist decadence and decomposition is something that I am very enticed to believe, but I also know that an idea like this can be dangerously comforting to those of us who are yearning to see some sort of end to the awful story that capitalism has been creating over the past several centuries. So, though this might seem a bit too wishy-washing/wavering, I’m not going to close myself off to the other side of the debate completely right now.
I do look forward to going to more ICC meetings, where I can participate in more fascinating discussions, learning and sharing revolutionary ideas. // posted by RS
It is impossible to clarify communist positions without an active exchange of different points of view, without a debate. Therefore we welcome letters from readers and regularly publish them alongside our response in the press of the ICC with the aim of generating discussion around our work and political positions. With this in mind we encourage readers to contact us if they have a comment on, or criticism of, a position defended in our press, even if it is just a few lines.
We recently received a letter from Germany, which deals with the question of human behavior and in particular, comportment. How we behave with others is a central aspect of social life, of what it means to be human. The letter conveys that its author is not merely dwelling on general problems of being human, but is especially interested in the question of social comportment. The letter also looks at the perspectives for the class struggle. Essentially it deals with the question of whether or not the working class today and in the future will be able to stand up to the pressure of competition –the central theme of capitalist thought and comportment – and put forward its own social perspective.
What are the preconditions for the proletariat developing its own specific class forms of behavior, which can live up to the final goal of its struggle – communism? In what context does a specific kind of behavior evolve? Which emotions are an expression of this?
This letter makes it perfectly clear that our reader has not just posed major a question but that he has gone a step further and has begun to provide an answer. We consider the questions raised by the comrade as extremely important and vital for the working class as a whole. Below we publish extracts from the comrade’s letter followed by extracts of our response.
“What influence, what function and what
cause does confidence, will, solidarity, organization, feeling of
responsibility and personal history have? What actually causes us to behave in
a specific manner and how can we consciously influence our behavior? How
arbitrary is the question of comportment? What meaning does comportment have
within society? Whose interests does it serve? And is it possible to build a
collective consciousness?
“The connection between these
questions must be made within the given social reality. Today, due to social
decomposition, there is a danger that,
if the proletariat does not succeed in developing a class perspective,
more and more parts of the working class will become lumpenized. Low paying
jobs and short term contracts are linked to this danger, because workers have
to take up such jobs in fear of unemployment and poverty. Another face of
capitalist decomposition is increasing criminality as an expression of the
capitalist idea of everybody for him- or herself and against the rest of the
world. If the working class gives in and forgets about its collective
consciousness, its solidarity and confidence and its class interests as a world
wide class in the face of its momentary weakness, then there is the danger that
the balance of forces will turn towards capitalist decomposition and towards a
loss of a communist perspective....In a society in which the ruling class owns
all the means of production and where competition is actually the ruling
ideology, this ideology certainly does
not serve the class interests of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie as a whole
has the main interest of expanding the exploitation of man as labor power. The
exploitation of the proletariat is in fact a necessity for the bourgeoisie to
exist. Competition is not part of the class nature of the working class.
Nevertheless each worker is forced to compete with other workers for a job in
order not to fall beneath the minimum standard of living. It is a matter of
fact that there are not enough markets. Therefore unemployment and low paying
jobs will increase. Of course the working class as a whole has to defend itself
against this situation. The proletariat has to do so by developing the
perspective of communism through collective consciousness, international mass
strikes, the creation of soviets and a yet-to-be created communist world party.
This shows that even though on the surface it may appear that the question of
comportment is a general, cross class issue, you do in fact need to give an
answer that is necessarily class specific. According to the way the
“democratic” policy answers this question of comportment with the help of sociology,
psychology, neurobiology, and philosophy, there is supposedly no general
difference between classes. The only differences to be found are between female
and male, old and young, rich and poor, social
and antisocial, stupid and intelligent,…losers and winners, good genes and bad
genes, good and bad, ill and healthy. So that at the end of the day behavior is
measured and selected according to how well you function as a worker, to be
exploited. Within these capitalist criteria of the functionality of the workers
– which obviously biased in favor of the interest of the ruling class’ ideology
– there remains no room for the common interests of wage workers.
“The working class as a whole and its political organizations have to stand up against the ruling ideology, and draw lessons from past experiences, and use its knowledge for its class interests. Emotions such as envy, jealousy, meanness and ambition are expressions of property relations and therefore part of bourgeois society, as well as the ruling ideology. They are also to be found within the working class but only when competition situations create it. Competition among workers is not abstract, but a concrete reality. It is, thus, in the interest of the international proletariat to fight to put an end to its exploitation. In consequence, the more the proletariat gains collective awareness, the more the ideology of general competition is unable to prevent the strengthening of the working class. This broad and far reaching perspective is necessary, so that we can defend ourselves against this increasing exploitation today….”
The comrade has posed questions of great complexity and relevance. Issues of comportment have been researched and controversially discussed in scientific studies. As a communist organization we do not feel able to develop in great detail the origin and historic development of a great number of forms of comportment, which humanity has produced. We want to limit ourselves to naming some important principles, which the Marxist workers movement has worked out on these questions. These few general ideas may help contribute a framework for the discussion our reader has opened up.
The comrade wrote that feelings like envy, jealousy or ambitions are an expression of property relations and therefore part of bourgeois society. We agree that these feelings, in their form today, are also part of the property relations and thereby also of capitalism. Nevertheless Marxist authors such as August Bebel or Leo Trotsky repeatedly stated that a feeling like ambition would still exist in a future communist society. They were convinced of the fact that these feelings would not be a driving motor of competition, as in capitalism, of each against all but rather a form of ambition which would serve the whole society as much as possible. Therefore it would play an extremely positive role. This shows that according to Marxism the history of humanity does not necessarily develop in such a way that every form of society comes up with its own, completely new forms of emotions. If this were the case this would mean that there would be no continuity in history at all but rather merely a series of breaks and beginnings. However, the dialectical method teaches us that every great leap forward does not just mean a restart; at the same time it constitutes building on existing emotions on a higher level than before.
One and the same feeling can have different effects depending on the organization of society. An emotion, which in a given context can rather serve a notion of hostility amongst human beings, is capable of strengthening the social bond in changed living conditions. Obviously we should be cautious not to make things too easy for ourselves by saying that feelings lead to more competition in a society based on competition but in a society of truly social bonds, feelings would automatically have the opposite effect. This cannot be the case because the basic feelings of human beings are not always in harmony with each other. They can get into a clinch because they serve different purposes. The so-called maternal instinct for instance can collide with the instinct of self preservation, when a mother risks her life in order to protect her children. Apart from which, it is also obvious that not all emotions can foster the unity of society to the same extent, such as the example of jealousy given in the comrade’s letter. We actually do not know how old the emotion of jealousy is. Engels did not consider it an inherent social impulse in humans, but rather a cultural product. Anyhow it appears to be a very old feeling. Since it is quite difficult to reconcile the notion of jealousy with preserving social ties in society at the same time, different societies have had to develop various means in order to keep jealousy under control. If a communist society should still be confronted with such a problem, it is quite likely that it will find more effective and culturally more advanced means to deal with it.
In the letter the comrade asks about the causes and the social relativity of comportment. “Which influence, which function and which causes do confidence, will, solidarity, organization, feeling of responsibility and personal history have?” The main concern in the letter is a better understanding of those emotions, which are most needed in course of the struggle of the proletariat. The letter expresses the fear that capitalism might finally destroy all these positive qualities.
We think that this worry is fully justified.
The fact that probably the most severe cruelties in history happened in the
last 100 years is directly linked to the fact that capitalism –like no other
system of production – destroys the bond
between and the compassion amongst man, by turning all human beings into
competitors within an impersonal market mechanism. As written in the letter,
capitalist decomposition speeds up this process. Do these emotions still exist,
which for 200 years were an undoubting sign of proletarian class struggle?
Where do its roots lay?
Let us take the example of the
feeling of social responsibility mentioned in the letter. In her article on the
writer Korolenko, which Rosa Luxemburg wrote in prison during the First World
War, she demonstrates how this feeling of social responsibility developed from
the 1860s onwards in Russia, where generations of heroic revolutionaries
emerged:
“That
attitude towards society which enables one to be free of gnawing self-analysis
and inner discord and considers ‘God-willed conditions’ are something
elemental, accepting the acts of history as a sort of divine fate, is
compatible with the most varied political and social systems.… In Russia, this
‘imperturbable equilibrium of conscience’ had already begun to crumble in the
1860’s among wide circles of the intelligentsia. Korolenko describes in an
intuitive manner this spiritual change in Russian society, and shows just how
this generation overcame the slave psychology, and was seized by the trend of a
new time, the predominant characteristic of which was the “gnawing and painful,
but creative spirit of social responsibility””. (Rosa Luxemburg Speaks.
Pathway Press, New York, p. 343).
It becomes clear that it is the power
of consciousness that arouses people. This consciousness, as well as
solidarity, is a sign of the social being of humanity. The fact that man was
able to achieve a higher level of consciousness and outgrow animality, is
directly connected to the highly developed social predispositions of our species. The manifestation of these social
predispositions itself – common labour, common language etc. – has not weakened
our social dependency but rather increased it incredibly.
Of course it is true that capitalism undermines social impulses and makes active solidarity more difficult. But at the same time it has given birth to a class which per definition, due to its position in production – unlike any prior class in history – is capable of rediscovering these common social feelings in class struggle and taking them to a higher level. This class is the modern proletariat. The working class is able to do this, not because workers are better humans, but rather because the proletariat is the first class, which produces collectively without owning any means of production.
The letter is absolutely right in saying
that there is the danger that unemployment, by increasing the competition on
the tight labour market, can lead to opening the door within the ranks of the
proletariat for the idea of everybody for him- or herself“. It was already back
in the 1840s that Friedrich Engels said in his “Elberfelder Speeches,” that the
workers only start acting as an active class as soon as they line up their own solidarity
against capitalist competition.
Even more so: according to Engels it is only by doing so that the workers
actually regain their own humanity. Towards an undefeated generation of the
working class, unemployment is a particularly good means to uncover the
revolutionary nature of the proletariat. Firstly, because unemployment turns
class solidarity more and more into a question of survival. Secondly, because
the bankruptcy of capitalism unveils the incompatibility of wage labour and
human dignity.
As Rosa Luxemburg wrote in her
“Introduction to National Economy”, the struggle of the proletariat
against being made superfluous by
machines, in other words, against the consequences of the inner tendency of
capitalism – the fall of relative labour rate, the increase of capital power,
an overflowing army of unemployed – is a struggle against the system itself.:
“The workers cannot oppose anything to the technical progress of production, to discoveries, the introduction of machines, to steam and electricity, to the improvement of the means of transport. The effect of all these steps forward on the relative wage is a purely mechanical product of commodity production and the commodity character of labor power. This is why even the most powerful trade unions are quite powerless against this tendency of the relative wage to rapidly fall. The struggle against the drop in relative wages is thus no longer a struggle on the terrain of the commodity economy, but a revolutionary, insurrectional offensive against this economy itself, it is the socialist movement of the proletariat.” (ICC translation from the German original)
The letter is right in stressing that the proletariat – in
opposition to the bourgeoisie - is capable of overcoming the bourgeois ideology,
which tries to hide its reality, because of its own class interests.
Social feelings as well as the power of human consciousness are incredible
forces. Marxist confidence in the working class is also confidence in human
nature.
Translated from Weltrevolution (Germany).
The current immigration crisis that has captured so much attention in the capitalist media is not solely limited to the U.S. but is increasingly experienced by all capitalist metropoles in Europe and North America. The rioting in France last autumn by immigrant youth and the children of immigrants, primarily from North Africa, the recent flood of illegal immigrants and refugees to Spain’s Canary Islands, and the massive immigrant demonstrations in the U.S. this spring, predominantly by Latinos, but also including Asian and European immigrants stand as a clear reminder that this issue is a problem of global capitalism that exposes the bankruptcy of the capitalist economy and the inexorable decomposition of its outmoded social system.
For some years now in the U.S. as in France, Great Britain, Italy, Germany and other countries in Western Europe, the capitalist media and politicians have fueled an anti-immigrant ideological campaign. The central message of this campaign is that the recent immigrant, particularly the illegal immigrant, is responsible for the worsening economic and social conditions faced by the “native” working class, by taking jobs, depressing wages, overcrowding schools with their children, draining social welfare programs, increasing crime, and just about any other social woe you can think of.
This scapegoat propaganda is a classic example of capitalism’s strategy of divide and conquer, to divide workers against themselves, to blame each other for their problems, to fight over the crumbs, rather than to understand that it is the capitalist system that is responsible for their suffering. Blaming these problems on the immigrant workers is particularly cynical, since it is American state capitalism, which needs immigrant workers to fill low paid jobs, to serve as a reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers to depress wages for the entire working class.
Under cover of this campaign the bourgeoisie implements increasingly repressive policies ostensibly aimed at immigrants, but which augment the state’s repressive apparatus and increase social tolerance for such repression that will ultimately be available for use against the working class as a whole in moments of decisive class confrontations.
At the same time that it ruthlessly fans anti-immigrant hatred, the U.S. bourgeois cynically boasts that it is “a nation of immigrants,” providing opportunity for a better life for millions of people. And it certainly is true that because of the particular historic conditions under which American capitalism developed – an enormous territory with an extremely small native population – it was built on the backs of immigrants, whether imported against their will as slaves and indentured servants or as voluntary immigrants. Put in other words, the “American” working class was historically recruited from all around the world.
During the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, wave after wave of workers and ruined peasants from Europe, and to a lesser extent from Asia, supplied the labor force needed for the expansion of American capitalism. However, the time when American capital used any and all imaginable means to entice a desperately needed labor force to the U.S., that time of “generous” and essentially unrestricted immigration, is long gone.
It is no accident of history that the period of unrestricted immigration corresponded with the period of capitalist ascendency, when capitalism was still an historically progressive mode of production, dramatically expanding the forces of production, and that repressive, restrictive immigration policies characterized the period of capitalist decadence when the relations of capitalism became a fetter on the further development of the productive forces around the time of the First World War. Thus for instance, the Immigration Act of 1917 barred all Asian immigrants and created for the first time the concept of the non-immigrant foreign worker – who would come to America to work but was barred from staying. The National Origins Act enacted in 1924 limited the number of immigrants from Europe to 150,000 persons per year, and allocated the quota for each country on the basis of the ethnic makeup of the U.S. population in 1890 – before the massive waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. This was a blatantly racist measure to slow the growth of “undesirable” elements like Italians, Greeks, Eastern Europeans and Jews. In 1950, the McCarran-Walter Act was promulgated. Heavily influenced by McCarthyism and the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War, this law imposed new limits on immigration under cover of the struggle against Russian imperialism and the “world communist threat.”
In 1986, America’s anti-immigrant policy was updated with enactment of the Simpson-Rodino Immigration and Naturalization Control Reform Act, which dealt with the influx of illegal immigrants from Latin America, by imposing for the first time in American history sanctions (fines and even prison) against employers who knowingly employed undocumented workers. The influx of illegal immigrants had been heightened by the economic collapse of Third World countries during the 1970s, which triggered a wave of impoverished masses fleeing destitution in Mexico, Haiti, and war ravaged El Salvador. The quantitative proportions of this out of control upsurge resulted in the arrest of a record 1.6 million illegal immigrants in 1986 by immigration police.
However, this repressive “reform” law had only short-lived success in blocking immigration, as the devastating effects of capitalist decomposition in the underdeveloped countries throughout the period since the 1980s – poverty, civil war, disease, untold suffering – has impelled millions of workers in the Third World to seek refuge in Europe and America. By 1992, arrests of illegal immigrants in the U.S. were back up to 1.1 million for the year. At that time the U.S. government responded by increasing the number of airport immigration officers, introducing counterfeit-resistant green cards, increasing the number of agents patrolling the Mexico-US boarder, introducing the use of “surplus” military vehicles for patrol use, and constructing an American-made “Berlin Wall” – a 10-foot high solid steel barricade which ran inland from the ocean for about 10 miles in the Tijuana-San Diego area. Fourteen years later, the Bush administration plans to extend this wall for 700 to 2,000 miles depending upon the final version of the immigration bill that will be worked out by the House-Senate conference committee.
While immigrants come to the U.S. fleeing deplorable conditions in their countries of origins, the social and economic situation they find themselves in once they get here is far from a paradise. They are as a rule condemned to the most hazardous and lowest paying jobs. Hispanic industrial workers, who comprise the majority of illegal immigrants in recent decades, are suffering work-related injuries more often and more seriously than other workers in similar jobs. Nor do they receive comparable medical care or workmen’s compensation for their injuries. In addition, immigrants are forced into the ghettoes of the big cities where they face crowded housing, miserable hygienic conditions, reminiscent of the 19th century conditions faced by Italian and Irish immigrants more than a hundred years ago.
There are two essential differences between the flight of today’s illegal immigrants and their class brothers of the past. First the working class and peasant immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries, after a period of extreme exploitation at the hands of the bosses were either integrated as part of the working class into the normal relations of production in an expanding bourgeois society, or to some extent became part of the petty bourgeois element in the cities and countryside. In this way the immigrants’ standard of living rose to the average economic and social norm for the rest of the working class. The situation has largely been different for today’s immigrants, who have been subjected to social marginalization, hazardous and low-paying jobs, and over-exploitation in an ever-growing cash/off-the-books economy.
The second difference between the immigrants of the ascendant period of capitalism and today is that contemporary immigrants confront a different historical situation: capitalist decomposition. Pushed to emigrate from the periphery of capitalism to its center regions due to economic collapse and political chaos, rejected, socially marginalized, victimized by racism and other bourgeois prejudices in the so-called “land of opportunity,” this “immigrant” sector of the working class is particularly trapped in the turmoil of capitalism.
Historically the working class has always been a class of immigrants, migrating in the first place from the countryside to the cities in search of work and the chance to be exploited at the dawn of capitalist development, or later migrating from city to city following opportunities for work as new industries and centers of production sprang up. In this sense the tension between “native” workers and immigrants is alien to the class interests of the proletariat, and has always represented the intrusion of bourgeois ideology into working class life. In the last analysis what matters for the world working class is to understand that both the wave of impoverished immigrant masses and the anti-immigrant campaigns we are witnessing today are expressions of the dead-end to which decadent capitalism has condemned humanity. The global economic crisis has put the working class standard of living under attack everywhere. The social decomposition of capitalism has created chaos and despair in the underdeveloped countries forcing millions to seek the opportunity to sell their labor power in the more stable capitalist metropoles. Only the working class movement, with its revolutionary communist perspective can deliver society from its current impasse. It is essential for proletarian revolutionaries and class conscious militants to point out the fundamental unity of the working class against all our enemy class’s attempt to poison us with hatred and disunity.
ES/JG, July '06.
This spring hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers, most of them “illegal aliens”, as the bourgeoisie calls them, predominantly from Latin American countries, took to the streets in major American cities across the country, from Los Angeles, to Dallas, to Chicago, to Washington DC, and New York City, protesting a threatened crackdown proposed in legislation advocated by the right-wing of the Republican party. The movement seemed to erupt overnight, coming from nowhere. What is the meaning of these events and what is the class nature of this movement?
The anti-immigrant legislation that won approval in the House of Representatives and provoked the demonstrations would criminalise illegal immigration, making it a felony for the first time. Currently being an illegal immigrant is a civil violation, not a criminal offense. Illegal immigrants would be arrested, tried, convicted, deported, and would forfeit any possibility to ever legally return to the US in the future. State laws which forbid local agencies, from police to schools to social services from reporting illegal aliens to immigration officials would be nullified, and employers who hired illegal aliens would suffer legal penalties as well. Under this legislation, upwards of 12 million immigrants would face arrest and deportation. This extreme legislation does not have the support of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie, as it does not correspond to the global interests of American state capitalism, which clearly needs immigrant workers to fill low paid jobs, to serve as a reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers to depress wages for the entire working class, and considers the idea of mass deportation of 12 million people to be an absurdity. Opposed to this proposed crackdown are the Bush administration, the official Republican leadership in the Senate, the Democrats, big city mayors, state governors, major corporate employers who need to exploit a plentiful supply of immigrant workers (in the retail, restaurant, meat packing, agribusiness, construction and home care industries), and the trade unions who dream of extracting membership dues from these destitute workers. This motley crew of bourgeois “champions” of immigrant workers favors more moderate legislation, which would tighten up the border, slash the numbers of new immigrants, allow illegal immigrants who have been here for a number of years to become legalized, and force those who have been here for less than two years to leave the country, but with the possibility to return legally in the future. Some form of “guest” worker program would be set up to allow foreign workers to find temporary work in the US on a legal basis and maintain the supply of needed cheap labor.
It was in this social and political context that the immigrant worker demonstrations erupted. Coming on the heels of the unemployed immigrant youth riots in France last autumn, the student revolt triggered in France this spring against the government’s attack on job security, and the transit strike in New York in December, the immigrant demonstrations were hailed by leftists of all stripes, many libertarian and anarchist groups as well. It is certainly true that the immigrants threatened by the legislation are a sector of the working class that confronts a particularly harsh and brutal exploitation, suffers a harrowing existence, denied access to social services and medical treatment, and that their situation demands the solidarity and support of the working class as a whole. This solidarity is all the more necessary because in classical fashion the bourgeoisie uses the debate over legal and illegal status of the immigrants as a means to stir up racism and hatred, to divide the proletariat against itself, all the while that it profits from the exploitation of the immigrant workers. This could indeed have been a struggle on the proletarian terrain, but there is a big difference between what could be and what actually happens in any given movement.
Wishful thinking should not blind us to the actual class nature of the recent demonstrations, which were in large measure a bourgeois manipulation. Yes, there have been workers in the streets, but they are there totally on the terrain of the bourgeoisie, which provoked the demonstrations, manipulated them, controlled them, and openly led them. It is true that there have been some instances, such as the spontaneous walkouts by Mexican immigrant high school students in California – the sons and daughters of the working class – that implied certain similarities to the situation in France, but this movement was not organized on the proletarian terrain or controlled by immigrant workers themselves. The demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets were orchestrated and mobilized by the Spanish-language mass media, that is to say by the Spanish-speaking bourgeoisie, with the support of large corporations and establishment politicians. The fact that the demonstrations announced for May 19 during the May 1 protests never materialized is testimony to the bourgeois control of the movement.
Nationalism has poisoned the movement, whether it was Latino nationalism, which cropped up in the opening moments of the demonstrations, or the sickening rush to affirm Americanism that followed more recently, or the nationalist, racist-based opposition to the immigrants fomented by right-wing talk show broadcasters on the radio and right-wing Republicans. When there were complaints in the mass media that too many immigrant demonstrators carried Mexican flags in California and that this showed they were more loyal to their home country than their adopted home, movement organizers supplied thousands of American flags to be waved in the demonstrations that followed in other cities to affirm the loyalty and Americanism of the protests. The demand for citizenship, which is a totally bourgeois legalism, is another example of the non-proletarian terrain of the struggle. This putrid nationalist ideology is designed to completely short circuit any possibility for immigrants and American-born workers to recognize their essential unity.
By the end of April a Spanish language version of the national anthem recorded by leading Hispanic pop stars was released and broadcast on the radio. Of course the right-wing nationalist opponents of the immigrants jumped on the Spanish-language version of the national anthem as affront to national dignity. Even though he opposes the extreme anti-immigrant legislation rammed through the House of Representatives, even Pres. George W. Bush criticized the Spanish-language version of the anthem, in an attempt to placate the far right base of the Republican Party. This was particularly ironic since Bush himself appeared in campaign rallies in Hispanic communities during the 2000 presidential election and sang along with Spanish renditions of the Star Spangled Banner.
Nowhere was the capitalist nature of the movement more evident than in the mass demonstration in April in New York City (with an estimated 38% of the adult population born in a foreign country) when 300,000 immigrants rallied outside City Hall, where they had the support of the city’s mayor, Republican Michael Bloomberg, and Democratic Senators Charles Schumer and Hilary Clinton, who spoke to the crowd and praised their struggle as example of Americanism and patriotism.
It’s been 20 years since the last major immigration reform effort undertaken by the Reagan administration, which granted amnesty to illegal immigrants. But that amnesty did nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigration that has continued unabated for two decades, because American capitalism needs a constant supply of cheap labor and because the effects of the social decomposition of capitalism in underdeveloped countries has so degraded living conditions as to impel growing numbers of workers to seek refuge in the relatively more stable and prosperous capitalist metropoles.
For the bourgeoisie the time has come to stabilize the situation once again, as it has become more difficult to absorb an increasing flood of immigrants and more and more difficult to tolerate a situation where millions of workers are not officially integrated into the economy or society, who don’t pay taxes, are not documented, after nearly 20 years of illegal status. On the one hand, this has led the Bush administration to resort to clumsy efforts to restrict new immigration at the border, for example by militarizing the border with Mexico, literally constructing a Berlin Wall to make it difficult for immigrants to cross into the US. On the other hand it has also led the administration to favor legalization for workers who have been here more than two years. Because the U.S. economy is such that it needs a constant flow of cheap labor in a big sector of the economy, it is highly unlikely that the several million workers who have been in the U.S. under two years and will be legally required to leave the country, will actually do so. Most likely they will remain here illegally, and will become the base of the future illegal workforce that will continue to be necessary for the capitalist economy, both to provide cheap labor and put pressure on wages for the rest of the working class.
The recalcitrance of the right-wing to accept this reality reflects the increasing political irrationality created by social decomposition, which has previously manifested itself in the ruling class’ difficulty in achieving its desired results in the presidential election. For example, the irrational xenophobia exhibited by the right is completely at odds with the interests of American state capitalism. In the last decade and a half the presence of immigrants has spread from the traditional population centers in California, New York, Florida, Texas, and Illinois to more rural, more traditional ethnically homogenous regions in the south and Midwest. The meat packing industry, for example, has brought thousands of illegal immigrants to work in their meat packing and poultry processing plants in places like Nebraska, Iowa, Georgia and North Carolina. The racist reaction to the immigrant influx in these areas is a classic illustration of the effects of decomposition. The immigration bill passed by the Senate which coincides with the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie’s policy orientation, with a few measures thrown in to placate the right, such as the construction of a wall at the Mexican border, beefing up border patrols, and the administration’s decision to dispatch National Guard troops to police the border, still has to be reconciled with the House. It’s hard to believe that the extreme right cannot see the impossibility of mass deportations of 12 million people, and the need to stabilize the situation. It’s only a matter of time before the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie imposes its solution to the problem as the bourgeoisie moves to integrate the newly legalized population into the mainstream political process.
Internationalism 5/30/06
As the Memorial Day weekend neared the price of gas at the pump in New York State skyrocketed to $3.21 per gallon for regular. In the past year crude oil has risen 33 percent. The Bush administration and the mass media claim the cause is the law of supply and demand. According to them the industrialized countries are “addicted” to oil and, particularly in the U.S., as the summer vacation period approaches, demand is going up. Add to this the lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina on oil production and the refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, and the burgeoning energy needs of the booming economies of India and China and fears of political instability in the Middle East, particularly because of the continuing war in Iraq, where oil production has not returned to pre-war levels, and a possible military confrontation over Iranian nuclear ambitions, and terrorist attacks on oil facilities in Nigeria, and the result, according to the bourgeoisie, is a classic situation in which demand far outstrips current oil supplies. As National Public Radio put it, “So you have a situation where demand has been growing steadily and inexorably, and the systems of supply is quite vulnerable. That’s the basic recipe for high prices” (NPR April 27, 2006).
The leftists, including consumer spokesman and Greens leader Ralph Nader, offer yet another explanation. For them, corporate greed and unconscionable price gouging are to blame, pure and simple. It’s the work of evil, money hungry capitalists. They point to soaring oil company profits as proof.
Whatever grain of truth these explanations contain that give them some semblance of plausibility, neither corresponds to a comprehensive explanation of reality.
Despite the current controversy over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, oil supplies are unaffected. Iran has not even threatened to cut oil production as a political tactic in the current confrontation. As Iranian oil minister, Kaxem Vaziri-Hamaneh, put it during the January OPEC meeting in Vienna, “We are not mixing politics with the economic decisions on this issue.” Despite the American bourgeoisie’s claim that there are inadequate supplies, all the evidence indicates that current inventories of crude oil are adequate to meet current purchases, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. According to forecasts for future global oil production from sources as diverse as the U.S. Energy Department, Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and Simmons and Company International, global oil production will continue to grow for the next 10 to 30 years. All the political instability and war that the bourgeoisie says might reduce supplies in the future are the inevitable by-products of imperialism and the social decomposition of capitalism. It is imperialism and decomposition that is responsible for soaring oil prices, not the invisible hand of supply and demand.
If there is pressure on world oil supplies, it comes from the headlong rush of industrialized countries to augment their Strategic Petroleum Reserves, in anticipation of possible interruptions in oil production due to the threat of war. Currently there are 26 nations with SPR of over 1.4 billion barrels of oil, oil that is artificially removed from world oil supplies, oil that it is not available to meet current consumer demand. With the growing threat of war (imperialism again!), the U.S. is reportedly planning to increase its current SPR of 700 million barrels of oil, by 300 million. Australia, the countries of the European Union, and Japan and Korea are also expected to increase their SPR as well. In addition, China, Russia, and India plan to create their oil SPR in the period ahead. India seeks to create an SPR of 40 million barrels initially. China plans an SPR of 100 million barrels. While Russia has not announced its SPR goal, 78 million barrels would give it a reserve equivalent to 30 days of typical oil consumption. To fill these expanding SPR needs, as much as 1,000,000 barrels of oil per day are likely to be withdrawn from the open market over the next few years, putting more pressure on crude oil prices (www.energybulletin.net/11386.html [42], May 22, 2006). This inflationary pressure on crude oil prices is the direct fruit of U.S. imperialism’s strategy in the Middle East for the past decade, to put pressure on Europe, particularly German and French imperialism, by exerting control over world oil supplies. As increasingly happens under the conditions of capitalist decomposition, every action U.S. imperialism takes to defend its hegemony only exacerbates its problems, in this case by sending petroleum prices through the roof, even for the U.S. itself.
In this context the leftist grumbling about greedy capitalists becomes a caricature. Nader’s arguments about corporate greed rest primarily on the contention that American petroleum industry has artificially created an oil shortage by shutting down “scores of refineries and then turn ‘refinery shortages’ into higher gas prices at the pump.” (Nader, “The Price of Oil,” April 28, 2006 www.pirg.org [43]). Even if this were true, it wouldn’t explain why the price of crude oil would rise so dramatically so fast. Sure, greed is inevitably a factor in the capitalist economy. The oil corporations, as any capitalist enterprise in the same circumstances, have not hesitated to take immediate advantage of soaring crude prices, to raise prices at the pump, even if it will take two to three months for current higher priced crude oil to make its way to retail outlets. Since their original investment in crude oil production, from which they gain most of their profits, was made at a time when oil prices were much lower and their break even point is therefore much lower, naturally profits will rise dramatically.
To the extent that the Hurricane Katrina impacted oil refineries in the Gulf Coast, that is a manifestation of decomposition, in that capitalism’s total disregard for the environment has negatively affected world meteorological patterns and caused the rash of extreme weather disturbances in the last few yeas. Years of neglect of the infrastructure, a fruit of the social decomposition of capitalism, has made the Gulf Coast unnecessarily vulnerable to catastrophic storm damage.
The bourgeoisie can spout all the mumble-jumble it wants about supply and demand as its alibi for skyrocketing oil prices, but it is the world imperialist system itself that is the fundamental cause of the current difficulties.
JG, July ’06.
Clearly the proletariat in the U.S. is completely inscribed in the same generalized return to struggle that has been occurring on the international level since 2003, as the world working class struggles to emerge from the disorientation, confusion and reflux in consciousness that ensued after the fall of the two bloc system at the end of the 1980s, which was so deep and so profound that in many ways the proletariat, while not defeated in the historic sense, experienced great difficulty in even recognizing is own identity as a class and in having confidence in itself as a class with the capacity to defend itself.
As we have noted on the Web site and in the press, the dramatic high point of this trend was the New York City transit strike in December, but it is important to stress that this struggle was not a sudden development but rather the fruit of an ongoing tendency to retake the struggle as seen in the grocery workers struggle in California, the struggles at Boeing and North West Airlines, Philadelphia transit, and the graduate assistants strike at New York University. As in other countries, workers in the U.S. have been pushed by the seriousness of the global economic crisis and consequent escalation of attacks by the ruling class on their standard of living to defend themselves as shake off the effects of the period of disorientation. The primary task posed by these nascent struggles in many countries was not the extension of struggles across geographic and industrial sector lines, but the reacquisition of consciousness at the most basic levels, of class self identity and solidarity.
The return to struggle in the U.S. occurs within a social situation increasingly free of illusions. Gone is the sense of a false reality that characterized at least part of the Clinton years, with promises of unending growth, the Internet bubble, the soaring stock market. Today there is a generalized sense that the future is not rosy, that things are not going right, there is nothing to brag about in the economy, no cause for optimism – no alternative but to struggle, to fight against the escalating austerity attacks on the standard of living. Coupled with the fact that there are today two generations of undefeated workers in the proletariat also favors the development of class struggle.
There is a qualitative aspect to the current return to struggle that is significantly different from previous experiences since the onset of the global crisis in the 1960s. Yes, there is anger, even rage, about austerity attacks, particularly in regard to cuts in pensions and medical benefits, which is in fact a drastic cut in the compensation or wages of the workers. But the struggles that are emerging today are not driven by blind anger or unthinking combativeness, as they were more likely to be in the late 60s or the 70s. Today workers are returning to the struggle with a great consciousness of what is at stake and what has to be done. A strike today means risky replacement by scabs, it risks the threat of company bankruptcy and the permanent disappearance of jobs, it risks trading increasing difficulty to support one’s family, for absolute disaster. In the case of the transit workers, their strike was illegal, with the loss of wages not only for everyday they were on strike, but also a penalty of two additional days’ pay for every strike day—in other words for a three-day strike, they lost nine days pay. In addition they faced the threat of a $25,000 fine for the first day of the strike, which would double each day – thus for the three-day strike, the court could have imposed a fine of $175,000 on each individual striker!
Conscious of all these risks, dangers, and penalties, workers have struck, because they increasingly understand the necessity to fight and that they are not just fighting for themselves but their class. This reclamation of class self identity and the closely linked revival of class solidarity are perhaps the most important legacies of the transit strike. We can see it in many manifestations, in the statement of the bus driver who told one of our comrades, “It was good that we stood up for the working class.” We can see it in the tremendous sympathy for the strike throughout the working class in NYC during the strike, even though the strike inconvenienced many workers. Workers everywhere talked about the need to stand up for the erosion of pensions, against the imposition of two-tier systems that would penalize new workers. It could be seen in the voice of the older African American worker who was seen on television denouncing Mayor Bloomberg for branding the strikers “thugs.” “If they’re thugs, then I’m a thug, too,” she said. It was seen as well in the tendency for other workers to refuse to leave the strikers isolated and alone, but the desire to demonstrate their support and solidarity. Other workers visited the picket lines, to march with workers, to bring food and hot coffee in the extreme cold weather, to talk to the strikers – and they were welcomed wholeheartedly by the strikers. In one case, several teachers brought their classes to visit the workers and offer support. The transit strikers knew they were not alone, that they were not isolated, and it was because their struggle confronted exactly the same problems and conditions that the rest of the class confronts.
During the 3rd wave of class struggle we used to argue that real solidarity meant joining the struggle, spreading the struggle to other sectors, having other sectors joining the strike, integrating their own demands, etc. This type of generalization, and spreading and politicization of struggles is absolutely necessary and integral to the revolutionary process, but perhaps the present manifestations of solidarity emanating from the proletariat itself shows how much deeper, and even more elementally human solidarity can be in the working class. During the waves of class struggle that occurred in the 70s, there was often a simultaneity of struggle, but not necessarily any significant sense of solidarity between the workers in struggle at the same time. Today, as workers turn to struggle with an increasing consciousness of the importance and difficulties of their struggles, a re-emerging sense of class self-identity, and a profound need for solidarity, the situation is qualitatively different. While the struggle ahead will be exceedingly difficult, there is room for optimism about the perspectives for class struggle, and a growing responsibilities for the intervention of revolutionary minorities in the class struggle.
Internationalism, July '06.
With the elections of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Michelle Bachelet in Chile, the bourgeoisie’s mouthpieces are once again spewing ideological venom, according to which these democratic elections have opened the door to new possibilities to help the have-nots in certain countries of Latin America. This is possible because the victors of such elections belong to Left parties, or to Center-Left coalitions. People such as Carlos Fuentes [1] portray the election of Morales to the Bolivian presidency as a positive event, which supposedly serves to strengthen democracy, as before then “The Left had no other recourse but armed insurrection” (Reforma, 02/01/06).
This trend began with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela; then Lula in Brazil; Lucio Gutierrez in Ecuador; Kirchner in Argentina; Tavare Vasquez in Uruguay; and Toledo in Peru. Could it be that democracy is finally paying off? Have the have-nots finally succeeded in electing candidates to office that represent their interests? Is the “Bolivarian dream” of a united American continent becoming a reality? Could this new united America—or at least part of it—offer a response to US imperialism, and in this way improve the lot of poor countries?
Perhaps we would do better by asking ourselves why it is that the bourgeoisie itself has been so welcoming of the newly elected Left, as the World Parliamentary Forum did: “We claim as ours the powerful presence of popular movements, one of the central elements in building alternatives that strongly put in question the capitalist model on its phase of neo-liberal globalization – a presence in which the social movements, and the mobilizations of native American Indians are on the first line of combat. In particular we claim the importance of the victory of the popular sectors in Bolivia and the election to the presidency of their American Indian leader Evo Morales…” (Final Declaration of the WPF, February 16, 2006).
Those still holding illusions about democracy and the democratic process believe that the main factor determining the policies of a particular candidate for office is his character. That is why the bourgeois media has focused greatly on the personal and social lives of presidents, in their “revolutionary” language, and on whether or not they are “indigenous.” These bits of information are used as guarantees that these governments will act on behalf of the exploited, and in opposition to the bourgeoisie.
However, we need to understand that it is not a candidate’s party affiliation, his intentions, or his ethnic origins that will determine the type of politics he will practice. On the contrary, his influences will always be the necessities of the capitalist system. That is why in today’s world it is impossible to implement a Left political platform that is essentially different from that of the Right.
Under decadent capitalism, parliamentary structures and electoral processes are mere circuses that the bourgeoisie uses to trap the working class in a democratic illusion. This is why left parties that participate in the electoral process - by claiming to champion the interests of the exploited - help reinforce the oppression of the exploited. These parties serve as agents of the capitalist class who have infiltrated the ranks of the working class. When they use names and rhetoric similar to that historically employed by the working class, or by “revolutionaries,” they do so with the intention of keeping the exploited under the illusion that a vote for the candidate that “fights on their behalf” will help the exploited “win” and have a chance for a better future.
In Revolucion Mundial (ICC newspaper in Mexico) No. 86, May-June 2005 [45], we wrote that the arrival of left parties to Latin American governments reflected “…a weakness of the political apparatus, which desperately seeks to unite the bourgeoisie and strengthen its control of the workers, in a time in which the later have been making their will known as a response to the on-going and deepening crisis of capitalism.” By following this line of thought, it becomes possible to understand that the political presence of left populist governments is fundamentally due to:
This is why the election of left parties, and the celebration of the “triumph of the oppressed” are only means by which the bourgeoisie takes combativeness and class-consciousness away from the class struggle.
In Latin America in particular, the election of leftist administrations have made the myth of democracy more believable once again (in the past, decades of poor living conditions in the continent had almost ruined the reputation of democracy). This is why we contend that although the elections of these “new” governments in Latin America reflect the inability of the bourgeoisie to produce a candidate capable of imposing discipline among the different factions of the ruling class; it is also an opportunity for the bourgeoisie to strengthen its ideological dominance. For example, with the election of Evo Morales, the Bolivian bourgeoisie accomplished something it had not been able to do in 40 years: to obtain the support of 54% of the population during the election. This trend can be seen in Brazil with Lula, in Argentina with Kitchner, and (as is expected) in Mexico with Lopez Obrador.
“In general, the mechanism is the same: to convince workers that the left will ‘change things,’ and that it’s enough to follow a ‘Messiah’ to solve society’s problems. The electoral campaigns attempt to have workers do away with their methods of struggle, their strikes and their soviets (soberain general assemblies…) to instead take refuge in ‘democratic channels and elections—and in doing so, they attempt to prevent workers from developing class consciousness, and lose themselves in the labyrinth of a ‘voting citizenry’…The election of Lula needs to be analyzed from a proletarian perspective. The illusions that Brazilian workers had in his candidacy gave the bourgeoisie the tools through which they were able to pass tough economic and political measures. However, let us make it clear: Lula did not betray the workers; his policies were merely a continuation of his anti-proletariat maneuvers that began with his invocation of ‘democracy’ and his alluring ways to trap the workers in the ballot box mystification.” (Revolucion Mundial, No. 86 [45])
Another myth that the socialist presidential candidates have spread is that their national economies will benefit from protecting their “sovereignty” through the nationalization of businesses, or by confronting “yanqui imperialism.” Hugo Chavez has been the most successful selling this lie, which was helped by his alliance with Fidel Castro. “Anti-imperialism” is as effective as nationalism in helping the bourgeoisie recruit proletarian participation in the exploitation of the latter, and the defense of the former.
The Bush administration defines Chavez and Castro as “negative forces within this region,” but not because Bush actually believes Chavez and Castro are dangerous in and of themselves. The Bush administration is aware that these two heads of state are just tools that are used by political and economic rivals of the USA to advance their own national interests. The election of left governments in Latin America will not necessarily strengthen the enemies of “yanqui imperialism,” even if the newly elected left joins the rhetorical anti-imperialist bandwagon. With the arrival of left governments, the Latin American bourgeoisie need not change its political alliances; Lula is a perfect example of this. [2]
When a government or group of governments (such as the ones that came together at the World Parliamentary Forum) screams anti-imperialist clichés, it is safe to assume that either its alliances lie with the imperialist’s enemy, or is attempting to use the anti-imperialist rhetoric to win votes (as Evo Morales did). [3]
The anti-imperialist “formula” used by the left factions of Capital can be summarized as such: the exploited need to take disease, misery and hunger with a smile so that their “poor” national bourgeoisie will not have such a hard time in life. And to help the workers swallow the nationalist poison, the bourgeoisie uses tactics such as protests against neo-liberalism, the advocacy of nationalist populism, the nationalization of businesses, co-operativism, auto-management, etc. all of which are sold as measures that are intended to help the workers, but which actually strengthen their particular state capitalisms and thereby help “save” their economies a little. [4]
What the above discussion suggests is that the bourgeoisie’s propaganda about the left’s advances in Latin America is intended to separate the proletariat from its class struggle. Neither the left nor the right of the bourgeoisie have the capacity to fix the state of the economy in Latin America. On the contrary, regardless of the party in power, the misery of the working class—on whose shoulders the bourgeoisie rests the weight of the crisis—will only grow. We thus need to reaffirm that the only way for the working class to obtain its emancipation is to develop its class struggle.
Hector / February 2006.
[1] Carlos Fuentes is a Mexican writer, and is considered one of the best known novelists and essayist in the Spanish-speaking world, according to Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Fuentes [46]
[2] “When asked to comment on the advances of the left in Latin America, and the possibility that this will fuel anti-American sentiments in the region, Donald Rumsfeld, the head of the Pentagon in the United States, answered that the majority of Latin American counties (with the exception of Cuba) are making strides towards democratic governance.” (EFE, 18 February 2006).
[3] “Evo Morales invited George Bush to visit him in Bolivia and have a chat ‘face to face’ about the chances of having their countries develop a relationship of cooperation. Morales also asked Bush to extend the U.S.’s Most Preferred Nations Status for Andean countries—which benefit Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, but expire at the end of this year. Morales has also stated that he will not force the DEA out of his country (AP, 2 February 2006). Yet, he continues to use anti-imperialist rhetoric to try to conserve his political image. And regarding the supposed regional Axis of Evil comprised of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, he stated ‘What Axis of Evil? Bolivia does not belong to an Axis of Evil; but from its location in Latin America, it builds an axis for humanity, and seeks to liberate the countries of this region…This is not a time when the people are able to raise their weapons against imperialism; this is a time when the empire makes war on the people.” (16 February 2006).
[4] The information that the news media has broadcast on Evo Morales’ first acts as President clearly demonstrate that even if he presents himself as a representative of the exploited, in actuality he represents the bourgeoisie: “President Evo Morales reached out to entrepreneurs in Santa Cruz, who were his most severe critics during the elections…Last Thursday, Morales met with leaders of the influential Chamber of Industries, Commerce, Services and Tourism (CAINCO), the Association of Private Banks, and associations representing the sugar and construction industries, to whom he pledged his support…He augured a new era of good relationship between the Santa Cruz bourgeoisie and the government in La Paz.” (AFP Y DPA, 4 February 2006).
The electoral circus is once again upon us and this time it is a particularly fascinating drama. In decadent capitalism, elections have long served as an insidious mystification, an ideological swindle designed to deceive the population, particularly the working class, into believing that it is free to choose the political leadership that will determine the direction of society. In this manner, the ruling class hides its class dictatorship over society behind a democratic myth. For decades the real decisions have been made behind the scenes by the dominant fraction of the ruling class, including political leaders from the major parties, the permanent state bureaucracy, leaders from major corporations, think tanks, and the mass media, based on an assessment of what best serves the interests of the global national capital both domestically and internationally. In this context elections have long been reduced to a theatrical event, scripted, manipulated and controlled to produce their predetermined results.
In recent years, as the social decomposition of capitalist society has progressed, it has become increasingly difficult for the bourgeoisie in the U.S to control effectively its electoral process and assure the desired result. The past two presidential elections, especially the disastrous election of 2000, are notable examples of this tendency. These problems include the ability of the media to manipulate popular opinion, in part because of the rise of religious fundamentalism, and a tendency in particularly close elections for candidates not to accept the division of labor, not to accept their role as designated loyal opposition, but to want to win at any cost. As we have written before, this is essentially what happened in 2000, when the Bush camp stole the election in Florida through the efforts of Jeb Bush, George W. Bush’s brother, and his underlings. The two sides then fought it out in the courts rather than gracefully accepting defeat in the interests of national unity. That Gore finally accepted the partisan ruling of the Supreme Court, rather than resort to the resistant posture of Lopez-Obrador in the recent Mexican election, is testimony to a more mature, responsible concern for the interests of the national capital, than Bush.
In 2004, the bourgeoisie had difficulty in deciding upon a strategic orientation until quite late, well into September when consensus finally crystallized on support for Kerry. This lack of clarity on how best to proceed in the wake of Bush’s bungling of the war in Iraq meant it was too late to implement this policy successfully, despite the best efforts of the media to boost Kerry’s candidacy.
As we examine the current political campaign, it is necessary to consider what political division of labor best corresponds to the strategic needs of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie in the coming period. While this fraction was unanimous in support of the invasion of Iraq and in the underlying imperialist strategy that aimed to reassert American imperialist hegemony, insert the U.S. into a dominant position with a military presence in the strategically important Middle East, and to mount pressure on its increasingly rancorous former allies in Europe, there is today consensus within the dominant fraction that the situation in Iraq is an absolute mess. The U.S. military is stretched too thin because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is incapable of responding to challenges in other parts of the globe, which is absolutely necessary. Recent reports in the New York Times reveal that high ranking military officers have been leaking classified documents to sympathetic congressional leaders, think tank scholars, and retired military officers that indicate that only 7,000-8,000 combat troops are available to respond to any military challenge beyond Iraq and Afghanistan (NYT 9/22/06).
Even worse from the ruling class perspective, the Bush administration’s inept handling of Iraq has resulted in the total collapse of popular support for the war and will make it increasingly difficult to mobilize support for future imperialist military missions abroad. This is a particularly serious problem for American capitalism because in order to maintain its imperialist dominance it has to increasingly exert its military muscle. The inability of the Bush administration to modify its policy, to compensate for shortcomings, to in any way restore the squandered national unity that accrued from the 9/11 attacks, makes the current division of labor even more intolerable for the ruling class. Except for the removal of Paul Wolfowitz as undersecretary of defense and chief architect for Iraq war policy, the administration has failed to make any fundamental changes, and, in the words of Vice President Cheney despite whatever mistakes may have been made, if they had to do it all over again, the administration “would make exactly the same decisions.”
The dominant fraction’s consensus that the Iraq war is a disaster led in March to the creation of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan group headed by James A. Baker, III, close adviser to the elder President Bush and secretary of state during the 1991 war in Iraq, and former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, who served as co-chair of the 9/11 commission. A long time friend and confidant to the Bush clan, Baker has a reputation as the Bush family “janitor,” who steps in to clean up the messes they have created from time to time. As the Washington Post recently reported, “The group has attracted little attention beyond foreign policy elites since its formation this year. But it is widely viewed within that small world as perhaps the last hope for a midcourse correction in a venture they generally agree has been a disaster” (WP 9/17/06).” Leon Panetta, former White House chief of staff under Clinton, and a member of the study group, characterized the need to find a solution to the mess in Iraq in these words, “If this war is consumed by partisan attacks, if the choice is presented as simply one between ‘stay the course’ or ‘cut and run,’ we will never be able to do what is right.” Panetta’s remarks reflect a concern to go beyond the politicization of the war in the current congressional campaign and assessing ‘blame,’ towards a policy adjustment that will serve the needs of the national capital. Some observers have likened this study group to a similar effort in 1968 after the Tet Offensive had exposed the lies and false intelligence disseminated by the government on the Vietnam War. That group recommendations led Pres. Johnson to decide not to run for re-election and to seek negotiations with North Vietnam.
The political goal of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie continues to require modifications in the disastrous implementation of the imperialist policy by the Bush administration. For the bourgeoisie, the problem is not, as some leftist intellectuals contend, that the irresponsible neoconservative faction has seized control of the state. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld are undeniably part of the dominant fraction of the ruling class; it’s just that they are not effective in implementing the shared imperialist strategic orientation of this fraction. In part this is because Bush has allowed the neocons to assert more influence – but not control – within this administration than ever before, and in part because Cheney’s orientation is particularly reactionary, oriented towards a clumsy reversal of the Watergate era responses to the excesses of the Nixon administration and a return to a “strong” executive branch. In addition, another aspect of this problem is Rumsfeld’s ill-founded penchant for a lean military with quick strike capacities, but insufficient manpower for sustained conflict and military occupation, as many in military circles have complained.
That the concern to revamp Iraq policy reflects the bourgeoisie as a whole and not the narrow partisan interests of this or that part of the Democratic party is demonstrated clearly not only by the creation of the Iraq Study Group, but by the festering political disputes within the Republican party itself. The feuding between the far right and the president over his failure to implement their extremist social agenda is only a small part of this problem. Of greater importance is the rebellion by Senators John McCain, former military hero and prisoner of war during Vietnam, John Warner, former Secretary of the Navy and head of the Armed Services Committee in the Senate, and Lindsey Graham, a former military judge, over the Bush administration’s attempt to openly abandon the Geneva Convention. The conservative Republican senators, with their strong military credentials, argue that Bush’s proposal to reinterpret Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (Bush complained that the treaty’s prohibition against “outrages upon human dignity” is vague and meaningless) in order to permit the extreme mistreatment and torture used by the CIA in their secret prisons to interrogate al Qaeda prisoners would risk terrible long range consequences. They warn of an erosion of American political authority on the international level, growing international chaos as each nation would emulate US comportment and redefine and reinterpret Article 3 to their own liking, and would thereby jeopardize the safety of American soldiers taken prisoner. It’s not that the senators are reluctant to use extreme measures to interrogate prisoners, as their “compromise” agreement with the president demonstrates, it’s the open repudiation of the Geneva Convention that they oppose. The public repudiation of the Bush administration position by Colin Powell, the former four-star general and head of the Joint Chiefs, who served as Bush’s Secretary of State from 2001-2004, and the congressional testimony by high ranking legal military officers against reinterpreting Article 3 demonstrates the seriousness of this dispute within the ruling class as a whole. Powell warned that the attempt to sidestep the Geneva Conventions would put in question “the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.” The leaking in late September in the New York Times and Washington Post of a classified intelligence estimate, reporting on the consensus of 16 U.S. spy agencies that the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the indefinite imprisonment of suspects at Guantanamo has given rise to a new generation of Islamist terrorists and increased the threat of terrorism (the opposite of the Bush administration’s repeated boasts) is yet another example of the growing pressure on the administration to abandon its “stay the course” line and in fact make a midcourse correction in imperialist policy implementation. The fact that hardliners in the Bush administration over the summer began blaming the elder Bush’s administration, including particularly James Baker, for emboldening bin Laden by deciding against ousting Saddam in 1991, reflects their bitterness against the pending policy changes that will be forced upon them.
The situation is no better on the domestic front. Despite controlling both houses of congress, the Bush administration has been totally paralyzed in implementing its domestic agenda, as the failure of its attempts to privatize and gut the social security program and to “reform” immigration amply demonstrate. Bush can no longer control the far right of his own party, which provided the electoral base for his victories in 2000 and 2004. The failure to push through an immigration reform package that would stabilize the situation of 12 million illegal immigrants who have been here years and to permit a guest worker program that would guarantee a reliable supply of cheap labor to the retail, meatpacking, hospital, and agriculture industry poses potential economic disaster, as the shortage of immigrant workers to pick this summer’s fruit crops in California illustrates.
In this context, the best electoral result from the bourgeoisie’s perspective would be for the Democrats to gain control of at least one house of Congress. This is most likely to be possible in the House of Representatives. Such an adjustment of the political division of labor would enable the dominant fraction of the ruling class to increase pressure on Bush to moderate his imperialist policies and block the most egregious mistakes through legislative action. It would increase pressure for extra-electoral adjustments in the administration, including perhaps the forced resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Journalist David Gergen who served in the White House as a press spokesperson for both Republican Ronald Reagan and Democrat Bill Clinton, recently criticized Bush’s tendency to rule in a divisive way with a partisan cabinet and pointed favorably to the examples of presidents John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, both of whom appointed Republicans as their defense secretaries (Robert McNamara in the case of Kennedy and William Cohen in the case of Clinton).He suggested that appointing a prominent conservative Democrat to replace Rumsfeld at defense would go a long way toward moving toward a unity government. Of course he meant “unity” for the ruling class. A conservative Democrat, such as former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, for example, would make a fine replacement for Rumsfeld from the bourgeoisie’s point of view. The departure of Vice President Cheney, seen by many as the “evil” force behind the war in Iraq and the attempt to legitimize torture and the negation of traditional civil liberties, because of “health” reasons might be another alternative extra-electoral adjustment to the ruling team.
While a Democratic victory would best serve the needs of the bourgeoisie, the question remains as to whether they will be able to control the process to achieve the desired result. Certainly the Foley scandal unleashed by the media in early October opens the possibility to crack finally the monolithism of the Christian right that Bush has relied so heavily on in past elections, and thereby favors Democratic gains in the election. In addition, the divisions within the Republican party at the moment go a long way towards undercutting the Bush administration’s attempt to use national security as an issue against the Democrats in the election and certainly undermines his political authority. Bush’s denunciation of prominent Republican critics as “putting the nation at risk,” his characterization of the conclusions that the war in Iraq had created a new generation of Islamist terrorists and increased the threat against the U.S. in the National Intelligence Estimate prepared by America’s 16 spy agencies as “naïve,” and his press secretary Tony Snow’s dismissal of Colin Powell as “confused” only fuels widespread fears about the administration’s self-delusional views on the current situation, and tendency to see critics as traitors, which might further isolate it from support within the ruling class. On the other hand such extremist posturing reveals an almost messianic belief by Bush that his is the one and only vision that can save the nation and could therefore justify using any means necessary to maintain control – in much the same way that Nixon justified his use of the state against his critics within the ruling class in the 1972 election. Thus despite the clear requirements from the ruling class’s perspective for a political realignment in Washington, we should not be surprised if the Bush administration resorts to all manner of illegal, fraudulent maneuvers to steal the election, which in the case of House races could be done at a very local level.
This election is a very important moment in
the political life of the American ruling class. A situation in which the
ruling class of the only remaining superpower has extreme difficulty in putting
in place a ruling team and political division of labor that best serves its
interests cannot be tolerated indefinitely. J. Grevin, 09/06.
The fifth anniversary of 9/11 has been marked by a propaganda orgy. In the two months leading up to the anniversary, there were all manner of solemn ceremonies, pompous speeches, television and radio news specials, interviews, documentaries, and Hollywood’s release of not one, but two, theatrical movies -- the World Trade Center and United 93 – during the summer. Even cultural institutions, like the museums in NYC have organized exhibits and displays as part of the campaign.
While some of the more local ceremonies perhaps simply memorialized the 2800 people who died on 9/11, the main focus of the Bush administration was an attempt to rekindle the patriotic fervor that gripped the U.S. in 2001 in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center. This fervor, complete with flag waving, war psychoses, and willingness to accept whatever the government said was necessary to prevent further terrorist attacks, has been largely squandered in the last few years, due to a combination of clumsiness, miscalculations, and general bungling of the Bush administration and the effects of capitalist decomposition which would have kept any White House occupant from being successful.
President George W. Bush threw himself into the forefront of the administration’s newest propaganda campaign with a series of addresses before pre-screened, guaranteed-to-be-friendly audiences, such as veterans groups and military officers associations, that reaffirmed American resolve to wage the war against Islamic terrorism. With nearly two-thirds of the population now believing that the war in Iraq was a mistake and expressing a lack of confidence in the government, Bush seemed particularly desperate to revive support for the war and minimize any Democratic gains in the midterm elections in November. Bush even introduced the formulation “Islamic fascism” into the mix and compared critics of his war policies, including those who disagree on the war in Iraq and those who oppose his abandonment of the Geneva Convention and endorsement of torture, to those who appeased Hitler in the 1930s. Such posturing appears increasingly quixotic when critics, particularly on torture, include the likes of Senators Warner, McCain, and Graham, as well as Colin Powell, former member of the Joint Chiefs and Bush’s own Secretary of State from 2001-2004.
In his radio address on Saturday, Sept 9th Bush fell back on his now boringly familiar platitudes about the “brutality of the enemy” and the need to “act decisively to stop them from achieving their evil aims.” His primetime address to the nation on the evening of Sept. 11 was more a pep talk for the war in Iraq than it was an homage to the 9/11 victims, especially since now the administration has been forced to admit that Saddam Hussein had no links to al Qaeda, had nothing to do with 9/11, and even regarded al Qaeda as hostile to his regime. Bush devoted a mere three paragraphs of his speech to remembering the dead, and went on and on glorifying his administration’s role in “this struggle between tyranny and freedom” and invoked the image of the glory days of World War II and the Cold War, when fascism and Russian Communism respectively were the “evil” enemies of the U.S.
Putting aside the bombast of the bourgeois propaganda barrage, it is appropriate to offer a revolutionary perspective on the 5th anniversary of 9/11. There are a number of observations that should be advanced:
1) The tragic death of so many innocent people, the overwhelming majority of them workers, on 9/11 is testimony not to a “war of civilizations,” a pretext for imperialist war, as the bourgeoisie claims, but irrefutable evidence of the depravity of world capitalism. It is proof that capitalism today offers humanity a stark choice between barbarism or socialism, that unless it is destroyed by proletarian revolution this bankrupt and outmoded social order will condemn humanity to more and more death and destruction. Nearly three thousand people died in a single day because capitalism no longer has a reason to exist.
2) Five years after 9/11, it is clear that the bourgeoisie has failed miserably to use that tragedy to achieve an ideological and political defeat of the working class in the United States in order to mobilize it behind the state for imperialist war. The dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie, including both Republicans and Democrats, were unanimous in their support for war in Afghanistan and Iraq, as part of American imperialism’s strategy to reassert its global hegemony in the post Cold War era, to firmly establish its military presence in the strategically important Middle East, and put pressure on its erstwhile allies in Europe who were increasingly inclined to play their own cards on the imperialist terrain following the collapse of the bloc discipline that had characterized the Cold War period. With the 9/11 attacks, which as we have detailed previously in articles in Internationalism and in the International Review, were anticipated, expected, and permitted by the Bush administration, in much the same way that the Roosevelt administration permitted the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941, in order to manipulate popular opinion in favor of war, the U.S. bourgeoisie counted on those traumatic events to help it definitively overcome what the bourgeoisie terms the “Vietnam Syndrome” – the unwillingness of the working class to be mobilized for war and to accept sacrifice in the service of America’s imperialist appetites.
However, despite the momentary gains the bourgeoisie made on this level in the aftermath of the attacks in 2001 and the high hopes the bourgeoisie harbored, the working class has turned its back on the war and increasingly moves to return to class struggle. So discredited is the official explanation of 9/11 and so advanced is the mistrust of the government, that all manner of conspiracy theories have proliferated in recent years. The growth of this “9/11 truth movement” shows a deterioration in the political authority of the state. This movement includes elements that believe the government knew in advance that a terrorist attack was coming but permitted it to happen and others who believe that it was the government itself that blew up the trade center. In fact polls show that as much as 36 percent of the population disbelieves the government’s official explanation of 9/11 – a level of distrust that was unimaginable in the days immediately following the attacks in 2001.
3) If the bourgeoisie has not achieved an historic defeat of the American proletariat, they have been successful in using national security as the pretext for a dramatic strengthening of the state’s repressive apparatus. Under the guise of protecting Americans from the “enemies of freedom,” the ruling class has eroded legal rights and protections that were supposedly characteristic of this highly vaunted “American freedom.” The USA Patriot Act, introduced in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and voted upon even before legislators had an opportunity to read it and without any public hearings whatsoever, permitted all manner of intrusions into individual privacy, promoted domestic spying, warrantless wiretaps and searches, and interception of email, regular mail, library borrowing and bookstore purchasing records (so Homeland Security could protect America by knowing what people were reading!). In New York City, the police now set up random checkpoints to search backpacks and briefcases of workers traveling to or from work. The Patriot Act was modified slightly this year when it was renewed by Congress, but its most repressive measures remain intact. While these repressive measures today are supposedly directed at Islamic terrorists, their institutionalization and general acceptance will make them a valuable tool in the future for the bourgeoisie to use against the working class as its struggles intensify. On this level, the ruling class can claim a real success from 9/11.
4) The war in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, the war in Afghanistan have achieved the opposite of their desired effect. Rather than strengthening American imperialism and reasserting its hegemony, have bogged U.S. imperialism down in an endless quagmire, weakened its strategic and tactical position, spread chaos throughout the Middle East, increased challenges to U.S. domination and created a crisis for American imperialist leadership. The American military, the most powerful in the world, has been stretched thin, unable to respond effectively to further military missions, and thus renders American imperialism more vulnerable to challenges in other parts of the globe. Indeed it is this crisis of American imperialism that underlies the current divergences within the ruling class, as it becomes increasingly clear that Bush team is incapable of adequately defending the interests of the national capital (see the article on the crisis of American imperialism elsewhere in this issue).
5) This disunity in the bourgeoisie over the ineptitude of the Bush administration has exposed the political incapacity of the ruling class to manipulate its electoral process effectively. For the bourgeoisie, George Bush’s re-election represented a setback in its ability to readjust its political division of labor and imperialist policy. It was not the result that best served the interests of the dominant faction of the ruling class. This inability to manipulate successfully the electoral circus as it has done for decades during the period of decadent capitalism reflects a serious weakness for the ruling class of the only remaining superpower. Following the election a series of political campaigns were used to put pressure on the Bush administration to moderate its policy. After a period of resistance, the administration seemed to respond to the pressure, removing, for example, Paul Wolfowitz, the chief neoconservative architect of the Iraq war strategy, from the Pentagon and kicking him upstairs to the World Bank.
However, since then the administration has dug in its heels and recently attacks on the Bush administration have reached incredible heights. The regime is essentially gripped by political paralysis, incapable of implementing any of its domestic agenda since the 2004 election, such as social security cuts or immigration “reform,” and facing a rising chorus of criticism on its conduct of the war. In June, the same Supreme Court, dominated by Republican appointees who put a partisan seal of approval on Bush stealing of the 2000 presidential election, ruled that his policies on international prisoners held at Guantanamo violate international law and the Geneva Conventions proscription of torture and inhuman treatment. (The Court did not rule on the CIA’s secret prisons and torture program, which were not acknowledged to exist by the government until September.) Even high ranking uniformed legal officials in the military testified before Congress in opposition to Bush’s new proposals for military tribunals for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo, and leading Republicans like McCain, Warner, and Graham have rebelled against the same proposals. This whole blame game is of course ironic since it doesn’t really matter who occupies the White House or how they nuance American policy. The conditions characteristic of the period of decomposition are in the final analysis the underlying cause for the failure of American policy. While the Bush administration is indeed particularly clumsy in its implementation of imperialist policy, there is in fact no reason to believe that any other occupant of the White House would have been any more successful.
In sharp contrast to
the warlike rhetoric of the last few weeks, on the occasion of the fifth
anniversary of 9/11, American capitalism is mired in crisis on both the
imperialist and domestic political terrain. Its long sought dream of mobilizing
the working class for war is once again just a dream, and it faces a working
class that is undefeated and more inclined to return to class struggle and
resist austerity. Not much for the bourgeoisie to celebrate. The only
alternative to the future of death and destruction that capitalism holds in
store for us is the class struggle and working class revolution. –
J.Grevin, 09/06.
The deepening of the crisis makes the workers’ conditions of life worse by the day and engenders expressions of real discontent. In the ICC press, we have written about the important mobilizations of the French workers and students against the CPE. The strikes of the metal workers in Spain have expressed a similar decisiveness, combativeness, and clarity, even though they have not had the same magnitude. Even in a country in the periphery, like Bangladesh, there are opportunities for the class to have important experiences of struggle, although with greater difficulties. And in Mexico, too, discontent has led to the outbreak of struggles in recent months, most notably by the Michoacan mine workers, and the public schoolteachers in Oaxaca. While these struggles demonstrated potential strength and resolution, the ruling class took the lead and directed the struggles toward real traps, sterilizing combativeness by mystifying and delaying reflection and the development of class consciousness.
The death of 65 workers in the Pasta de Conchos mine, caused by the dangerous conditions of work under which the miners are obliged to labor, sparked discontent among the miners. Low wages fueled the miners’ anger even more. But their struggle was sterilized by the union, which put itself at the head of the movement, supported by bosses and government, with the aim of derailing the workers’ discontent in the dead-end of the defense of corrupt industrialist Gomez Urrutia, who is currently in conflict with the government (1). This manipulation eventually led the miners into confrontations with the police, during which 2 miners were killed.
Similarly, the combativeness expressed by 70,000 Oaxacan teachers as they struck for wage increases, ended up suffocated in an interclassist movement led by the City of Oaxaca Popular Assembly (APPO), which, regardless of its radical and autonomous pretenses, has no class orientation whatsoever. The strike began in May, as yet another in a long list of springtime teachers strikes over the past 26 years in impoverished Oaxaca state, where teachers are among the most poorly paid in Mexico. Most striking teachers earn from $400 to $600 per month. As they often do, the striking teachers set up an encampment in the central plaza of Oaxaca. On June 14, governor Ulises Ruiz ordered police, armed with tear gas and clubs, to disperse the encampment. Dozens were injured, but the strikers held fast and quickly became a rallying point for farmer groups, university students, and leftists of all stripes, who rushed to the town and created the APPO which claims to govern the town, or at least the part of town that they have occupied and barricaded off.
But the APPO is far from being an embryonic form of a workers commune. It is an interclassist organization, dominated by leftist and union structures in which one can find such diversity as Stalinists and supporters of the Zapatistas’ 6th declarations side by side. The APPO drains the workers’ strength by leading them into mobilizations that have no coherent objectives, dominated as they are by the desperation of those classes in society that have no future. Desperation and voluntarism help to create a fertile soil for provocation by generating demoralization and isolation.
This is best illustrated by the manipulation of the Oaxaca teachers. First, the SNTE (teachers’ union) kept the teachers in isolation through a long, drawn out strike. The Mexican government then attacked the strikers with its repressive apparatus, the police. The workers successfully resisted the aggression, but the demands around the wages and conditions of work, which showed that teachers are part of the working class, and that, as such, they directly confront exploitation, are gone, and the discontent has been derailed toward the ‘improvement’ of Oaxaca democratic order, a thoroughly bourgeois, not a proletarian, preoccupation. For example, with proletarian demands like wages now no longer in the forefront, the APPO has demanded the removal Oaxaca governor, Ulises Ruiz, in order to facilitate the search for “…a new leadership and a new democratic and popular constitution for the city of Oaxaca,” (La Jornada, 8/24/06), as if a new bourgeois constitution corresponded to the interests of the working class.
In the face of these events, the workers need to reflect on whether changing one governor for another will in any way change their condition of exploitation, and whether it is at all possible that a system based on exploitation and oppression can generate laws that benefit the workers.
This derailment of the struggle by a fake radicalization has benefited the bourgeoisie, which has also used the struggle as its own arena. The bourgeoisie has in fact used the massive demonstrations and the desperate responses to put pressure on certain sectors of the dominant class to the detriment of others. Already at the time of the intervention of the SNTE we could see the differences between sectors of the bourgeoisie. With the aggravation of the conflict the various bourgeois gangs try to influence or put pressure on the workers, either through provocations or by allowing the conflict to drag on.
It is important to keep in mind the attitude the different fractions of the bourgeoisie kept for the duration of the conflict. Even though they express political differences, some personalities and groups of the ruling class have united behind Oaxaca’s governor. This is the case, for example, with Felipe Calderon, presidential candidate of the PAN who won the July elections contested by Manuel Lopez Obrador. The federal government’s attitude towards alliances and ruptures is also significant. For instance, the government allowed the conflict to escalate, but its aim was to isolate Ulises Ruiz. Let’s remember, for example, that Fox’s spokesman made a veiled accusation against Ulises Ruiz’s use of paramilitary groups, used to take back the Oaxaca radio station which the APPO had occupied, while Ulises Ruiz was careful about denying any such intervention.
Throughout the movement, the bourgeoisie did not care to show its bloody face as it killed, tortured, and jailed, but all along it was very careful not to lose control of the movement. Even though some sectors of the bourgeoisie may be weakened, the system as a whole has strengthened while the working class’ confusion has deepened.
We also need to point out that, even though the APPO does not represent class interests, the working class looks at it sympathetically because, in appearance, this organization seems to be critical of the ruling class. However, it is precisely the sympathy of the workers that the left apparatus of the ruling class uses in order to strengthen its own trap. What is now called ‘peaceful popular insurrection’ is hailed as an example to follow. If this was an example in the negative, now the campaign is about extending such ‘peaceful insurrections’. This is how confusion deepens among the workers, and the pro-democracy campaign strengthens. For instance, Lopez Obrador’s proposal to carry out a ‘democratic national convention’ on September 16 gained credibility thanks to the ‘example’ set by the Oaxaca ‘peaceful insurrection’. In this way, the bourgeoisie moves to demolish all discontent and feed illusions in democracy and the possibility of a betterment of capitalism through ‘…new representatives who will make of the country that which all of us aspire to.’ (Excerpted from the Popular Assembly of the People of Michoacan, 8/20/06.)
The conditions of misery under which the working class lives cannot be changed with a change of representatives in office, by the laws, or by an extension of democracy. On the contrary, these are instruments used by the ruling class to tie the workers’ hands and have them believe that capitalism can offer a better life.
Based on an article by Cloe [50], translated from
Revolucion Mundial , organ of the ICC in Mexico. October 2006.
1. The confrontation between Gomez Urrutia and the Secretary of Labor is nothing but the tip of the iceberg of a more serious confrontation going on within the bourgeoisie. Behind it, we find the confrontations between mining interests, where political alliances and business disputes are mixed. This is why it’s not surprising that some businessmen openly support the union behind which Gomez Urrutia stands, while others promote the union in support of the federal government.
The collapse of the Russian superpower in 1989 and with it the disappearance of the system of imperialist blocs that dominated world affairs since the end of World War II, left the US as the dominant imperialist power. After more than a decade and half, in spite of a relentless questioning of this hegemony, the US has been able to maintain its economic, political and particularly its military global supremacy. And for the moment there isn’t another country, or group of countries, that can challenge this position of power on the global level. This lack of a viable imperialist competitor, capable of strategically challenging American world dominance, is in great part the product of the present historic state of capitalism, in particular decomposition’s chaotic dynamic preventing the formation of permanent imperialist alliances. But it is also the consequence of the US bourgeoisie’s political imperialist strategy centered around the battle to block the rise of any power, whether a single country or a group of countries, that could effectively challenge its world supremacy. This policy has been in place and has served as the cornerstone of American imperialist strategy since the collapse of the system of imperialist blocs, regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican has occupied the White House.
However, even though the US bourgeoisie has for the last 16 years successfully defended its world hegemony, this success has to be very much qualified. In fact behind the preservation of American world supremacy is the hard reality of the historic crisis of US leadership against which all the policies of the American state have proven ineffective.
This decline of the American empire, has been particularly obvious in the failure of the last world-wide offensive of the US bourgeoisie launched under the cover of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
At the end of May 2006, the Bush administration announced that, with the formation of a new democratically elected government in Iraq, there has been a turning point in the struggle against terrorism and the fight for “democracy” in the world. Empty words of an embattled president who seems to continue to hold power only thanks to the weaknesses of the American bourgeois political apparatus. Unlike its European counterparts with their parliamentary systems, which permit them to change horses in the middle of the race, the American bourgeoisie has almost no way to dump its ineffective head of state before a full term has been served. With two and a half years more left in the White house, there is one sure legacy that this president will pass to his successor: a declining imperialist power, seemingly unable to extricate itself from the quagmire that its actions have created in Iraq, and heavily restricted in its ability to respond to the constant questioning around the world of its hegemonic imperialist position.
In past declarations Bush has said candidly that the problem of withdrawing US troops from Iraq will be left for the next president to decide. This declared impotence to bring the war in Iraq to a successful resolution is just the crowning jewel in the administration’s growing disarray in the implementation of US imperialist policy.
In the beginning of his first term Mr. Bush put forward the belligerent imperialist “Bush doctrine,” which had as its centerpiece the notion that the US would take the initiative in knocking down any would-be enemy before it had the chance to attack America –a so called “preemptive action.” This declaration of war against the world served well the immediate post-September 11 situation during which the American bourgeoisie launched, under the cover of the so called “war on terrorism”, a major political and military offensive in South Asia and the Middle East aimed to advance US military and political position in those regions in order to better contain the expansionist imperialist appetites of Russia and various European powers.
Today this grandiose Bush “doctrine” is nowhere to be heard of in America. And this is not an accident. The fact is that the political military offensive engineered by the Bush administration is a total shambles. The “war on terrorism” ideological banner has lost the appeal that it had within the American population following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Besides, five years after these terrible events and the ensuing American response, the US is far from “winning the war on terrorism” as the government would like us to believe. In fact Osama Bin Laden and his loose network of followers of Islamic extremists seem only to have gotten stronger, while the American bourgeoisie has lost domestically and internationally the high moral ground that it had at the time of the barbaric Al Qaida terrorist attacks—attacks facilitated, to say the least, by the higher echelons of the US state itself. Even though the war in Afghanistan has allowed the US to improve its strategic military position in South Asia –curbing Pakistan’s imperialist ambitions, establishing American military bases in former Russian satellites in Central Asia-- the situation in post-Taliban’s Afghanistan itself is hurting American political credibility enormously. Five years after being taken over by America, this country is far from stable with permanent on-again-off-again flare ups of war in many regions and no visible improvement in the fortune of a population that for decades has been ravaged by war and abuse by one or another foreign power and/or local political clique.
However it is in the Middle East where the implementation of American imperialist policy by the Bush administration has been a total fiasco. In Iraq, where Bush’s preemptive action doctrine got its real first test, after three years since easily toppling Sadam Hussein regime, the US is bogged down in a costly and increasingly unpopular war with no victory in sight. Over 2600 American soldiers have been killed, and 8 billion dollars are spent a month in this conflict. The US invaded this country, for reasons that have long since been proven to be phony, and overthrew its brutal regime, promising the moon and the stars to its brutalized population. Instead, the misery, suffering, insecurity, and dehumanization that it has brought about are beyond anything imagined at the time of the invasion. Also in the Middle East the American strategy vis-à-vis the Palestinian question has been a total failure. Completely busy with Iraq the US role in the Israel/Palestine conflict has been reduced to one of spectator. It makes one laugh to remember Mr Bush’s “road map” for peace in this conflict that was announced with great fanfare after the “victorious” Iraqi invasion. Powerless to play any substantial role in this conflict the US has witnessed the recent election to power of the terrorist group Hamas in Palestine, and the continued re-drawing of the Palestine/ Israel borders by the Israeli government to its own liking, neither of which fit at all with the needs of American imperialism in the region.
The Bush administration’s failure to be up to the needs of the imperialist requirements of American capitalism is creating tremendous difficulties both for the present and future policy needs of American imperialism.
Its political credibility in shambles, there exists a growing international isolation of the US In Iraq even the “coalition of the willing” –the little gang that the US managed to put together to give its invasion of Iraq an international flavor-- has, little by little disintegrated. Spain has long retreated. Italy, now that Berlusconi is gone, will probably pull its troops out soon. There is even tremendous pressure on the lame-duck government of Blair to withdraw Great Britain’s troops.
Its mounting loss of political authority and credibility and the very material fact that it is bogged down in Iraq are exacerbating imperialist tensions around the world and encouraging other countries to play their own imperialist cards. In this context, there is a growing recognition among the high level military officials that, under present conditions, America cannot fight another war simultaneously to the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the Far East, North Korea, one of the so called “axis of evil” countries, has been able to continue its defiant attitude towards the US vis-à-vis- its nuclear ambitions. China, despite being identified recently by the Pentagon as the greatest potential threat to the US, has gone unchallenged by the US and has continued to increase its regional and international power status. The European powers, the real targets of the US invasion of Iraq, have not given up on their ambitions in the Middle East, as demonstrated by their diplomatic meddling in the Israel/Palestine conflict and Iran’s nuclear activities. Iran has been able to improve its status as a regional imperialist power increasing its influence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, leading many bourgeois commentators to suggest that the big winner from American imperialism’s offensive and democratization campaign in the Middle East are pro-Iranian groups like Hamas and Hezbollah triumphing in Palestine and Lebanon, and the dominant Shiite groups in Iraq maintaining close links to Iran. At the same time, Iran has been able so far to get away with its efforts to develop a future nuclear armaments program and European powers have resisted the US call for sanctions against Iran. In Somalia the “war on terrorism” resulted in a debacle with the triumph of extremist Islamic militias against the war lords supported by the US secret services. In Latin America, the tendency to question US control in its own backyard by other powers has just gotten another boost with the ascension to power of one more “anti-imperialist” left government, now in Bolivia. Even Canada, with its new conservative government, has been giving the US a hard time over the control of the Artic Ocean waterways.
In the face of this questioning of its hegemony, the US bourgeoisie, given its present difficulties, is having a hard time to respond with a coherent policy, thus giving the impression that it is jumping erratically from situation to situation with no clear orientation. For instance, when Israel decided to redraw its borders with Palestine without Washington’s consent, the US was incapable of opposing this policy –after all Israel is America’s only trusted ally in the Middle East— and the American government decided to endorse its actions. Vis-a-vis China, even though this country has been identified by the Pentagon as a main challenger to the US, unable to do much about it in the present situation, the US had no choice but to placate China in a recent controversy over the itinerary of Taiwan’s head of state. When Taiwan’s democratically elected president wanted to stop in the US on his way to Latin America, the Bush administration, in order not to upset China –which considers Taiwan a renegade province-- did not allow a stopover. India, which against the US wishes went nuclear and has faced US sanctions ever since, has now been rehabilitated. The US and India have signed a treaty allowing India to buy nuclear technology from the US. This could seem rational in the sense of the need that the US has to contain China, yet what is remarkable is that according to bourgeois commentators, India has not made any commitments to the US in response to this new policy. What is most incredible is that India seems to be helping Iran with nuclear technology. Vis-à-vis this last country the official position of the American bourgeoisie has been not to negotiate. The US considers Iran a “country sponsor of terrorism”, one of the “axis of evil” nations in Bush’s terminology, but recent diplomatic developments around Iran’s nuclear program seems to imply that the US is changing this hardline position.
The continued eroding of American world leadership will without doubt lead to another crisis. As we have said before the US is obliged more and more, given its historic decline, to use its military muscle as the central element in its imperialist policy. The pressure is building more and more for a new American show of military force. In particular the Iran question seems far from exhausted. 09/06 Eduardo Smith
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[40] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/readers-letters
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[42] http://www.energybulletin.net/11386.html
[43] http://www.pirg.org
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[45] https://es.internationalism.org/rm/86_GobDerIzqAL.html
[46] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Fuentes
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[50] https://es.internationalism.org/rm/2006/94_oaxaca
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