Even at the highest level of the American state, it has become evident that the war in Iraq has been a complete disaster. The report of the Iraq Study Group made it perfectly clear that the longer the US and ‘Coalition’ troops stay in Iraq, the worse things are going to get.
And yet Bush’s response to the findings of this panel of wise and loyal servitors of US interests was not to move towards troop withdrawals as the ISG suggested, but to call up another 21,500 troops to ‘get the job done’. It was not to engage in a “constructive dialogue” with Iran and Syria, as the ISG proposed, but to adopt an even tougher stance towards Tehran, typified by the declaration that the US will openly justify killing Iranian agents stirring up trouble in Iraq.
Why this response?
Is it, as practically all the forces organising the official ‘anti-war’ campaign argue, because Bush is a particularly thick-headed, corrupt, self-serving war monger?
Bush is all of that. But his response to the ISG’s proposals is not simply the desperate last throw of a ‘lame-duck’ president. It expresses the impasse facing US imperialism as a whole, and, behind that, the impasse of the capitalist system as a whole.
Despite the fact that the Democrats control both Houses of Congress, they have not come up with a real alternative to Bush’s policy. Nor did Kerry during the last election. And Bush’s ‘Republican’ war-mongering is in perfect continuity with Clinton’s ‘Democratic’ war-mongering in the years prior to 2000. Bush’s military adventurism in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia follows Clinton’s repeated bombing of Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia (and Serbia), which was in turn in perfect continuity with the first Gulf War launched by Bush Senior in 1991. The man, or the party, in the White House is not the issue. The issue is the existence of a relentless and impersonal drive to war which neither the US, nor any other capitalist state, can resist, no matter what the cost in economic or human terms.
Following the collapse of America’s great imperialist rival, the USSR, in 1989-91, we were promised a ‘new world order’ of peace and prosperity. In fact we got a new disorder of war and crisis. As its former great power allies, no longer scared of the Russian bear, began to pursue their own separate national inclinations, the USA was compelled to use its massive military strength to try to re-impose its fading authority. Its focus was Afghanistan and Iraq not just because attacking ‘international terrorism’ and the ‘Butcher of Baghdad’ gave it the perfect alibi to deliver a spectacular warning to its ex-allies, but also because controlling the Middle East is key to the USA’s global strategic domination.
Of course none of this succeeded in creating anything like a state of ‘order’ for US imperialism. The more the US throws its weight around, the more chaos it has left in its wake, the more hostility and hatred it has stirred up, from the petty warlords of ‘radical Islam’ to major regional powers like Iran to great powers like Russia, China, France and Germany. And yet American capitalism has no choice: to back down, to renounce its status as the world’s superpower, would be unthinkable, for Bush, Hilary Clinton, Obama or any other representative of the US bourgeoisie. And so it is driven to go on spreading chaos and destruction. And so all its rivals must go on trying to sabotage its plans, build up their own power bases, support local states and gangs opposed to the US – in short, defend their sordid imperialist interests everywhere in the world. For as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out during the First World War, “imperialism is not the creation of one or any group of states, but is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will” (The Junius Pamphlet).
The capitalist system has reached a stage of permanent warfare. Therefore, as Luxemburg concluded in the same pamphlet, “it is not through utopian advice and schemes to tame, ameliorate, or reform imperialism within the framework of the bourgeois state that proletarian policy can re-conquer its leading place”. The answer to imperialism cannot be to ask it to become peaceful and to give up its weapons of mass destruction. It’s as logical as asking a shark to become a vegetarian.
Nor is it to support the lesser imperialist sharks against the more powerful ones. The USA may be the most destructive power because it is the most powerful, but all the others follow the same logic. France, for example, played the peace card over Iraq but it is busy playing its own imperialist games in Africa; Russia does the same in Chechnya or Georgia.
Nor is it to support the so-called ‘anti-imperialist resistance’ in Iraq, Lebanon or elsewhere. The resistance forces are would-be imperialists in search of a new capitalist state, and they cannot operate without acting as agents of existing imperialist powers. Hezbollah fights Israeli imperialism with the aid of Iranian imperialism; the Iraqi resistance fights the US and Britain with the aid of Syria, and again Iran.
The only real answer to imperialism is the struggle against the capitalist system of exploitation which has spawned it and which sustains it. It is the struggle of the exploited against their exploiters and against the state which enforces their exploitation. This is a struggle which crosses all borders and which stands as a force of opposition to nationalism, to ethnic and racial divisions and to the drive towards war.
Peace in capitalism is the true utopia. ‘World peace’ can only be established if the class war reaches its final destination: the overthrow of the capitalist system, its states and its borders, and the creation of communism, a society in which all production is geared towards the satisfaction of human need. WR 3/2/7
The situation of capitalism can only be understood at the global level, since it is only by grasping its totality that its real nature and dynamic can be seen. Thus it is a mistake to expect to see every aspect of capitalism expressed equally in the situation of any particular nation state. Britain does not show the devastation of the economic crisis seen elsewhere any more than it bears the direct scars of war and nor has it seen class struggle on the scale witnessed elsewhere. Nonetheless it is part of the international dynamic and the particular developments in this country contribute to the overall dynamic.
2. Over the last two years the developments in the class struggle internationally have confirmed that the working class is once again moving towards confrontation with capitalism. The reflux in its struggle that weighed on it so heavily after the collapse of the old blocs in 1989 has been coming to an end for several years and in country after country the proletariat has struggled not only to defend its immediate interests against the ever-increasing attacks of capitalism, but also for the long-term interests of the whole class. Indeed, it is this qualitative dimension that most defines the current struggle. Against the culture of look after number one, against the racial, ethnic and religious divisions so assiduously cultivated by the ruling class, the working class has again raised the banner of class solidarity. This principle stands opposed to the whole logic of bourgeois society and contains within it the embryo of the revolutionary challenge to capitalism. In the struggle against the CPE in France, but also in the struggles in Vigo, Spain, this principle has reached a high point with the reappearance of mass, sovereign assemblies that work to unify the class and control the struggle. Here, again in embryo, are the means of the mass strike, the means of the proletariat’s direct confrontation with capitalism, the means of the revolutionary struggle for communism. But, however significant this qualitative dimension is it has to be joined by the quantitative one, by the mobilisation of the masses, if the potential is to be realised. While there have been signs of this - for example the movement against the CPE was successful when it seemed as if the workers would come out in support of it - this task still stands before the proletariat.
3. Over the last two years the situation in Britain has evolved and is now clearly part of this international development. Two years ago we identified a range of factors tending to limit the class struggle in Britain: “the experience of the two classes, the historical strength of the unions, the legacy of the defeats suffered in the miners’ strike, the effectiveness of the gradual introduction of economic attacks and the continuing ideological weight of the Labour government”. Today most, if not all of these factors carry less weight and we can conclude that the proletariat in this country has taken its struggle forwards and has played a significant role in the development of the class struggle. The struggles generally remain small in scale, with the exception of the public workers’ strike in March, and also tend to be short lived; but the signs of a growing combativity and the consciousness shown in the most important actions suggest that the period of relative calm is coming to an end.
This evolution is underpinned above all by the development of the crisis, with the attacks not only becoming more generalised, but also calling into question the viability of capitalism as a whole. The attack on pensions exemplifies this: not only does it confront every worker with the threat of the loss or reduction of their pension or of having to work for several more years, but it also puts in question the fundamental illusion held out by capitalism of a better tomorrow.
The question of war has also begun to have an impact. The war on terror, which has led only to more war and more terror and particularly to the nightmares of Iraq and Afghanistan, has helped to wear out illusions in the Labour government, with surveys showing strong opposition to the war. While this has the potential to pose fundamental questions about capitalism as a whole, rather than the policy of this of that particular government, this has not happened to any very significant extent yet.
4. The development of struggle in Britain, like that globally, is above all qualitative:
- firstly, solidarity between workers that breaches the divisions imposed by bourgeois society. In August 2005 BA workers struck in support of staff sacked by Gate Gourmet. The former were mainly white, the latter Asian. This strike was also significant because it took place in the middle of the campaigns following the bombings in London. In February 2006 Catholic and Protestant postal workers in Northern Ireland went on strike, marching together in Belfast. In the same month workers at Cottam power station struck in protest at the low wages paid to Hungarian workers at the site. In the aftermath of the council workers’ strike in March permanent contracted workers forced the reinstatement of Polish workers employed by an agency after they had taken part in the strike;
- secondly, the development of actions outside of the unions, and sometimes opposed to them. The BA/Gate Gourmet strike, several postal workers’ movements and the Cottam power workers all took the form of unofficial action and were criticised by the unions;
- thirdly, a growing level of combativity. The most significant example of this was the council workers’ strike in March but other examples include the walkout by Vauxhall car workers on the news of job cuts and the strike by police support workers in Devon and Cornwall in the face of pay cuts of up to 28%.
5. The quantitative level of struggle remains low: 2005 saw the lowest number of days lost to strike actions since records began in the late 19th century. The only large-scale struggles in recent years have been the two by local government workers in 2002 and 2006. However, they give an indication of the evolution of the situation. In 2002 the one-day strike was completely dominated by the unions and was essentially a manoeuvre to contain the anger of the working class. The strike this March seemed superficially very much the same in that it was called by the unions and controlled by them. However, the number on strike seems to have been greater and it seems to also have been animated by a more combative spirit, with solidarity being shown between workers – such as that with Polish workers penalised for participating in the strike. This suggests that this time while the unions were still trying to contain the anger of the workers they were less in control. Historically, the working class in Britain has not been the most volatile, due in part at least to the ability of the bourgeoisie to manage the factors pushing the class into struggle on the one hand and to contain and derail the struggle once begun on the other. Today, as we have seen, it is becoming harder to manage the attacks on the working class and there is a real potential for the development of the struggle, including a significant increase in its scale.
6. All of this increases the importance of the unions in defending capitalist order. The history of the working class in Britain, where the creation of the unions was the product of an intense and prolonged struggle and marked a step forward for the whole working class, means that they continue to have a weight on the working class beyond the numbers who are actually members. Nearly a century after they ceased to be a weapon in the hands of the workers this legacy has not been shaken off and the idea that the unions defend the workers remains deeply rooted in many parts of the working class. After 1989 the unions first worked to renew their position with the workers, staging a number of manoeuvres which, for all their modesty in comparison with the larger and more spectacular manoeuvres in other countries, were nonetheless effective. While supporting the election of Labour a deliberate distancing between the two began, which has developed further since, for example with some unions ending financial support for Labour while others campaigned against its ‘move to the right’. This put the unions in a position where they could ‘defend’ workers against the government if necessary. In the face of the solidarity being developed within the working class today, the unions have responded with calls for fake solidarity. One union leader, after criticising the Heathrow workers for staging an illegal strike, called for the legalisation of solidarity strikes – after appropriate consultation and voting had been completed of course. The leftists have a role to play, in particular by turning every struggle into a struggle for union rights or against a particular government policy.
7. A further aspect that poses difficulties to the working class has been the questions of unemployment and of changes to employment. The Resolution on the International Situation notes that during the 1980s unemployment tended to play a negative role, increasing the atomisation and demoralisation of the working class, especially the younger generations. This weight still exists today and can lead to the fatalistic acceptance of the blows of capitalism, or even to the hope that one boss will be better than another. However, the deepening of the crisis makes it more difficult for the bourgeoisie to hold out such hopes, thus leading the issue of unemployment to prompt questions about the nature of capitalist society as a whole rather than just about individual survival within it. The spontaneous walkout by Vauxhall car workers on the news of job cuts was an indication of such a change, while the fact that it was very short-lived shows the road still to be travelled.
Workers in employment experience widely varied conditions that risk polarising full-timers against part-timers, contracted against non-contracted, agency staff against permanent staff and so on. However, the generalisation of attacks on the terms and conditions of work raises the possibility of solidarity developing across all such divisions, as was that case at Cottam power station where permanent contracted staff struck in support of un-contracted, temporary workers.
9. Underneath the developments taking place in the class struggle today is the dynamic towards a new confrontation with the ruling class, that is, towards the mass strike. This is not an immediate perspective, not least because the level of struggle is far below what is required. But this is not the decisive aspect at this stage. What is pointing towards the mass strike is not the numbers involved but, as the Theses on the Student Movement in France in IR 125 say, the means. While the struggle against the CPE was the high point and showed these means most clearly, in many of the struggles seen today the political means that are being used – solidarity between workers in one, going outside the unions in another – are evidence to a lesser degree of the development of those means in embryo. Looking at the general evolution of the situation – the deepening crisis and the question of war (we can recall the latter was a significant factor in the general dynamic that led to 1905) we can see a maturation of the conditions for larger scale struggles. We cannot predict the exact rhythm of this evolution but we must be prepared. Just as 1905 seemed to grow from very little, so today the evolution of the situation and the subterranean development of consciousness that is a feature uniting the minority moving towards communist positions and the wider numbers moving into struggle, makes the rapid appearance of larger and more politicised struggles a real possibility.
9. Over the last two years the difficulties facing US imperialism have developed into a crisis. Iraq has descended into an increasingly uncontrollable and barbaric hell. In Afghanistan the Taliban are regaining control in many regions. In both, the ‘democratically elected’ government is all but powerless and isolated in its capital. The US military, far from reducing its numbers in Iraq has had to increase them, resulting in the death of yet more soldiers. Divisions have developed in the American ruling class; and following the defeat of the Republicans in the mid-term elections in November, Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of the war in Iraq, was immediately dumped. However, the crisis will not be so easily overcome. The Democrats may have won the election but it is far from clear that they have any idea of how to get US imperialism out of the impasse it is in.
10. After the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989 the British ruling class developed an independent strategy based on an effort to steer a course between the US and Europe, playing one off against the other when possible. Initially in the conflict in Yugoslavia, in particular following the bombing of Kosovo, it had some success. But at the same time, it came under increasing pressure from both sides, notably from the US through its intervention into the situation in Northern Ireland. Faced with the offensive launched following the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, Britain aligned itself more closely with Washington, joining it in the invasion first of Afghanistan and then of Iraq. However, it did not do this because it had decided to throw in its lot with the US but in order to continue to pursue its independent strategy in the new situation. It was a recognition that the point of equilibrium between America and Europe had shifted under the impact of the storm whipped up by the US. Today not only has this tack to the US failed, but the whole strategy is also in crisis and there are serious divisions in the British ruling class. A number of factors have contributed to this situation.
11. Firstly, in Iraq Britain has been drawn into the impasse. From the pretence that its presence was benign it has become clear its forces are no different to the Americans. They are equally involved in the violence, equally unable to venture out unless heavily armed, equally unable to resolve the situation. The British bourgeoisie has contemplated the break up of Iraq and has changed its approach to support the criticism of Iran in order to limit its regional ambitions.
12. Secondly, it has also been drawn into the quagmire in Afghanistan. Britain has continued to participate despite its humiliation by the US during the invasion in order to try and keep a presence in the region. Today it is engaged in the most serious battles since the Korean war and has been unable to contain the situation in Halmand province, effectively being forced to surrender control of some parts. Its forces are over-stretched and taking casualties, leading to increasing disquiet in parts of the military.
13. Thirdly the bombings in London in July 2005 drove home the failure of Britain’s strategy. The issue for the ruling class was not the dead and maimed but the fact that its policy had rebounded on it, revealing its failure and exposing it to the attacks of its imperialist rivals. Essentially, its attempts to play a role beyond its real power and global position had blown up in its face – a point readily driven home by its rivals with their accusations about “Londonistan”. This suggests that the British state was not behind the bombings and it is possible that its rivals had some prior knowledge and merely stood by and watched.
In the aftermath the ruling class used the bombings as one more pretext to further strengthen its state apparatus, to inculcate fear in the population and to demonise part of it, leading to an increase in attacks and official harassment of those deemed to be ‘Muslim’. However, at the imperialist level it gained nothing. Whereas after 9/11 the American bourgeoisie was able to launch an offensive that for a time drove the world before it, the British ruling class failed to gain the initiative, despite some attempts to do so in Afghanistan and Iraq a few months later.
14. The full extent of the weakening of British imperialism was exposed by the conflict in the Lebanon during the summer. Although not a traditional area of British interests, Blair sought to use the conflict to present Britain as a central player by posturing as America’s loyal ally, refusing to condemn even the most blatant of the atrocities committed by Israeli imperialism, and talking grandly of bringing peace to the region. In fact, Britain was excluded by Washington, in alliance with France, from the negotiations to end the conflict; and Blair was left a pathetic figure in his office, waiting for the call to take part that never came. Britain’s weakness on the world stage was laid bare for all to see. The fundamental significance of the Lebanon conflict for British imperialism was that it confronted it with the reality of its status as an imperialist power and marked another stage in the historic decline of British imperialism. Half a century ago the Suez conflict confronted Britain with the fact that it had become a second rate power; today it is confronted with the fact that it has become a third rate power.
Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc the ICC has argued that British imperialism is caught in a contradiction it cannot resolve. In seeking to play an independent role and to continue to punch above its weight, it must play the US off against Europe, but more and more the reality has been that it is caught between these powers. We have seen this contradiction sharpening for years and reiterated this in the resolution adopted at the last WR congress when we wrote: “The danger of the tack towards the US lies in the fact that it makes the British ruling class more vulnerable, not just to pressure from the US but to reciprocal pressure from its European rivals. The perspective is thus for the contradiction to continue to sharpen” (point 12). This was correct but it was a situation that could not continue forever: at some point the situation would demand a qualitative change in strategy. This point has been reached and it has provoked a deep division within the ruling class.
15. These divisions became increasingly clear during the year, growing from a concern to pressure Blair to correct his strategy to the attempt to get rid of him in the early autumn, following which he had to confirm that he would be gone within the year.
The conflict in the Lebanon led to a storm of criticism from within the ruling class, while the media for once showed something of the reality of war in the 21st century. In the aftermath the head of British armed forces publicly criticised government strategy and called for a change of direction. This is an unprecedented event and should have led to the dismissal and humiliation of the general; but far from this Blair was forced to pretend that he agreed and the general remained in post.
The scandal over loans for peerages has been used intermittently as part of this. Today it has been revealed that dozens of MPs have been interviewed, some after being arrested and there is growing speculation that Blair himself will be interviewed, while the police have hinted that they have very strong evidence and are preparing a case that may lead to prosecutions.
However, Blair has shown himself ready to defend his position and it is clear that he is not isolated in the British bourgeoisie. Thus the perspective is for continuing divisions within the ruling class in the period ahead.
16. One feature of the current campaigns is that they have shown that the British ruling class has been quite deeply affected by the phase of decomposition. In the Theses on Decomposition adopted in 1990 we identified a general tendency towards a loss of control by the bourgeoisie: “The absence of any perspective (other than day-to-day stop-gap measures to prop up the economy) around which it could mobilise as a class, and at the same time the fact that the proletariat does not yet threaten its own survival, creates within the ruling class, and especially within the political apparatus, a growing tendency towards indiscipline and an attitude of ‘every man for himself’” (IR 62). That this has affected the British ruling class is particularly significant given its historical stability and renowned intelligence.
This indiscipline has found one expression in the functioning of the Blair government, which has been marked by informalism, cronyism and the replacement of the traditional methods of the administration. This aspect was highlighted in the Butler inquiry, which criticised the tendency to take decisions without records and to ignore official reports. However, while this expressed the concern felt in parts of the ruling class about the lack of discipline, the methods used to put pressure on Blair actually fuelled this tendency. Thus, during the Butler inquiry the security service breached its own rules when it set up a website and published confidential documents that contradicted the government’s claims about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Today, the loans for peerages scandal has led to the arrest of senior politicians and may yet see Blair interviewed and potentially even arrested and charged.
17. In the period ahead the British ruling class will continue to defend its interests as much as possible. However, the days when Britain could aspire to actually control events is long past, and today it is as dependent on the actions of the greater powers as any other country. This means above all seeing what happens in the US, given the growing difficulties of continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the outcome of the mid-term elections. There is no dramatic alternative path open to the US, just a realisation that the current path is leading nowhere. The British bourgeoisie is in a similar situation in that there is a recognition that the imperialist strategy has to change but an absence of any well-defined plan. The next two years are likely to be a period of uncertainty for the British bourgeoisie, although it would be a mistake to underestimate it.
18. At the international level the bourgeoisie is confronted with the relentless deepening of the crisis. While the impressive growth rates achieved by China and India seem to contradict this, at the global level their advances are paid for by retreats elsewhere. World production remains low. The development seen in China reflects the fact that capital has shifted to low-wage countries, rather than an actual overall development. The capitalist economy can only be defended through the active and continuous intervention of the state: “capitalism has kept itself alive through the conscious intervention of the bourgeoisie, which can no longer afford to trust the invisible hand of the market…What is noteworthy is the bourgeoisie’s determination to keep its economy going at all costs, its ability to hold off the inherent tendency towards collapse by maintaining a gigantic façade of economic activity fuelled by debt” (Resolution on the international situation adopted by the ICC’s 16th congress, pt.10).
19. The British economy has continued to keep ahead of many of its rivals in Europe, although not the US. The ruling class has shown that it is still able to manage the crisis, albeit in a more difficult situation that has tended to be marked by flat growth, rising inflation and hidden unemployment. Above all productivity remains low and the bourgeoisie seems unable to address this in any fundamental way. This means that the ruling class continues to rely on increasing the absolute exploitation of the working class, which can only increase the risk that this will provoke a reaction from it.
20. State capitalism has been the means to defend the economy in Britain as much as anywhere else in the world. Indeed in Britain the state has been particularly effective. The Labour government has sought to manage the economy through the adoption of counter-cyclical policies. It has increased state spending to counter the global recession in the short-term, and to smooth out the decline in the longer term. The latest OECD survey of the United Kingdom has explicitly recognised this: “An expansionary fiscal policy has been an important factor supporting demand since the global downturn; between 2000 and 2004 the cyclically-adjusted balance declined by 4½ per cent of GDP, which was only exceeded by the United States. Over the same period over half of new jobs have been created in the public sector, which has experienced average employment growth of 2% per annum (about six times the growth rate in private sector employment)”
21. In short Britain has relied on state spending and debt to sustain the economy. Government debt now stands at 42.1% of GDP. Personal debt has grown from £1 trillion two years ago to £1.25 trillion today – a 25% increase. However, it has been able to manage the housing market – which has been one of the main factors behind the increase in personal debt – engineering a soft landing rather than a sharp drop that would have had a serious impact on rates of growth. It has also created a significant number of jobs.
The government claims to have kept to its ‘golden rules’ but has done so by manipulating the figures. Its plans assume a decrease in the government deficit to balance it out over the cycle, but in the last 20 years there have only been four years of surplus (during the first years of the Labour government). This suggests that it will become harder for the government to continue to manage the economy as it has in recent years.
22. The ‘health’ of the British economy continues to be based on attacks on the working class. Increasing exploitation in work, escalating debt outside. Attacks on its future with the gradual destruction of pensions; degradation of the social wage through the erosion of health, social and public services; the continued decline of the infrastructure through lack of investment.
23. The period ahead poses a number of questions to the British ruling class:
- Will it be possible to continue to manage the economic crisis as well as it has over the last decade given the gradual worsening of the situation?
- Will it be possible to forge a new imperialist strategy in the wake of the failure not just of London’s independent policy but also of Washington’s post-9/11 offensive?
- Will it be possible to contain the divisions within the ruling class?
- Will it be possible to contain the class struggle given the necessity to continue to increase exploitation and impose deeper and more extensive attacks?
These are essentially the same questions as face the bourgeoisie internationally. And, while the British bourgeoisie may still be one of the most capable and unified parts of the ruling class, and while it may in particular have an understanding of the need to unite across other divides against the working class, it can no more hold back the continued decline of capitalism within ‘its’ nation than can the bourgeoisie internationally.
The working class too has questions posed to it. Questions of continuing to develop its struggles, of seeing itself as a class with its own interests, capable not only of fighting against capitalism but of overthrowing it and making the possible new world real. These questions are also posed at the international level and can only be answered at that level. However, unlike the bourgeoisie, this is a source of strength for the proletariat because it is an international class. Marx once commented that communism – the real movement of the working class - is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself to be such. Today we can see that the working class is struggling to regain this understanding so that to the question confronting it - and the whole of humanity - it can answer decisively: “socialism”.
WR, 21/11/06
During the recent Celebrity Big Brother, apart from the swearing, belching and farting, young British women were singled out for criticism as racist bullies.When Bollywood film star Shilpa Shetty won the vote the media saluted it as a victory against racism. There was general approval in the House of Commons. The people of Britain had displayed the fairness and tolerance that we should have expected.
In the row over bullying in Big Brother, most media observers had little to say about what is bound to happen when you lock people up under 24-hour surveillance, like animals in a crude experiment, because that might suggest that the whole purpose of Big Brother is to promote bullying and encourage the lab rats to gang up on each other. Instead we were treated to a range of arguments about racism, to heart-searching reflections on what Jade’s comments about Shilpa reveal about the true state of Britain today. In short, the air was filled with the stench of righteous indignation and bourgeois hypocrisy, incluing the media bullying of Jade following her eviction.
This was another of capitalism’s endless parades of spectacles and diversions, a further stage in the campaign to keep us fixated on questions of race and religion. With their endless scare-stories about asylum-seekers and Muslim terrorists, the media incite racial and religious hostility and then rush to condemn it. They promote divisions, while trying to get the whole population to march under the banner of national unity bound together by shared British values, like the use of anti-semitism in 1930s Germany. This might seem contradictory, but both the divisions and the ‘unity’ serve the needs of the ruling class. It doesn’t want the working class to recognise that it has shared international interests which cut across all ethnic or religious divisions, but it does want it to identify with the national framework which corresponds to the interests of capital.
So, next time a row blows up over racism, multiculturalism or ethnic identity, don’t look at the headlines but see whose class interests are being served. It’s not usually the working class. Car 2/2/7
What is the situation we are living in? What is the balance of class forces - that is to say, is the working class struggle developing, or has the ruling class got it confused and demoralised? And what are the needs of the working class today? These are questions that a revolutionary organisation must answer in order to be able to understand its responsibilities, and so had to be taken up during the congress of World Revolution, the ICC section in Britain last November.
Regular readers will know our analysis of the period today as the being that of the decomposition of capitalism, a period of increasingly chaotic military barbarism such as exists in the Middle East today, with the US and UK stuck in the Iraqi quagmire. However, it is also a period of growing class struggle. If you just look at the number of strike days in Britain today you would have to think that we are fooling ourselves, but that way of looking at things would leave out the most important developments going on in the working class today. First of all we cannot look at one country in isolation: the working class is an international class, and what is going on in Britain is only one part of the overall situation that includes the student struggles against the CPE in France last year, the garment workers’ strikes in Bangladesh and many others. When we look at the struggles in the UK we do not only consider the size but also the issues posed, such as pensions in the public sector, such as solidarity among power station workers at Cottam, which show the development of consciousness of being part of a class and of the perspectives that capitalism has in store (see the resolution on the British situation opposite).
Among the most important expressions of the developments going on in the working class today is a growing questioning of what this society has in store for humanity and how we can change it. The ruling class knows this and has responded with its own false questions and answers, for example those posed at the various social forums and in general by the anti-globalisation movement. By putting forward nationalism as anti-imperialism (as if nationalism could be anything but imperialist) and by describing media circuses as important moments of struggle, these forums aimed to convince the working class that an alternative world is possible within capitalism. But this has not prevented a growing questioning expressed in the development of discussion circles, on internet discussion forums, in a growing interest in left communist history, positions and organisations. Like the developments in the class struggle as a whole, this is an international trend: we have seen, for example, new expressions of internationalism, such as the EKS in Turkey (see WR 295) and the declaration from Korea (see WR 299), while the internet discussion forums obviously have an international dimension. This open questioning involves only a tiny minority, coming up against the prevailing capitalist ideology expressed in the mass media, and the effects of the period of decomposition, which is characterised by the loss of taste for theory of any kind, the retreat into irrationalism as shown in the growth of religious fundamentalism, and the spirit of ‘look after number one’. Nor is it a question of simply looking for people who agree with us. The very fact that there is a minority of workers willing to question capitalism, to debate seriously, is already an important gain and a promise for the future of the class struggle.
Our congress looked at the developments there have been in this milieu of questioning and discussion. It has certainly grown in the last two years, particularly on the internet discussion forums, but also with the greater potential for new discussion circles. And there has been a greater liveliness of discussions at meetings in general, not just our own. In addition we are seeing a small number of people starting out on the slow and difficult process of breaking from leftism, having left various Stalinist and Trotskyist groups. Above all, there is an increased interest in our positions among the young generation. It was necessary for us to recognise the importance of this development, to see this as an intrinsic part of the class struggle, and to understand that what is at stake is our ability to debate, to defend internationalist positions, and to win the next generation of revolutionaries. This is therefore our most important responsibility in the present period.
Among the themes of our intervention, one of the most important has been to defend the debate itself. It is essential that contributions can be made in a fraternal atmosphere, where positions can be stated and argued passionately - for or against, without personal insults. In order to do this we have argued against flaming on the internet forums, and where there is a dynamic for discussion, as on libcom.org, this has been largely successful. The question of debate is also important in our understanding of discussion circles: they are not support groups or readers’ meetings, but a space for clarification. So we always argue that they are open to anyone who wants to discuss working class positions seriously, whatever view they are starting from. It is also our aim to contribute to the level of debate in any forum of discussion by listening to what is being said and responding with serious arguments. Debate in any one forum is of general interest, and so we write articles for our press and website taking up the issues that come up. For instance we have published articles taking up questions raised in threads on libcom.org (eg ‘Anarchism and the patriotic resistance’ in WR 287), in public meetings, whether our own (eg ‘Report on the public forum in London on Spain 1936/7’ on our website) or others (eg ‘Anarchist bookfair meeting on the struggle against the CPE in France’ in WR 300), as well as selected correspondence.
Are we up to this important work? In order to do it we need to do more than just follow the discussions and reply blow by blow, we also need to understand developments at the deepest level, and ensure that they are centralised internationally so that we can benefit from, and contribute to, the experience of the whole ICC. In keeping with this, our congress was not a private affair of comrades who happen to live in Britain, but a living part of the international organisation. We had a strong international delegation able to transmit the lessons of very important interventions in other parts of the ICC, including the student struggle against the CPE, and also able to examine the WR’s work from a greater distance. International centralisation and solidarity is not just a matter for congresses but an essential part of the life of the ICC. This is not something easy or automatic since it goes against everything that capitalism tries to impose on us, particularly in this period with the emphasis on national divisions and the attitude of ‘look after number one’. Understanding that we are not just part of one small group or circle in this or that city, but part of an international organisation of the working class, gives us great strength for our work.
This article can only give a small taste of the preoccupations and work of our Congress. We are also publishing the resolution on the British situation, since the analysis of the national situation is a particular responsibility of each section of the ICC. WR 1/2/7
It was once hoped that the more scientific explanations contributed to a rational understanding of the world, the less there would be a place for superstition and religion. This was a naive view that failed to take into account the origins of religion in humanity’s alienation, and the ability of the ruling class to make use of any ideology in the defence of its dominant position in society. The use of religious ideologies, not just Christian and Islamic, but all the other varieties, is a worldwide phenomenon. The following article, written by a close sympathiser of the ICC, focuses on the situation in Britain.
There continues to be a rash of stories about the position of religion in British society. Although these mainly focus on Islam and everything from the adoption of sharia law to the wearing of the veil, there have also recently been many interventions from Anglican bishops, controversy over catholic adoption agencies and the well-publicised case of the British Airways worker fighting for the right to wear a crucifix as a symbol of her Christian faith. From a seemingly different angle there has been the contribution of Richard Dawkins, renowned crusader for rational thought, and his book, The God Delusion.
These episodes are only the latest in a new ideological campaign by the British bourgeoisie. Religion has been increasingly politicised since Tony Blair came to office (and later said that he was only answerable to God.) There has even been speculation about his de facto conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism. At the last General Election, the issue of abortion was thrown into the spotlight with Michael Howard saying he backed a reduction in the legal limit from 24 weeks to 20 weeks. The Catholic Church promptly called for its congregation to support the Tories, and it was openly asked if British politics was going to follow along the route of America where religion is increasingly a dominant political and social force.
But why is the role of religion growing in Britain, a country that is supposedly one of the most secular in the world? Religion has long been a useful tool for manipulating the exploited classes. Although the bourgeoisie, in its revolutionary youth, waged a vigorous battle against religious ideology it quickly accommodated itself to religion once it became the ruling class. The working class, as it began to assert itself on the historical stage also launched into its own critique of religion. So successful was this effort to throw off the shackles of faith that Marx talked in his era of religion being a dead issue for the working class.
Today this is not the case. As the Dutch revolutionary Anton Pannekoek wrote "As soon, however, as it became evident that capitalism could not solve the life problems of the masses ... The world was seen again full of insoluble contradictions and uncertainties, full of sinister forces threatening civilisation. So the bourgeoisie turned to various kinds of religious creeds, and the bourgeois intellectuals and scientists submitted to the influence of mystical tendencies. Before long they were quick to discover the weakness and shortcomings of materialist philosophy, and to make speeches on the ‘limitations of science' and the insoluble ‘world-riddles'." (Lenin as Philosopher)
Pannekoek was analysing the situation of a capitalism that had only just begun to enter its period of decline. Today, capitalism is wallowing in irrationality of every description. Not only has Christianity become more and more dominated by an openly reactionary fundamentalism, but bourgeois ideology is ever more saturated with increasingly bizarre and absurd ‘new age' philosophies.Although the question of religion has importance for the working class, the bourgeois framework of the debate offers nothing to the proletariat. Religion is not simply the product of ‘ignorance', ‘stupidity' or errors of epistemological method. Although these are factors, religion in the final instance is the product of a social system that reifies humanity's own social powers into objects beyond our control. Religion cannot be combated on a purely intellectual terrain as Dawkins tries with his rationalist ideology. It can only be fought through the development of the class struggle. Only the proletarian struggle can unite human beings to a sufficient level to allow them to become conscious of their social powers and begin to dominate and control them rather than being unconscious slaves of their own activities.
In a more immediate sense, the proletariat must not let itself be drawn into debates about whether this or that religious grouping should be protected or suppressed by the bourgeois state. These campaigns are designed to rally people around either this or that fraction of the bourgeoisie or to defend the capitalist state against growing religiosity or creeping secularism. The proletariat has no business defending the bourgeois state against anything - its only goal is to destroy it. DG 14/11/06
Recent developments in the conflict between Israel and the various Palestinian factions, who have also been at each others’ throats, have reached the height of absurdity. What’s striking is the way that the different bourgeoisies involved have been pushed by the force of circumstances to take decisions which are altogether contradictory and irrational, even from the standpoint of their short-term strategic interests.
When Ehud Olmert offered his hand to the president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, along with a few concessions to the Palestinians such as the withdrawal of a number of roadblocks and the promise to unfreeze 100 million dollars in the name of ‘humanitarian aid’, the media immediately began talking about the revival of the ‘peace process’. Mahmoud Abbas has certainly tried to cash in on these offers in his competition with Hamas, since the aim of these pseudo-concessions was to show that his policy of cooperation with Israel could bring advantages.
But it was Ehud Olmert himself who largely sabotaged any common approach with the president of the Palestinian Authority when he was compelled by the pressure from the ultra-conservative factions in his government to renew the policy of implanting Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and to step up the destruction of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem.
The accords between Israel and Fatah resulted in Israel authorising Egypt to deliver arms to Fatah in order to give it an advantage in its struggle against Hamas. However, the umpteenth Sharm-el-Sheikh summit between Israel and Egypt was totally overshadowed by the new military operation by the Israeli army in Ramallah on the West Bank and by a renewal of air-raids in the Gaza Strip in response to sporadic rocket fire. So the message about wanting to revive peace talks was rather drowned out and Israel’s intentions look very contradictory.
Another paradox is that at the moment that Olmert and Abbas met, and just before the Israel-Egypt summit, Israel announced that it possesses nuclear weapons and made open threats about using them. Although this warning was directed essentially against Iran, which is trying to attain the same status, it goes out indirectly to all Israel’s neighbours. How were the latter to start negotiations with such a belligerent and dangerous power?
Furthermore, this declaration can only push Iran to push on further in the same direction and legitimate its ambitions to becoming a gendarme and a protector of the region, resorting to the same logic of ‘deterrence’ as all the great powers.
But it’s not just the Zionist state which is acting in this way – it looks as if each protagonist has lost its compass.
Abbas for example has taken the risk of unleashing a test of strength with the militias of Hamas and has poured oil on the fire by announcing his aim of holding elections in Gaza, which could only be seen by Hamas, which was elected only last January, as a real provocation. But this test of strength, which has also taken the form of bloody street-fighting, was the only way that the Palestinian Authority could try to break out of the Israeli blockade and the freezing of international aid in force since Hamas came to power. Not only has the blockade been a disaster for the local population, which has been unable to go to work outside the areas boxed in by the Israeli army and police; it has also provoked the strike by 170,000 Palestinian civil servants in Gaza and the West Bank who have not been paid any wages for months (especially in vital sectors like health and education). The anger of the civil servants, which extends into the ranks of the police and the army, has been exploited both by Hamas and by Fatah as a means to recruit people for their respective militias, each one blaming the situation on the other, while children between 10 and 15 are being enrolled en masse as cannon fodder in this murderous conflict.
Hamas meanwhile has been trying to take advantage of the confusion by negotiating directly with Israel for an exchange of prisoners, proposing to swap the Israeli corporal captured last June for some of its own activists.
The bloody chaos that has come out of a year’s explosive co-habitation between the elected Hamas government and the president of the Palestinian Authority remains the only prospect. Given this suicidal policy, there should be no illusions about the truce agreed at the end of the year between the Fatah and Hamas militias. It will certainly be punctuated by murderous confrontations: car bombs, street battles, kidnapping, all of it sowing terror and death among the already impoverished population of the Gaza strip. And to cap it all, the Israeli raids on the West Bank or the brutal searches of the Israeli army and police mean that children and school students are regularly being killed in the crossfire, while the Israeli proletariat, already bled white by the war effort, is subjected to revenge operations by Hamas on the one hand and Hezbollah on the other.
At the same time, the situation in South Lebanon, where UN forces have been deployed, is becoming increasingly uncertain. Instability has increased since the assassination of the Christian leader Pierre Gemayel. There has been a major demonstration of force by Hezbollah and other Shiite militias, as well as by the Christian faction led by General Aoun who has provisionally rallied to Syria, besieging the presidential palace in Beirut for several days, while at the same time armed Sunni groups were threatening the Lebanese parliament and its Shiite president Nabil Berri. Tension between the rival factions is reaching a peak. The recent general strike in Lebanon – which seems to have been originally a response to austerity measures by the government – was hi-jacked by the warring factions who look to be hell-bent on renewing the process of ‘Lebanonisation’ which ravaged the country in the 1980s. As for the UN mission disarming Hezbollah - no one takes that seriously.
With Afghanistan and Iraq in an even more disastrous situation, the whole region is descending into a terrifying and irrational spiral of violence. Like the war in Somalia, it provides us with a warning of the future: allow capitalism to continue, and it will destroy the very bases of social existence. Wm, January 07 (Adapted from anarticle in International Review 128)
The judgment and execution of Saddam Hussein were hailed by Bush as a “victory for democracy”. There’s some truth in this: the bourgeoisie has so often justified its crimes in the name of democracy (see International Review 66, 1991, ‘The massacres and crimes of the great democracies’). With boundless cynicism, Bush also announced on 5 November 2006, when he himself was in Nebraska in the middle of an election campaign, that the death sentence handed out to Saddam was “a justification for the sacrifices willingly accepted by the US forces” since March 2003 in Iraq. So for Bush the hide of a murderer is worth the more than 3000 young Americans killed in Iraq, most of them in the flower of their youth. And the hides of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed since the beginning of the American intervention count for nothing at all. In fact, since the US occupation began, there have been more than 600,000 deaths and the Iraqi government is no longer counting so as not to ‘undermine morale’.
The USA was very interested in ensuring that the execution of Saddam took place before the next round of trials. The reason for this is they would have brought up far too many compromising facts. It has been deemed necessary to obscure all memory of the total support given by the US and the western powers to Saddam’s policies between 1979 and 1990, and in particular during the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988.
One of the main accusations against Saddam was the deadly use of chemical weapons against 5000 Kurds in Hallabjah in 1988. This massacre was part of a war which cost 1,200,000 dead and twice as many wounded, and throughout which ‘the Butcher of Baghdad’ was supported by the US and most of the western powers. Having been taken by the Iranians, the town was the re-taken by the Iraqis who decided to carry out an operation of repression against the Kurdish population. The massacre was only the most spectacular in a campaign of extermination baptised ‘Al Anfal (‘war booty’) which claimed 180,000 Iraqi Kurdish victims between 1987 and 1988.
When Saddam initiated this war by attacking Iran, it was with the full support of the western powers. After the emergence of a Shiite Islamic republic in Iran in 1979, with Ayatollah Khomeini denouncing the US as the “Great Satan”, and given US president Carter’s failure to overturn the regime, Saddam Hussein took on the role of gendarme in the region for the US and the western bloc by declaring war on Iran and weakening it through 8 years of war. The Iranian counter-attack would have resulted in victory for Tehran if Iraq hadn’t been given US military support. In 1987, the western bloc led by the US mobilised a formidable armada in the waters of the Gulf, deploying more than 250 war-ships from nearly all the major western countries, with 35,000 men on board and equipped with the most sophisticated war-planes. Presenting itself under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention’, this force destroyed an oil platform and several of the Iranian navy’s most effective ships. It was thanks to this support that Saddam was able to sign a peace accord which allowed him to keep the same borders he had started the war with.
Even before that, Saddam had come to power with the support of the CIA, executing his Shiite and Kurdish rivals but also other Sunni chiefs within the Ba’ath party, falsely accused of conspiring against him. He was courted and honoured as a grand statesman for years, for example, being recognised as a ‘great friend of France’ (and of Chirac and Chevenement in particular). The fact that he distinguished himself throughout his political career by bloody executions and massacres of all kinds (hangings, beheadings, torturing opponents, use of chemical weapons, slaughter of the Shiite and Kurdish populations) never bothered any bourgeois politician until it was ‘discovered’ on the eve of the Gulf war that Saddam was a bloody and frightful tyrant. We should also remember that Saddam was lured into a trap when he believed that he had been given the green light by Washington to invade Kuwait in the summer of 1990, thus providing the US with a pretext to mount a gigantic military mobilisation against him. Thus the US set up the first Gulf war of January 1991 and from now on Saddam Hussein would be deemed public enemy number one. The Desert Storm campaign, presented by the official propaganda as a ‘clean war’, a kind of video war game, actually cost 500,000 lives in 42 days, with 106,000 air raids dropping 100,000 tons of bombs, experimenting with the whole gamut of murderous weapons (napalm, cluster bombs, fuel-air bombs…). Its essential aim was to make a demonstration of the crushing military superiority of the US and to force its former allies, now becoming potentially dangerous imperialist rivals, to take part behind the US at a moment when the old bloc alliances were in the process of falling apart.
With the same degree of Machiavellianism, the US and its ‘allies’ carried out further machinations. Having called upon the Kurds in the North and the Shiites in the South to rise up against the Saddam regime, they left him with the elite troops he needed to drown these rebellions in blood since they had no interest in threatening the unity of the country. The Kurdish population in particular was subjected to the most atrocious massacres.
The hireling European media, even Sarkozy in France who has been very pro-American up till now, are now hypocritically denouncing the “poor choice”, the “mistake”, the “botched job” of Saddam’s hurried execution. It is true that the circumstances of the execution will further exacerbate hatred between the religious groupings. It may have pleased the more fanatical part of the Shiite grouping but not at all the Sunnis, while the fact that it took place at the beginning of Eid, a very important festival in Islam, shocked most Muslims. What’s more Saddam Hussein may now be seen by generations who have not lived under his iron heel as a martyr.
But none of the bourgeoisies had a choice in the matter because they had the same interest as the Bush administration in seeing this execution rushed through in order to hide and erase the memory of their utter complicity in the atrocities of the past and their responsibility in the worsening barbarism going on today. Wm January 07 (Adapted from article in International Review 128)
For 15 years, Somalia has been ravaged by imperialist powers and gangs of local warlords. At the end of December, after a week of bloody confrontations, Ethiopian troops, supported by the American army, routed the battalions of the Islamic Courts, who had to flee the capital Mogadishu, taking refuge with their heavy weaponry in the surrounding areas. But the Islamists are far from defeated and are now waging guerrilla war against the Ethiopian occupation and the federal Somali government.
Under the watchful eye of their various imperialist mentors, the protagonists of this war have been engaged in a truly barbaric contest, involving among other things the mobilisation of children of ten or even less, armed to the teeth to kill and be killed. Several thousand people were slaughtered in the space of a few days, and rape at the point of bayonet has become a standard practise.
The Somali volcano is in the process of shaking the entire region, starting with Ethiopia and Eritrea who are taking advantage of the situation to settle old scores on Somali territory. Both of these states have amassed several thousand men to back up the two main warring factions in Somalia. Kenya is also already involved in the conflict. Tens of thousands of refugees have already fled across the Somali border, and Nairobi is in the process of taking military action to expel thousands of them on the pretext of preventing any incursion of ‘terrorist groups’ into its territories. The war is becoming general while Somalia itself is sliding even further into the most terrible chaos, torn apart by various local war-lords who are in turn being manipulated from afar by the imperialist powers disputing the region since the 90s. Since the overthrow of the former president Said Barre, the country has been put to the sword by a succession of murderous clans struggling for power. The central state has virtually disappeared and the country has been sliced into regions under the control of mafia gangs- like Mogadishu itself, which has in turn been cut up into several zones ruled by cliques who enforce their authority through murder, rape and theft. For the population in general, it has been a true descent into hell.
Not content with having armed and trained the Ethiopian army which chased the Islamic Courts from the capital, the Pentagon carried out air raids in mid January, leaving dozens of victims. This was a new military offensive by the US in this country, following the humiliating failure of their previous intervention in 1993.
At that time, under the fallacious pretext of the ‘Restore Hope’ operation, the US, accompanied by France and Italy in this instance, made an attempt to bring the situation under control by dispatching tens of thousands of soldiers to the country. This was a total failure and in 1994 the US had to pack its bags and go, but this didn’t stop them from continuing to use local gangs to do their bidding on the spot.
According to the Bush administration, the aim of the military engagement by the US in Somali is to continue the war against al Qaida This is a gross deception, because the US has been intervening in Somalia long before the formation of al Qaida. Its real aim is to defend its strategic imperialist interests.
“The Horn of Africa is of growing importance to the American administration. The region is seen as strategic both for containing Islamic terrorism and preventing ‘failed states’ like Somalia from becoming a sanctuary for al Qaida; and, more classically, for controlling the approach to the Persian Gulf and protecting oil traffic” (Le Monde, 4.1.07)
As we can see, the real aim of the war being waged by Washington is to control the approach to the Persian Gulf and to make itself a global master of oil supplies. Somalia is directly opposite the Gulf and is a strategic zone for the imperialist powers disputing the region. It was with this very aim that the US has set up a new and specific regional command for Africa, entitled ‘US Africa Command’. In fact, the US is trying to increase its ability to maintain surveillance over the area and already has a military base in Djibouti and another one on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean facing Somalia. It is clear that US ambitions can only come up against the ambitions of rival imperialist powers, which, like the USA, are pushing various local pawns across the chessboard.
As long as the armed hand of world capitalism has not been cut off, the perspective for Somalia is a new plunge into chaos. The bourgeoisie itself admitted this in a UN report cited by Le Monde on 16/11/06:
“Victim of unlimited militarism, Somalia, according to the UN experts, is heading ineluctably towards a wide-scale war which threatens to drag in the countries of the region…the Islamic Courts are consolidating their hold over the country thanks to the military support of Eritrea, but also of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Djibouti.
The transition government, internationally recognised but forced to take refuge in Baidoa, benefits from the ‘aggressive support’ of Ethiopia, Uganda and Yemen. According to this report, the government doesn’t have much weight compared to the Islamists, who control the capital Mogadishu, as well as most of the centre and south of the country, and who have the capacity to turn Somalia into a new Iraq through terrorist attacks and assassinations.”
Of course the Islamic Courts have now been pushed out of the capital, but they haven’t gone far and can count on support from a number of imperialist sources to continue carrying out raids against their enemies. It is more likely than ever that the country is heading towards an ‘Iraqi’ situation: indiscriminate killing, suicide bombings and massive bombardments. Or a ‘Congolese’ situation in which the country is occupied by a number of different powers all slogging it out for control of strips of territory.
Somalia may be miserably poor, but the imperialist vultures need it nonetheless. It is for that reason that it is currently the most striking illustration of capitalist decomposition in the whole of Africa. Amina 13/1/07 (from Revolution Internationale 376)
The media response to the publication of the latest report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was more or less unanimous: the ‘debate’ on whether global warming is caused by ‘human activity’ is now over. There is now overwhelming evidence that climate change is being driven by greenhouse gases produced by factories, power stations, transport, and other sectors of the economy. And it is clear that things are “worse than we thought”, as The Guardian put it the day the report came out. Global temperatures could rise by as much as 6 degrees by the end of the century, with almost incalculable results: melting of the polar ice-caps, vast floods, droughts, famines, and a frightening possibility of ‘feedback’ mechanisms which could lead to an unstoppable spiral of catastrophe.
So we know who’s to blame: mankind. These changes are not brought about by changes in solar radiation or other cosmic phenomena, but by the actions of human beings. In one sense, of course, this is true. It is human beings who build factories and power stations, fly planes and burn down rain-forests.
But this is an observation, not an explanation. The teams of scientists who are trained to analyse and interpret the natural world have no corresponding theory for explaining why mankind’s economic activity operates the way it does, with so little regard for its effects on the natural environment. And as a result they are capable only of identifying the existence of the problem, not of locating its causes and mapping out a solution.
For example: a great deal of attention is paid to the technologies used to generate power and to produce and transport goods. It is recognized that these technologies are unacceptably profligate in the production of greenhouse gases and that new technologies must be found. Power should be produced by wind and tide instead of coal. Cars should be powered by electricity or hydrogen instead of oil. And while the more short-sighted representatives of the energy industry continue to give big hand-outs to the dwindling band of scientists prepared to argue against the conclusions of the IPCC, more and more spokesmen for business express the confident hope that the search for new technologies will generate new markets and so allow them to preserve and even increase their profit margins.
No doubt, any solution to the gigantic environmental problems facing humanity will involve fundamental changes at the level of technology. But the problems, at root, are not to be found in technology. They are to be found in the very structure of present day society, in the basic motivation of economic activity.
Present day society is not just ‘industrial society’. It is bourgeois society – capitalism, a system where for the first time in human history all production is driven by the competitive hunt for profit. It is this motivation which forces the system to grow and grow and keep on growing regardless of the human and ecological consequences. It is structurally incapable of producing for human need, of adjusting production to what is humanly and ecologically viable. For capitalism that would signify the end of accumulation – suicide, in other words. And since, to grow faster than your rivals, you must cut production costs as much as possible, you need to invest in the type of technology that does the job as quickly and as cheaply as possible, regardless of the damaging consequences for the generations of the future.
By the same token, as a system irredeemably divided into competing national units, it is equally incapable of acting in a truly cooperative way at the global level. On the contrary: the more national capitals are faced by economic difficulties and diminishing resources, the more they will be obliged to retreat behind their national barricades and look for military solutions to their problems. Well-meaning commentators may lament the fact that, instead of pouring resources into saving the planet, the world’s leading powers (and, proportionally, all other states) are pouring them into developing the weapons of war. From a human point of view this is indeed absurd and tragic, but it makes sense from the point of view of the ‘nation’, of the capitalist state.
The problem of the environment is indeed a problem for mankind – for the very survival of the human species. But it cannot be solved by the very institutions whose function is to guard and maintain the present social system. This is why a science of society must also be a science of revolution. Amos 3/2/7
In this issue we begin a new occasional series, contributed by a close sympathiser, which looks at the struggle of the working class in Britain to organise itself in the era when capitalism was still a progressive, expanding system. It will examine the pioneering efforts of the proletariat to struggle on an economic and political terrain against inhuman capital and a ruthless bourgeoisie. We hope in this way to demonstrate the immense capacity of the working class to become aware of itself as a class with its own interests, and to create organisations which express its growing confidence and the need for solidarity.
If the working class today is to recover its confidence and solidarity in the face of decaying capitalism, in order to finally put an end to this completely bankrupt social system, it must recover its own history and draw all the possible lessons for its future struggles.
This first article covers the period from the French revolution of 1789 to the rise of Chartism. It shows clearly the evolution in the proletariat’s organisations, from conspiratorial sects to the creation of mass, national organisations of factory workers, and highlights the role of the creation of trade unions in this evolution.
Many today who agree with the ICC that the trade unions act against the working class find it difficult to accept that the trade unions ever expressed the interests of the working class, or that workers should have set up and supported them in the 19th century. The a-historical view that the trade unions have always been reactionary is a common one in the anarchist milieu, which also prefers the violent machine-breaking of the Luddites because this appears as a quasi-insurrectionary alternative to ‘peaceful’, ‘collaborationist’ trade unionism. This article aims to answer these arguments by placing developments in their proper historical and political context.
(These articles will complement our past series on the historic struggle of the working class in Britain to form a class party, which eventually covered the period up to the betrayal of social democracy in the first world war, running from WRs 198 to 237).
The industrial revolution in Britain (1760s to1830s) went hand in hand with brutal repression and deeply reactionary politics, and from the moment of its birth the British proletariat was forced to try to organise itself under the direct threat of imprisonment, transportation or hanging; or more simply a volley of shots and a cavalry charge. As pioneers of the world proletariat, British workers struggled alone for the most elementary rights against both starvation and the concerted violence of a fearful ruling class, which mobilised more troops to suppress its own insurrectionary workers than to fight Napoleon.
The French bourgeois revolution was a turning point for both classes. Initially some radical fractions of the British bourgeoisie were enthusiastic, but sympathy was deepest among the workers, who showed enormous popular support for the republican politics of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and engaged in strikes and riots in support of France. Faced with such a mass radical movement, the bourgeoisie quickly gave way to panic, and Britain’s motives for going to war were explicitly counter-revolutionary: to eliminate the twin perceived dangers of revolution at home and abroad. Preparations against Napoleon’s armies were as much against the ‘enemy within’ as without, and even at the height of the invasion scare there was strong resistance to any arming of the seriously disaffected population.
Deserted by the radical wing of the bourgeoisie, the working class organised its own reform movement inspired by the French Jacobins. Radical groups like the London Corresponding Society, which stood for universal suffrage and annual parliaments, were mainly composed of skilled artisans and small tradesmen rather than factory workers, but their agitation embraced social and economic issues and expressed a genuine internationalism in the British proletariat, for example explicitly linking the struggle for democracy with the cause of Irish and Polish national liberation.
Government repression drove these working class Jacobins and trade unionists underground, where they were thrown into further disarray by the French revolution’s slide into terror. Some small minorities did become further radicalised, and there were shadowy preparations for an insurrection, but by drawing their inspiration from Jacobinism these minorities lacked a distinctly working class political programme, and their vision of revolution was restricted to that of a coup d’état supported by the ‘mob’. However, some working class Jacobins continued their political activity, to re-emerge in future waves of struggle, for example as Luddites during the wars with France (1803 to 1815), and as physical force Chartists in the 1830s.
“As soon as the working class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of the new system of production, had recovered its senses to some extent, it began to offer resistance, first of all in England, the native land of large-scale industry (...) The English factory workers were the champions, not only of the English working class, but of the modern working class in general, just as their theorists were the first to throw down the gauntlet to the theory of the capitalists.” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1)
It was above all the rise of the factory system which gave birth to the proletariat as a class with its own distinct interests. Industrialisation was a brutal experience: the introduction of machinery, primarily into the textile industry, resulted in the ferocious exploitation of the unskilled, mainly women and children, in the new mills and factories, while inexorably destroying traditional trades and the communities they supported. For hundreds and thousands of artisans and skilled workers, capitalist ‘progress’ was a catastrophe: whereas in the 1820s the number of hand-loom weavers, for example, rose to around 250,000, by the early 1840s this had fallen to just over 100,000, and only a few years later there were “little more than 50,000 starving wretches”(Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire). These workers, previously well organised and with a long tradition of independence and struggle, put up a fierce resistance to an inhuman system which quite literally in many cases meant their death.
Not surprisingly, in this period of capitalism’s advance the class struggle was partly a defence of immediate conditions but also often a rearguard struggle against proletarianisation and the real degradation of conditions it implied. It wasn’t new machinery as such that workers resisted, but the onslaught of capitalist ‘free competition’, which tore up surviving hard-won rights and protective legislation. The political arguments in support of this resistance naturally tended to look backwards for their justification: threatened woollen workers objecting to the shoddy goods of new capitalist entrepreneurs called on parliament to defend Elizabethan statutes and ancient customs, while pauperised agricultural workers fought for “the defence of the customary rights of the rural poor, as free born Englishmen, and the restoration of the stable social order which had - at least it seemed so in retrospect - guaranteed them” (Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing). This past was undoubtedly romanticised and many, not long uprooted from the land, still dreamed of a return. But the resistance of the weavers and others in this period also presented a challenge to the political economy of the capitalist class, and in its widest sense expressed the confused desire to create an alternative social order, in which production was for social need, not profit.
This is the context for understanding the emergence of ‘Luddism’, which actually began as a semi-legal campaign by skilled woollen workers for a minimum wage and poor relief, and in defence of existing protective legislation, only going underground and turning to machine-breaking in response to government repression at the height of the Napoleonic wars. Luddism was certainly a politicised and highly disciplined movement, with an effective military organisation which was quite successful at least in its early phase. But more broadly this expressed the increasingly desperate struggle of the hand-loom weavers, and the revival of Luddism in 1817 was directed far more against the machinery itself, and further extensive machine-breaking during the slump of 1825 was almost the weavers’ last rebellion. The violence of Luddism was also partly an attempt to overcome the scattered nature of production in this declining sector, and can be contrasted with the massive struggles of the factory workers who increasingly took the lead in the class struggle, and which demonstrated an open, massive character, also highly disciplined but with very little violence, as in the first great cotton spinners’ strike of 1818.
The earliest combinations formed by workers against the capitalists were clandestine by necessity, formed in defiance of repressive legislation which outlawed strikes and trade unions and threatened workers with imprisonment, hard labour and transportation. But combinations grew, at least among skilled workers, in part because employers in some industries were willing to negotiate with their leaders, and with ‘illegal’ trade unions openly parading in the streets even backward bourgeois politicians were forced to recognise the impracticality of stamping them out.
The bourgeoisie had emerged from the war with backward landed interests (‘Old Corruption’) still in control of the state apparatus; indeed with their grip strengthened by the need for unity against a semi-insurrectionary proletariat. A movement emerged after the war calling for parliamentary reform, but due to the cowardice of the manufacturing bourgeoisie this was led by the middle class and petty bourgeoisie. The working class, reform’s most consistent supporter, formed a powerful and barely-controlled ‘physical force’ wing of this movement, which constantly threatened to get out of the control of the constitutionalist leadership. The strength of the working class, and its willingness to engage in insurrectionary struggles (as in Derbyshire and Yorkshire in 1817) and in open, mass demonstrations (as at ‘Peterloo’ in Manchester in 1819 when 11 peaceful demonstrators were killed and many hundreds wounded by cavalry), only provoked the bourgeoisie into passing even more repressive laws against public meetings and demonstrations.
But the more intelligent sections of the ruling class could see that in the long term such crude tactics were ineffective in controlling a growing industrial proletariat. With the repeal of the hated Combination Acts in 1824, peaceful trade unionism was finally made legal, although the bourgeoisie was still very careful to outlaw any use of violence in order to prevent any effective class struggle tactics. This marked a change of strategy by the bourgeoisie to contain the class struggle, involving an acceptance of trade unionism within the framework of capitalist political economy. Radical bourgeois MPs argued that the Acts were not consistent with the principles of free competition, and that their removal would soon lead to the peaceful coexistence of workers and employers.
In fact, the following period saw a great advance in the self-organisation of the working class on both the political and economic terrain, with growing efforts to organise the factory workers, primarily in the textile industry, and to extend this organisation to create ‘general unions’ of all trades at a national level. There were also attempts – only partially successful – to co-ordinate solidarity action in support of victimised workers and extend struggles to other sectors, while improved trade conditions led to a wave of strikes in which the workers used their own class violence to enforce demands. This prompted the bourgeoisie to tighten up the legislation on ‘intimidation’, and selective repression certainly did not end - as shown by the famous case of the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ (the six Dorset farm labourers transported in 1834 for organising a trade union).
The struggles of the factory workers also gave rise in this period to some of the earliest political and economic theorists of the socialist movement; men who, in Marx’s words, “threw down the gauntlet to the theory of the capitalists”. Robert Owen - the ‘model’ manufacturer, founder of experimental communities and advocate of cooperativism - was recognised by Marx and Engels, despite their vigorous critique of his prescriptive utopianism, as “the founder of English Socialism”. By 1830 Owenism was a popular movement of the politicised working class. Others - men like Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson and James Morrison - were also active at this time in constructing a proletarian theory of political economy based on a primitive theory of labour value, which demanded that the workers should receive the full product of their labour from the capitalists.
Legalisation of trade unions signified a strengthening of the left-wing of the bourgeoisie, but in 1830, just when the right-wing showed signs of weakening, a huge revolt by agricultural workers coinciding with the July revolution in France forced it to oppose the slightest reform. Britain appeared once again to be in a revolutionary crisis; in Bristol workers controlled the city for several days, Nottingham castle was burned and Derby jail sacked. The manufacturing bourgeoisie finally acted by organising a peaceful, counter-revolutionary reform movement in order to force concessions to its own political interests, while the right (the Tories) tried to provoke the working class into violence in order to justify a backlash. The resulting Reform Act of 1832 was a con trick; a new accommodation of ruling class interests masquerading as a reform to divert the threat posed by the working class, and the resistance of die-hard elements in the Church and landed aristocracy only lent greater credibility to this manoeuvre. Even so, there were many working class radicals (for example Bronterre O’Brien and his Poor Man’s Guardian) who saw through the trick and denounced the Act as a cynical consolidation of ruling class power.
One lasting consequence of this defeat was to engender a deep suspicion of political reforms in the British working class and to encourage the growth of syndicalist ideas, i.e. that the trade unions themselves could become organs of dual power, set up their own parliament and ultimately abolish wages. 1834 was certainly a high point for the working class’s struggle to organise itself, with successful solidarity action from clubs and societies throughout the country in support of workers in Derby sacked for belonging to a union, leading to the formation of a ‘Grand National Consolidated Trades Union’ by delegates gathered in London. The ‘Grand National’ grew rapidly with half a million members extending to previously unorganised sectors like agricultural and women workers. But the slump of 1834-5 inevitably saw the collapse of these attempts to create a national trade union organisation and forced a reversion to local societies. In these conditions the working class increasingly turned to the struggle for the vote as the key to political power. MH 12/06
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/131/religion
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/58/palestine
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/somalia
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/398/workers-movement-britain
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1830-rise-chartism