History, we are told, is littered with the failures of those who want to establish ‘heaven on earth'. Such people are either good-intentioned but touchingly-naïve fools who want to deny ‘human nature' or dangerous fanatics who will shrink from no atrocity in their efforts to bring about their ‘paradise'.
Humans, we are told, are simply imperfect creatures. We lie, cheat, steal, exploit our brothers and sisters, fight horrendous wars, and kick the neighbour's puppy for no good reason other than that we can. A society based on a view of human nature that denies these facts is simply a non-starter.
For communists, however, there is another fundamental side to human nature. The human species is a social one at root and branch and every activity we carry out has a social dimension. Ties of solidarity bind us together at multiple levels and affect us at the deepest levels of our psyche. Without the company of our fellow human beings we quickly deteriorate psychologically and loneliness (that is, a lack of satisfying emotional relationships) has as much a detrimental effect on human happiness as poverty and deprivation. In the most profound sense, an isolated human being is actually something less than human: a man alone is not a man.
Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that the relations of exploitation that arose with class stratification distort this social nature. The presence of an exploiting class that is driven to maintain its rule through oppression undermines the relations of solidarity upon which all societies depend. The exploited suffer under the whip of the taskmaster, while the exploiters are tormented by repressed guilt at their position in society. A class society cannot, by definition, truly satisfy the needs, material or psychological, of its members.
These contradictions express themselves in both the material and ideological arena and are internalised within the psychic composition of each member of society. The anti-social behaviour of some elements represents the working out of these contradictions in practical form. Whether a thief steals to feed his starving family or through some perverse inner compulsion, the root of this behaviour is found within the fault-lines of class society and the psychological torment inflicted upon its members.
Human beings have lived with class society for a long time and the scars of this social development are now so deeply rooted that it must seem to many to be a part of human nature. But we must never forget that class society itself is relatively recent in humanity's evolutionary history.
The majority of our species history was spent living in communal relationships without exploitation and without a state. Despite their limited scope, the very existence of the prehistoric societies demonstrates that exploitation is not an inevitable consequence of human nature. The dim memory and yearning for this way of life and attendant psychological wholeness is found, albeit highly mythologized, in many of the creation myths of ancient religions. From the Golden Age of Greek Mythology to the idyllic hunter-gatherer state of Adam and Eve in the Judeo-Christian canon, humanity has ever looked back to its communist origins. These origins, moreover, are seen as the ‘natural state' of humanity before it ‘fell from grace', something to be valued and cherished. In these ancient myths, which represent the earliest dawning of consciousness, it is in fact class society that is unnatural, so much so that its appearance has to be explained by the action of cosmic forces dwarfing humanity!
Even as the grip of class society tightened upon humanity, communism has never lost its fascination. In every age, in every society the exploited masses have longed for the return of this halcyon period. As an example, for the early Christians, it wasn't simply enough to wait passively until Christ re-established Eden - their communities attempted to express this perceived truth in practical form, by holding all things in common. This radical current is to be found throughout the history of Christianity as well as other religions which, despite its alienated and idealised form, expresses a counterpoint to all those who point to history's tragic procession of wars and massacres.
And paradoxically, even the phenomenon of war itself expresses the contradictions of human nature in class society - this slaughter of thousands, even millions of fellow human beings is accompanied by deep expressions of bravery, solidarity and compassion.
The view of ‘human nature' appealed to by the bourgeoisie is thus a distorted one that, while containing elements of truth, ignores the full import of human thought and behaviour throughout history. To say it is ‘human nature' to exploit others is, in the sweep of history, no more profound an observation than saying it is ‘human nature' to live peaceably. Both can be true in certain circumstances.
What, then, are the circumstances facing humanity today? What is their import for the communist project?
In 1914, the clearest revolutionary currents considered that capitalism had exhausted its capacity for improving human society. Although capitalism had always been a society based on exploitation and inflicted a new level of alienation upon human society, it was still able, initially at least, to play a progressive role for humanity.
Its earliest stirrings were accompanied by a tremendous advancement in the areas of philosophy, allowing society to begin to criticise the religious and superstitious modes of thought that had now become a fetter on the development of human thought. Science also took dramatic leaps forwards while the toiling masses were mobilised by radical ideas of democracy and freedom. Despite the new exploitation, the living standards of those incorporated into the new system slowly began to rise, albeit as much as the result of ferocious class struggle as any natural inclination on the part of capitalism or its new ruling class.
Signs that this progress was beginning to come to end, at least in Europe, were appearing as early as 1870 but capitalism still had tremendous fields for advancement in the New World and elsewhere. Advancement in many fields, especially science and the economy, in fact continued to accelerate although at the cultural level, signs of decline were beginning to appear. Tensions began to rise between the great powers as each state's need to expand began to conflict with those of others. Philosophical progress began to retreat and the ruling class began to seek comfort once again in the superstitions and cults that it had thrown off in its youth.
In 1914, these tensions exploded and the First World War began. It was a disaster unprecedented in the entire history of humanity to that point, all the more poignant because it was not the random strike of disease or natural disaster but was self-inflicted. Suddenly all the great progress of the previous centuries stood in the balance as the whole of society was reoriented towards the goal of destruction.
From this point, the progress of humanity in many areas has at best slowed down and often stopped altogether. Even those areas where progress has continued - science and production - do not benefit humanity or even the system itself. Instead, they threaten both more and more, fuelling ever more catastrophic economic crises or providing ever more devastating weapons with which to wage war. The increased life expectancy seems meaningless as more and more human populations are subjected to horrific wars or the scourge of easily preventable diseases, or the grinding poverty that is the product of economic crisis. Those who are spared this nonetheless suffer an ever-increasing alienation. In the midst of material abundance, surrounded by millions of our fellow humans and provided with ever more inventive ways to communicate, more and more seem denied the simple satisfaction of normal human relationships suffer with all the attendant psychic distress that this denial implies. The sole purpose of human society is to provide for its members mutual needs - but capitalism today, for all the tremendous advancement it has provided, seems more and more incapable of doing this for all but the smallest percentage of the population and, in reality, not even them.
Capitalism has evolved into a living contradiction, an anti-social society; it is thus capitalism that is the very antithesis of ‘human nature'. Every day this utterly degenerated social organism continues to threaten humanity at multiple levels: economic crises cast more and more millions into poverty if not starvation, while increasingly intractable wars wrack the globe. The nightmares of nuclear annihilation, ecological disaster and social collapse loom threateningly on the horizon. Indeed, total social collapse is no longer some dystopian vision of a few science fiction writers - it is already the living reality facing many in the third world and an incipient reality in the advanced countries. Even if capitalism manages to avoid total self-destruction its continued existence will strip the survivors of anything resembling humanity to the point that we can talk of the spiritual extinction of humanity even if the material shell somehow carries on for a limited period. The price of the continued existence of capitalism is the total negation of humanity and all it means to be human.
If humanity is to survive, it can only do so by the utter destruction of this anti-social system. And this destruction must be accompanied by the reconstruction of society on a truly human basis. The progressive aspects of capitalism have provided humanity with the technical and social means to effect this.
One of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism is that, in spite of producing the most corrosively individualist society ever known, it has also created a productive force that represents the polar opposite. In capitalism, production has been increasingly centralised and regimented. Products incorporate materials (and the congealed labour within them) from all over the world and the division of labour has created a level of interaction between the different components of the productive apparatus never before seen.
The bourgeoisie, with its relations of commodity production, perceive production as a question of competition. Planning can only ever exist in such a vision as an alien force, imposed unnaturally over a market that is the true dominant force in capitalism. In counterpoint to this, the fundamental condition of the proletariat is associated labour. Only rarely can an individual proletarian perform all the functions necessary to create the product of his workplace. Her labour exists as one component amongst many, all of which must co-operate if a use value is to be generated. This process of co-operation is explicit in the individual factory or office but also implicit in the whole of the capitalist economy, where each link in the productive process is dependent on the those preceding it for its components and those following it to give it meaning. While the market for commodity production is naturally chaotic, the conditions of production itself are planned and ordered to the highest degree. It is in this socialised aspect of production that we see a potential for a different kind of social organisation and a class that is capable of generalising these conditions throughout society as whole.
The contradiction between the chaos of the market and the order of production is expressed in the life experience of the proletariat itself, which perceives itself to be the victim of the vagaries of the market and relations of commodity production that are expressed in society by the actions of the bourgeoisie. The working class is thus compelled to revolt against the bourgeois class and the relations of production that are expressed by this ruling class.
In the proletariat, therefore, we see a class that represents both an alternative mode of production to the present dominant one and also that this class is compelled to resist and revolt against this dominant mode of production. The struggle of the proletariat then, although conditioned by dying capitalism cannot be limited to it in the sense of a futile revolt against exploitation. It has another form of society to propose, one based on the collective, associated labour of humanity.
This new social form offers humanity a way out of the impasse of capitalism. Moreover, it offers the possibility of the abolition of class society itself and a world without class and without exploitation. The worldwide integration of production and the proletariat achieved by capitalism has laid the basis for a truly global human community. The new society will no longer be plagued by the primitive tribalism that was the hallmark of prehistoric communism and will not be plagued by wars and national conflicts. Nor will the new society be dominated by the chaos of market relations. Just as the modern factory works to a plan, so the whole of society will be managed on a planned and rational basis by the common consensus of the producers.
Communism is not therefore simply the utopian vision of naïve dreamers. It has already existed in concrete reality in the distant past. Nor is it somehow antithetical to human nature - in fact, it is the form of society that best corresponds to human nature! Certainly it is no more foreign to human nature than the debased monstrosity of capitalism today.
But most importantly, the concrete bases of communism exist already in the world today in the form of the modern productive process. And there exists a class whose situation in society both compels it to struggle against the old regime and to generalise those basic building blocks of communism throughout society.
Communism is not therefore just a ‘nice idea'. It is a material possibility conditioned by historical circumstances. It can also be described as a material necessity because it is the only social form that can progress human civilisation as opposed to a capitalism that is more and more destroying it.
DG 18/7/07
The first respondent agreed with the notion that capitalism today represents a “crisis of humanity” but questioned how this crisis could be overcome. Is there not also a “crisis of leadership”, in that there is no strong revolutionary party leading the working class today? The speaker mentioned his own Troyskyist background and stated that for this milieu, this question of leadership is the principle question facing the working class.
The question stimulated some lively responses, exploring the role of the party and class in making the revolution. One comrade immediately responded that this view reduces the problem to simply a question of “getting the right leaders”. Other comrades went on to elaborate some important points. The leftist approach is flawed on a number of levels.
Most crucially, it is based on a misunderstanding of the role of the party in the revolution[1]. The party is not there to “organise” the class, its role is push forward the consciousness of the class to enable it to organise itself. This is a complex process related to the balance of class forces. To put things another way, if it’s true the working class is not lining up behind the party – or producing capable leaders – then there is a reason for this is to be found in the consciousness of the proletariat as a whole. The Trotskyist view is simplistic and idealist in the sense that it sees everything else being “ready” for revolution – you just need the right Lenin or Trotsky to come alone and the revolution will happen.
Secondly, the leftists measure consciousness on the basis of how much workers agree with them (i.e. their particular organisation). Consciousness is seen as the adherence to the party line. For communists, class consciousness is to be found in the increasing confidence of the working class to examine questions for itself rather than being dependent on a minority of “intellectuals”.
Leadership can therefore be examined only in the context of the class as a whole. The Bolsheviks were only able to take on the role they did because the mass of the class had awoken to a real consciousness of their own needs and saw that the Bolsheviks were expressing their own demands in a coherent form.
The role of minorities in this process is vital. Because of the nature of the proletariat’s oppression, at most points in history it will only be a minority of the class that is able to throw off the shackles of bourgeois ideology. They have a duty to develop this consciousness by discussing with other revolutionaries and organising themselves to spread this consciousness as far as their means allow.
The forms these efforts take will depend on the objective and subjective circumstances of the time. In the current period, the appearance of web forums and discussion groups around the planet represents this hunger for consciousness deep within the proletariat. The party is the highest product of this process but it is not the only form consciousness takes. By definition, the party cannot exist unless there is a movement within the working class to create it.
Another aspect of leadership was raised, namely the role the proletariat takes in the revolution in relation to other social classes. The ICC believes the proletariat to be a minority on a global scale. There was some debate about this, with various exchanges on differing views of the numerical weight of the peasantry in the third world. Also discussed was the effect of “decomposition” in lumpenising the working class in the central countries. But despite some disputes on the sociological aspect of this, there was a general agreement that the “core” of the working class i.e. those sectors in the heart of capitalism with relatively stable jobs, the discipline and belonging of the workplace, etc. would be a minority.
Despite the disagreements, all participants were agreed that those on the fringes of the working class were not to be written off either. These sectors can engage in powerful struggles and, because of their extreme deprivation, can often act as the detonator for movements. Nonetheless, for the struggle to advance, it is necessary for the “core” to join, bringing their experience and capacity to lead the struggle with them.
Another aspect of the discussion dealt with the issues of working class youth and their struggle to reappropriate the lessons of their class. For many workers, especially those under 30, the last big struggles that would have impacted upon their consciousness took place when they were children. Many have never experienced open struggle in the workplace. There is a hunger for solidarity, especially in reaction to extreme alienation, but little actual understanding of it. Despite this weight, there is an effort within the class to recover this – many of the strikes in the current period have placed this question firmly in the centre, through practice if not explicitly in theory.
Communists have a role to play here, but it is not to somehow artificially engender solidarity. Rather, it is a question of making workers in struggle conscious of the implications of their own praxis i.e. making, practical, instinctive actions into explicit conscious ones. This also works the other way – by drawing on the lessons of the past, revolutionaries can help the working class recover the “abstractions” of theory and lessons learnt from the past so that they can be applied again in today’s situation.
The discussion emphasised the continual nature of this drive for consciousness. It cannot be posed in the sense of the working class becomes conscious, makes the revolution and that’s it. Even after the revolution, there will be heterogeneity of consciousness within the working class. Different layers of the class will be more or less convinced about the communist programme. Only a permanent reflection and discussion undertaken by the whole of the class can drive this process forward.
In some respects, it might appear that the discussion did not focus on the immediate points of the presentation. But, in fact, it examined one of the most vital elements of the opening text – the revolutionary nature of the working class. The concern of revolutionaries to tackle this question springs from the fact that the communist revolution will be the first truly conscious revolution in human history, just as communism itself will the first human society to manage itself in a fully conscious manner. It is precisely because of this that consciousness is such a preoccupation for the proletariat – and it is the proletariat’s capacity to develop this consciousness that conditions the nature of the proletarian revolution.
The rebirth of the class struggle in 1968 was largely dominated by a sense of consciousness rising out of struggles. It was the inspiration of the massive struggles of this period that pushed new revolutionary forces to seek out the “red thread” which had been largely crushed by the counter-revolution and maintained only in the obscure writings of the communist left. Today, a different pattern in emerging: although there have been no massive struggles on the scale of ’68, significant minorities within the working class have already demonstrated an increasing drive to rediscover the “red thread”. If this trend continues, the proletariat will enter into the mass struggles of the future with a far more developed theoretical consciousness than it had in ’68. Although today we are witnessing but small steps in this direction, it is with confidence that we can say along with Marx: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
DG, 15/9/07.
[1] It should be said that confusions on the role of the party are not limited to the leftist milieu. They are also firmly entrenched in the revolutionary milieu as well, especially among the Bordigists.
Today, we all recognise the state as the antithesis of socialism, the enemy of a new society, an expression and conservator par excellence of the old, along with the ruling class whose privileges and mode of production it defends. The state's fate is to be smashed by the working class en route to communism. As the ICC's book puts it very succinctly, "As far as Marxism is concerned, the strength of the state is the measure of man's unfreedom."
Yet we are obliged to go a little deeper for two main reasons:
a) Because the idea that the state can be the motor of social transformation is still perpetrated by those who claim to defend working class interests - let's take the example, one among many, of Chavism in Venezuela. And illusions in this ‘road' are not absent within the proletariat in general: there still remain confusions, for example, that nationalised capital is somehow more ‘progressive' than ‘private' capital, that a state health service is preferable to a private health service. Or that, in the final analysis, the state is the only protector against such ravages as terrorism, climate change, and so on. In short, we still have to wage a war ‘for hearts and minds' as Mr Blair used to say, on this subject.
b) And because, on a more fundamental level, and despite the fact that Marx and Marxism owes its origins to a class-based critical reaction to Hegel's idealisation of the state, backtracking on this fundamental truth has been a constant feature of life within the proletariat's own political and mass organisations, from the IWW to the CI, from the Paris Commune to the Russian Revolution and its results, or rather its defeat.
Why is this? Why this constant combat on the question of the state? Why this going over what seems today to be such an elemental position, of what in essence was understood from the very beginnings of the politicised workers movement?
Firstly, and most obviously, because we live, exist, in bourgeois society. The dominant ideas are those of the ruling class, which has every interest in preserving the mythology of the eternal state. We, the proletariat in general, and its political expressions in particular, have to wage a constant fight against the penetration of the dominant ideology. This is a cliché. But a cliché is merely the truth repeated until it's lost its original - living - content. It's still the truth.
In the real movement which has unfolded in front of our eyes - in the history of our movement - this has not expressed itself abstractly but concretely at certain, particular stages, around issues specific to the conditions in which they arose. Thus the ICC's book exposes isolated examples of Marx's own illusions - under the weight of the dominant ideology and the level of development of capital at the time - that in certain countries like Britain or America - the proletariat can actually assume a dominant position through bourgeois democracy, through perhaps elections, without first destroying the state but, instead, through its mechanisms.
However such aberrations - and that's what they were - are far removed from the general line of march of Marxism which defined, refined and honed itself precisely against the incursions of the dominant ideology, and specifically its manifestations within the workers' movement expressed by reformism and anarchism.
Not just against the ideological incursions of capital, of course, which is just one side of what is a social relationship, but in light of the actual movement of the proletariat. Thus the Paris Commune - "the real movement which is worth more than a hundred programmes" - enabled Marxism to become more precise: the proletariat couldn't just take hold of the bourgeois state and use it for its own ends: in fact it was obliged to confront, to smash that state in order to assure its domination over society and effect a social transformation.
Here, in the Commune, despite its limitations in duration, extent and in the material conditions under which it arose, was posed and answered an eminently practical, political question: what is the process through which the proletariat must pass in order to transform its own conditions and those of humanity? The answer was that there is no avoiding a centralised, armed conflict with and against the ruling class's state.
Many more lessons, in embryo, too: concerning the revolutionary 'semi'- state that replaces the bourgeois state: not an end in itself, or even a direct expression of the proletariat, but one over which the proletariat will still have to retain its autonomous, political control, concerning which it would have to lop off its most pernicious expressions. Hence the mass elected and revocable delegates, mandated to carry out specific tasks, as opposed to the former bureaucratic elite answerable only to the national capital's needs. This question would be further clarified in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.
Plus the fact that this experience of the Commune was the result of a war that saw, for the first time, the bourgeoisie of different countries unite against the proletariat: an end, as far as Marx was concerned, to discussions over national ‘defensive' wars, at least in the most developed heartlands of capital, even if the colonial question couldn't at this stage be resolved.
All these issues are touched on by the Marxist currents of the time. Some lessons become more ingrained than others.
However... History is not static. Clarity in the final analysis doesn't depend on abstract will and purism. It's not homogeneous throughout the class, and that goes for its revolutionary minorities.
The Paris Commune ended in a defeat, a bloody massacre, the break-up of the Ist International and a retreat of the workers' movement in general. In addition, bourgeois relations of production were still in the ascendancy: the most dynamic growth of this mode of production was still unfolding.
Thus in the wake of this defeat of the first proletarian attempt to take power, the social wealth generated by a still ascendant mode of production allowed for the further penetration of bourgeois ideas into the workers movement. The lessons of the need to smash the bourgeois state, not to use it to create socialism, were going to have to be restated.
For when the workers struggle re-emerged amidst the apparent flowering of bourgeois political economy, its growth was accompanied by a certain receding of the perspective of revolution itself, the maximum programme, in favour of pursuing the minimum programme, the necessary and possible struggle to ameliorate immediate living conditions, to win the right of a shorter working day, of the right of assembly, and so on. Such concerns weren't a deflection of a revolution that in any case was not on the immediate agenda, but a necessary part of the proletariat's education, its formation as a class, one which was genuinely able to influence affairs in its favour.
Nonetheless such successes came at a price. On the level of the revolutionary perspective, the famous Gotha programme which was meant to found the German SDP sees all kinds of illusions, including the idea that the creation of socialism depends on state-assisted workers' cooperatives. The critique made by Marx and Engels of this proposed programme obliges them to clarify, to deepen the communist programme, to insist that, contrary to its illusions, communism couldn't be declared the day after the revolution, but that a period of transition would necessarily ensue; that the object of communism wasn't the perpetuation of exchange relations, or attaching a value to individual or even collective labour power, and that the statification of capital did not equal its suppression.
In fact, long before the onset of decadence, before the lessons bequeathed by the Russian Revolution and its defeat, we can see that Marxism, from the very beginning, defined the state as the antithesis of socialism, as the expression of a society divided into classes. The capitalist state could neither be ignored nor conquered, was not and is not a tool through which the proletariat could express its revolutionary nature. State socialism is indeed a contradiction in terms, an impossibility.
Today, there are revolutionaries - and many anarchists - who take this to mean that the 19th century struggle for reforms, parliamentarism, the growth of mass unionism and mass proletarian parties was an unnecessary and dangerous detour from the maximum programme. Such views ignore the real, material conditions of the time.
It's necessary not to read back into history: not to parachute our knowledge of the appearance of the weapon of the mass strike and the creation of workers councils or soviets; the bankruptcy of the bourgeois mode of production as evidenced by the First and Second World Wars and the unprecedented economic slump that lay between them , and above all the lessons generated by the revolutionary wave - it's necessary to really understand that these events were not known to the revolutionaries of the 19th century.
We're here talking of a time where, in certain places on the planet, capitalism did not even exist. We're talking of a time when it was by no means certain that the bourgeois, let alone the proletarian revolution would triumph: when feudal political forms and autocratic dictatorship still reigned. A time when, even in those countries like France and Germany where the bourgeois economy was making great strides, the realm of political control was still in the hands of dictatorships such as those wielded by Bismarck or by Napoleon. We're talking of a time when workers were forbidden to combine, to meet, to have their own press or parties, to have their views affect the unfolding of reality through political representation, as well as through economic struggle. A time, in short, when the proletariat was still forging itself and being forged as a distinct class, when capitalism was still laying the basis for communism.
Looking at it this way, what is remarkable is not the insistence of Marxists of the day on the necessity to influence current events by being involved in them, but on their clear-sightedness in insisting that this phase would not, could not last forever, that at a certain stage in the evolution of capital, the proletarian revolution would be top of the agenda.
In his later years, through his study of the Russian question, Marx began to see that not all areas of the globe would necessarily have to go through a bourgeois stage of development, that conditions in the main capitalist centres implied that the time of moving directly to the proletarian revolution and a direct confrontation with the capitalist state was approaching on a global level.
Based on these prophetic insights, based on the actual evolution of the struggle between classes towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, revolutionaries such as Engels, Pannekoek, Luxembourg and Lenin attempted to criticise re-orient the workers movements of which they were part, began to re-assert that the time for winning advancements within capitalist society had to be subsumed into preparations for the coming struggle for proletarian power, a struggle which implied preparations for a direct confrontation with the bourgeois state.
All power to the soviets, not all power to the state: this was the Bolshevik's revolutionary translation of this situation in 1917. The defeat of the revolution proved the point in negative. From that point on, there was no question of state socialism - the discussion was about state capitalism.
KT 28.7.2007
Within a general agreement that the capitalist state cannot bring about revolutionary change - "revolution is the destruction of the state" - two main areas of discussion emerged:
a) The persistence of strong illusions within the working class about the state as ‘protector' of the proletariat, illusions which found an echo in the meeting itself;
b) What method to use to analyse the aims and means of the workers' struggle in the 19th century and today?
On illusions in the existing state apparatus, one comrade (Devrim, EKS) said there were certainly those who thought that state socialism existed - eg the defenders of Chavez in Venezuela - and the role of the ICC's section there was essential to counter such propaganda by clearly showing the deterioration of the proletariat's actual conditions of life. But more pernicious than the idea that the state can produce socialism is the belief that it can protect the working class, an illusion which is widespread. In Turkey, for example, many workers would currently support the idea of a coup by one faction of the state against another more ‘backward' (Islam-leaning) faction. In areas where there is no strong democratic tradition, the idea of a fight for ‘democratic rights' can be strong.
Other comrades agreed on the persistence of such illusions which had weighed heavily on important struggles such as Poland 1980 (illusions in the democratic state and ‘free' trade unionism as protector against and vanquisher of the Stalinist state) or the struggles of workers in South Africa in 1980/90 which (temporarily) had been derailed behind support of the emerging ‘anti-apartheid' faction of the state (Mandela/ANC). These examples expressed the weight of the general idea that it was possible to reform the state apparatus for the workers' benefit.
In Britain, the mistaken notion of the state as defender of workers' interests was exemplified in the proletariat's attachment to protecting ‘our free' National Health Service (NHS) from cuts in jobs and services, particularly through ‘privatization'. One comrade (DL) who had broken from the Trotskyist milieu said that even if he could be persuaded that defending the NHS was not in workers' interests, many workers would not be easily convinced.
In response, various comrades made the following points:
Comrades perhaps summed up this part of the discussion by saying the ICC's book Communism Is Not a Nice Idea but a Material Necessity addresses the underlying illusion: communism is utopian; we can only make capitalism more humane. This applies to the idea of defending the nationalised health service as being more humane than a privatised one.
The discussion also and inevitably touched on the question of capitalism's different periods - that of its ascendancy and that of its senility or decadence and the different conditions that these epochs impose on the form, content and even the goals of the working class and this was the second major theme examined.
For the so-called ‘anti-state' anarchists who nonetheless are often the fiercest defenders of the NHS and of nationalised rather than privatised companies, such distinctions are meaningless. Even the minority of their number who today denounce unions or parliamentary activity often do so by claiming that work for or within these institutions was always reactionary, thus ignoring the real evolution of capital and the struggles it produced at this or that moment in the past - by dismissing vast swathes of the proletariat's history and political organisation, in effect.
One disagreement which might be said to show the influence of this ‘radical'-sounding rhetoric came in a discussion on the position of Marx, Engels and the IWA concerning the American Civil War in which they - together with large swathes of the proletariat in England - supported the Union of the northern states against the slave-owners of the south. For comrade Devrim this, together with Marx's position on the1871 Franco-Prussian war, was tantamount to communists acting as recruiting sergeants for the bourgeoisie, urging workers to die for their bosses. The correct position was that of the Bolsheviks in 1914: turn the war into a class war - indeed the workers did rise up in 1871 (ie the Paris Commune).
For the ICC and other comrades, it was a question of method, of the actual situation unfolding in front of the communists' eyes, not one of universal panaceas.
In the US civil war it was a question of promoting a revolutionary mode of production - capitalism, which in turn was laying down the material basis for socialism - against the incursions of a retrogressive organisation of society in the form of the slave-holding south.
This historical, dialectical, materialist method was first popularised in The Communist Manifesto which argued that the bourgeoisie was still a revolutionary class which had yet to develop globally. In this sense, genuine bourgeois revolutions and progressive national struggles should be supported by the proletariat and its organisations. The Communist League's debate on the bourgeois revolutions of 1848 drew out the fact that such support should be strictly limited: the working class should attempt to act independently and autonomously within this process: it wasn't a case of uncritically supporting even the most radical bourgeois and petty bourgeois currents. Nonetheless, it remained a question of in which direction did the proletariat's long-term interests lie.
By 1870, there was still only one fully-developed capitalist country on the planet - it was in no way analogous to 1914 and the outbreak of WW1 which showed that on a global level, capital had completed its ‘laying of the foundations' for socialism and had therefore lost any progressive content. However even here, Marx and the 1st International recognised a change in the situation: in their first address to workers at the outbreak of the Franco Prussia war, it was a question of resisting through the friendship of German and French workers, the encroachments of Bonapartism which were seen as a threat to the development of a unified capitalism in Germany. However, once Germany became an aggressor in the war, it was a signal that ‘progressive' wars in Europe were at an end (even if this ‘lesson' was not well assimilated). Underlying this was a method which tried to look at the proletariat's historic, not just immediate interests.
In conclusion, the question is not ‘did Marx and Engels make mistakes' but was their fundamental method of understanding ‘the historic line of march' correct or not? It is only such a method which allows us today, regarding for example China, to understand that recent developments there are not some repetition of early capitalist accumulation, nor even a modern return to such methods involving gross exploitation and the despoliation of the environment, but a very real expression of the fact that state capitalism offers absolutely no perspective for the working class today other than misery and war. This was not the case in the 19th century.
KT, 15/9/07.
The article below has just been published by the ICC's section in Germany to denounce the arrest and imprisonment in isolation ward of several German intellectuals accused of terrorism and belonging to a so-called "Militant Group".
We have just published on our German site an article about the so-called autumn of 1977 [4]. That was the time when the kidnapping and the murdering of the president of the employer's federation by the Red Army Fraction (RAF) provided the pretext for a wave of repression unparalleled in post-war West German history. It was a time during which the security forces were let loose to intimidate the population. There were police raids everywhere, entire districts were surrounded, trains stopped in the countryside and passengers obliged to get out by armed policemen. An idea of the atmosphere of fear, hysteria and public denunciation which was whipped up at that time, and of the role that the bourgeois democratic media played in this, can be reexperienced through reading Heinrich Böll's novel "Katharina Blum". The extent to which the kidnapping of Schleyer was merely a pretext for putting on a display of power and justifying new repressive measures became clear soon afterwards when the magazine Stern revealed that the police had known about Schleyer's whereabouts from a very early stage.
Our article shows that the terrorism of the RAF or the "2nd June Movement" in Germany, or of the "Red Brigades" in Italy, expressed an indignation towards capitalism, but also doubts and even feelings of desperation regarding the revolutionary role of the working class. This led to an impotent, because individualist, revolt against the state, which was basically petty-bourgeois by nature, and which not only did not endanger the upper class but even suited its purposes. The extent to which the ruling class not only used this terrorist rebellion, but was able to manipulate it, was already made clear at the time in a book of one of the witnesses of this movement: "Bommi" Baumann's How it all began. The book explains how the first armed fighters, unsuspectingly purchased their first weapons from the German political police.
The bourgeois class used this generation of "armed struggle" in two ways. For one thing they were used as a bogeyman in order to justify a strengthening of the state which was directed, not so much against "terrorism" as against - in a preventive manner - ones "own" population, above all against the working class. On the other hand these armed groups, as a result of their political confusions, and not least on account of their own impotence were invariably drawn into the power struggles within the bourgeois class (whether the East-West conflict or Palestinian nationalism). In fact, already at that time terrorism was first and foremost a means of imperialist struggle between capitalist states and fractions (IRA, PLO etc.)
How little these two main uses of terrorism by the state - as a weapon of imperialist war and as a justification for repression against the working class - exclude each other, how much on the contrary they complement and mutually enforce each other, is best shown by our contemporary world. Islamic terrorism is, in the first instance, a weapon in the hands of a series of states and cliques against economically and militarily often superior imperialist opponents. But above all it is the "war against terrorism" which, at least since "9/11" has become the war cry of all the leading industrial states of the world. This goes not only for the USA, who most recently used this pretext to justify the invasion and occupation on Iraq. It applies no less to German imperialism which opposed the US-war in Iraq for its own reasons, but justifies its own military operations in Afghanistan, Africa or on the coast of the Lebanon in very similar terms. Regarding the recent enormous strengthening of states vis-à-vis their own populations, which has also of course taken place in Germany it is true that initially the foiling of terrorist attacks from enemy states and cliques was the pre-dominant concern. But the ruling class is fully aware that its natural and mortal enemy is the proletariat. This is its enemy both "at home" and world wide. By contrast, the ruling class has no reserves about getting involved in terrorist activities. It is a well-known fact that the USA originally helped to build up, arm and train Bin Laden's organisation. But the longstanding close ties between German politics and terror groups in the Middle East or on the Balkans, or more recently in Afghanistan, is a subject which would also a be well worth researching.
Six years after the terrorist attack on New York, events in Germany this year have powerfully illustrated the second spearhead of the "war against terrorism" directed against the social front. 30 years after the German autumn we can almost speak of a "German summer 2007". For one thing we have seen how the mostly very young demonstrators, who in Rostock and Heiligendamm demonstrated against G8 and for "a different world", were confronted by open state terror, and thrown into prison. For another thing, the activities of a so-called "Militant Group" (MG) has been the occasion for fabricating a connection between critical, anti-capitalist thinking and terrorism, and for answering such thinking with arrests and imprisonment in isolation cells. This group is supposed to have been involved in damaging property, "symbols of capitalism" such as luxury cars or trucks of the German army.
We do not have any confirmed knowledge about the nature of this group, the public appearance of which remains very foggy. What is clear on the contrary, and very striking is the way in which the state has responded to it. These symbolic attacks against objects have been met with the whole weight and spectrum of the "war against terrorism". We quote from an open letter to the attorney general against the criminalisation of critical science and political engagement, which was drafted August 15th by colleagues in Germany and abroad of one of those recently arrested.
"On 31st July 2007 the flats and workplaces of Dr. Andrej H. and Dr. Matthias B., and five other persons, were searched by the police. Dr. Andrej H. was arrested, flown by helicopter to the German Federal Court in Karlsruhe and brought before the court. Since then he has been held in pre-trial confinement in a Berlin jail. Four people have been charged with ‘membership of a terrorist association according to § 129a StGB' (German Penal Code, section 7 on ‘Crimes against Public Order'). They are alleged to be members of a so-called ‘militant group' (MG). The text of the search warrant revealed that preliminary proceedings against these four people have been going on since September 2006 and that the four had since been under constant surveillance.
A few hours before the house searches, Florian L., Oliver R. and Axel H. were arrested in the Brandenburg region and accused of attempted arson on four vehicles of the German Federal Army. Andrej H. is alleged to have met one of these three persons on two occasions in the first half of 2007 in supposedly ‘conspiratorial circumstances'.
The Federal Prosecutor (Bundesanwaltschaft) therefore assumes that the four above mentioned persons as well as the three individuals arrested in Brandenburg are members of a ‘militant group', and is thus investigating all seven on account of suspected ‘membership in a terrorist association' according to §129a StGB.
According to the arrest warrant against Andrej H., the charge made against the above mentioned four individuals is presently justified on the following grounds, in the order that the federal prosecutor has listed them:
Andrej H., as well as Florian L., Oliver R. und Axel H., have been detained since 1st August 2007 in Berlin-Moabit under very strict conditions: they are locked in solitary confinement 23 hours a day and are allowed only one hour of courtyard walk. Visits are limited to a total of half an hour every two weeks. Contacts, including contacts with lawyers, are allowed only through separation panes, including contact with their lawyers. The mail of the defence is checked.
The charges described in the arrest warrants reveal a construct based on very dubious reasoning by analogy. The reasoning involves four basic hypotheses, none of which the Federal High Court could substantiate with any concrete evidence, but through their combination they are to leave the impression of a ‘terrorist association'. The social scientists, because of their academic research activity, their intellectual capacities and their access to libraries, are said to be the brains of the alleged ‘terrorist organization'. For, according to the Federal prosecutor, an association called ‘militant group' is said to use the same concepts as the accused social scientists. As evidence for this reasoning, the concept of ‘gentrification' is named - one of the key research themes of Andrej H. und Matthias B. in past years, about which they have published internationally. They have not limited their research findings to an ivory tower, but have made their expertise available to citizens' initiatives and tenants' organizations. This is how critical social scientists are constructed as intellectual gang leaders."
No less striking is the way in which these events have been reported on in the media. On the one hand this subject has not been widely published. The media is evidently concerned to play things down in order not to provoke a hostile reaction of the population. As opposed to the RAF murders which preceded the "German Autumn" of 1977 the recent attacks against property in Berlin and Brandenburg are hardly suitable for creating an atmosphere of public fear and hysteria. Moreover time has not stood still since 1977. In the epoch of open economic crisis, of massive demolition of social services and of bureaucratic mistreatment in particular of the unemployed population, it is much more difficult to mobilize the population even temporally behind the state (as was revealed soon after the attacks in New York). The concern of the organs of repression seems to be rather to intimidate and terrify those politically searching minorities who have already begun to put bourgeois society in question. On the other hand these attacks, when they are discussed, are regularly connected to a certain "theoretical environment" which is referred to as the "fertile soil for terrorism". The media has frequently referred to "talk about world revolution" as a characteristic of this milieu. There is talk about ominous theoreticians, who as a result of the radicalism of their opinions have to be considered to be "intellectual incendiaries" even when they themselves reject terrorism.
It fits into this picture that the recent wave of police raids in Berlin also hit the Rotes Antiquaritat, which more then any other bookshop in Germany offers the possibility to get to know the ideas and the publications of internationalist revolutionary groups. Here also, the difference in the approach of the bourgeoisie in comparison to the 1970s is striking. In those days the media in Germany or Italy didn't give a damn about the political ideas of the RAF or the Red Brigades. The attacks of these groups were, on the contrary presented as the products of mental illness. It was even proposed to deal with them through brain surgery. At that time most politicized people were very activist and tended to accept the slogans of Stalinism more or less uncritically. What characterises the new generation of today, despite of activist, is a much more critical and profound reflection - something which threatens to become a much greater danger for capitalism. Hence the criminalisation of radical theory.
The reappearance of the practise of attacks against "symbols of capitalism" might seem strange. Even though these present actions are not directed against persons, they show that the lessons from the experiences of the RAF or the Red Brigades have not been, or have been insufficiently drawn. Such pointless acts of desperation are, today also, the expression of a profound indignation against the ruling system. We fully share this indignation, whence our solidarity with the victims of state terror, independently of whether or not they were involved in such actions. But such acts are also the expression of a profound difficulty to understand where is the real revolutionary force within this society. Such a difficulty is not surprising. What characterises the contemporary world, in comparison to that of 1977, is not only the much more dramatic and dangerous dead end which capitalism has lead humanity, but also the fact that the proletariat has to a considerable extent lost its sense of class identity since 1989. However today the world proletariat is beginning to rediscover its own strength. And the political vanguard of this class is beginning to rediscover and to further develop their own revolutionary theory and positions. Part and parcel of the solidarity of the proletariat with the victims of state terror is the struggle to win over the desperate ones to the cause and to the methods of the working class (see the article on our German site)
31.08.2007
We are publishing below the address sent to the 17th Congress by the Internasyonalismo group in the Philippines, which was invited to send a delegation to the Congress but which was unfortunately unable to do so for various material reasons. The comrades have been in contact and discussion with the ICC for over a year, and have undertaken to develop a left communist presence in the Philippines under the most difficult material conditions. It is thanks to their efforts that the ICC has been able to open its own web site in the Filipino language [7], and readers can follow and participate in the Internasyonalismo comrades' discussions on their blog.
The Congress strongly welcomed this address. Not only is it an expression of international communist solidarity both to the ICC and to all the other groups attending the Congress, but the reflections that are included in it, notably on the question of the trades unions in countries like the Philippines and on the development of China's presence as an imperialist power in the Far East, were valuable contributions to the work of the Congress as a whole.
Comrades,
(...) For almost 100 years, the workers in the Philippines did not know about the positions of the communist left, and more so, the revolutionaries here were not able to read and study about them especially in the 1920s and 1930s. Now, even though we are very small internationalist communist group in the Philippines, we will try our best to contribute in the collective discussions and debates in the Congress through this text.
We collectively studied and discussed the three draft documents for the 17th Congress. May we present to the Congress the following:
Generally, we agreed with the contents and positions in the three draft documents -- Draft Report on the Class Struggle, Report on the Evolution of the Crisis of Capitalism, Report on the Imperialist Conflicts. The documents are founded on internationalism and the current dynamics of the decomposing system and the class struggles, as well as on the actual interventions of the revolutionary minorities in the world scale. These are consistent with the historical materialist method of Marxism.
"That with the actual evolution of the contradictions, the most critical question for humanity is the crystallization of a class consciousness sufficient for the emergence of the communist perspective" and "the historical importance of the emergence of a new generation of revolutionaries". (Class Struggle Report for the 16th International Congress)
On the whole, we agree that class solidarity is the most important thing for us as revolutionaries. The maturation of class consciousness can be measured on the level of class solidarity because the latter is the concrete expression of self-organization and independent movement of the proletariat. (...).
What is more important today is to seek ways for class solidarity to rise on the basis of internationalism and independent class movement. But we want to propose to the Congress to highlight the following:
1. The reactionary nature of the unions in the decadent capitalism could hinder the true development of class solidarity on the international scale.
If in the advanced countries the unions (both from the Right and the Left) have been exposed in the eyes of the workers, in the countries where capitalism is weakest the unions of the Left still have strong mystifications on many workers because generally the capitalist bosses are anti-union. For these workers, leftist unions are expressions of militancy and defender of workers' interests even though a growing number from the class are questioning the performance and promises of these leftist unions.
In times of massive struggle, when the workers' assemblies are the appropriate form of class organizations, opening these assemblies to the unions for solidarity is putting to risk the independent struggle of the class and also risking these assemblies to be transformed as tools of the unions, as well as fall victim to the inter-union conflicts of the different leftist organizations.
In the 1970s up to early 80s, the massive workers' struggles in the Philippines were led not by the unions but by the workers alliances constituted in the midst of struggles. The composition of the alliances were unionized and non-unionized workers with the support of the middle class. The unions were with the alliances, but they were not decisive. The non-unionized workers were decisive because they were the majority within the alliances.
But the unions guided by the Leftists were organizing the non-unionized workers within the alliances thus swelling their membership in a few years time. In the next wave of struggle in the mid-80s and until now, the alliances were either transformed into union federations or were placed under the control of the unions.
2. It should be highlighted that hand in hand in seeking class solidarity is the vigilant and timely resistance against any maneuvers and sabotage from the unions within the workers' assemblies so as not to derail the generalization of struggle especially in a situation like in the Philippines where sectarianism and competition within different union federations and different Leftist organizations are acute.
3. In seeking class solidarity, the broad masses of workers should also be made aware about the dangers of unionism just as we are always warning the workers about the dangers of any kind of reformism and leftism.
We fully agree with the analysis of the evolution of the crisis of capitalism. However, we would like to stress the following:
1. That the rise of call center industry is also a manifestation of the crisis in the advance capitalist countries especially the U.S. This outsourcing industry hires hundreds of thousands of young workers both in the Philippines and India. Almost all of these workers are contractual or have precarious jobs and work long hours.
2. China is also invading the Philippine economy, but we are still gathering data of how big it is and if it is supporting a faction of the Filipino ruling class to compete against the political control of the U.S.
Chinese made RTWs, electronic chips and even a multi-billion dollar railway project have entered the country. Many Filipino-Chinese big businesses are investing in China and many government officials from local to national went to China on business observation tour. Most of these officials look up to China as model for development.
U.S. imperialism is well aware of this and it is exerting pressures on the Arroyo government on this matter.
This report is comprehensive and detailed. We agree that chaos and barbarism today are getting worse day by day, but the capacity of the international proletariat is not yet enough to stop them and eventually overthrow international capitalism. Thus, there is the urgent need for the communist left world-wide to exert more efforts in their interventions within the proletarian struggles.
With all these reports, there is an urgent need today that all the internationalist communists in the world should coordinate their activities and interventions in the world scale. The proletariat could only hasten its accumulation of strength and raising its class consciousness through the common efforts of the revolutionary minorities in the world. Thus, sectarianism of the other communist left organizations is very harmful to the international proletariat in its combat against its powerful class enemy (...)
For the success of the ICC 17th International Congress,
INTERNASYONALISMO
21 May 2007
On the occasion of the centenary of the Belfast summer of working class discontent in 1907, John Gray's account of these historic events - "City in Revolt: Jim Larkin and the Belfast Dock Strike 1907 [10] " - first published in 1985, has been reprinted. Gray is not a revolutionary communist, but a Belfast Librarian, an historian and a trade unionist. At all events he has rendered a great service to the international working class by lifting this struggle out of historical oblivion and making it possible for the present generations to re-appropriate its lessons. The book is all the more remarkable on account of the reproduction of photos capturing the drama and the mass character of these struggle, many of them taken by Alex Hog, a well known Belfast photographer of the time.
Basing itself on Gray's account, this article will attempt to briefly summarise the events and their historical and contemporary significance.
The opening skirmish of the Belfast „summer of discontent" took place at the Sirocco Engineering plant April 26, when non-unionised workers went on strike for higher pay. The company responded with threats to transfer the factory to Germany. The strike ended with the sacking of the "ring leaders" and the workers being obliged to sign a document promising not to join any trade union.
The same day, a spontaneous strike broke out at the coal quay in Belfast harbour over the dismissal of union members. The Belfast branch of the Shipping Federation immediately offered its support to the coal merchant employers. The Shipping Federation was experienced in organising armies of blacklegs and transferring them across Europe. At the moment when the Belfast dispute began, thousands of such strike breakers were finishing off a mass strike in the harbour of Hamburg. Later in the same year, they would leave a bloody trail behind them in Antwerp.
But in Belfast, labour unrest quickly spread to the employees of the Belfast Steamship Company itself - again around the question of unionisation. The union representative on the spot at the time was Jim Larkin, who was later to become famous as a labour leader in Dublin during the Great Lockout of 1913, and as one of the founders of the Communist Party in the United States. Infact Larkin tried to prevent the strike, feeling that it was immature since the workers concerned were not yet organised. The two conflicts in the harbour quickly escalated with the moving in of blacklegs and the locking out of harbour workers by the employers. The strikers chased the blacklegs off the quays, brushing the police aside. May 9 the blacklegs, obliged to take shelter in offshore boats, themselves went on strike and departed for Liverpool. In face of the fierceness of workers resistance, the main employer on the coal quay, Sam Kelly, now capitulated, granting higher wages, and also union recognition to the NUDL - the National Union of Dock Labourers which Larkin was representing. During the ensuing victory march, workers carried Union Jacks (the British national flag) and sang "Britons never shall be slaves."
Thomas Gallaher, owner of a major tobacco company in the city, now intervened in public, criticising that employers had backed off in face of workers resistance, and announcing what he believed to be the real stakes in the conflict: the struggle against socialism and trade unionism. Fresh blacklegs were brought over from Britain. 300 policemen were specially assigned for their protection. They were to be lodged on a ship which would steam out into the middle of Belfast Lough (the bay outside the harbour) each night so that they would be safe from amphibious strikers attacks.
At a mass meeting May 16, Larkin linked these struggle to those going on at the same moment in New York and in Montreal, Canada, and to growing unrest in harbours throughout Britain. A dynamic of mass public debate had begun, and that same night a police baton charge was needed to disperse a crown of 2000 workers who were still gathered on the streets. On the same day, Larkin directly challenged Thomas Gallaher, who had called for the unity of all the employers, by holding a lunchtime meeting outside his tobacco factory. The following day, Gallaher sacked seven girls for having attended this meeting. In response, a thousand women employees walked off work and marched to the afternoon strike meeting in Corporation Square. A furious Thomas Gallaher threatened to transfer his tobacco production to Britain. In response to a rumour that shipyard workers were intending to join the dockers in storming the warehouses on Donegall Quay, 200 soldiers were called into the harbour - the beginning of military intervention in this conflict.
May 17, the girls at Gallahers Tobaco were obliged to go back to work - under circumstances which were as unprecedented as they were historically significant. They had been called on by Larkin to join a trade union. Now it turned out that neither the NUDL nor any other union could take on so many new members at one go. Nor was there any financial support available for them. This showed how increasingly inadequate the union form of organisation was becoming in the modern epoch of mass struggle and rapid extension of movements.
Encouraged by the success at Kellys, other coal heavers, dockers and also iron workers came out on strike. In face of general discontent and a growing potential of its spreading, they had their demands quickly satisfied. By mid-June, sailors and firemen were presenting ultimatums to their bosses, iron moulders were out on strike, and the main concentration of workers in the city, those at the shipyards - already heavily involved in solidarity actions with those on strike - were themselves threatening to come out. To this list must be added the many workers who were locked out by their bosses as an indirect result of other strikes, and who were regularly participating in the mass assemblies in the city.
In order to widen and galvanise the strike front, the NUDL under Larkin now put in a general wage increase demand to all the cross-channel operating shipping companies. Many of these enterprises were owned by the big British railway companies, making the whole dimension of the conflict clear, going far beyond the nature of a local dispute. Whereas the local bosses were often inclined to seek a settlement with their employees, the great railway companies openly backed the Belfast Steamship Company, rejecting negotiations and instead calling in a further five hundred troops to guard the quays. The British Army stood arms in hand, faced eye to eye with the Protestant workers of Belfast who - according to loyalist mythology - they were supposed to be defending against the "papist" (i.e. Catholic) workers.
That same day, June 26, the railway workers union - the ASRS - was meeting in Birmingham, where the question of strike action throughout Britain for union recognition was on the agenda. The Belfast strikers had been banking on this strike taking place as a means of spreading the front against the block of the employers - within which the rail companies were playing an increasingly aggressive role. But the ASRS rejected strike action, leaving Belfast in the lurch.
By this stage, the massive military presence on the quays was beginning to make the dockers' strike ineffective. With hopes of extending the struggle to Britain dashed, the workers were looking for an alternative response to the increasingly massive and united offensive of the ruling class. The first attempt in this direction was a march of the dockers to the City Hall to pressurise the council chamber (the politicians who ruled the city) who were in session. According to a local press report, they were "marshalled in a long column of fours, and headed by Mr Larkin they marched in military order through the streets gathering an immense crowd at their heels." (Gray. P. 67).
Although the "city fathers" had to admit a delegation of the dockers to their meeting, they refused to make any concessions. But soon, an answer to the army occupation of the quays came from another direction. Towards the end of June, the carters came out on strike out of solidarity with the dockers. These were the workers who picked up the goods which had been unloaded from the ships and brought them into the city on their carts. They thus transferred the conflict from the quays, which could easily be controlled by the military, to the streets of the city. What this meant soon became visible. The first blackleg cart which emerged from the port was immediately surrounded by a crowd of several thousand people - the strikers and their working class supporters from all over the city - who in a kind of spontaneous division of labour either jeered the strike breakers or agitated them to come over to the side of labour. By the afternoon these blacklegs brought over from Glasgow were already asking to be sent home again.
Through the solidarity action of the carters, and of the whole of proletarian Belfast, the workers were able to neutralise the presence of the British Army and give their struggle a new quality. Encouraged by this development, the carters now raised their own demands: a wage rise and a reduction of their working week to sixty hours. The ruling class was taken aback by this development, since it is always difficult for the bourgeoisie to understand the nobility of the class solidarity of the proletariat. The world of a difference between the two classes was well summarised by a spokesman of the employers, who declared: "It is difficult for anyone in our business to conceive why the carters should have thrown in their lot with the dockers who, in my opinion, are an entirely different class of men altogether." (Gray P. 69). The struggle had been transferred to the streets. The streets were ruled by the workers. There were discussions and meetings everywhere. Extension of struggle and of consciousness instead of violent confrontation were the means through which the intervention of the armed capitalist state was counter-acted.
The movement began with labour disputes mainly involving Protestant workers in and around the port. We have seen the workers celebrating their first small victory by marching under the Union Jack. But we have also seen how these labour disputes became a mass movement involving the working population of the whole of Belfast, facing up together to the might of the British state, the principle world power of the day. With this mass movement on a class terrain, something appeared which had never been seen in Belfast before: a social struggle where workers from the Protestant and Catholic districts fought side by side. With this, a politicisation arose which was not that of British Protestant loyalism or Irish Catholic nationalism, but of the working class itself. On the eve of the twelfth of July, the traditional day of the orange order marches and of sectarian violence throughout Ulster, a mass rally was held in Belfast. Reporting on this event, Police Commissioner Hill commented that "the speakers at the meeting last night did not speak of the strike. They spoke of socialism and generalities." (Gray P.77). The following day, Belfast witnessed the strangest 12th of July ever. Instead of riots and pogroms, strike leaders were getting up in public to defend workers interests against sectarianism.
Infact, already before the July 12 parades, Protestant workers had been writing readers letters to the daily papers taking position against religious sectarianism. One Walter Savage of Ohio Street, for instance, wrote of those: "who have been trying all through this dispute to stir up the old spirit of bigotry and hatred that has kept the labouring classes of this great city so long under the heel of their masters and made them white slaves, and even worse than slaves, for no slave had to work the hours we had to work...from 6 in the morning to 9.30 at night for the first five days in the week and on Saturday from 6 in the morning till 11.30 at night, and a good many of us had to turn out and work a half day on Sundays for the miserable sum of 1shilling...being even deprived of the right of attending our place of worship. I would like to know where the Orangeism or Protestantism of our city comes in? Or what Orangeism or Protestantism has got to do with men fighting for their just rights, when the issue lies not in religion but is a question of bread and butter, and shorter hours and better conditions which we should have had 20 years ago.." (Gray P. 80).
Encouraged by these unprecedented successes, the movement began to employ mass meetings more and more consciously as a weapon against sectarianism. Here is the press report on the declaration, given at the mass meeting at the customs house steps by W.J. Murray, one of the strike leaders, the day after the July 12th loyalist rallies. "They intended to begin a new policy and during the week would hold two meetings daily. At noon each day they would hold a demonstration in that square, and at 7.30 another meeting would be held but in different parts of the city. Hitherto they had held all their meetings at that square, but now they would visit every part of the city and strive to promote a spirit of brotherhood between the Protestant and R.C. workers."
The first of these meetings was held at Tennent Street at the foot of the Protestant Shankill Road on the night of Monday July 15. Two days later, another mass meeting took place at the Catholic Falls Road, where Larkin and the labour leader Alex Boyd from the Protestant districts of the city spoke. A press report of the speech of Boyd tells us: "He was proud of the fact that he could come to Clonard Gardens and address a meeting in his official capacity as the representative of Sandy Row (cheers) and moreover, he was glad to tell them that he saw before him some members of his own constituency." (P. 83)
Here is how John Gray comments these developments in his book.
"The new scheme for meetings could be seen as a logical parallel to the ever-widening theatre of strike activity, but it had an added significance not appreciated at the time. It marked the extension of the movement from one within strictly industrial confines to one aiming at a wider mobilisation. This too was reflected in the rhetoric of the strike leaders who now spoke of a more general social transformation as well as immediate strike objectives." (P. 83).
There were now three mass meetings being held a day, with thousands turning out each time.
By mid July, the crisis was beginning to come to a head. The three main industrial disputes were threatening to paralyse the city. But the hopes of spreading the struggle beyond the city had not been fulfilled. Whole sectors of the working population were reduced to destitution. Many were obliged to go begging in the countryside. Others were admitted to the poorhouses.
In this dramatic situation, the workers looked to the co-operative movement and to the trade unions for support. The Belfast Co-Operative Society was asked to hire its own ships and bring in coal for the workers. But the Co-Op was obliged by its statute to supply its own members first, and soon the coal men were refusing to distribute this coal on the grounds that the co-operative movement was charging exorbitant prices to its working class customers. Trade union funding also failed to alleviate the desperate situation of the strikers, since the whole working class was being reduced to destitution by the long strikes and lock-outs.
At this moment, trade union leaders from Britain arrived in Belfast with the promise of massive material support. But it soon turned out that they had come in order to end the strikes. Despite their rhetoric of solidarity, they set out to break up the strike front piecemeal. Infact, in early July the Belfast Trades Council had to pass a resolution condemning the use of members of the ASRS railway workers union (one of them a branch secretary) as blacklegs on the Belfast quays! Joseph Maddison, president of the Ironfounders Society, alarmed about the state of strike funds, then came to Belfast with an ultimatum. Either the men would accept a one-shilling-a-week increase or forego strike pay. Then the coal men were sent back to work by their union on the basis of an agreement which the strikers did not even support, and which the employers had not even given them in writing.
"Whatever the terms of the settlement, the tactical consequences of the coal men's return were disastrous. For the first time a group of strikers had accepted a piecemeal settlement. Now the dockers and carters were bound to ask should they not attempt to get back while they could. The carters, in particular, had refused generous terms offered at the end of June...precisely because neither offer included the dockers. Larkin and the other leaders had always emphasised the importance of solidarity; Larkin in particular had stressed the value of the sympathetic strike. The strikers had come to understand the principle of "one out, all out" and its corollary "one back, all back". Now the strike leaders, under pressure from the British leaders, had abandoned that principle. More extraordinary and misleading was the attempt to dress up the settlement as a victory (...) Larkin claimed that the coal men were to go back to work next morning with full recognition of their organisation ‘and their demand as to wages conceded‘ (...)The Belfast Evening Telegraph the following day accurately described Larkin's claim as ‘absolutely wrong'." (P. 95).
And Gray continues:
"The same day, Friday 26 July, the mood of false euphoria over the settlement, which was encouraged by all the labour leaders, was given an added boost by a massive demonstration organised by the Trades Council. This showed that the coal settlement was made at a time when there was unprecedented support for the strike movement from all sections of the working class in Belfast. James O'Connor Kessack, a correspondent for Forward, the Glasgow socialist paper, described sitting enthralled in the top of a tram on the Shankill Road as the huge demonstration, two or three miles long, wound past. James Sexton later claimed that 200,000 took part (...) The procession went through the main working-class areas of the city, and in doing so crossed all those sectarian dividing lines that normally so disfigured the life of the city" (P. 96).
Infact, from the onset, the coal men rebelled against the trade union settlement, repeatedly coming out on wildcat strikes and refusing to carry coal to establishments where strikes were still going on.
Larkin had come over from Liverpool in January 1907 to unionise the unskilled workers of Belfast. According to one popular legend, it was he who instigated the whole class movement there. This is completely untrue. But there is no doubting the devotion of Larkin to the cause of the proletariat, or the positive role he played during the events in Belfast. The fact that even he could be caught up, at certain moments, in the growing logic of trade union containment of workers radicalisation, only goes to show the degree to which this instrument of the class struggle - independently of the will of those involved - was becoming inadequate to the needs of the new period.
Already at the beginning of July, one of the bourgeois newspapers, the Northern Whig, had written that "we are on the eve of an experience something akin to that which has paralysed Russian cities during the past couple of years." (P. 72) This comparison with the mass strikes of 1905 in Russia is very fitting. Both developments were the product of the aggravation of the contradictions of world capitalism, the ripening of the epoch of world war and world revolution. There was also a parallel between Belfast and Russia at the immediate material level: in both cases a very modern and concentrated proletariat working particularly long hours for very low wages. But in Belfast, this extremely miserable situation was not yet typical of the class as a whole in the rest of the United Kingdom, but essentially a product of the local sectarian division within the class. Moreover, as part of the oldest industrial working class in the world, that of Great Britain, the proletariat in Belfast was much more under the weight of trade union traditions than its counterparts in Moscow or Petersburg. We can thus understand that, unlike Russia, there were no workers councils formed in Northern Ireland at the time, and that there were rarely more than a few thousand workers on strike at one go during the summer of discontent.
Nevertheless, the movement in Belfast was an expression of the development of the mass strike as the new form of proletarian struggle in the new epoch of capitalist decline. The most important contribution of 1907 was at the level of public mass meetings as a means of unification of the class.
Towards the end of July, with the working class, isolated in Belfast, being grounded down in a war of attrition, and being left in the lurch by the very trade unions, the recognition of which it was trying to impose, something happened which took everybody by surprise. July 19 constable William Barrett of the Belfast police refused to sit beside a blackleg driving a motor wagon - and was promptly suspended from duty. On Saturday July 27, over half of the police force of Belfast marched to an illegal solidarity meeting for Barrett at Musgrave Street Barracks - and were joined by thousands of elated strikers.
Of course it was a victory for the workers. The very nature of their movement, its massive and public character, the meetings and demonstrations, the helplessness of the security forces as the workers took control of the streets, the unprecedented situation of unity and not strife between the different working class districts - all of this isolated, disoriented and demoralised the police, turning their own wives and children against them.
But this victory gave rise to a new situation with unprecedented dangers for the proletariat. For one thing it created a vacuum which the workers themselves would have to fill through the establishment of a workers militia. But the masses were too euphoric and their leaders too inexperienced to think of such measures. In the meanwhile, the mob began to creep out of its crevices. For another thing, the alleged breakdown in public order was now used by the British government to justify the military occupation of the whole city, while disguising from the British working class that this move was directly aimed against the proletariat of Belfast.
It is obvious that the ruling class has no interest in a mutiny of its own forces of police repression. But once this mutiny had begun, questions have to be asked about the way it was handled by the British Government. When the question of the police revolt was brought up in parliament in Westminster, the issued was completely played down, and presented as having already been resolved - thus being allowed to simmer on. We cannot exclude that the bourgeoisie, once it was confronted with the unpleasant reality of the mutiny, deliberately allowed the crisis to take its course. At all events, on the dawn of August 1, nine men-of war-ships from the Second Division of the Atlantic Fleet of his majesties government appeared on the shores of Belfast Lough. Four additional regiments of troops were rushed into the city - in all 9,000 troops and 1,000 special police. The next day, the dismissal of Barrett was officially confirmed, six other constables suspended, and 203 others transferred to other parts of the country. Even the local bourgeois press spoke of a "reign of terror".
The workers responded by carrying Barrett on their shoulders from one police barracks to another in a mass demonstration, passing from Protestant to Catholic districts. It was as if they sensed that, with the military occupation of the city, the danger of sectarian violence was back again.
Allegedly sent to restore public order, the army immediately moved to smash the domination of the streets by the carters pickets and their working class supporters. Protestant and Catholic working class districts were equally heavily occupied. By August 8, the army had gained control of the streets. This was the occasion for the Irish nationalist politicians from the Catholic "community", who had been lying low during the strikes, hardly concealing their hostility towards them, to resume their sectarian propaganda.
In face of mounting tensions, the workers movement now made a fatal error. Determined to take the struggle against religious sectarianism to a higher level, it decided to forsake the strict class terrain which had characterised the movement until then, inviting the (bourgeois) political leaders of both communities to address a mass rally August 10. It was the same illusion which is fostered today by the idea that long term peace can be established between the religious communities when the arsons on both sides, the likes of Paisley and Adams, come together to form a government.
The result was that Tom Sloan, the Protestant parliamentary representative invited to speak, stood down at the last moment - leaving the meeting dangerously "unbalanced". As for the Catholic speaker, Joe Devlin, he delivered an inflammatory nationalist speech. He seemed out to provoke a Catholic riot against the army. The Loyalist propaganda, for its part, thankfully seized on this meeting as "proof" that the strike movement had from the beginning been a Catholic nationalist plot.
The next day, the police arrested two drunks fighting on the streets in one of the Catholic districts. Thousands of rioters proceeded to attack the barracks where they were being detained. This was the opportunity the army was waiting for. It invaded the district with 2,600 soldiers and 500 special police forces supported by cavalry, setting the whole district ablaze. The following day, the Gordon Highlanders, traditionally seen as particular friends of the Protestant "community", were set in march through the Shankill Road to the Falls Road. In other words they were seen to be coming straight from the Protestant heartlands of the city to attack its main Catholic ghetto. At 7.25 the riot act was read. Immediately, the soldiers fired up the Falls Road, leaving dead and wounded. The next day, the army withdrew from the area. But not before having driven a wedge between Catholic and Protestant workers. As Gray writes: "All over the city, workers resented the appearance of the Army as a strike breaking force, but otherwise viewed it with very conflicting emotions. Only in nationalist areas was it viewed clearly as a foreign army of occupation. That tendency was exacerbated by the overwhelming level of military force applied to the Falls and one not experienced elsewhere." (P. 144)
At a mass meeting the next day, Larkin declared: "The Lord Mayor invoked the aid of the military with the deliberate intention of sowing seed of dissention among the dockers. The masters rejoiced at the rioting, because it gave them the opportunity of asserting that this was a party struggle. But the cause they were fighting was the cause of the workers against the employers, and Protestants and Catholics were banded together regardless of religion or politics."
That same night, the strikers put up posters all over the city, declaring: "Men of Belfast - don't be misled. The employers of Belfast and the authorities are trying to make the disturbances a party matter, for they know that if they can get the Protestants and Catholics to fight they can beat the workers." (P. 146).
Despite these appeals, this violence spelled the end of the mass meetings with their huge working class, non sectarian crowds which were the backbone of the strike movement - which from then on was doomed to defeat.
Among the attentive readers of these lines, there may be some who - at least until reaching the tragic end of our narrative - have been asking themselves: Is there not something wrong here? Is this remarkable workers struggle really supposed to have taken place in Belfast? The same Belfast which, over the last century and a half, has consistently been the main bastion in all of western Europe of religious violence and bigotry?
What these events illustrate, is that there is not one Belfast, not one capitalist reality, but two - just as there are two main classes in bourgeois society, each the carrier of a different social principle. The great contribution of capitalism to the advancement of humanity was the creation, for the first time, of a single world economy. In doing so, it liquidated, or at last shook up and connected to the world, all the narrow and parochial communities with their superstition and bigotry, which pre-capitalist class society had brought forth. But it did not do so without reproducing this narrowness and bigotry at a higher level. Yes, capitalism did create a world economy. But it created it on the basis of a world market, on the principle of competition. As such it pitted each plant, each company, each nation state, but also each community and religious group against all the others.
The history of Ireland illustrates well this dialectic. Through a series of "plantations", the English ruling classes attempted repeatedly to eliminate the indigenous population by removing it from the soil. All of these plantations failed, because they were an expropriation to the benefit of a tiny aristocracy which needed the local rural population to work the land for it. The only "successful" plantation was that of Ulster, because there, the pauperised indigenous peasantry was replaced, (although not entirely) not only by absentee landlords, but by a new and hardly less pauperised population brought over in particular from Scotland.
But the success of this operation was inseparably linked to the triumph of the bourgeois revolution in England itself. This revolution was fought out in the name of Puritanism against feudal Catholicism. Its shining shield and sword, Oliver Cromwell, already prepared the way for what was to come. During his military campaign in Ireland, Cromwell committed atrocities on a new scale and of a new quality, leaving behind him a heritage of religious hatred. In England itself, the "Glorious Revolution" ended in a compromise between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, and in the ferocious repression of the lower classes which had taken the biblical millennialism of the revolutionary period literally. Although these layers of the urban and rural poor lost their revolutionary zeal, becoming narrow minded and bigoted, they retained their suspicion towards the "Establishment" and their hatred of Catholicism. The new bourgeois order in Britain was thus doubly happy to get rid of them. This was achieved by sending them to Ulster, where they could be pitted against the Irish Catholic poor (just as, in North America, the puritan communities and sects were originally used to oust and then eliminate the indigenous population).
The industrial revolution in Northern Ireland thus took place in this pre-existing context, and soon reproduced the situation of the countryside in the cities. There, segregated residential patterns had already been established by the mid nineteenth century. From then on, any attempt of one of the two religious groups to spread its settlement beyond its own area was regularly answered by pogroms and house wrecking from the other side. And if, in Belfast in particular, Catholic districts such as the Falls or the Ardoyne were veritable ghettos, the Protestant workers districts such as the Shankill were no less poverty stricken. Daily life on both sides was organised and completely dominated by religion and the clergy, so that ever those employers who were opposed to religious sectarianism, or had grasped that in the long term it would prove economically counter-productive, were more or less obliged to abide by its rules of segregation. The result, from 1832 on, was sectarian rioting at least every decade. The last outbreak of major community violence of this kind before the 1907 summer of discontent had been in 1901.
This violence in turn was used to mobilise the population behind the different competing fractions of the ruling class. The loyalist bourgeoisie taught the "Protestant workers" that their "prosperity" depended on the link with Britain, which they claimed the Irish Catholic bourgeoisie wanted to sever. But in reality, the goal of the latter part of the ruling class at the time was "Home Rule". This meant that the Irish bourgeoisie wanted to participate, as junior partner, in the exploitation of the British Empire.
This is the history and the pre-history of Belfast in the epoch of the rise of capitalism - its local history. And at this level, the city on the Lagan has been one of the most horrific and sordid spots on the face of the earth.
But there is another Belfast, that of the working class, the class of international solidarity. Belfast was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a great industrial city and seaport, the fastest growing city in the British Isles. Harland and Wolff, with 12,000 employees, was the largest shipyard in the world. A second shipyard, Workman and Clark, with 7,000 workers, was known locally as the "wee yard". The largest Linen Mill and the largest rope factory in the world were also located in Belfast (see chapter one of Gray's book).
Lacking in socialist education, the working class for half a century had been trapped in religious views of the world. But we have seen how the proletarian struggle liberated the workers from this trap, pitting them against world capitalism. We have seen how their exploiters threatened to transfer production to Britain or even to Germany. We have seen how the ruling class was ready to bring in strike breakers from all over Europe. We have seen how the workers learnt to unite in struggle and to consciously and systematically combat the divisions within their ranks. And we have seen how, in this process, the workers began to develop a socialist perspective, and, in so doing, to throw off the dead weight of religion.
Of course it was only a beginning, and the struggles of 1907 ended in defeat. The lessons of 1907 lay buried for decades under the debris of sectarian violence. But the proletarian Belfast, once it asserted itself, never fully disappeared. It re-asserted itself in 1919, during the world wide revolutionary wave of workers struggles, and among the unemployed in the 1930s. Then, as very recently with the postal workers demonstration of 2006, the workers of the Protestant and Catholic districts of Belfast stood together as proletarians.
This is the lesson of 1907, a perspective for how to respond to religious or community division. A perspective for Belfast, for Baghdad, for Beirut, for Bombay, for the whole of humanity, as part of an international struggle of the only class capable of world wide solidarity.
Ted D, September 2007.
This statement of position about the recent earthquake in Peru was sent to us by a contact in that country. It breathes with indignation about the consequences of this event for the workers and the poor in general, while the reaction of the bourgeoisie has shown all its hypocrisy and cupidity. We fully share the view that capitalism is responsible for these consequences and that only the destruction of this system can allow us to live a truly human life.
"It's another test that God above has sent us" (Alan Garcia Perez, president of Peru)
It is perfectly obvious that the bourgeoisie is profiting from this "divine test". In recent months, the Peruvian bourgeoisie has had to deal with millions of militant workers fighting for their demands. These struggles, especially in the mining sector, have shown a high level of proletarian solidarity[1].
In the last ten days, using the regional governments, the provincial bourgeoisie, which has its own particular interests although they are basically identical to those of the national bourgeoisie, had been threatening to paralyse a number of regions. Even certain sectors of the police were threatening to go on strike if their trade union wasn't recognised, and the doctors of ESSALUD (social security) had stopped work since Wednesday morning. Alan Garcia's manoeuvre against the Chilean bourgeoisie[2] had long ceased to have any impact except in the subservient press and the words of intellectuals at the command of the state. A new wave of struggles was threatening to explode on various fronts.
Last Wednesday at 18.40, there was a quake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale about 60 km from Pisco, which is about two hours from Lima. Hundreds of thousands of inhabitants lost everything in 70 seconds, especially in Pisco, Chincha and Ica. These towns were completely destroyed. In Lima, the capital, the shock wave caused considerable damage. The main areas hit were in the north of Lima and in the department of Ica.
The state apparatus seemed to be in total disarray. For hours it did nothing. Neglecting his famous sense of style, President Garcia posed in his office in shirt sleeves, alongside the acolytes he was about to send off to evaluate the scale of the disaster. Nobody could get there by land, since the Panamerican highway was impassable in several places, but a few journalists managed to get to Chincha, Pisco and Ica, the main devastated cities, and immediately began to broadcast their reports. In Ica, the church of My Lord of Luren collapsed, crushing dozens of worshippers in its rubble. In Tambo de Mora (the port of Chincha), the prison walls caved in and 600 prisoners escaped. On Thursday morning, the death toll was already 500, with over a thousand injured. The same day, president Alan Garcia made his appearance, accompanied by the Prime Minister Jorge del Castillo, the army minister Alan Wagner and the president of the Congress Gonzales Posada. During the electoral campaign, the latter had committed himself to reconstructing Ica's airport, a promise which was of course not kept: as a result, aid, which could only have come by air, has still not been able to reach this city.
The first signs of discontent began to be expressed in the population. A few examples of this filtered through despite the chaotic state of information and the grip of the media, showing the real underlying reasons for the disaster: poverty. In the areas of the cities where the main devastation had taken place, the population had built their houses out of mud, and obviously without the least protection against earthquakes. On top of this, many other houses were extremely old and worn and could not resist the quake.
Here is an illustrative example: in Pisco, a town which has a port nearby and a seaside resort for millionaires, Paracas, the impact of the catastrophe was very uneven. The solid buildings and beach villas of the rich stood up to the quake, even though the town of Pisco and the port were totally destroyed. Nature makes no distinctions and accords no privileges; it's the division of society into classes which perpetuates them. It is the poverty provoked by capitalist society which has led to so much destruction, since the poor can never live in solid houses, built with good quality materials and according to plans that take the demands of earthquake zones into account. But the ignominy of capitalism doesn't stop there. The bourgeoisie is already rubbing its hands, thinking about the benefits it can draw from the reconstruction of the country.
The army, which has hundreds of expert building engineers and the heavy materials needed for the job, is for the moment staying in the barracks because financial speculation on the building work has already begun. The various factions of the bourgeoisie are arguing over the contracts. The most significant example was provided by the alliance between the journalist Cecilia Valenzuela and the La Positiva insurance company which wants to reconstruct the region.
Air tickets for this zone have already increased by 400% and Alan Garcia has done no more than protest on the TV, since everyone has to kneel before the rules of the free market. The Credit Bank, headed by Dioniso Romero, has opened an account to hold aid funds for the region, a new source of revenue for a bank which wants to show that it is the best performer in the country, that it has business sense written into its genes. Spanish Cooperation has also made its appearance, as well as Firemen Without Frontiers, in fact the whole edifice of social aid, while central, regional and local government is leaving reconstruction in the hands of private enterprise. But the workers already know that the state, under capitalism, can only be the state of the capitalists.
The UN has already sent a million dollars and the Interamerican Development Bank, which lent 80 million dollars to the Wong corporation with the approval of Fujimori, has only sent 200,000 dollars. The coffers of Caritas have only been opened after some delay. Business has to go on: this is the essential lesson that the local bourgeoisie has drawn from this tragedy.
What we have to draw from it is that while the colossal power of nature can cause a great deal of suffering, the real destructive power resides in the social relations which dominate the lives of millions of human beings. These relations condemn them to live in misery, in the worst possible housing. It is only the disappearance of these bourgeois social relations, the disappearance of capitalism on a world scale, which can allow the whole population of the planet to live decent and human lives. This is the only way we can survive into the future,
H, Lima, 17.8.07
[1] Concerning these struggles, the same comrade has already contributed two articles to our website: en.internationalism.org/wr/305/miners-strike-peru [12], and (in Spanish) es.internationalism.org/cci-online/200704/1866/luchas-proletarias-en-peru [13].
[2] The Peruvian state had published a map displaying its claims on territorial waters. The Chilean bourgeoisie took the ball in its court and immediately sent its army to carry out manoeuvres in the north of Chile, on the frontier with Peru. We can see once again that nationalist demands by states are just manoeuvres aimed at prolonging their power at the expense of millions of workers who can be sent to fight against their class brothers in another country. The enemy of the Peruvian workers is the Peruvian bourgeoisie, just as the Chilean bourgeoisie is the enemy of the Chilean proletariat.
A comrade from Lima who is corresponding and discussing regularly with our organisation has already sent us an article on the miners’ strike in Peru [12] last April and has now sent us an update with further news of the teachers’ strike there and of workers’ struggles in Chile. We warmly welcome his efforts. It’s vitally important to rapidly circulate information, experiences, lessons regarding the workers’ struggles developing across the world. The contributions by this comrade are an example which we can only encourage. The article that follows is based on a number of texts written by the comrade. It was written before the terrible earthquake which “benefited” the Peruvian bourgeoisie by breaking the dynamic of the social struggles that had been spreading throughout the country (see this article [15] where the same comrade describes the way the Peruvian bourgeoisie tried to take advantage of the misery caused by the quake).
The social situation in South America is more and more marked by the development of workers’ struggles. In Chile over the past year there have been numerous strikes in the copper mines, which provide 40% of world copper production. This indicates the importance of this sector in a country where the working class is seeing a very brutal deterioration in living and working conditions. It’s difficult to obtain precise information about these movements because there is a media black-out. But we do know that the unions have organised the division between the workers of the state enterprise CODELCO and the workers of the soustratantes, who earn a third of the wage for the same work. The same goes for divisions between strikers and workers still at their jobs. The strike lasted 38 days up till July and ended with promises of improvements in contracts for the ….workers, without any real change in their status, which was their main demand.
In Peru, in April, a strike beginning in the Chinese enterprise Shougang extended to all the mining centres in the country. The unions have played their reactionary role to the full; in the country’s most important mine, Yanacocha (a gold mine near Cajamarca in the north of the country, producing between hundred and a thousand million dollars worth of gold each year), the unions entered into private talks with the bosses and didn’t resume the strike.
In Chimbote, where there was also a strong movement among peasants and the unemployed, the Sider Peru enterprise was totally paralysed. The miners’ wives demonstrated alongside them as well as a large part of the town’s population. In Ilo and Cerro de Pasco, the roads were blocked. In the latter 15 miners were arrested, accused of throwing stones at the regional government’s headquarters. The bourgeois press rushed to declare that the strike had been a failure. They quoted the minister of this sector, Pinilla, who said that only 5700 miners were on strike when the real figure was more like 120,000.
In the mountains around Lima, the miners of Casapalca locked up the mine’s bosses who had threatened to sack them for abandoning their posts. The minister declared the strike to be illegal because they had only given four days warning instead of the five required by law. He threatened to sack all the workers who continued the strike.
Students from the University of San Marcos de Lima expressed solidarity with the miners and brought food to their “collective kitchens”, a practice which was common to all the strikes in Peru, whether by teachers, nurses or miners. Sharing food with strikers’ families also made it possible to exchange experience and collectively analyse the struggle on a day-to-day basis.
It is very significant that this unlimited national strike took place after 20 years of social peace in this sector.
On 19th June, a leader of the teachers’ trade union, Huaynalaya, called for a national strike, and this call had an echo across the country. Huaynalaya was seen by the press as being in opposition to the majority of the teachers’ union, the SUTEP, which has a somewhat pro-Chinese orientation along with the “Red Motherland” party (Patria Roja, a party of the left wing of the bourgeoisie).
On 5 July the union joined the strike anyway. Previously, influential journalists had been denigrating the movement. The position of the press could hardly have been clearer. The teachers were described as being responsible for their own intellectual shortcomings and were accused of “cultivating strikes”, depriving the children and teenagers of the nation of precious days of their studies. It has to be said that this argument is a bit contradictory. How can these days of studies be so precious when the people doing the teaching are so incompetent? Basically the press was afraid that the pupils would come out onto the streets to support the teachers as they had done in 1977, an experience which gave rise to a new generation of militants, many of whom turned to armed struggle.
The Minster of Education himself told the journalist Palacios that there were only 5000 strikers out of the 250,000 teachers employed by his ministry. Later on he had to admit he had made a “mistake”. The mobilisations spread across the country: to Juliaca, Puno, Ucayali, Ayacucho and Huanuco. The teachers were also supported by the population as had been the case two months before during the miners’ strikes. However there was very little coordination among the most combative sectors, capable of drawing a balance sheet of these experiences. The unions remained in control and were a real obstacle to the movement of the workers.
The current struggles in Peru, which have covered the whole country, are the fruit of a confluence of events which have their origins in two sources of discontent. On the one hand, regional demands, in particular in Pucalipa where the town was taken over and isolated for over 15 days, and, on the other hand, the strike of the SUTEP which began on 19th June by teachers opposed to the orientations of the Patria Roja party, and later joined by the whole of the union, bringing in the majority of the 320,000 teachers of Peru from 5 July onwards.
This mobilisation, mixed up with regional demands, which were very varied and generally highly localist, gave rise to a huge mass reaction across the country. The number of injuries and arrests remains unknown, and occupations or burnings of local headquarters, as well as confrontations with the police, took place in all areas. On 9 July, the minister admitted that there were still 75 unresolved conflicts, which means that there were no doubt a good deal more.
The current struggles, despite the violence they have unleashed, don’t contain the perspective of an autonomous struggle of the proletariat, fighting for its own objectives and its own programme. The proletariat at the moment is dominated by the interests of the local bourgeoisie and its numerous petty bourgeois allies (intellectuals, journalists…). The proletarians who intervene in these movements need to create nuclei that can draw the lessons and facilitate the autonomy of the struggle, which is the only path that will enable the working class to get rid of the capitalist system and all its misery, death and destruction.
Lima 9.7.07
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/307/day-of-study
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/16/state-capitalism
[4] https://de.internationalism.org/content/1503/die-lehren-aus-dem-deutschen-herbst-1977
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/germany
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/terrorism
[7] https://fil.internationalism.org/
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/internasyonalismo
[10] https://www.amazon.co.uk/city-revolt-larkin-belfast-strike/dp/095558230X
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/ireland
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/305/miners-strike-peru
[13] https://es.internationalism.org/cci-online/200704/1866/luchas-proletarias-en-peru
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/peru
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2007/sept/peru-quake
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle