Because of the depth of capitalism's economic crisis the attacks on working class living and working standards have been increasingly serious. There are increasing signs that workers have been responding to the deterioration of their material situation, a fact that has been noticed by various political tendencies. We look at some of these responses.
In Socialist Worker (12/9/9), for example, the SWP highlights "the new wave of struggles breaking out in different areas across Britain." In International Socialism 124 it writes of "very important signs of a new mood of militant resistance among some groups of workers which may spread in a way which we have not seen for many years"
The SWP points to a number of factors. Strikes have been unofficial and not tied to legal ballots. Some strikes have been indefinite. Workers have used their imaginations. Young workers have come to the forefront of struggles. Workers have gained victories as a result of their struggles.
Some of these things are true. Workers have indeed fought without waiting for the unions' seal of approval, and, part of an international trend, a younger generation is getting more involved in struggles. There have been ‘indefinite' strikes, but that's not always positive.
Also, in the context of the postal strike, they say (IS124) that the "union is able to keep the lid on any outbreak of unofficial action." Elsewhere "There was a point in the Visteon dispute where the trade union officials nearly got hold of it and put it at risk."
However, for all these comments, the SWP, and the whole Trotskyist tradition it stands for, is solidly behind the union framework, no matter how many flaws it admits. With Vestas, for example, it admits that "For the first three or four days of the occupation there was no union involvement at all." Yet it also claims that one of the big gains of the occupation is the new strength of union organisation on the Isle of Wight. Workers occupied without any union assistance, and then, when the RMT etc got involved, there was no move to extend the struggle to other workers. On the contrary, Vestas became a cause célèbre in which the needs of the struggle got lost in the campaigns of unions, leftists and greens.
One interesting remark from these firm advocates of the need for a disciplined party is on the need for "a wider group of people who form around these disputes to keep in touch with each other and create networks to confront the bureaucracy." The creation of networks is usually more the concern of more informal political formations and varieties of anarchism. In this instance the ‘confrontation' with the ‘bureaucracy' would still seem to be part of normal union activity.
The SWP is an evident example of ‘leftism': political currents that, under a veneer of socialism and revolution, have the function of shoring up the state organs charged with keeping the working class in line. We now turn to groups and currents who, with varying degrees of success, aim to put forward the real interests of the working class.
Brighton Solidarity Federation has recently produced a statement "For workers' control! Lessons of recent struggles in the UK" that begins: "Recent years have seen promising signs of a working class fightback, after decades of attacks on working class living standards." As opposed to the SWP they see the struggle going back more than a few months and look at examples from the last three years.
With the 2007 postal strikes they see how the movement ended with a "stitch up." In the public sector disputes of 2008 they note the impact of "those willing to take militant, sustained direct action and spread the struggle beyond their immediate workplaces."
For 2009 they choose to focus on the Ford/Visteon occupations. This does show the strength of the movement and the way the Unite union finally regained control, but it wasn't the only significant movement of the year. The Vestas occupation and the solidarity strikes in and beyond the oil refineries (which SolFed do mention elsewhere - see Catalyst 22) also have important lessons - indeed the omission of the latter is particularly hard to understand, given that they offer clear examples of workers being willing to take "direct action and spread the struggle beyond their immediate workplaces".
When SolFed itself draw out the "lessons learned" their clearest points are on the nature of workers' self-organisation. "The central form of self-organisation is the mass meeting. However, it is vital that mass meetings do not just give a democratic rubber-stamp to decisions made elsewhere (as happened in the Ford-Visteon dispute), but take an active role in organising and controlling the struggle."
However "Not everything can be done in a mass meeting. Sometimes a strike committee is needed to draw up demands. Other times workers may want to produce a leaflet or do some research. They may also want to send delegations to other workplaces in order to encourage solidarity actions and spread the struggle."
These are all fundamental acquisitions of the workers' movement. Confusion starts when they explain "the contradictions and limits of a rank-and-file level of trade unionism". This begins quite promisingly: "It is not simply a matter of the unions ‘not doing their job properly' - they do it only too well, since they need to be able to control workers' struggles in order to function as representatives of those struggles."
They do make it clear what they mean by ‘rank and file' unionism. "Shop steward and convenor positions - often taken by the most militant workers - must mediate between shop floor interests and the union bureaucracy's organisational interests." But then they go on to argue that "stewards have to be transformed from being representatives, whose role is to reconcile workers' demands with the interests of management, into being delegates"(Catalyst 22). If stewards can transform the function they have - presumably through a mix of enlightenment and will power, and with their actual social position having no influence on what they think, say or do - then why can't union bosses or other functionaries of the capitalist class change the way they act as well? What's the point of mass meetings and recallable delegates if workers (or a militant minority) still have to struggle within the union structure?
SolFed's take on industrial unionism is also rather confused and confusing. It is against the idea of "One Big Union for all", which at least has the intention of stressing the global unity of the working class. Instead they want a union "made up of those workers committed to the anarcho-syndicalist aims and methods".
This doesn't sound much like a union, but very much like a political organisation - one that defends some very clear positions, like the necessity of mass meetings to keep control of the struggle in workers' hands, but which then undermines this clarity by arguing that it wants shop stewards capable of ‘doing their job properly.'
The Communist Workers Organisation is a group of the communist left (as is the ICC). The latest issue of Revolutionary Perspectives (no 51) starts with an article titled ‘From episodic resistance to global class war?'. It opens "We are dedicating the bulk of this issue of RP to ‘green shoots'. No, not of the mythical, much spotted capitalist recovery, but of the revival of working class resistance around the planet, much of which is going unreported."
They do not limit themselves to workers' struggles in Britain, but take in struggles in China, South Korea and South Africa, as well as going back to look at the lessons of the miners' strike in Britain in 1984-85. They not only show the struggles that have been fought, but also the obstacles of nationalism and unionism that workers face. Not leaving it there they say that "All these signs of resistance after years of relative class quiet are heartening but, as the weight of the attacks is building up, they will have to develop into a bigger movement with wider goals."
Spelling this out they say that "Ultimately workers everywhere will have to recognise that the only permanent way to ensure their living standards is when they take over the running of society themselves."
In their current intervention, therefore, the CWO is both greeting different expressions of class struggle and putting forward the wider perspective beyond the immediate battles.
In the CWO's latest broadsheet, Aurora 15, they have an article on "class war at Royal Mail". It not only emphasises the importance of solidarity action in workers' struggles, but also that "In embryo this is also a strike about a different society". This is a good reminder of the different values of the parasitic capitalist class and state, and those of the working class as it develops its struggles.
There are, however, a couple of formulations that seem to single out one sector of workers when the extension of the struggle is the prime need. "Support the posties! They offer us a better world" at the beginning of the article and "The postal workers are fighting for us all" at the end. The postal workers are only part of the working class and, when the main danger facing postal workers is isolation, it is no time to talk up their particular strengths when they desperately need the struggle to spread.
Whatever the differences, what these three views share is a lack of any sense of the changing shape of the class struggle and its historical context. In the case of a leftist group like the SWP, when they have made generalisations about the class struggle they seem calculated to disorientate. In the early 1980s, a period of workers' militancy in Britain and internationally, they talked of a ‘downturn' in workers' struggles. With the decline in struggles at the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 1990s they insisted on a ‘new mood of militancy'.
With the CWO, for all their commitment to theoretical clarity, there have been many occasions when they have expressed enthusiasm for particular struggles, but never a serious attempt to establish a framework for understanding the inevitable ebbs and flows of the class struggle.
The most important point to register about the last twenty years of workers' struggles is that not only were there very low levels of class struggle in the 1990s compared to the successive waves of struggle that broke out in the period after the 1968 events in France, but also that workers' consciousness had been hit so badly that the very sense of a working class identity was seriously diminished. When we saw the revival of the working class it was not at the level of the massive struggles of the 1970s and 80s, but it did show signs of a changing consciousness in the working class.
The strikes and demonstrations over the attacks on pensions in France, Italy and Austria in 2003/4 were significant not just as struggles that involved a large number of workers, but also because they were not about immediate questions but showed a concern for the future. This was a turning point in the situation
Subsequently, in the gradual revival of workers' struggles we have seen forms of organisation that have bypassed the unions, struggles in which workers have expressed solidarity and attempts to establish discussion as a part of the combat.
Among the highlights of recent years have been the struggles against the CPE in France in 2006 and last December's revolt in Greece. In each case we saw occupations, a commitment to discussion, solidarity, and the involvement of students, those in work and the unemployed.
That is the context for understanding today's struggles, internationally and in Britain. When looking at this year's struggles - Lindsey, Visteon, Vestas, post - it is not a matter of producing a series of balance sheets for each individual struggle, but of seeing how they are expressions of a growing class movement, taking the form of occupations, wildcats that escape union control, and attempts at putting solidarity into practice; it is equally necessary to consider how this movement is dealing with negative elements such as the union obstacles, the influence of nationalism, and the campaigns of the leftists.
There are indeed ‘promising signs' in the class struggle. Revolutionaries can play their part in its advance by giving a perspective for its development.
Car 29/10/9
Between 1647 and 1649 the deepening class consciousness of the exploited masses in England was transformed into a revolutionary movement that for a time challenged the very foundations of the state the rising bourgeoisie was trying to consolidate.
At its highest points this movement showed an extraordinary capacity for self organisation, creating democratic organs that anticipated the formation of workers' and soldiers' councils in the Russian revolution, and gave rise to pioneering communist minorities who defended a practical programme to abolish private property and establish common ownership through the revolutionary action of the exploited masses.
The third and final part of this series by a close sympathiser (see WRs 323 [7], 325 [8]) examines this revolutionary movement and its relevance for today.
The initial focus of the movement was in the army, where the rank and file quickly became a powerful revolutionary force.
Having created the New Model Army to secure its victory over the monarchy, the bourgeoisie found itself confronted by a highly motivated and well-disciplined body of armed labourers and peasants, which considered itself not as ‘a mere mercenary army' but as a force created by parliament to defend ‘the people's just rights and liberties' (A representation of the army, June 1647). When the Presbyterian-controlled parliament tried to disband part of the army without backpay and send the rest to invade Ireland, the rank and file reacted swiftly by creating their own democratic organs, electing delegates or ‘agitators' to represent their views. The army agitators were well organised, forming committees from which a central council was drawn, and highly active, organising meetings and demonstrations and maintaining contact with the civilian population and the Leveller movement. From protests over army grievances they moved rapidly to a much broader attack on parliament with demands for constitutional change, and it was the agitators who took the initiative during 1647 in seizing the king and occupying London to throw the Presbyterians out of parliament.
The Levellers were quick to grasp the power of this force to effect radical change and intervened towards the rank and file movement. Lilburne was particularly active among the most radical agitators, emphasising the importance of winning the support of the common people and of regularly re-electing delegates to prevent their corruption. Relations between the army agitators and civilian Levellers became close, particularly in London where, also under Lilburne's influence, militant apprentices appointed their own agitators. This collaboration resulted in military support for the Agreement of the People, a proposed new democratic constitution for the state.
The revolutionary movement in the parliamentary army achieved a very high level of organisation, and should be seen as an early struggle of the modern proletariat; for Marx, soldiers' pay was the first form of wage labour, and the New Model Army was a creation of the capitalist class. The appearance of soldiers' councils composed of revocable delegates in the mid-17th century English revolution is a very early demonstration of the capacity of the working class to spontaneously organise itself, to unify its struggles through its own centralised organisation, and actively extend these struggles to other sectors.
For the ruling class, this alliance of a radicalised army rank and file with the civilian Leveller movement raised the spectre of an armed struggle for political power by the exploited masses. It was vital to retain control of the army, and so, having failed to prevent the rank and file from organising, it was necessary to defeat the movement from within. Only the left-wing of the bourgeoisie had the necessary credibility and intelligence to do this.
There were real and important differences between the main factions of the bourgeoisie in this period, which saw a struggle for power between the Independents and the army led by Cromwell, and the Presbyterians, who were trying to secure their position by making a settlement with the monarchy. The Independents, backed by industrial, manufacturing and smaller capitalist farming interests, became increasingly alarmed at the strength of the Presbyterians, fearing that they would undo the work of the revolution. For their own part the Presbyterians, backed by large landowning, commercial and financial interests, feared that any extension of the revolution would put their own position and privileges at risk. The majority of the Independents were quite prepared to restore the king, but faced with the Presbyterians' alliance with the royalists, the faction around Cromwell decided to use the army to force parliament into a compromise. This meant first curbing the army's radicalism.
Cromwell and the Independents were just as concerned to defend private property but were better placed to deal with the threat from below. Cromwell himself, the great bourgeois leader of the English revolution, personifies the ruthlessness as well as the pragmatism and flexibility of the capitalist class, proving himself to be a supreme political opportunist prepared to use any means to make England safe for the men of property, from intriguing with the king to purging parliament and negotiating with the Levellers. Eventually he was even prepared to execute the king, famously declaring "we will cut off his head with the crown upon it". But he remained utterly consistent in his determination to keep control of the army and use it to crush any movement that ventured to challenge the authority of the state.
The rank-and-file-controlled councils were neutered by absorbing them into a ‘general council of the army' controlled by the officers, who vetoed any proposals for decisive action, and then, when it appeared that the Agreement of the People would be endorsed by the whole army, rather than one mass gathering as the agitators proposed, a series of separate meetings were held instead. In this way, the most radical minority of agitators around Lilburne was skilfully isolated and the army's adoption of a radical democratic programme averted. The mutinies that arose in some of the more radical regiments were then swiftly suppressed.
This was by no means the end of the threat from the army rank and file, but by sabotaging the soldiers' councils from within, and successfully isolating and defeating the most advanced elements, the bourgeoisie had acted decisively to banish the spectre of a self-organised revolutionary army leading the struggles of the exploited against the whole existing order.
The intransigence of the bourgeoisie, and its political opportunism towards the radicals, was highlighted in the army council's debate of the Agreement, held in late 1647. Here the Levellers argued for an extension of the vote to all men, not just property owners, on the basis of their ‘natural right' as ‘freeborn Englishmen'. As the Leveller Rainborough put it, "...the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he." The Independents, acutely aware of the threat from below, immediately saw in these apparently moderate democratic reforms a challenge to bourgeois order, Cromwell warning ominously that the consequences would be ‘anarchy'. The Levellers insisted that they had no intention of challenging the right to private property, but the bourgeoisie's intransigence forced them into taking up a more radical stance; after all, what had the common people fought for if their rights and liberties were to be denied them in the interests of securing the rights of property? This surprisingly open debate on the future constitution of the state formally ended with concessions on both sides, but the bourgeoisie had no intention of compromising its class interests, and Cromwell later, with characteristic bluntness, let slip its true fear and hatred of the exploited masses, when he warned the new English republic against the Levellers: "I tell you ... you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them in pieces. If you do not break them, they will break you."
With the temporary defeat of the radical movement in the army, the focus of the revolutionary wave shifted to the struggles of the labourers in the towns and cities and the poor peasants in the country. Struggles were continual, particularly in the north, midlands and west, after the disastrous harvest of 1648 led to widespread hunger and unemployment and food prices rose to famine levels. With increasing desperation, petitions to parliament highlighted acute economic distress rather than political issues, demanding urgent social reform rather than constitutional change and threatening direct action if these demands were ignored. In London, the largest centre of the growing proletariat, there was a development of political consciousness, particularly among the apprentices and young unemployed. The poor peasants and small farmers also became more articulate in their protests.
The Levellers' propaganda began to reflect this spontaneous expression of class consciousness, demanding measures to help the poor and supporting the struggles of the peasantry by including opposition to land enclosures in their programme. The Levellers also extended their activities, sending emissaries to all parts of the country, and strengthened their organisation.
Throughout this period there was a concerted effort by the ruling class to crush the Leveller movement and suppress all radical propaganda. This determined campaign of repression, which was to be greatly intensified after the establishment of a republic, finally convinced a sizeable section of the radical movement that it was impossible to achieve their aims by peaceful means and that direct action leading to the forcible seizure of power was necessary instead. The political programme of the Leveller movement still reflected the interests of the petite bourgeoisie, the peasants and tradesmen who deeply feared the loss of their land and livelihoods and determinedly opposed any perceived threat to property, but the repeated denials of Leveller leaders that they stood for common ownership suggests that they were coming under increasing pressure from the propertyless masses, and a significant current within the movement began to argue that the problems of poverty and oppression could not be solved until private property had been abolished and a system of common ownership established.
Perhaps the most valuable legacy of the English radicals is their fearless exposure of the rule of the capitalist class, from the very moment of its ‘heroic' victory, as a new form of tyranny masked by hypocrisy and maintained only by force.
In April 1648 the alliance of a large part of the Presbyterians with the royalists and a Scottish army plunged the country into a second, counter-revolutionary civil war. Faced with this common danger, parliament and the army temporarily entered into a political truce. This had the effect of diverting the revolutionary movement, but when the war was won the Levellers renewed their agitation for acceptance of the Agreement, without which, they argued, even if the king was executed and power devolved to the army, "our slavery for the future...might be greater than ever it was in the king's time." (The legal fundamental liberties, 1649).
When parliament persisted in negotiating with the king, the Independents around Cromwell realised that order could only be guaranteed by directly seizing power and executing the king. To gain the necessary popular support, through a series of cynical manoeuvres they allied themselves with the Levellers, apparently accepting their programme. The forcible removal of the Presbyterians from parliament in December 1648 (‘Pride's Purge') in effect placed the army in power through a military coup d'etat. There followed the public trial and execution of the king, the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords, and finally in May 1649 the proclamation of a republic.
The Levellers and army radicals now realised that they had been duped. The Independents adopted some reforms without conceding any power whatsoever to the people: "We were before ruled by a king, lords and commons, now by a general, a court martial and house of commons; and we pray you what is the difference? " (Richard Overton, The hunting of the foxes, March 1649). The Levellers began to urge the army rank and file to reappoint their agitators and re-form the elected army council. The bourgeoisie's response was to arrest Lilburne and three other Leveller leaders and imprison them in the Tower of London.
The situation came to a head in the early months of 1649. Unrest again spread in the army in response to further plans for an invasion of Ireland, with those troops refusing to serve dismissed without pay. 300 threw down their weapons and declared they would not go abroad unless Leveller political demands were met. Open mutiny broke out in London, for which six men were sentenced to death and one, Robert Lockier, was executed, his funeral becoming a massive popular demonstration with thousands wearing the Levellers' colours. Revolutionary ferment grew rapidly. In May the Levellers issued a new Agreement and a more serious revolt broke out in the army. The soldiers in revolt issued a manifesto demanding the implementation of the Agreement and the release of Leveller leaders. Cromwell and Fairfax acted swiftly to prevent the mutiny spreading to London, finally crushing the revolt at Burford.
The swift action of the bourgeoisie again removed the immediate threat, but massive struggles continued: at the time of the confrontation at Burford there were reports of 1500 ‘Clubmen' marching from the south-west to support the Levellers; in the summer of 1649 there was a serious rising of Derbyshire miners against their conditions of labour, and in September the garrison at Oxford rose in mutiny. Attempts at armed revolt continued despite mounting repression during 1649, but the collapse of the Oxford mutiny effectively marked the end of the revolutionary wave of struggles.
At its highest point in early 1649 the revolutionary ferment gave rise to small political minorities defending the world view and historic interests of the emerging proletariat. These minorities tended to emerge from the left wing of the Leveller movement, like the group of advanced rural Levellers who published Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, but the most politically significant were the Diggers around Gerrard Winstanley.
The story of the Diggers has since passed into folklore. In April 1649 a small band began to dig on St George's Hill in Surrey. They issued a manifesto, The True Levellers Standard Advanced, and called on others to cultivate the wastelands in common. They called themselves True Levellers but began to be called Diggers.[1] News spread rapidly, leading the Levellers to issue denials that they would ‘level men's estates'. Delegations were sent to gather support and other Digger colonies appeared across the country. Persecuted by the men of property, the Surrey Diggers were finally driven off at the end of March 1650.
There is a risk that this story portrays the Diggers simply as a failed utopian experiment, which ignores the real, lasting political significance of the group around Winstanley.[2] While it's true that they had little practical impact on the English revolution, it was the Diggers, primarily through the writings of Winstanley, who more profoundly than anyone else in the 17th century identified the root of exploitation in the new capitalist society, and set out a practical programme to abolish private property and establish common ownership through the revolutionary action of the exploited masses.
For Winstanley, private ownership of the means of subsistence, which excluded the common people from their rightful access to the soil, was the key to understanding history and the foundations of society. Having taken the land by theft and murder, the owners of property had erected a system of law and government that protected their privileges by the ‘power of the sword', aided by the hypocritical doctrines of the church. Wage labour ensured the oppression of the propertyless: "The poor men by their labours ... have made the buyers and sellers of land, or rich men, to become tyrants and oppressors over them" (The new law of righteousness, January 1649).
By going to the root of exploitation, Winstanley, more than any other radical writer at this time, was able to expose the real nature of the civil war as a struggle for economic and political supremacy between the monarchy and the rising gentry, who had enlisted the common people by promising their freedom from oppression. But private ownership of land remained, and the common people therefore remained in bondage; their freedom could only be achieved by abolishing private property and restoring common ownership.
Winstanley was convinced that there was a law of development that made the disappearance of private property certain: "as everything hath his growth, reign and end so must this slavery have an end", and the force that would abolish this system was arising from the "lowest and most despised sort of people" (The new law, etc). He did not stop there. Moving in a matter of months from religious mysticism to practical communism under the influence of the class struggle, he recognised that the world could be changed only through the direct action of the masses, initially by withdrawing their labour, refusing to work for the landlords and gentry, and collectively cultivating the common lands (which at this time made up about a third of all land in England). But this was to be only the first practical step in the complete transformation of the economic foundations of society, a transitional stage towards restoring the earth as ‘a common treasury for all'. The role of the Diggers was by their direct action to rouse the masses to effect their own emancipation.
Uniquely in the 17th century, therefore, Winstanley offers not only a vision of a future communist society but also a thoughtful consideration of the methods by which it can be achieved and the practical issues involved, together with an optimism that this task is within the capacity of human beings, all founded on an analysis of the development of society. With hindsight of course we can see that he was over-optimistic about the potential of the historic period to create communism. Capital's transformation of the productive forces was barely underway, and the industrial proletariat hardly yet existed. It was simply not clear to radicals at the time that the English revolution presaged an epoch of unprecedented economic expansion led by the new exploiting system. Moreover, the programme of the Diggers demanded a level of organisation of the landless wage labourers that did not yet exist, and their proposed revolutionary transformation, if attempted, would have very quickly posed the question of the seizure of state power, with which, due to Winstanley's rejection of violence as a method, the movement was ill equipped to deal.
After the collapse of the Digger movement, in The Law of Freedom (1652), Winstanley tried to more fully develop his vision of a future communist society with a set of constructive detailed proposals. But by this time the revolutionary wave had ebbed and he was forced to accept the failure of the propertyless masses to transform society. Significantly, this work was dedicated to Cromwell, who alone, Winstanley claimed, had the power to effect the change his measures required. In the political counter-revolution that followed the defeat of the revolutionary wave, Winstanley abandoned political activity, and the subsequent influence of the Diggers appears to have been minimal.[3] But by attempting to tackle the practical problem of how communism could be brought about, and by recognizing that the initiative for transforming society had to come from the propertyless classes, Winstanley was the most advanced pioneer of the proletariat and its historic struggle for communism until the French revolution.
With the defeat of the revolutionary movement, England was made safe for capital's ‘peaceful' advance, and the bourgeoisie entered into an historic partnership with the landowning aristocracy to exploit the ensuing opportunities for plunder and profit. In 1660 the monarchy was restored without undermining capital's fundamental gains and in the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution' of 1688 the ruling class finally settled the arrangements for the efficient running of the capitalist state.
But the Restoration was also necessary to put an end to the political instability and social disorder that was the legacy of the revolutionary movement. The men of property had been given a terrible fright that they would not forget, and from then on everything the bourgeoisie did was informed by an acute awareness of the threat from below. The tactics it used to defuse the threat from the soldiers' councils in 1647 would also serve as a model for the counter revolutionary strategies subsequently adopted by capitalist states: the use of agents to sabotage the movement from within; appearing to go along with the movement until it felt strong enough to crush it; agreeing to demands while emptying them of their radical content; manoeuvring behind the scenes until it had deployed all its forces, and then acting decisively to crush any sign of dissent to send a lesson to the entire class.
The revolutionary movement of the exploited in the English civil war suffered from the almost complete absence of a working class able to impose itself on society, which inevitably gave it a certain backward-looking character, and many of its most valuable lessons were effectively lost by the time an organised workers' movement emerged in the 19th century. Nevertheless, the work of Winstanley and the Diggers also shows that from the moment of its birth the proletariat has struggled to become conscious of its own interests as a revolutionary class within capitalism and has fought to create a classless, communist society.
Today, a full 360 years later, the epoch of bourgeois revolutions has long ago definitively ended, along with capitalism's progressive development of the productive forces. Faced with the unimagined barbarism of decadent capitalism, and its equally unimagined degradation of the planet as it sinks further into decomposition, we can stand up with the Diggers and the English radicals of 1649 and affirm that the struggle of the proletariat is indeed a struggle to destroy the roots of exploitation and finally restore the earth as a common treasury for all.
MH 31/10/9
see also
Lessons of the English Revolution (Part 2): The response of the exploited [8]
[1] The name Digger first appeared during the enclosure riots of 1607 in a manifesto issued by ‘The Diggers of Warwickshire to other Diggers'. See David Petegorsky, Left-wing democracy in the English civil war, p.164.
[2] For example, a recent Guardian advert for the DVD of Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's film Winstanley (1975), describes its subject as "a tragic, perennially relevant story of dashed hopes" (the film itself is a serious and beautifully recreated historical account, well worth seeing).
[3] The only one other known text of the English revolution to defend a similar position is Tyranipocrit Discovered (1649), which has been described as "one of the most remarkable pamphlets of the whole period"(Petegorsky, p.232). The anonymous author calls for economic equality rather than common ownership, but is very clear in its exposure of the role of religion in providing the hypocritical justification for state tyranny, creating the Tyranipocrit of the title.
The much-criticised appearance of Nick Griffin on BBC Question Time demonstrated that, far from being outside the political mainstream, the BNP actually serves to strengthen the bourgeoisie's democratic ideology.
There was shock, outrage and protests over the appearance of the BNP on Question Time. According to its opponents the BNP isn't a ‘normal' party but is ‘racist' and ‘fascist.' In the words of the Guardian "by inviting it on to Question Time, the BBC runs the risk of normalising" the BNP and provided "its best-ever platform for its poisonous politics".
In fact, all the the programme's participants draped themselves in the national flag at every opportunity. Jack Straw claimed the BNP lacked a "moral compass" while the rest of the politicians on the panel fell over themselves to insist they were tough on immigration. Straw bragged about the success of Labour's immigration policies, which he later repeated in the London Evening Standard: "Asylum applications, at 25,000 a year, are now a third of their peak (and below the average in the European Union 15); the dreadful backlog of appeals which was there in 1997 is being overcome, and enforced removals and voluntary departures are up threefold". This wasn't good enough for Baroness Warsi (herself a descendent of Pakistani immigrants and touted as the ‘most powerful Muslim woman in Britain') who said: "we need a cap on the number of people who are coming here", combined with more tracking and removal of those deemed illegal.
There was also a squabble over who best defended the legacy of Churchill, the man who once declared that he was "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes" and who did not "admit that a wrong has been done to these people [Native Americans and Australian Aborigines] by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place".
It is clear that racism and nationalism are not the sole province of the extreme Right. The rest of the ruling class is no less willing to propagate racism and prejudice. The popular press, while decrying the BNP, runs endless campaigns about ‘immigrants' who are held responsible for every ill the capitalist system itself imposes on the ‘white working class' - housing shortages, urban decay, unemployment etc. This is the same press that vilifies Muslims for being terrorists or indulges in homophobic rants following the unfortunate deaths of gay pop stars.
Meanwhile, the democratic and multicultural British state, commanded by the Labour Party, has presided over a brutal campaign of prison camps for asylum-seekers and forced repatriation that has included removing terminally ill patients from hospital beds so that they can be deported.
However, the bourgeoisie has to be careful not to overplay the race card as it can provoke a response from the working class. For example, as we reported in WR316 [14], the residents of a Glasgow ‘sink estate' took up the struggle to defend the immigrants in their community from Home Office thugs.
This is why other parts of the bourgeoisie (usually the Left) pose as the defenders of ‘human rights' and contrast the ‘inclusive', multicultural state to the brutality and racism of fascism. Not only does this mask the continuing assaults carried out by the democratic state, but it also encourages workers to seek the state's ‘protection'. One of the most poisonous elements of the current campaign is to present ‘multiculturalism' as a counterweight to the racism of the ‘white working class'. The BNP, in particular, is presented (by friend and foe alike) as being in some way representative of white workers. Warsi herself has argued for more attention to be paid to the ‘concerns' of ‘BNP voters'. The aim is to undermine the potential for working class unity across racial boundaries and keep it divided into competing ‘communities' disputing the crumbs from the exploiters' table. The ruling class wants any reaction against such divisions to be recuperated into a struggle ‘against fascism' under the control of the democratic multicultural state.
By giving the BNP more exposure - and it's possible that the BNP could have an annual apearence on Question Time - the bourgeoisie is trying to increase the impact of these campaigns. This is because it is undertaking a series of brutal attacks on working class living standards. This is the only answer it has to the crisis. But, for all its difficulties, the working class has not suffered a decisive defeat and retains the potential for developing struggles that can threaten the moribund capitalist system. It is fear of these potential struggles that moves the bourgeoisie to reinforce the ideological firewalls that constantly work to break up the unity of the working class. As long as workers are blaming other workers for their problems, there's less chance of them turning on their capitalist masters.
It is true that the working class, in its daily life, is capable of holding all sorts of prejudices. But it is also undeniable that the ruling class will encourage these at every possible opportunity. As an exploited class the working class can only defend itself in a united struggle across all the divisions imposed upon it by capitalism. In developing its struggle, the working class is forced to confront the racist, nationalist poison of the ruling class in both its democratic and fascist forms.
Ishamael 28/10/9
This book, based on original research in newly available Russian archives, is a serious re-appraisal of the processes that led to the degeneration of the Russian revolution, and includes fascinating information on the opposition to this degeneration by Russian workers and communists in the early 1920s.
Simon Pirani is a former Trotskyist and the book is in part his critique of Trotskyist positions on the Bolshevik Party as a vanguard party and defence of the ‘workers' state'. His break with Trotskyism and his view of the inadequacies of the positions defended by Trotsky's Left Opposition have led him towards a more open and sympathetic approach towards the left communist oppositions, as described in his recent review of the ICC's book on the Russian Communist Left in Revolutionary History. We will return to this in a subsequent article.
The book focuses on the struggles of workers and communists against the Bolshevik Party in Moscow, covering the period from immediately after the end of the civil war in 1920, through the wave of workers' struggles in early 1921 that led to the Kronstadt uprising, to the defeat of the left-wing opposition in the Bolshevik Party in 1923-24. This focus gives the reader an in-depth view of the processes by which the revolution degenerated, and of the reactions from the working class to each twist and turn. On the other hand, it also means that the book lacks an international context, and its analysis of the roots of the Bolsheviks' errors is made almost entirely in isolation from the history of the international workers' movement and the defeat of the revolutionary wave in other key countries like Germany.
Simon Pirani's book is worth reading at the very least as a supplement to the ICC's Russian Communist Left, as it contains a wealth of new and hitherto unavailable information on the left-wing oppositions that emerged from within the Bolshevik Party, including the Workers' Opposition, the Workers' Truth, the Democratic Centralists and the Workers' Group. It also helps to widen our understanding of the opposition within the Bolshevik party as it describes the activities of other organised groups in Moscow like the Bauman group, a precursor of the Workers' Group, and the supporters of Ignatov, who were close to the Democratic Centralists (pp61-.65). There are vivid descriptions of the battles within the party and of the activities of the communist dissidents in the factories. (There is also a tantalising reference on p119 to a group of ‘revolutionary left communists' who broke from the party in 1921 condemning the Bolshevik leadership for ‘returning to capital'). Pirani includes a section on the struggle of the communist left, describing the failure of "the only significant challenge to the party among Moscow workers in 1923" by the Workers' Group, and a description of the final confrontation between the left and the party leadership at the 12th party congress in 1923. He acknowledges that it was only the communist left who voiced the danger that the party leadership "might play a role in the formation of oppressive social relations" (p216-7), while Trotsky at this time supported repressive action against the "far left" (p215).
Other aspects of the book are not so helpful. While Pirani is clearly motivated by a desire to defend the Russian revolution and the struggles of the Russian working class, his study, which originates in a PhD dissertation, is also marked by strong tendency towards academicism, with copious references to abstruse debates within bourgeois historiography, and there is a definite tendency to get lost in detail at the expense of a clear global, historical framework.
Politically, as far as they go, there is still much we can agree with in Pirani's arguments about the retreat of the Russian revolution; how the Bolshevik Party abandoned its original revolutionary principles, becoming fatally enmeshed in the state apparatus, depriving the soviets of power and politically expropriating the working class, culminating in the violent suppression of the revolt at Kronstadt. He meticulously describes the emergence of a "party elite" embedded within the state apparatus that with the Stalinist counter-revolution was to become the kernel of a new ruling class. He does not, however, relate the rise of Stalinism to the global tendency within capitalism in its epoch of decay towards state capitalism, or to the historical specificities of how this tendency showed itself in Russia; one of the key theoretical gains of the communist left. This leaves his conclusions on the role of the Bolshevik Party and the particular path taken by the revolution in retreat lacking a solid historical framework.
One of Pirani's key conclusions is that the legacy of the Bolsheviks is negative, if only for the spread of authoritarian, vanguardist and statist ideology in the workers' movement. He rejects the crass councilist and libertarian contention that the Bolsheviks were machiavellian power-seekers from the beginning, acknowledging the impact of external events on the revolution, including the failure of the world revolution to spread outside Russia. He also rejects a fatalist approach and suggests that different choices in 1921 might have made possible a more successful resistance to the advance of Stalinism (p240-241).
But his lack of a deeper historical framework, and the narrow focus of the book on developments in Russia, leaves Pirani's analysis vulnerable to the councilist and libertarian rejection of the whole experience of the ‘old' workers' movement and of any role for the most politically advanced minorities of the working class. If the root of the Bolsheviks' errors was a substitutionist position - that the party takes power on behalf of the class - he fails to acknowledge that this was essentially the same position defended by the rest of the international workers' movement. Substitutionism was at root a symptom of the as yet incomplete break of the working class from the social democratic conceptions prevalent in the ascendant period of capitalism, not a specifically Bolshevik deviation.
Pirani's book must be seen as part of his own personal attempt to break with Trotskyist positions, and this is definitely a positive sign of the disarray of leftism, particularly Trotskyism, in the face of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes after 1989, and of the search by the most positive elements for genuine proletarian political positions. But it also shows the difficulties of breaking with leftism without beginning to draw the vital lessons of the experience of the proletariat's past struggles, and particularly of the Russian revolution.
Mark Hayes 31/10/9
Simon Pirani, The Russian revolution in retreat, 1920-1924: soviet workers and the new communist elite, Routledge, 2008
see also
Russian communist left: reponse to Simon Pirani [17]
As the UN-run trial of ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic began in The Hague it was clear that there were many others who could also be put in the dock on charges of genocide. This bloodthirsty killer and rabid nationalist was only a pawn in a much wider game going on in the Balkans in the early 1990s. All the major powers, with the exception of China and Japan, who were too far away, manoeuvred and jostled for positions of power and influence and attempted to undermine their rivals.
Representatives of the ruling classes of Germany, Russia, France, the USA, Turkey and Britain are not on trial though their culpability in setting-off and maintaining the murderous Balkan war, the bloodiest in Europe since World War II, is far greater than local gangsters like Karadzic and Milosevic before him. This current trial is a farce and cover-up organised by a nest of guilty UN vipers engineering an ideological campaign and trying to pin the blame on one or two individual snakes.
The context for the Balkan War of 1992 was the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989 and the New World Order of US imperialism. After the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, where the US attempted to impose its global domination on its erstwhile ‘partners' and adversaries alike, the Balkan war, showed the open development of the centrifugal tendencies of ‘every man for himself' that is still a major characteristic of the international situation. Germany tripped the war by its recognition of Slovenia and Croatia and its attempt to cut a path to the warm-water seas of the Mediterranean. Britain, France and Russia immediately conspired to back their old Serbian ally in order to counter German imperialism and carve out their own spheres of interests. The USA, lacking much direct influence in the region, first aligned itself with Germany through Croatia and then built up the Bosnian army from scratch.
Britain was involved, in the guise of an ‘humanitarian' role, positioning the British military, in their UN Blue Helmets, to facilitate the murderous siege of Sarajevo, which it did for months alongside French imperialism, its partner in massacre. But it's in the context of the cold blooded murder of 8000 men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995 that the ‘humanitarian' role of British imperialism is worth examining. According to BBC's Newsnight at least 2 UN Security Council members knew of the imminent attack on the Bosnians (or the "towelheads", as British High Command called them). It's a reasonable assumption that those two were Britain and France who were working closely together in order to facilitate the Serbian advance. On the programme, Richard Holbrooke, then a US envoy to the region, suggested that Britain knew that a massacre of Muslim men and boys was planned. Britain was very close to the Serbian war machine: Lt. General Sir Michael Jackson, who had a background in intelligence and was commander of the Anglo-French Rapid Reaction Force, was a drinking partner of the Serb high command, including General Mladic (who is still very much at large). General Rupert Smith was instrumental in overseeing the Serbian advance, the aim of which was the creation of a Greater Serbia, perfectly in accordance with the policies of British imperialism in the region and beyond. All the talk about Britain's ‘special relationship' with, or being a ‘poodle' of the United States was wrong. The Balkans conflict was a war with Britain and France backing one side and the USA backing another as competing national interests compelled imperialisms to clash.
The current Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Diodik, has demanded the right of the Serbian part of Bosnia to secede. This has raised concerns that the countries of ex-Yugoslavia will be plunged into another round of ethnic killings. As the media watches the circus of Karadzic's trial, the attention of all the rival imperialisms is focussed on how to defend their interests, without any regard to the human consequences.
Baboon 31/10/9
"We are caught between the government and the Taliban..." The situation for the population in Pakistan was put very clearly by a South Waziristan resident fleeing to Dera Ismail Khan.
The death toll from the car bomb at a busy market in Peshawar is 118 and rising, only the most recent of a wave of terrorist attacks which has killed hundreds. Civilians are also suffering from US drones in border areas and by the Pakistani army's campaign against the Taliban in South Waziristan. There the population has already suffered a four month siege in which they were encouraged to flee, seen their homes bombarded and been deprived of aid. The 100,000 or so internally displaced are staying with relatives, if they can, as no tents or provisions have been made available for them, despite having been forced to leave the area in preparation for the current military campaign. The population is terrorised by all sides.
All this follows Pakistan's campaign in the Swat region earlier this year, under intense pressure from the US to take action against the Taliban strongholds - bases for attacks on Afghanistan - on the Af-Pak border. It follows an increase in US drone attacks, including one that killed Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader. But the government has chosen to attack the Mehsud area and Tehrik-i-Taliban, which carries out its terror within Pakistan, while the army made peace agreements with others, such as the Haqqani network, which attack over the border; and it has also told the US that Quetta is off-limits to their drones, although they believe the commander of the Shura Taliban, Mullah Omar, is hiding there. The situation begins to resemble a chaos of competing interests, rather than a war with two clear sides.
It is impossible to understand the present fighting on the Afghan-Pakistan border region without the framework of the development of confrontations in the region since the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Then Pakistan and particularly its intelligence service (ISI) and army played a central part in training and supplying the Mujahadin forces against the Russians - on behalf of both the US western bloc and its own imperialist interests which then coincided. When the Taliban took power in the mid 1990s - after years of growing instability and gangsterism following the defeat of the Russians - this was particularly favourable for Pakistan which had a close ally cum client in power in its strategically important neighbour. The rewards for Pakistan's loyalty were short-lived. The US needed to impose its control over Afghanistan and when the 9/11 attacks gave them the pretext the Taliban regime was quickly overturned. Pakistan co-operated with this war after overt threats from the US.
Pakistan was constrained by the might of the world's only super-power and pushed into supporting a costly conflict with its former allies. However, the US has become mired in first Iraq and now Afghanistan, and is currently debating its strategy. General McChrystal wants up to 100,000 more foreign troops in Aghanistan for a full blooded counter-insurgency strategy (Gordon Brown's conditional offer of another 500 troops indicates at least token support for this). Meanwhile Vice President Joe Biden wants to limit the mission. The view that McChrystal's strategy is impossible, and the aims should be limited to a small counter-terrorism force with drones, put forward by Rory Stewart, former British soldier and diplomat, also has some influence in Washington. Such difficulties leave a small margin for other powers to become more open in their opposition to American interests. Iran, for instance, has become more daring in pursuing its local and nuclear aims. Similarly, when Pakistan feels a let up in US pressure it makes use of this opportunity to pursue its own imperialist interests more directly even if it is unable to openly oppose the USA.
As things stand at the moment, however, Pakistan is in a difficult position in relation to Afghanistan, with their allies out of power and under attack, and even their longstanding enemy, India, allowed to invest there. As we have seen, Pakistan has good reason to be reluctant in attacking the Taliban. They would, according to the Economist (17/10/9) like to mediate talks between the Afghan government and the Pashtuns, closely related to their own frontier population, including the Taliban, with a view to forming a government that is much more favourable to their interests. Whether or not this is realistic, even if it is reckless in the face of the much more powerful USA, this is what Pakistan's imperialist interest forces it to aim at.
With the US putting pressure on Pakistan to deny any haven to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, it is no accident that its two military campaigns against them should occur at the time of meetings with US politicians: Zardari's visit to Obama in May, and Clinton's visit to Pakistan in late October. Clinton, standing "shoulder to shoulder" with Pakistan against "brutal extremist groups", congratulated their army on its fight against the Taliban, and made clear the real message behind this diplomatic language when "she said she found it hard to believe that nobody in the Pakistani government knew where al-Qaeda was hiding in the country and ‘couldn't get them' if they wanted" (BBC news online, 30/10/9).
US imperialism is using aid as a way of imposing its will on Pakistan. When the US Congress voted for a $7.5bn increase in non-military aid over 5 years it caused great bitterness in Pakistan, given the conditions imposed. It has to provide frequent evidence that it is cracking down on terrorists, including those attacking India; no nuclear proliferation; and the army has to keep out of politics. The army is whipping up anti-American feeling. President Zardari has been weakened as generals brief his rivals: "Pakistan's generals consider foreign policy too important to be left to the politicians" (Economist 17/10/9).
Pakistan's hesitation to attack the Taliban and Al Qaeda reflect not only its external ambitions, but also internal difficulties that threaten its disintegrating into all out conflict.
It is not for nothing that the Af-Pak border, including the Federally Administered Tribal Areas such as South Waziristan, have been called the most dangerous place in the world. Going back to the days of British rule they were difficult - or impossible - to control, having to be granted a degree of independence, and those regions remain incompletely integrated into the Pakistani state. The region is the perfect terrain for Al Qaeda and the Taliban to hide out and holding the border regions would put impossible strain on the army. The fighting is more likely to spread the conflict than contain it, while the Taliban and their Uzbek fighters largely slip out into other areas such as neighbouring Baluchistan. And they won't just stay in the border regions but spread out to fuel more terrorist incidents, as we have seen throughout October with a wave of attacks, including the suicide bombing at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, which killed 8 and wounded 18, and the siege of the army headquarters at Rawalpindi which killed 22, to name but two of the incidents. The devastating car bomb in the market in Peshawar, with all the claims and denials about who set it, is the sort of thing we are seeing more of as the conflict spreads.
Nor is the spread of this conflict limited to Pakistan, which is known to be central to many terrorist networks. Iran has recently accused Pakistan of harbouring the Jundallah Sunni group (among those they blame for a bomb that killed 42) - and the recent arrest of 11 Revolutionary Guards who strayed across the border is an indication of increasing tensions throughout the region.
The greatest danger in the situation lies in Pakistan's difficulty holding together as a coherent, and nuclear armed, state. Internally it has many ethnic groups, with many historical enmities, particularly between the Pashtuns, living in the border regions such as South Waziristan, and the Punjabis who make up most of the army sent against them. Its politicians tend to be divided on ethnic lines, and its civilian politicians have been regularly overthrown by the military which has the greatest capacity to cohere the country. The whole situation is extremely dangerous.
There is nothing to choose between the Pakistani government and army on the one hand and the Taliban and Al Qaeda on the other. The first is a regional imperialist power entirely reckless of the lives and misery of its population as it tries desperately to defend its interests despite pressure from within and without; the second desperately trying to get back into power and willing to kill and maim civilians in its effort to do so. The USA differs from the first two only in its greater military and economic power, and has been willing to spread chaos and death on a much larger scale from the Middle East to South Asia in order to defend its super-power status. Only when the whole working class sweeps all these murderous forces away will the area no longer pose a threat to humanity.
Alex 31/10/9
Links
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[6] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/digscene.gif
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/2009/323/eng-rev1
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/2009/wr/323/eng-rev2
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/english-civil-war-1642-1651
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/english-revolution
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/diggers
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/levellers
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/new-model-army
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/316/int-councilest
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/nick-griffin
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/british-national-party
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/content/3371/russian-communist-left-reponse-simon-pirani
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/russian-revolution
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/simon-pirani
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/collapse-balkans
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/balkans
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/radovan-karadzic
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-afghanistan
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-pakistan