We will have to wait for the government spending review next month to find out a lot more detail of the cuts to come – which services will lose most funding, which 500,000 (and more) public sector workers will lose their jobs. This hasn’t stopped the drip-drip announcements of attacks over the summer. The attack on the 2.5 million people claiming incapacity benefit has already begun – the government aims to have eliminated this benefit stream altogether by March 2014 with 30% being denied benefits altogether, 50% moved onto Jobseeker’s Allowance and the remaining 20% shifted onto other benefits.
The Government is taking £74m from regional development and £200m from higher education, just when young people are turning to this for lack of job opportunities. The attempt to find 10-20% cuts in education spending has killed the ‘building schools for the future’ scheme, which will result in larger classes as primary schools struggle to accommodate over 4000 extra pupils in the next few years resulting in larger classes. 1,300 playground schemes have also been scrapped. Meanwhile, schools are being encouraged to convert into academies and ‘free schools’ in order to cut centralised costs – costs that should not all be put down to bureaucracy as education authorities also provide vital services that individual schools cannot. Transport budgets are being cut - £309m from local authorities and £100m from Network Rail, on the way to finding cuts of over 25%. And so on.
The NHS on the other hand has its budget ring fenced. Yet it still has to save £20bn by 2014, from an annual budget of £104.6bn, as no extra resources will be provided for new treatments and an ageing population. In other words, health is being cut like everything else. Scottish hospitals will lose 1000 beds in 3 years. Ever tighter budgets, with no leeway for expensive emergency treatment, will be imposed. A new North Tees and Hartlepool hospital has just been scrapped to save £450m.
Cuts are not being imposed just because of government ideology and policy. They were already under way under the previous Labour government, which announced £11bn in cuts last March. And it is not just in this country – budget cuts are under way across Europe and not just in the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain with particularly worrying debt problems) but also Germany, France, Romania and so on.
The huge government deficits are not simply due to individual mismanagement or corruption, however much of that there is. In fact, deficit spending was what kept the world economy going artificially until the risk of states defaulting on their repayments made them unaffordable.
Now the working class is being made to pay. Lots of democratic spin is being put on it, to make it look as if we are all in this together, such as the Treasury website where the public can suggest and vote on suggestions for cuts. The director general of the BBC is discussing how to report the spending cuts with Downing Street, and has promised to hold similar discussions with the Labour Party. The media will continue to take up the ‘debate’ on how the cuts are introduced, whether they could or should be more progressive, take more or less from the poorest in society. But however democratic and ‘impartial’ the BBC and the rest of the media may be regarding government and opposition politicians, none of them can admit that capitalism is bankrupt and has nothing to offer humanity but more financial crises, more misery, more wars.
Cuts today have an air of inevitability about them in a way they didn’t in the 70s and 80s, after two decades of post-war growth. Now we have the experience of the 1970s, the Labour government with its Social Contract to keep wages down in a period of high inflation, the growth of unemployment to a million; then the Thatcherism of the 1980s with more cuts, with closure of much of the steel and mining industries among other things, along with cuts in public expenditure and the growth of unemployment to 3 million, before they changed the way the figures are counted. We also have the experience of the defeat of the miners’ courageous year long strike which seemed to demonstrate the futility of fighting these attacks. These attacks have continued ever since, even with the last Labour government and its stealthy attacks on benefits, its plans to raise the pension age, all of which have recently been accelerated.
But we dare not just put up with the new attacks, for the easier it is for the government to impose them, the harsher they will be.
Difficult as the struggle is we must avoid the siren call of quick fixes, or any political campaign that relies on the Labour Party or the trade unions or other prominent public figures. For example, the Coalition of Resistance, launched by Tony Benn, wants to “develop and support an alternative programme for economic and social recovery”; sowing the illusion that capitalism can have such an alternative policy. Supported by many Labour MPs, it asks us to rely on the very political forces that were in government and supervising the attacks until only 4 months ago!
An alternative of Anti-Cuts Committees based on trades councils is proposed by others including Workers’ Liberty and Socialist Unity. Meetings have been held where speakers from the platform or the floor can describe very well the level of attacks that we can expect, and make rousing calls for action. Stalls will be set up to campaign for this. Promises are made to oppose every cut, to support each other’s actions. The only problem is where is this call coming from? The trades councils are the local trade union bodies, the very same trade unions that time and again keep workers divided. Have we forgotten that the NUT could call a strike and tell teachers in Sixth Form Colleges to continue working; that workers in the same schools in different unions or doing different jobs were told to cross each other’s picket lines? When push comes to shove, the exponents of the legal (i.e. ineffective, isolated) struggles and negotiation can only act on behalf of the capitalist class.
We cannot rely on these forces to struggle against the cuts. We can only rely on the struggle of the working class. There are many important examples of workers fighting back – and in some cases winning concessions – in China, Bangladesh, Spain, Greece as well as the Tekel workers in Turkey last winter. There are also struggles in Britain, at BA, on the underground, and more brewing (see article above) that will give us valuable experience. We need to make use of these experiences, publicise them when they are blacked out, discuss and draw the lessons and set them in the whole history of the working class and its struggles. The working class can only rely on itself in the fight back against the cuts and against capitalism. Alex 4.9.10
The Manchester Class Struggle Forum was created at the beginning of 2010 and has met once a month since February. It was motivated by a group of young people who are active in the internet forums like Libcom and who see the need to deepen an understanding of working class politics by bringing similar minded people together, including several older, experienced militants. The aim is to discuss in the context of assisting a fight back against the current and planned attacks on the working class produced by the deepening economic crisis of world capitalism. The meetings are the forum for a confrontation of positions between different organisations and individuals and between the anarchist/ anarcho-syndicalist and marxist traditions and their different perspectives for political work and intervention.
The first discussion of the Forum was held just prior to the British general election and addressed the question of the relevance of parliamentary elections to the working class. Then we discussed the role of the trade unions to today’s working class in the context of a revival of current labour disputes in Britain (strikes and occupations). The third meeting took up the question of nationalism and internationalism, both in the history of the workers’ movement and with regard to the importance it has for revolutionaries today. Next we attempted to broach the question of how revolutionaries organise themselves, including some reflections on the positions and practices of Lenin and the Bolshevik party. The meeting in July was about anarcho-syndicalism and we discussed around the personal experience of a member of the Solidarity Federation. The last meeting on August 19th looked at the massive growth of strikes and struggles (and the way the Chinese ruling class is dealing with them) that have seen the working class of China at the forefront of the international class struggle in the recent period, this following the opening up the country to foreign investment and ‘free market’ forces since the mid-1990s.
What is important about these meetings is that they are open to anyone who wants to discuss and deepen their understanding of revolutionary politics. In addition they have demonstrated a real proletarian spirit of fraternal debate and respect for the different political viewpoints and positions of the participants. They are attended by people involved in various groups, primarily the Anarchist Federation, SolFed, the Commune group and the ICC, as well as people who are not directly involved with any groups, and there have also been people from various leftist groups, including someone with a profound knowledge of the situation in China, at the last meeting, which proved a good stimulus to the discussion. There is a solid core of regular attenders, amongst them some individuals who are eager and willing to take on the responsibility of doing the presentations and who are prepared to book the room and post the details on the internet (see the Manchester Class struggle Forum blog on Libcom) without which the meetings couldn’t take place. Others attend irregularly and there are some who have only attended once and may not want to return. But it is significant that new faces appear at each meeting. Everyone who attends has been able to contribute by bringing their own knowledge, experience and understanding to the Forum.
We can draw a positive balance sheet of these meetings because they express a commitment to the class struggle and a concern to improve our understanding of the measures and the manoeuvres the ruling class uses against the class’s capacity to defend itself against the attacks. The discussions so far have clearly rejected any illusions in the capitalist state, such as through support for the ‘lesser evil’ in elections or through defence of ‘oppressed’ minority nationalisms in imperialist wars, in the guise of anti-Americanism or anti- any other imperialism. In other words they have adopted a clearly internationalist orientation.
The Forum did have some discussion at one of the meetings about a joint intervention in the class struggle but this wasn’t pursued as the specific strike/dispute that would have been the focus didn’t materialise. We did present an ICC international leaflet that was written around the time of the big strikes in Greece for discussion in the context of organising an intervention in Manchester, but that was at the end of a meeting and there hasn’t been the opportunity to re-discuss a joint intervention since. No doubt it will come up again soon.
Just as the working class as a whole is faced with the difficulty of re-connecting with its traditions of organisation and debate, so the Forum is in its early stages and there are many questions posed about how it can best organise its activities, draw conclusions from its discussions, attract new elements to the meetings and develop a coherent framework for combined activities.
There are immense challenges ahead for the working class today. It is under attack internationally because of capitalism’s need to make it pay for the deepening economic crisis. If workers are going to resist, it is essential for them to unify their struggles across all the divisions that capital imposes on them. It is equally important for revolutionaries to come together across the different proletarian traditions and across the generations to develop clear political perspectives and a common intervention towards the working class. The Manchester Class Struggle Forum is one small step along this road, and it is an example that deserves to be followed elsewhere in the country. Duffy 30.8.10
Faced with appalling living and working conditions, with miserable wages and price rises in basic necessities like rice, thousands of textile workers in Bangladesh have launched massive and very determined struggles. In June there were bloody confrontations with the forces of order. The workers were so angry that they rejected the offer of an 80% pay rise drawn up by the government, the bosses and the unions. The strikes spread spontaneously to factories at the edge of the capital Dhaka and to other parts of the country, especially in response to state repression. The workers’ indignation with their situation also expressed itself in the destruction of machinery, seen as symbols of their enslavement. But they also set up barricades, blocked motorways and invaded the centre of the city, in order to make their voices heard and defend themselves collectively.
Bangladesh has seen more and more wildcat strikes, often violently put down by the state, especially since the explosion of unrest in 2006. The country employs 3.5.million workers in the textile and garment industry. 80% of this production is exported by the big international corporations. These western merchants of ‘designer goods’ are full of noble speeches about demanding decent wages for their workers and banning child labour, but they exert a huge pressure on local employers to keep the price of labour power as low as possible. This is perhaps one of the cheapest labour forces in the world. And in a world context of overproduction and crisis, even wages of 19 euros a month seem rather high to the capitalists!
The textile workers, who have often just come from the countryside, cannot survive on such poverty wages. They live in the slums of Dhaka that are often exposed to floods. Their living conditions are in many ways worse than those experienced in the early days of the industrial revolution. The majority of the workforce is made up of women who work over 10 hours a day, many of them through the night, at a frenzied pace in conditions of searing heat. They are victims of all kinds of brutality from the bosses and foremen, including physical threats and sexual abuse. One worker in five is less than 15 years old. The archaic infrastructure and lack of safety regulations mean that accidents are extremely frequent. In 2009 hundreds of workers died in two factory fires.
Now that the poorer countries are witnessing such violent and visible explosions of anger, the bourgeoisie is becoming aware that repression alone is not enough and it is trying to complement the police with more suitable organs of social control – trade unions. In Bangladesh, the main unions have very little grip over the workers. This is why unofficial unions are taking up the slack, presenting themselves as a real opposition and criticising the lack of trade union rights. As a trade unionist in Bangladesh put it: “Because legal recourse is virtually impossible, spontaneous demonstrations are often the solution” (www.lemonde.fr [3]). With the same concern, the local trade union, the BGWUC, aware of the need to keep things in the proper framework, emphasises that “minimising repression can give the union leaders the chance to intervene quickly in the workplace to prevent nascent conflicts from degenerating into the usual violence” (www.dndf.org [4]).
In other words, the trade unions are insisting that before resorting to the truncheon, the bosses should call on their services to stifle the class struggle. This is why western trade unionists have been travelling to Bangladesh recently. Members of the UK union Unite and the American United Steel Workers have been over there helping local trade unions. It was the same in 1980 when British, French and other trade unionists went over to Poland to help build the Solidarnosc trade union and support its efforts to corral the mass strike.
Against the various weapons of the enemy class, the proletariat has to be vigilant. The wildcat strikes and militant street demonstrations in Bangladesh are part of a huge international movement which began in 2003 with the public sector strikes in France. Since then, this dynamic of resistance has grown, especially in the poorer regions, as we have seen in countries like Algeria, Turkey and China.
For years the workers in the peripheral countries have been presented as being in competition with workers in the more developed regions. But now they are showing themselves to be our class brothers and sisters; victims like we are of the economic crisis of capitalism. This is why the bourgeoisie prefers to impose a black-out on their struggles while spreading the same old lies. It needs above all to hide all signs of a growing solidarity between the workers.
In this process of international struggle, the workers of the advanced countries have a particular role in extending the movement and, given their historical experience, in providing it with the perspective of revolution. WH 24.810
In July, during a visit to India no less, David Cameron, British Prime Minister, no doubt delivering a message from his earlier meeting with the US administration, accused Pakistan, or elements within Pakistan, of exporting terror and playing a double game. He should know. The export of terrorism and the double games that surround it are a speciality of British imperialism – as Pakistan well knows.
The Guardian newspaper, as a national newspaper, is one of the elements of the British state, but some of its reporting on Iraq and Afghanistan has been extremely informative about the double-dealing going on. Reporters Simon Tisdall and Haroon Siddique and columnist Mark Curtis, author of the book Secret Affairs, Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, have recently provided some strong evidence that Britain, too, is ‘facing both ways’.
First of all, on the AfPak border, Tisdall quoting from Stephen Tanner’s Afghanistan, A Military History: “This arbitrary line (the Pakistan/Afghanistan border), drawn through the mountains in 1893 by the bird-watching Englishman (Henry) Mortimer Duran, was meant at the time to split the Pashtun people, the world’s largest remaining tribal society”. Tisdall goes on to say: “London also wanted to keep Peshawar, Quetta and the strategic Khyber Pass in the territory of the Raj. It succeeded in both aims – but the partition of ‘Pashtunistan’, heartland of the Taliban, is now a major complicating factor in the security situation. This problem was made in Britain”.” Made in Britain”, like so many of the continual running sores and flashpoints of imperialism today that have their roots in British double-dealing and the policy of divide and rule: Iraq, Palestine, the Balkans, Africa, etc.
Mark Curtis (The Guardian, 6.7.10) shows that British involvement with and manipulation of militant Islamist groups goes back decades and that Whitehall’s collusion with “terrorist” Islamist groups is continuing. He shows how two of the London 7/7 bombers were trained in camps in Pakistan run by the Harkat ul-Mujahideen (HUM) group that received at least indirect aid from Britain. MI6’s covert operations in the AfPak region in the 80s, involved, along with the CIA and government of Benazir Bhutto, the aiding, financing and training of various Islamist and Talib groups to fight against the Russian occupation. One of these faction’s warlords was “Jalalludin Haqqani, who is now the Taliban’s overall military commander fighting the British: his past is not something that the Ministry of Defence relates to the young soldiers deployed to Helmand province.” Curtis also talks about the warlord/killer Hulbuddin Hekmatyar, now on the ‘other’ side, who met Foreign Office officials in Whitehall. Noises from the F.O. suggest that Britain will, once again, have to deal with these men to extricate themselves from the mess they are in. Curtis quotes the head of the British army, Sir David Richards, saying that the “UK’s authority and reputation (!) in the world” are at stake. Since 2004, Britain has been holding talks with elements of the Taliban and this should come as no surprise given Britain’s historical entanglement with Islamic fundamentalism. Curtis again: “The Anglo-American operation in Iran in 1953 to remove the popular Mossadeq government, which had nationalised British oil operations, involved plotting with Ayatollah Seyyed Kashani, the founder of the militant fundamentalist group Devotees of Islam. Both MI6 and the CIA were involved in this plotting and scheming. “Also targeted was Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, who in 1952 overthrew the pro-British King Farouk, providing an Arab nationalist alternative to the pro-western monarchies in the Middle East. Britain had first covertly funded the Muslim Brotherhood, a new radical force with a terrorist wing, in 1942, and further links were made with the organisation after Nasser’s revolution. By 1956, when Britain invaded Egypt, contacts were developed as part of the plans to overthrow Nasser. Indeed, the invasion was undertaken in the knowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood might form the new regime. After Nasser died in 1970, the pro-western president Anwar Sadat secretly sponsored militant Islamist cells to counter nationalists and communists (mainly Russian influence, but workers would have been directly attacked). British officials were still describing the Brotherhood as a ‘potentially handy weapon’”.
Britain certainly contributed to the rise of global terrorism even if local conditions were favourable to it: support for the anti-Russian “holy warriors” in the 1980s which resulted in Al Qaida, support for Algerian fundamentalist killers, giving them, among many others, safe haven in London, where, along with elements of the British state they plotted and schemed. “But Whitehall’s view of Islamic militants as handy weapons or shock troops is far from historical. In 1999, during Nato’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, the Blair government secretly trained fighters in the Kosovo Liberation Army to act as Nato’s soldiers on the ground (also importing fundamentalists from the AfPak region). The KLA was openly described by ministers as a terrorist organisation”. The SAS was involved in training them and “... one KLA unit was led by the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s right-hand man. This murky feature of Blair’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ remains overlooked in most accounts of the war”.
British imperialism’s involvement with radical Islam continued into the aftermath of the war in Iraq relatively recently, with British army commanders sucking up to the fundamentalist groups in Basra, effectively handing over security, i.e., its own brand of terror and oppression, to the Shia fundamentalists.
Britain, as a major power, is by no means alone in using, sheltering, aiding and manipulating fundamentalist terrorist groups and warlords. Imperialism abounds globally, nationally and locally and there is no escape from it or its decomposing spread of warfare and militarism. Around the Union Jacks, nationalism and processions of returning soldiers coffins or young men who have been blown apart, yet still live, and those many more that have been brutalised and traumatised, we will hear nothing of all these dirty dealings of the British state. Instead, the Goebbels’-type Big Lie is repeated again and again: we are in Afghanistan to provide security to the local population and keep the streets of Britain safe. Military, Labour and Conservative liars covered in blood. Baboon. 12.8.10
The San José mine in the Atacama Desert where 33 miners have been trapped since an explosion in the Chilean mine on 5 August has seen dozens of previous accidents. In 2007 it was actually closed down because of health and safety considerations. When it was reopened there was supposed to be a ladder from the emergency shelter to the surface – this was never finished.
When it was discovered that the miners were still alive there were jubilant scenes on Chilean streets. But the media frenzy that followed obscures the reality: across the world the conditions of miners are of no concern to their employers, whether in state enterprises or private mining companies. In China, in particular, where it is estimated that 80% of the world’s mining accidents occur, death and injuries from explosions, floods and other accidents are widespread.
Official figures for deaths in Chinese mining accidents run from 2009’s 2631 to 2002’s 6995. Serious analysts of the industry suggest that a typical annual figure of 20,000 deaths is probably more accurate, and this is without estimates of injuries or lung afflictions. One guess for the number of Chinese miners suffering from pneumoconiosis gives a figure of 600,000.
Productivity in the Chinese coal mining industry is very low. That is to say, it is very labour intensive: this accounts for the 5 million workers employed in it. The accident rates per 100 tons of coal are 100 times greater in China than the US, 30 times greater than in South Africa.
While the world’s media turns its attention to the prospects of the Chilean miners it’s worth remembering that, looking world-wide across all industries in a typical year, and only taking the official statistics, more than 2 million workers are fatally injured as the result of a work-related accident – the equivalent of 6000 a day. People make jokes about the absurdities of the health and safety industry, but the fact that capitalist exploitation kills on such a scale is deadly serious. Car 4/9/10
Bloomberg (4/8/10) report that workers in Guangdong province may soon have the ‘right to strike.’
“The proposed law is seen as a trial balloon before a possible countrywide rollout. The rules: If one-fifth or more of a company’s staff ask for collective bargaining, then management must discuss workers’ grievances. Once workers demand negotiations, the union must elect worker representatives. Until now, union representatives came from management ranks.... For six decades, allowing workers to picket and disrupt production has been officially illegal and subject to punishment. Under the Guangdong proposal, as long as workers first try negotiating and don’t engage in violence, they are allowed to strike.”The problem for Chinese capitalism is that, regardless of their ‘rights’, workers have already been launching determined waves of struggle against the ruthless exploitation of the bosses and their state. In the past the Chinese state has very often relied on repression to deal with workers’ struggles, now it seems to be adopting the methods of democratic capitalism to undermine workers’ efforts to defend their interests.
The Guangdong experiment is no advance for workers. The legal framework will be a fetter on workers’ energies. As with workers elsewhere, workers in China need to hold mass meetings to discuss the needs of their collective struggle, to elect delegates who can be recalled at any time, to discuss the best means to spread the struggle to other workers. What the capitalists fear is when workers begin to express their solidarity outside the union framework. Ishish 4/9/10
In South Africa, the patriotic euphoria created by the World Cup is already over. Like every other country in the world, South Africa is ruled by capitalism, and capitalism is a system in crisis which can only survive by stepping up the exploitation of the majority. A bitter strike by 1.3million public sector workers, led by teachers and nurses, has broken out around wage demands. The nurses have attempted to maintain essential services in the hospitals but have been condemned by the media for abandoning the sick and vulnerable. But the struggle has a lot of support within the working class. The strike has been joined by car workers, fuel supply workers, and, briefly, miners, with growing unrest among soldiers being used as strikebreakers.
In nearby Mozambique, a 30% rise in the price of bread has sparked strikes and riots in the streets of the capital Maputo as well as Matola, a neighbouring city to Maputo, and in Beira and Chimoio, urban centres in the central part of the country. Police have responded brutally, with live ammunition as well as rubber bullets. At least 10 people were shot dead and hundreds have been wounded. There have also been clashes over food price rises in Egypt. Prices of basic food stuffs around the world are steadily rising, particularly as a result of droughts and floods – probable effects of climate change - which have devastated agriculture in countries like Russia and Pakistan. The media are already voicing fears that the Mozambique rebellion could herald an international wave of food riots, as we saw in 2008. Across the planet, millions are already faced with starvation and capitalism’s economic and ecological breakdown is making the situation dramatically worse.
South African workers mocked the World Cup’s official feelgood slogan ‘Feel it, it is here’, with their own version: ‘feel it, it is war’. And the class war is international. Workers in countries like China and Bangladesh, whose cheap labour has kept up profits for the big western companies, are refusing to lie down in front of the capitalist crisis any longer. There have been huge waves of strikes in China and Bangladesh, many of them outside the control of the established unions, which the workers see as corrupt and subservient to capital and the state. The ruling class has responded with brutal repression, but also by trying to cobble together more ‘representative’ trade unions which can do a better job of keeping the workers in line. We are seeing similar tactics in South Africa, where the Congress of South African Trade Unions is threatening to break its ties with the ruling ANC so it can present itself to discontented workers as a really ‘independent’ force.
First of all because they have shown that massive and determined struggle is the only answer that the exploited have against the criminal attacks that our exploiters want to impose. In this case a 5% cut in wages. An anti-working class attack that is completely illegal even from the point of view of bourgeois legality, since it is a unilateral violation of the Collective Agreement signed by the authorities. Yet they still dare to call the Metro workers “criminals”!
Solidarity also faced with the campaign of lies aiming at the “social lynching” of these comrades. The right wing politicians and media have carried out a rancid campaign which tries to present the strikes as the pawns in a campaign by the Socialist Party against the “leader” of the PP (Esperanza Aguirre), and made the most rabid calls for sanctions and sackings. However, we should not forget the left’s energetic collaboration with this campaign aimed at isolating and disparaging the workers. Aguirre or Rajoy called for a firm hand against these “vandals”, the minister for development carried out a massive mobilisation of other means of transport in order to break the strike and the interior minister placed nearly 4500 police at Aguirre’s disposal! Whilst the ‘left’ media was less odious it was more hypocritical, reinforcing the idea of “a strike with hostages” as El Pais headlined on the 30th June. These “Red” lackeys of the capitalist system know which side to choose between Aguirre and striking workers.
What they have been most indignant about has not been the problems faced by passengers. It is enough to see the conditions they have to endure on ‘normal’ days and the growing chaos caused by the increasing deterioration of public transport. Nor are they particularly irritated by the loses incurred as a result of delays or employee absences. It takes some nerve to accuse the striking Madrid Metro workers of violating the “right to work” when Spanish capital has deprived nearly 5 million workers of this “right”!
No, what really worries and preoccupies them about the struggle of the Madrid Metro workers is that they have refused to accept the sacrifices and attacks that have rained down on them from all sides, that they have tried to push back these attacks. These workers have not be willing to accept sterile parades like the civil servants’ strike on the 8th June, but instead have given an example of unity and determination. As the aforementioned editorial of El Pais recognised “The works committee claims that there is an Agreement in place until 2012 and that the Madrid Municipality has unilaterally broken it. But this was the case for the Civil Servants (‘and they were satisfied with the pantomime of the 8th June’ is the paper’s subliminal message). It is possible that it is necessary to have a more pedagogic explanation of the seriousness of the situation which demands such sacrifices in exchange for job security (and they have the gall to brand the strikers as blackmailers!) and a greater clarity in order to explain how to square a 5% pay reduction with a later guarantee to maintain purchasing power...”
As an expression of the response of the working class, the struggle of the comrades of the Madrid metro is full of vital lessons for all workers. Today the struggle has entered a kind of lull and it is difficult to know how it will develop, so it is too soon to make an exhaustive balance sheet of all of these lessons. Here we will take up the most striking ones.
One of the characteristics of the struggle of the comrades of the Madrid metro has been the holding of truly mass assemblies. On the 29th June when the assembly decided not to accept the minimum service, most people could not get into the room; on the 30th, despite the campaign of lies about the struggle, even more took part than the day before. Why? As the metro workers said themselves “In order to show that we are united as one”.
During these assemblies there was an effort to avoid the habitual tricks of the unions. For example, dispersal and confusion around the calling of the strike. Thus the assembly of the 30th June agreed to implement the minimum service on the 1st and 2nd July in order to avoid the struggle being squeezed between the union which was for a total strike and those that were not. This assembly also drew back from the radical verbiage of the former spokesman for the committee, whose declaration “We are going to shut down Madrid” served the interests of the enemies of the struggle in their campaign of disinformation aimed at isolating the metro workers.
The assemblies not only served to temper this phony radicalism and avoid being dragged into provocations. Above all they acted to encourage the workers, to support their determination and militancy. Thus, for example, instead of the usual secret ballots and individual union votes, the metro strike was decided upon and organised by raised hands, which allowed the determination of some comrades to help stimulate those who were more undecided. Of course the media wanted to raise the ghost of some metro workers being ‘pressurised’ by the pickets, but what has really animated the workers to take part in the stoppage is the fact that it is the result of a conscious decision taken after open and frank discussion, where it was possible to express fears as well as give reasons for the struggle. On one of the websites that served to express the solidarity with this strike (www.usuariossolidarious.wordpress.com [11]) a young Metro worker said frankly that he had attended the assembly of 29th June “in order to lose his fear of the struggle”.
In the case of the metro strike, the decree on minimum service has served as the basis for battering the strikers and trying to intimidate them in order to undermine the struggle.
As much as Ms Esperanza Aguirre would like to presented herself as a damsel in distress in the evil clutches of ruthless strikers, the truth is that the decree allows the authorities (the bosses for public sector workers) to set the minimum service. Knowing from experience the margin of maneuver provided by this law and, above all, having the support of Sexta, President of the Madrid local authority, she made a really provocative move by dictating that 50% of the workforce maintain a minimum service.
This trap placed the workers between a rock and a hard place. If they accepted it they would break their hard won commitment not to bend to management dictates. If they didn’t provide a service they would give a gift to their adversaries who would blame them for the suffering of their class comrades who are the main users of the metro... Furthermore this strike law, which according to all the defenders of bourgeois order needs “to be toughened”, allowed the employer, which in this case we have to insist is the government, to impose sanctions against those who do not provide a minimum service, giving it another bargaining tool. Two days after the metro workers agreed to put in place a minimum service, management increased the number of those sanctioned from 900 to 2800 comrades.
The only way to escape this trap is by seeking the solidarity of the rest of the working class.
The strength of workers’ struggles does not reside in their capacity to causes losses for capitalist firms. As the Madrid metro experience has shown, the managers of these firms are more than capable of doing that. Neither does it lie in their ability to paralyse a city or a sector. There again it’s difficult to outdo the bourgeois state on that score.
The strength of the workers’ struggles is fundamentally that they put forwards, more or less explicitly, a universally valid principle for all of the exploited: that human needs should not be sacrificed on the altar of the law of profit and capitalist competition.
No matter how radical the confrontation between this or that sector of workers and their bosses may be, if the bourgeoisie can present it as something specific or particular, it will be able to defeat it and inflict a demoralising blow against the whole working class. On the other hand, if workers can win the solidarity of other workers, if they can convince them that their demands are not a threat to the other exploited, but an expression of the same class interests, if they can form their assemblies and hold demonstrations in order to draw in other workers, they will be able to strengthen themselves and the whole of the working class.
For the struggle of the comrades of the Madrid Metro, what was important was not to dedicate pickets to stopping the movement of trains – though of course the assemblies had to ensure its decisions were carried out – but to explain to their comrades working for the EMT or Telemadrid, or the other public sector workers, the cause of the struggle. Moreover, the future of the struggle will not be determined by this or that percentage of a minimum service, although the majority of workers will have to be freed up in order to be able to attend the assemblies, man the pickets, attend demonstrations etc; the most important thing will be to gain the confidence and solidarity of other sectors of workers, to go to the workers’ neighborhoods to explain their demands in order to show that the Madrid metro workers are not privileged nor a threat to other workers, but are responding to the attacks caused by capitalism’s crisis.
These attacks are going to affect the working class internationally, whatever their conditions or jobs. If the bourgeoisie are able to play off one group of workers against another, or to keep struggles isolated, even if they are radical but trapped in their own corner, they will be able to impose the needs of their system of exploitation. If, on the other hand, workers’ struggles begin to spread and unite against these criminal attacks we will be able to impede the imposition of new and more brutal sacrifices. This will be an important step in the development of a proletarian alternative to capitalist poverty and barbarism. Accion Proletaria, 12th July 2010.
Hello comrades:
The writers of this text are from district 43 of the Madrid Post Office. As postal workers we are in the streets daily; as workers we live several kilometers from our place of work as do others (a relocation imposed precisely by our employers). As public sector workers we are paying for the feast that the government invited the bankers to, we are being privatised, packaged up and contracted out, and like you we are no longer civil servants. We just want to give you our full support. We want to tell you that we are taking the long displacement bus journeys with smiles on our faces, because you have shown us WHAT CAN BE DONE, that we do not have to be indefinitely fucked over by this world, that we can have a little of the dignity that has been lost for some time.
We want you to know that daily we talk with hundreds of people through our job, we know that reality is not what the media shows us, there is anger and excitement, that there are discussions on buses, in squares and bars…
We are with you because you give us hope. In our district whilst we are working we hear comments: “We are the ones who have to pay” and “This strike has balls”, there are those who say that “this is a real strike and not another dead-end one day strike”.
We are being given lessons. Lessons such as when a strike is called by a show of hands by workers they are not lost before they start. We are very tired of our unions, we are sick and tired of the thousand and one times that we have been sold out.
Therefore we end this letter by telling you that our hearts have been beating quicker since Monday, that we are with you in the defense of your strike.
Don’t be cowed, we already know that Aguirre or Zapatero, the COPE1 or Prisa have different interests than ours. That they are used to being against us. They know that thousands of workers are watching you because you are the FUTURE, and not the dull future offered by them.
If you need us you know we are here, in the meantime we will continue to defend you against anyone who dares to denigrate you.
Post men and women of District 43,
1 July 2010
1. COPE is a right wing radio station and Prisa is a left wing media enterprise.
On the 17th August the Unite union representing airport workers reached an agreement with the British airport operator, BAA, for a measly 2% increase on basic pay and allowances with the added guaranteed lump sum of £500. Let’s be clear what this manoeuvre means: the same union, UNITE, which ‘represents’ both airport workers and cabin crew staff who have been engaged in a year long running dispute have delivered … for the bosses of BAA and British Airways.
The proliferation of these phenomena and their growing seriousness is not an accident or a tragic inevitability against which nothing can be done and for which no one is to blame. Capitalism and its laws bear a heavy responsibility in the gestation of these disasters.
According to numerous scientists global warming plays an important part in the multiplication of extreme climatic phenomena such as torrential rain and hurricanes. In the words of Jean-Pascal Van Ypersele, Vice President of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “These are events that are known to recur and intensify in an environment disturbed by pollution from greenhouse gas emissions”. From 1997 to 2006, with the temperature of the planet continuing to increase, the number of more and more intense catastrophes grew by 60% compared to the previous decade. As a symbol of this global warming, at the beginning of August 2010 a gigantic iceberg of 250 km2 broke off into the Arctic Ocean, reducing the extent of the ice cap for the fourth consecutive year so that it is now less than 4 million km2. This summer many temperature records have been broken, like the staggering 53.5° on 26 May in Pakistan. “The mean temperature of the planet is growing, according to the records and analyses of James Hansen’s team at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA), as the first six months of 2010 establish a record as the hottest in 130 years” (Libération, 12/8/10).
Scientists from oil companies, some politicians and TV pundits resist the idea that global warming is the result of a massive pollution of the atmosphere, but all serious scientific research shows a clear correlation between greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and the proliferation of natural disasters. However, scientists are mistaken when they say that a little political will from governments is the way to change things. Capitalism is incapable of limiting greenhouse gas emissions because that means going against the very basis of its mode of production: the pursuit of profit with its consequent competition and imperative to cut costs. It’s because of these laws that the bourgeoisie pollutes, with, among many examples, its heavy industry and the transport of commodities over thousands of kilometres.
The responsibility of capitalism in the spread of these catastrophes is not limited to atmospheric pollution and climate change. The methodical destruction of ecosystems through, for example, massive deforestation, waste disposal in areas of natural drainage, or urban sprawl - sometimes onto the beds of drained rivers or at the heart of particularly inflammable areas - forcefully aggravates the intensity of disasters.
Since July torrential rain has battered Pakistan causing major flooding, landslides, thousands dead or injured, 20 million people affected, 11,000 schools damaged, 1.2 millions houses damaged, 3.6m hectares of crops destroyed, 1.2m livestock lost, 6m poultry lost and much other material damage. A fifth of the country is submerged in the worst floods in the region since the late 1920s. Officially, the number of people living below the poverty line has risen from 33% of the population prior to the floods to 40% now.
Famine and the spread of disease, particularly cholera, have worsened an already desperate situation. For more than a month, in the middle of this horrible tableau, the Pakistani bourgeoisie and its army have displayed a mind-blowing cynicism and incompetence, blaming the remorselessness of nature, when between unplanned urbanisation and impotent emergency services, the laws of capitalism appear as the essential element in understanding the magnitude of the disaster.
But a particularly nauseating aspect of this tragedy is the way in which the big imperialist powers try to benefit from the situation using the humanitarian operations as an alibi, to the detriment of the victims. The US supported the fragile government of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and very rapidly profited from the events in deploying a significant military contingent, including helicopter carriers and amphibious assault vehicles. In the name of the war against terrorism the US has spread its net over Pakistan and checks all arrivals of ‘international aid’ coming from other countries. ‘Humanitarian aid’ is made up of soldiers, diplomats and unscrupulous investors.
As with every disaster of such a magnitude, all the resources that are sent by each country are made to serve their imperialist interests. This includes the promise of aid, which has become a systematic con trick. Each government officially announces substantial financial help, which is officiously granted according to the interests and ambitions of the donors. Take the example of Haiti where only 10 % of the international aid promised in January 2010 has actually been given to the Haitian bourgeoisie so far. Pakistan is not going to be an exception to this rule. $800m has been promised, but what will be handed over to the state will be for services rendered by the Pakistani bourgeoisie.
From late July hundreds of fires raged throughout a large area around Moscow, burning hundreds of hectares of forest, peat bogs and agricultural and urban areas. The fires have killed dozens of people and left thousands homeless. For several days a thick cloud hung over the capital with devastating effects on health, to the extent that the usual mortality rate doubled. And, for good measure, significant nuclear and chemical risks threaten people beyond the Russian borders, in particular with fires on the land contaminated by the Chernobyl explosion, but also with nuclear sites and more or less forgotten stocks of arms and chemical products menaced by fire. Curiously enough this has not attracted much media attention.
These fires show the negligence of the bourgeoisie and the decay of capitalist society. One of the most striking aspects of these events was the incapacity of the Russian state to get the fires under control. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin can play the superhero in front of the TV cameras, piloting a fire-fighting plane, but this disaster is the result of several decades of typical bourgeois policies, cynical and blinded by profit.
An essential element in understanding the role of the bourgeoisie in the extent of the wildfires is the staggering neglect of the forests. Russia is an enormous country endowed with very significant and dense forestry, requiring particular care to promptly contain fires in their early stages and prevent them spreading and getting out of control. A lot of massive Russian forests don’t have access routes, so the fire service is incapable of getting to the heart of many fires. Russia has only 22,000 fire-fighters, less than many much smaller countries. Many particularly corrupt regional governments prefer to use limited resources intended to manage forests to buy luxury cars, as several scandals have revealed.
The same cynicism is shown with the impact of wildfire on peat bogs, areas where the soil is made of particularly inflammable decomposing organic matter. In abandoning the peat bogs the Russian bourgeoisie has favoured the construction of housing in those areas where fires were particularly rife in 1972. In these dangerous areas property speculators have been able to buy land – declared building land by law – at derisory prices. It is in such ways that capitalism transforms natural phenomena, controllable by humanity, into veritable disasters. Incidentally, the Russian authorities have been reduced to waiting for the winter freeze to put out the fires in the peat fields.
It is also, at this point, worth recalling the damage across the Gulf of Mexico from the oil slick caused by the explosion on the BP oil rig. The recklessness of capitalism in its search for materials that it can profitably sell has never known any limitations. To this it can be added that China, in addition to recent floods and landslides in several provinces, has also suffered its worst ever oil spill after a fire at an oil depot caused crude oil to leak into the sea for several days in the area around the important northern port of Dalian. Far from employing the latest cutting-edge technology there were poignant pictures of people on beaches trying to clean them up using only chopsticks and plastic bags. Elsewhere “Fishermen covered in oil, some of them working just in their underwear, scrape up the toxic sludge that spilled out of the jars they have brought back from the open sea. No one is wearing protective goggles, facemasks or even gloves to protect them from the hazardous chemicals in the oil.” (BBC 30/7/10).
Capitalism and its state are directly responsible for the multiplication and the deadly extent of the climatic catastrophes. The working class must not have any illusions in the capacity of the ruling class to protect humanity against devastating natural phenomena, no illusions in replacing the existing government cliques with more ‘green’ leaders and no hope for ecological reforms that will save the planet and humanity from environmental chaos. The basis of capitalism, with its drive for profit, competition and exploitation is at the heart of the problem at every level. We must destroy it. V 31/8/10
In the first part of this new series of articles [15], we tried to show that there are fundamental points of agreement between the internationalist anarchists and the communist left. For the ICC, without denying that important differences exist, the crucial thing is that we are all determined defenders of workers’ autonomy, since we refuse to give our support “even in a ‘critical’ or ‘tactical’ way, or in the name of the ‘lesser evil’, to a sector of the bourgeoisie - whether the ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie against the ‘fascist’ bourgeoisie, or the left against the right, or the Palestinian bourgeoisie against the Israeli bourgeoisie, etc. Such an approach has two concrete implications:
1. Rejecting any electoral support or cooperation with parties which manage the capitalist system or defend this or that form of this system (social democracy, Stalinism, ‘Chavismo’, etc)
2. Above all, during any war, it means maintaining an intransigent internationalism, refusing to choose between this or that imperialist camp.” (‘The Communist Left and Internationalist Anarchism’, Part one, WR 336)
All those who defend these essential positions in theory and practice need to be aware that they belong to the same camp: the camp of the working class and the revolution
Inside this camp, there are necessarily differences of opinion and position between individuals, groups and tendencies. It is by debating on an international scale, openly, fraternally, but also firmly, without making any false concessions, that revolutionaries can best participate in the general development of proletarian consciousness. But in order to do this, they have to try to understand the origin of the difficulties which still stand in the way of such a debate.
These difficulties are the product of history. The revolutionary wave which began in 1917 in Russia and 1918 in Germany put an end to the First World War but it was defeated by the bourgeoisie. A terrible counter-revolution descended on the working class in all countries, the most monstrous expressions being Stalinism and Nazism – precisely in the two countries where the proletariat had been in the forefront of the revolutionary tide.
For the anarchists, the establishment, by a party which claimed to be marxist, of a terrifying police dictatorship in the country of the October revolution was seen as a confirmation of the criticisms it had always made of marxist ideas, reproaching them for their ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘centralism’, for not calling for the immediate abolition of all forms of the state the day after the revolution, for not making the principle of Liberty their number one value. At the end of the 19th century, the triumph of reformism and of ‘parliamentary cretinism’ within the Socialist parties had already been seen by the anarchists as confirmation of the validity of their refusal to take any part in elections[1]. It was very similar following the triumph of Stalinism. For them, this regime was just the logical consequence of the ‘congenital authoritarianism’ of marxism. In particular, they saw a continuity between the policies of Lenin and those of Stalin, since, after all, political terror had already developed when Lenin was still alive, and indeed not long after the revolution.
Obviously, one of the arguments given to prove this ‘continuity’ is the fact that, as early as spring 1918, certain anarchist groups in Russia were repressed and their newspapers shut down. But the ‘decisive’ argument was the bloody crushing of the Kronstadt uprising in March 1921 by the Bolshevik power headed by Lenin and Trotsky. The Kronstadt episode was obviously very significant because the workers and sailors of this naval base had been in the vanguard of the October 1917 insurrection which overthrew the bourgeois government and allowed the soviets (the workers’ and soldiers’ councils) to take power. And it was precisely this most advanced sector of the revolution which had rebelled in 1921, raising the slogan ‘power to the soviets, not the parties’.
Inside the communist left, there is full agreement among its different tendencies on these obviously essential points:
- recognition of the bourgeois, counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism;
- rejection of any ‘defence of the workers’ bastion’, the USSR, and in particular the rejection of any participation in the Second World War in the name of defending the USSR or on any other pretext;
- the characterisation of the economic and social system in the USSR as a particular form of capitalism, state capitalism in its most extreme form.
On these three decisive points, the communist left is thus in agreement with the internationalist anarchists but is totally opposed to the Trotskyists who considered the Stalinist state to be a ‘degenerated workers’ state’, the Communist Parties to be ‘workers’ parties’ and who, in their great majority, enlisted in the Second World War (mainly in the ranks of the Resistance)
On the other hand, within the communist left, there are notable differences in understanding the process which led from the 1917 revolution to Stalinism.
Thus, the Dutch left current (the ‘council communists’ or ‘councilists’) consider that the October revolution was a bourgeois revolution whose function was to replace the feudal Czarist regime with a bourgeois state more capable of developing a modern capitalist economy. The Bolshevik party, which was at the head of this revolution, is itself seen as a bourgeois party of a particular type, charged with establishing a kind of state capitalism, even if its militants and leaders were not really conscious of this. Thus, for the ‘councilists’ there is indeed a continuity between Lenin and Stalin, the latter being, in some way, the ‘executive heir’ of the former. In this sense there is a certain convergence between the anarchists and the councilists, although the latter did not give up their reference to marxism.
The other main tendency of the communist left, the one which descends from the Italian left, considered that the October revolution and the Bolshevik party were proletarian in nature[2]. The framework that this tendency puts forward for understanding the victory of Stalinism is the isolation of the revolution in Russia – the result of the defeat of the revolutionary struggles in other countries, above all Germany. Even before the October revolution, the whole workers’ movement, and the anarchists were no exception, thought that if the revolution didn’t extend onto the world scale, it would be defeated. But the fundamental historical element which illustrated the tragic destiny of the Russian revolution was that this defeat didn’t come from the ‘outside’ (the White armies, supported by the world bourgeoisie, had been beaten) but from the ‘inside’, through the working class losing power, above all losing all control over the state which had arisen in the wake of the revolution, as well as through the degeneration and betrayal of the party which had led the revolution, through its integration into this state.
Having said this, the different groups who claim descent from the Italian left don’t all share the same analyses on the policies of the Bolsheviks during the early years of the revolution. For the ‘Bordigists’, the monopoly of power by a political party, the establishment of a form of monolithism in the party, the use of terror and even the bloody suppression of the Kronstadt revolt are not to be criticised. On the contrary, they still fully endorse such policies; and given that internationally the Italian left current has largely been known about through the ‘Bordigists’, this has served to repel a lot of anarchists from the communist left.
But the Italian left current cannot be reduced to Bordigism. The Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy (which later became the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left) undertook a whole work of drawing up a balance sheet of the Russian experience (the name of its French review was Bilan or Balance Sheet). Between 1945 and 1952, the Gauche Communiste de France (which published Internationalisme) carried on this work and the current which was to form the ICC in 1975 had already taken up its torch in Venezuela in 1964 and France in 1968.
This current (and also a current within the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in Italy) considered it vital to criticise certain aspects of Bolshevik policy from the very beginning of the revolution. In particular, many of the elements which the anarchists denounce, the taking of power by a party, the terror, and in particular the repression of Kronstadt, are seen by our organisation (following on from Bilan and the GCF) as errors, even crimes committed by the Bolsheviks which can perfectly well be criticised from a marxist standpoint, and even from the standpoint of Lenin, notably his State and Revolution written in 1917. These errors can be explained in various ways which we can’t go into here, but which are part of the general debate between the communist left and the internationalist anarchists. Let’s just say here that the essential reason is the fact that the Russian revolution was the first (and to this day the only) historical experience of a proletarian revolution which was momentarily victorious. But it is up to revolutionaries to draw the lessons of this experience as Bilan sought to do in the 1930s. For Bilan “a deep understanding of the causes of the defeat” was a fundamental requirement. “And this understanding cannot permit any taboo or ostracism. Drawing the balance sheet of the post war events is thus the way to lay the bases for the victory of the proletariat in all countries” (Bilan no. 1, November 1933)
Periods of counter-revolution are not at all favourable to unity or even cooperation between revolutionary forces. The disarray and dispersion which affects the working class as a whole also has repercussions on its most conscious elements. Among the groups who had broken with Stalinism while still defending the October revolution, debate was not easy in the 20s and 30s, and discussion between the communist left and the anarchists was particularly difficult throughout the period of counter-revolution.
As we saw above, the fact that the outcome of the Russian revolution seemed to provide grist to the mill of its criticisms of marxism meant that the dominant attitude within the anarchist movement was to reject any discussion with the ‘inevitably authoritarian’ marxists of the communist left. And this was all the more true given that in the 1930s the anarchist movement was much better known than the small groups of the communist left, largely because of the key position occupied by the anarchists in Spain, where one of the most decisive historical events of this period took place.
At the same time, while the anarchist movement generally considered that the events in Spain were a confirmation of the validity of its ideas, the communist left saw them above all as proof of their failure, and this for a long time made collaboration with the anarchists very difficult. We should however bear in mind that Bilan did not put all the anarchists in the same pot: for example, they published a tribute to the Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri when he was murdered by the Stalinists in May 1937. Berneri had made an intransigent criticism of the policies carried out by the leadership of the Spanish CNT.
More significant was the fact that in 1947 there was a conference which brought together the Italian communist left (the Turin group), the Gauche Communiste de France, the Dutch left and a certain number of internationalist anarchists. One of them even presided over the conference. This shows that even during the counter-revolution, certain militants of the communist left and of internationalist anarchism were animated by a real spirit of openness, showing a will to discuss and an ability to recognise the fundamental criteria which unite revolutionaries above and beyond their differences. These comrades of 1947 give us a lesson and hope for the future[3].
Obviously, the atrocities committed by Stalinism in the usurped name of marxism and communism still weigh very heavily today. They function as an emotional wall which gets in the way of sincere debate and loyal collaboration. The tradition of the - murdered – generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living, as Marx put it in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. This wall will not be demolished overnight. However, it is starting to crack. We have to continue the debate which little by little is developing in front of our eyes, maintaining a fraternal atmosphere and always keeping it in mind that we are all sincerely working towards the goal of communism, of a classless society. ICC August 2010
[1]. For Lenin, “In Western Europe revolutionary syndicalism in many countries was a direct and inevitable result of opportunism, reformism and parliamentary cretinism” (Lenin’s preface to a pamphlet by Voinov (Lunacharsky) on the party’s attitude towards the unions - 1907). Anarchism, which had existed well before revolutionary syndicalism but was close to it, also benefited from the evolution of the Socialist parties in this direction
[2]. We should note that there were several groups who came out of the Bolshevik party which had the same analyses. See our book The Russian Communist Left.
[3] In fact, debate, co-operation and mutual respect between internationalist anarchists and communists were not something new at that point. Among other examples, we can refer to what the American anarchist Emma Goldman wrote in her autobiography (published in 1931, ten years after Kronstadt):
“Bolshevism was a social conception taken up by the shining spirit of men animated by the ardour and courage of martyrs...it was extremely urgent that the anarchists and other genuine revolutionaries should take up the resolute defence of these defamed men and of their cause in the events which broke out in Russia” (Living my Life, translated from the French edition). Another very well known anarchist, Victor Serge, in an article written in August 1920, ‘The anarchists and the experience of the Russian revolution’ adopted a very similar tone and while still referring to himself as an anarchist and criticising certain aspects of Bolshevik policy, continued to support this party. For their part, the Bolsheviks invited a delegation from the anarcho-syndicalist CNT in Spain to the second congress of the Communist International. They held very fraternal discussions and invited the CNT to join the International.
In July, following its April release of footage of a US Apache helicopter firing on civilians, including children, Wikileaks, coordinating with the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times, released 92,000 secret US documents dating from January 2004 to December 2009, relating to the war in Afghanistan. Thousands more were held back. Julian Assange, the prime mover behind Wikileaks, said that “you have to dig down in the archives to understand”. Not much archaeology is needed. The leaks show, in the words of the US military itself, the atrocities carried out against civilians by US, British, French, German and Polish ISAF troops and the cover-ups involved; the scale and extent of the Taliban attacks; the dubious role of Pakistan and the involvement of Iran; assassination squads and special forces at work with ‘collateral’ damage; the lies and misinformation put out by the US and Britain and the other militaries involved and the lack of trust between the ‘allies’. President Obama, initially commenting on the leaks, said that they showed how bad things were under the Bush regime, and the White House used the logs to further blame Bush for “under-resourcing” the war. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates said, with the gall of a US war chief, that Wikileaks had “blood on its hands” and that they were damaging to “our relations and reputation in this key part of the world”!
The Guardian calls these Afghan war logs “the unvarnished picture”, but it’s not quite that. These logs are secret, not “top secret” or a higher classification. Much of what they contain (or what’s been reported so far) was in the public domain already and much could have reasonably been surmised from official statements and reporting. A point on the controversial ‘intelligence’ contained in many of the logs is that this is one of the major, most lucrative industries in the whole corrupt ‘state’ of Afghanistan, a state that is rotten to the core; a great deal of the information, at this level, is totally unreliable. The information from higher up is no better: the Afghan intelligence unit, the National Directorate of Security, is a bitter rival of the Pakistani ISI and its intelligence is coloured accordingly. Former US ally and powerful warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar[1], is involved with Iranian intelligence units, further muddying the waters. US Major-General Michael Flynn said in January that foreign newspaper articles about Afghanistan were more useful than intelligence gathered on the ground.
What the logs clearly show, though, is the extent and depth of the war – the sheer scale of it all and the imperialist rivalries, killings and chaos that it is spreading. They show the real nature of the war, the atrocities, torture, intrigues, the corruption and the growing recognition that the war in unwinnable. The idea of a stable Afghan government in 2, 4 or 10 years time is manifestly risible. By the end of this month 100,000 US forces will be on the ground, plus 50,000 others, tens of thousands of ‘contractors’ and mercenaries and thousands of NGOs more or less representing the interests of the states that they come from; plus hundreds of thousands of Afghan soldiers. The current propaganda from ISAF/NATO is about how civilian casualties have been reduced through their policy of “courageous restraint” and how the Taliban are increasing civilian deaths. There’s no doubt about the latter as the war spreads; but General Petraeus’s recent orders to “pursue the enemy relentlessly” can only mean more civilian grief. There’s no one Taliban enemy but factions, ethnicities, tribes and even local farmers taking up arms against the military despoliation of their lives and land. One of the factors of this war is that whenever there’s an ISAF push, in Kandahar or Helmand for example, Taliban and anti-coalition forces appear where they didn’t exist before. To add to the chaos being generated, Afghan border guards, police and army units have been fighting each other in some instances. This is turning out not to be a fight against the Taliban or al-Qaida, but an increasingly complex local and regional war involving Pashtun, Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara factions with wider powers interceding.
The war is spreading, involving and arousing other forces of imperialism. Pakistani territory and peoples have been hit by ‘black’ US special units, Warthog warplanes, Apache helicopters, drones and howitzer shells, and there has even been bombing by B52s in order to deny Taliban the safe havens described as “unacceptable... intolerable” by the White House. This is the slow implementation of the threat made several years ago by the US to “bomb Pakistan back into the Stone Age”. Afghan President Karzai has had secret meetings with the Pakistani secret services (ISI), with the latter encouraging rapprochement between his faction and the ISI-sponsored jihadi network of Sira-juddin Haqqani[2], giving the latter the Pashtun south and consolidating Karzai in Kabul (the US was not party to these talks). In echoes of the Great Game between Britain and Russia over a hundred years ago, Pakistan regards the small, but significant presence of India in what they claim as their backyard with the fear and horror of a threatened imperialism. This danger is highlighted in a report by Matt Waldmen of the Harvard Carr Centre, documenting how the ISI “orchestrates, sustains and strongly influences (the Taliban... even being) represented as participants or observers on the Taliban supreme leadership council, the Quetta Shura”. As William Dalrymple says in The Guardian, 2.7.10, Afghanistan is turning into a proxy war between India and Pakistan.
Behind Pakistan, China lurks in the shadows, and in the geo-strategic games being played out, particularly in the confrontation with Iran, US and British forces have a free rein along the Afghan/Iranian border. This latter is one of the ‘values’ of the US presence in Afghanistan. There are further tensions within ISAF/NATO itself; disagreements and unilateral actions involving Germany, France, Holland, Canada, with US ‘policy’ only demonstrating the tendency towards imperialist chaos in and beyond Afghanistan itself.
The war in Iraq is instructive here. President Obama, who called it “a dumb war”, has now said that he has brought it to “a responsible end... as promised and on schedule”. This will obviously be news to the people of Iraq where more civilians are living in intolerably frightful conditions and more are dying than in Afghanistan. In Iraq there is still no functioning government 5 months after ‘democratic’ elections; and, from nothing, al-Qaida is now firmly established there. At any rate, the US won’t be leaving Iraq any time soon but retreating behind its fortresses. As Seumus Milne shows in The Guardian, 5.8.10, at least 50,000 US troops (plus British forces and tens of thousands of mercenaries) will remain in 94 bases, “advising, training... providing security and carrying out counter-terrorism measures”. In fact, as Milne makes clear, there is a “surge” of private contractors to be based in “enduring presence posts” across Iraq. Killings and torture are still commonplace here, health and education have worsened as has the position of women; fifteen hundred checkpoints divide the capital and ordinary Iraqis protesting on the streets about the frequent power cuts have been labelled “hooligans” and attacked by Iraqi troops. If the Iraq war has been a monumental and bloody failure on the part of US and British imperialism then not only are these latter still very much involved but are also now locked into an even bloodier and irrational mess in Afghanistan that has even more dangerous implications for the whole region and beyond. Baboon, 12.8.10
[1]. This Hekmatyar is a well known mass murderer. He was given aid and training by the US and Britain in the 1980s and held talks with British officials in Whitehall. Britain backed Hekmatyar to conduct secret operations inside the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union.
[2]. Haqqani is a warlord in the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) terrorist network. Pakistan has also backed him in its proxy war against India in Kashmir. Britain has provided covert aid to the HUM in the past and there are reports that Britain was involved in units of this group being sent to fight in ex-Yugoslavia and Kosovo in the 90s. Many HUM fighters have received indirect aid from Britain. Two of the four London bombers were trained in Pakistani camps run by the HUM. So much for being in Afghanistan to keep the streets of London safe!
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/wr337.pdf
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/manchester-class-struggle-forum
[3] http://www.lemonde.fr
[4] http://www.dndf.org
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/bangladesh
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/chilean-miners
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/china
[11] http://www.usuariossolidarious.wordpress.com
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/spain
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/pakistan-floods
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/336/anarchism
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/kronstadt
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1292/left-communism-and-internationalist-anarchism
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/internationalist-anarchism
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-afghanistan