What’s happening to the ‘economic boom’, led by the US and the internet, that we have heard so much about recently? Dot com companies are going to the wall, prestigious US banks are wobbling, manufacturing – especially the car industry – is slowing down, and there are fears of a return both of recession and inflation in the world’s biggest economy. For the ideologues of the ruling class, these are just temporary blips in an otherwise healthy world economy. But as we argue in this article, they are in fact pointers to the real state of the capitalist world economy, and a warning of savage attacks on the living standards of the working class, which have in any case continued to worsen throughout this period of phoney boom.
Since the end of the 1960s, when capitalism once again entered into an open crisis of overproduction, the ruling class has seized on any subsequent period of growth – even if each growth – even if each one is shorter than the last, and is followed by phases of ever more devastating recessions – to fuel its ideological campaigns about capitalism’s new-found prosperity. And there is no doubt that it has had some success in masking the real degradation of the economic situation over the past 30 years.
But haven’t things really changed since the recession at the beginning of the 90s? Hasn’t capitalism in this period shown that it can still be a factor of progress? Certainly the USA has just been through nine years of positive growth, without any interruption. This hasn’t been seen since the Second World War. The European powers have also registered growth since 1994. As for the ‘Asian crisis’ of 1997-8, it didn’t have the devastating effects on the world economy that were at first feared. Could that have been a crisis of growth rather than a sign of the system’s insurmountable contradictions? What’s more, isn’t capitalism proving that it regenerates itself through the development of new technologies? And finally, doesn’t the present fall in unemployment in the industrialised countries constitute definite proof that we really have entered a period of prosperity?
All these supposed expressions of capitalist prosperity are based on indicators created by the bourgeoisie itself. If we are to take them into account, we have to place them in their proper context – in other words, after examining the real evolution of social conditions.
What has been the real situation of the working class during the 90s?
In the 19th century, while showing that the contradictions of capitalism had no ultimate solution, marxists also showed that this system of exploitation was capable of playing a progressive role for humanity. It was able to accomplish a considerable development of the productive forces and of the working class, on the basis of a real prosperity.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, revolutionaries have been pointing to a new reality, one which the bourgeoisie has constantly tried to hide: the decline of the capitalist mode of production, which among other things has been characterised by a deterioration in working class living conditions and a tendency to exclude a growing mass of proletarians from the process of production. The reappearance of the open crisis of overproduction at the end of the tion at the end of the 1960s (1) is an illustration of this tendency since it has brought about a major regression in the situation of the working class in the industrialised countries, notably in the form of massive unemployment and the development of absolute pauperisation. Its consequences have been even more dramatic in the so-called third world countries, where a huge mass of people live without work in the most inhuman conditions. And it was the aggravation of this crisis which was at the root of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes as well. Finally, the economic impasse has seen its destructive effects considerably amplified by the headlong rush of the different states into wars and environmental destruction. In sum, the economic crisis is at the core of an unprecedented social crisis which threatens the very existence of humanity.
The ‘years of growth’ over the past decade are in no way an exception to this dramatic picture (2), since they have been accompanied by an aggravation of the situation at all levels: proliferation of wars and ecological catastrophes, the intensification of poverty all around the world, including for the working class of the central countries of capitalism.
As for the diminution2>As for the diminution of unemployment which the bourgeoisie has boasted about so much, this has been brought about by statistical manipulation on the one hand, and by the explosion of part-time and short-term work on the other. Although the number of such precarious jobs created has been higher than the number of stable jobs suppressed, the overall balance sheet in terms of workers’ living standards has been largely negative. This situation is illustrated in particular by the fact that, in the USA, more and more people with jobs can’t afford to house themselves.
What has been the reality of growth in the 90s?
The crisis is above all a crisis of overproduction, the result of a lack of solvent markets to absorb capitalism’s production. In their efforts to palliate this problem, from the end of the 60s (as during the 1930s), the different states have created an artificial market by running up massive debts. And since this remedy is no real solution, every time that economic activity starts to stumble, the system has had to pile up even greater debts, which on the world level have now reached astronomical proportions. These are debts which can never be repaid and which constitute an ever-increasing threat to the stability of the worhe stability of the world economy.
If, despite all the contradictions assailing capitalism, the crisis has only deepened at a relatively slow rhythm, this is because the most powerful states have done everything in their power to postpone its effects at the centre of the system – and debt has been the main instrument for achieving this. The policy of the ruling class has been aimed in particular at preventing sudden accelerations of the crisis from provoking large-scale workers’ reactions to massive and brutal attacks. Such reactions could lead to the working class developing an understanding of the necessity to do away with this system. But while the bourgeoisie can influence the pace of the crisis, it can’t stop it from getting deeper. Even during so-called phases of growth, the crisis has been getting worse and worse, as can be seen for example from the process of industrial desertification which hit the central countries of Europe and the USA during the 80s; or again by the savage amputation of the productive apparatus in certain countries on the periphery of capitalism, including some of the most industrialised ones, such as Korea, in the second half of the 90s.
In fact the indicators used by the bindicators used by the bourgeoisie are a deception. For example, when it measures growth, it throws in all sorts of unproductive expenses, as well as those which do produce wealth, but which have to a large extent been paid for through debts that will never be reimbursed.
When capitalism is no longer able to hide its contradictions
At the time of the ‘Asian crisis’ in 1997-8 we were told that it was basically the result of the irresponsibility of certain sectors of the bourgeoisie who had run up ‘shady’ debts; debts that had no chance of being repaid. To avoid the bankruptcy of countries which were unable to repay their debts to the big industrial powers, huge salvage plans amounting to billions of dollars had to be set in motion. In fact, here once again, this explanation was distorted for propaganda purposes, so that it could appear that the collapse of certain Asian countries, which resulted in millions of redundancies, was caused not by the crisis of capitalism but the bad management of a few greedy and irresponsible leaders and bosses. Today reality is putting paid to all these lies, in the shape of two significant events. The first is the financial crisis in Argentina and Turkey. The first country had been touted as a model whi touted as a model which conformed in every respect to the rules for managing capital laid down by the IMF. And yet we have recently seen new salvage plan brought into effect to prevent Argentina from going bankrupt, a plan consisting of new debts and new attacks on working class living conditions. The scenario is very similar in Turkey. The second is the ‘discovery’ of dubious debts contracted in the US itself. If growth there comes to a halt, we are now being told that it’s the European banks which will pay the heaviest. The USA is not going to go through a purge like certain Asian countries did three years ago. But it still shows that American economy, like that of all the big powers, is not as healthy as the bourgeoisie has been claiming. And this at root is because the world economy has not been cured of the disease of which the Asian crisis was but a symptom.
On top of this, a number of important indicators which the bourgeoisie has been presenting as signs of economic health over the past six years or more are beginning to point in the opposite direction. In the USA, the index of values for the ‘old economy’, the Dow Jones, has fallen by over 9% since January 2000. In the same period, the index of the ‘new economy’, the Nasdaq, has loste Nasdaq, has lost 43% of its value and 53% over the last 8 months (figures from Le Monde, 1 and 22 December 2000). And more generally “most of the world’s major stock exchanges fell during 2000. There hasn’t been a similar result since the beginnings of the 90s in the US and since 1994 in Europe” (Le Monde 2 December).
“No one is prevented from getting rich” (French ad); “Either you’re rich, or you’re a cretin” (Business). These media slogans, which reveal the profound cynicism of the bourgeoisie towards those who ‘don’t succeed’, were based on the share performances of the ‘new economy’. As even the bourgeoisie is beginning to admit that the new economy wasn’t a miracle cure after all, such slogans are becoming totally out of synch with reality for the vast majority of people.
Although the optimism of the official version hasn’t altered, the American bourgeoisie has accepted that growth is slowing down, that unemployment and inflation are on the increase. Faced with new threats of recession, there is no alternative but to resort even more to the drug of debt. But this is not a neutral procedure. Among other things Among other things it opens the door to the spectre of inflation. This is causing great unease among those in charge of economic policy: the bourgeoisie fears open recessions because they tend to give an impetus to the class struggle. But it also fears inflation because it can push the working class as a whole to fight for the defence of its purchasing power.
Even if it is difficult to be precise about the form that the new acceleration of the economic crisis will take, it is clear that this is what is already happening. Further signs of this are the job cuts in important industrial sectors in France 2000 at Bull, 2700 at Gilette; in the USA 15,000 at General Motors, between 75,000 and 80,000 following General Electric’s acquisition of Honeywell, 26,000 at DaimlerChrysler, 16,000 at Lucent technologies, 7700 at WorldCom, 5300 at J.C.Penney, 1300 at Amazon.com; in Britain threatened closure of Vauxhall in Luton, and of steel plants in South Wales, etc… But while the crisis means the worsening of an already unbearable situation for millions of people, it is also the best ally of the proletariat, because it compels it to engage in massive struggles against the attacks of the bourgeoisie and, in the longer term, to develop the perspective of the overthrow of capitalism.
(1) See the articles in the series ‘30 years of the open crisis of capitalism’ in International Reviews 96, 97 and 98.
(2) See the article ‘The abyss behind “uninterrupted growth in International Review 99 [1].
(3) The control of the rhythm of the crisis demands a degree of international cooperation between the big industrial countries but, among the latter, there is a balance of forces which obviously acts in favour of the most powerful ones, enabling them to take the decisions which are less unfavourable to themselves.
The ideology of globalisation has generated many myths - as much by its ‘opponents’ as by its advocates. In particular there is the idea that multinational corporations are out of the control of nation states and can move capital to wherever they can make the most profit, regardless of the local circumstances. Ralph Nader wants to save capitalism from the big corporations. Noam Chomsky denounces unaccountable private power and the international institutions which impose the ‘Washington consensus’ of ‘neo-liberalism’. The power of ‘international capital’ (which can be used to mean the US, or big corporations, or the biggest powers, or just an abstract ‘evil’) is presented as being so great that it can even overcome the drive of national capitals towards war. In the words of a leftist group, the “pillage” of the poorest countries continues, not in the same way as the 19th century, but with “the urbane international banker replacing the colonial soldier and tax collector” (Workers Liberty, July 2000). To back up this view that the big global corporations now rule the world, it has been said that t has been said that ‘no two countries with a McDonalds have ever gone to war’.
Reality lies elsewhere. Not just because the handful of McDonalds in Belgrade did not prevent the bombing of Serbia by US-led forces, nor simply because of the sheer number of imperialist conflicts either in progress or simmering across the globe. Since the start of the twentieth century, the marxist current has developed its understanding of the intimate relation between the concentration of national capital in the hands of the capitalist state, and the tendency for all states to be pushed into pursuing imperialist policies. This was analysed at the time of the First World War by revolutionaries such as Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg and Gorter. They all demonstrated the tendency towards state capitalism, where all enterprises follow the dictates of the national state, and the tendency towards imperialist conflict, all within a capitalist system that had reached its historic limits once it covered the planet. If ‘globalisation’ means anything, it’s what capitalism achieved at the beginning of the 20th century, by creating a world economy. It did not remove the basis for imperialist conflict, as Kautsky argued with his theory of ‘ultray of ‘ultraimperialism’, (“the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital in place of the mutual rivalries of national finance capitals”, as Lenin cited Kautsky in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, 1915). No, it brought these conflicts to a veritable paroxysm.
Today, at the start of the 21st century, while much has changed - imperialist blocs have come and gone, forms of state control have changed - the essential framework established by the marxist movement has been verified by history.
The influence of globalisation myths
Unfortunately, while the ICC is convinced of the validity of the marxist framework for understanding today’s imperialist conflicts, this is not shared throughout today’s proletarian political milieu. In particular, the Communist Workers Organisation, and the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party of which it is a part, have, in recent years, made a number of concessions to globalisation ideology.
In the 1997 revision of the IBRP’s platform we read that imperialism as a process “recognises no state frontiers and commands no national loyalties from the indigenous bourgeoisie of the peripheral zones. These latter are part of an international capitalist class and are just as enmeshed in the machinations of international finance capital as the bourgeoisie of the traditional capitalist metropoles.” The conclusion drawn from this is that “the modern capitalist state is national only in the sense that it is dominated by the bourgeoisie of a certain nationality. In other respects it remains an agent of international capital and the particular imperialist grouping to which it is presently allied.” (Revolutionary Perspectives 14, p28). While initially it did not seem that this applied to a major power such as Britain, this is not now so clear. In RP 19 they write: “Globalisation has further made protection of national interests virtually impossible for a single second order state such as Britain. These can only be protected by a larger grouping of states. The actual nature of ‘National Interests’ has also changed. Globalisation of production has produced such a penetration of foreign capital that it is no longer shat it is no longer strictly correct to speak of ‘British Capital’ and British Capital’s ‘interests’” (RP 19, p 29)
The danger is that, in doing away with ‘British Capital’, the CWO remove the basis for the very existence of British imperialism. For the IBRP “the WTO [World Trade Organisation] is part of the club run by the richest capitalist powers and their multinationals. Its purpose is to oversee the pulling down of any national barriers that might impede the creation of a true global economy for today’s giant monopolies” (Internationalist Communist 18). The role of such as the British state has changed as “governments now find that the way to defend the interest of the national capital is to play the role of broker and creator of political and social stability for international finance capital” (Revolutionary Perspectives 17). It appears that British national capital (if it exists at all) is only a facilitator for unidentified (but probably US dominated) international capital. Logically, this would undermine any foundation for British imperialism.
Conflict in Ireland. Or not.
Any analysis has to be tested in practice. The ICC’s insistence on the break-up of the western bloc following the collapse of the bloc once dominated by Russia, the end of the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US, the pursuit of an independent imperialist orientation by Britain, and the retaliation by the US, give a framework for understanding the events of recent years in Northern Ireland. In particular, the Good Friday Agreement has broadly benefited the US at the expense of British imperialism, which has put forward many obstacles to its imposition.
For the CWO, what’s been going on in Northern Ireland has involved rational decisions, based on almost exclusively economic considerations, made by powers almost without conflicting interests. In RP 9 (winter 98) they identify a coincidence of US and British interests in the unfolding ‘peace process’. “The US was decisive in originating and maintaining the process... A major aim is to expand investment opportunities... The British state wishes to disentangle itself from its military commitments in Ireland” (p6).
In RP 11 they insist that “the economic motives for Britain to cut itself free of the burden of Northern Ireland are obvious and far outweigh any benefits she might derive from holding onto the province” (p15). Delving into demography, they see the ‘obvious’ implications of the erosion of the Protestant majority and argue that “the more farsighted leaders of Unionism can see this and the majority of their supporters have now concluded that greater co-operation and greater integration with the South is in their best interests” (p15) In this view the rational Unionists and their supporters have accepted integration with the South and only “the Neanderthal rump of Unionism around Paisley will not accept this”, (ibid).
The verdict of the CWO on the Good Friday Agreement is that “in practice Irish Nationalism and Ulster Unionism have been superseded. Both the British and Irish bourgeoisies see their interests as being better served by prostrating themselves at the feet of international capital. Their aim is primarily to create the best conditions for attractonditions for attracting international capital to both the Northern and Southern parts of the island. The godfather of this deal and the main beneficiary will be US imperialism” (RP 11, p13). The comrades admit that “under capitalism there can be no lasting peace” (ibid), but it is difficult to square that assertion with their view of Ireland, where the US is the main beneficiary, ‘international capital’ is happy with its investment opportunities, and the British and Irish bourgeoisies are grateful for any crumbs left on the table. While the CWO say that periods of peace “will become less frequent” and that “ultimately capitalism offers us ideologies which lead to the barbarism of war” (ibid p16) it is hard to see how that applies to Ireland where the bourgeoisie has ‘superseded’ the main nationalist ideologies.
In RP 15, they return to the inevitability of the ‘Anglo-American’ peace process. While acknowledging that the Unionists/loyalists oppose the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, this is a minor matter, as “the outdated Unionist resistance clinging to forms and relationships which no longer harmonise with the needs of imperialise needs of imperialism will be swept aside - only the timescale is in doubt” (p7). The implications of this remark are not dwelt on. The Unionist parties and loyalist terrorists are vital instruments of British imperialism in Northern Ireland, particularly against the possibility of an independent united Ireland. As Trotsky said in 1916 “an ‘independent’ Ireland could only exist as an outpost of an imperialist state hostile to Britain”. To say that unionist resistance will be inevitably swept away by the US is to imply that Britain is incapable of defending its interests in its own backyard.
Possibilities for ‘normalisation’
As time has passed the CWO have become more aware of the ‘obstacle’ of Unionism. In RP 18, while they see a narrow majority of the Official Unionists following the Good Friday Agreement, they acknowledge that “this is a very fragile arrangement and the position could collapse into chaos” (p29). But having used the awful c-word, which puts in doubt the smooth running of the US operation, they still insist that “the bourgeoisie, no matter how bigoted, invariably act ited, invariably act instinctively to maintain their own interests… the ‘hidden hand’ of profit-rates... is more than capable of countering residual attachments to the Union Flag” (ibid). If “dissident” Unionists don’t recognise what’s in their interests, then “immense pressure” will be brought to bear on them. What form would this pressure take? A strong lecture to Mr Paisley on ‘how to better recognise where your interests lie’ or maybe something more forceful?
No, the reason that the so-called ‘dissidents’ act the way they do is not because of ‘bigotry’ or ‘backwardness’, but because the disruptive actions of many in the loyalist camp serve the interest of British imperialism. Marxist analysis is a very concrete affair. If you examine the statements and activities of the Unionist parties, the loyalist terrorists and the British state in Northern Ireland, you’ll find that they are not identical. This either means that they have different interests to defend, which neither the CWO nor the ICC have ever suggested, or that they are different expressions of the defence of British imperialism’s interests. This is the ABC of marxism: idC of marxism: identifying the different forces in society and how their interests are advanced. After the Omagh bombing, for example, the CWO rightly talk of a “victory to the ‘forces of democracy’ - i.e to the capitalist state” (RP 12, p2). But, in starting the article, they describe the Omagh bomb as “pointless savagery” as if the devastating effect of a car bomb could not serve the interests of the ‘rational’ forces in capitalist society. In terms of the interests of the capitalist state it wasn’t “pointless”. Regardless of who exactly planted it, it helped to strengthen the state’s repressive apparatus.
In RP 18, the CWO repeat what they described in RP 15 as the central features of the “convergence” between US and British interests:
“ - The preparedness of the British bourgeoisie to abandon the state structures established in the early 1920s
- The desire to demilitarise the situation and to ‘normalise’ investment opportunities in an aopportunities in an area of low wages and a divided working class heavily imbued with varieties of bourgeois ideology.
- The absence of any significant imperialist power with the desire or ability to manoeuvre against the USA/Britain in the area
- The co-option of the bourgeoisie in the Irish Republic into the process
- The full agreement of the main Loyalist terrorist organisations - unsurprising given their links to the British state - to support the imperialist ‘peace’ process.” (p28)
The vision presented here is alarmingly close to the dominant one presented in the media in Britain. Press and TV say that, with sectarian prejudice put to one side, it has been possible, with the help of the US, to embark on a ‘peace process’ that will make Northern Ireland ‘normal’. The only problems are the dissidents and terrorists, but they have been marginalised by the others who are doing their best for ‘peace’. For the ’. For the CWO, the bourgeoisie, particularly the US, want to demilitarise the situation and to normalise investment opportunities. The only problems come from the outdated Unionists, and the US will marginalise them if they get out of hand. The CWO have crossed no class lines, but their analysis echoes strongly the propaganda of the bourgeoisie. For the capitalist media what has happened in Northern Ireland is the triumph of rational people in the pursuit of ‘peace’. For the CWO it is the triumph of rational capitalists in pursuit of profit.
Polemics should be used to clarify
It should be underlined that throughout their intervention the CWO have not neglected the wider imperialist picture. They have for some time asserted how “the bourgeoisie in both Britain and Ireland are caught, in more than the geographical sense, between a German-led Europe and their old American links” (RP 18, p29). While this is true, the comrades seem to think that the dominance of the US and Germany is so overwhelming that the lesser powers are no longer capable of struggling in defence of their own interests.
Britain is undeniably a 2nd-rate power, but still very much an imperialist force defending its interests in many regions across the planet. One of the main priorities of the dominant faction of the British bourgeoisie is how to do this independently of other powers, particularly the US. There is still a fundamental tendency towards the formation of imperialist blocs, and there are substantial elements within the British bourgeoisie that advocate a pro-US orientation; this has provoked a long history of tensions within the ruling class in Britain. But, for revolutionaries, identifying the main tendencies within the bourgeoisie is an important task, no matter how tedious it might seem. Class consciousness is not just a self-consciousness, it also means ‘know your enemy.’
In RP 18 the CWO refers to the “ICC’s ‘topsy-turvy’ interpretation of history” (p29) on the question of Ireland. They say that it is “obsessive” to see the dominant faction of the British bourgeoisie having an independent orientation. When they say that Britain is ‘caught’ between Germany and America, they are at least right in identif right in identifying the only two powers who, ultimately, have the capacity to dominate an imperialist bloc. What they miss out is the material reality that drives British capital to try and defend its own interests, against the encroachments of other major imperialisms.
They also criticise us for seeing “the Irish Republicans as reliable clients of the US bourgeoisie against the British state.” ‘Clients’ is the CWO’s word - we have tended to describe Sinn Fein and the IRA as pawns, agents of US imperialism. In the CWO’s analysis, their assertions point to most (or all?) forces in Ireland serving the interests of the US, the “main beneficiary” of the ‘peace process’. Yet the CWO seem to suggest that the mainstream republicans are ‘unreliable’ when, in practice, of all the different groupings, Sinn Fein and the IRA have been the most keen to stick to the spirit and the letter of the Good Friday Agreement, the best defenders of the ‘Pax Americana’.
So, when the CWO paraphrase our position as seeing that “‘part of the British state’ is now an agent of thes now an agent of the US and an irreconcilable opponent of the British bourgeoisie” (RP 18, p29) they are shocked by our “peculiar method”. Yet what could be more straightforward. Sinn Fein have ministers in the Northern Ireland Executive, which is an organ of British imperialism (albeit one taking a form forced on it by the US). So long as Britain and the US do not have shared interests then Sinn Fein will be “irreconcilable” to British interests at certain levels, while still prepared to implement policies for the Executive that satisfy capitalism’s needs in areas like Health and Education. It is difficult to know what most offends the CWO: that we identify British capital as defending its own interests, or suggest that the British state is not merely a conduit for ‘international finance capital’. And as for the IRA, do the CWO want us to believe that this republican faction is an instrument of something other than US imperialism? And if so, what?
The ICC’s analysis of Ireland is an attempt to identify the contradictory and antagonistic forces involved in the situation. When the CWO say that some Unionists are far-sighted enough to appreciate the necessity for a United Ireland, or that the Ireland, or that the British government wants to disentangle itself from Ireland, we disagree. We have consistently shown that the Unionists continue their virulent defence of the link with Britain, and that British governments (and oppositions) have not for a moment flinched from upholding the Union.
We will continue, at every opportunity, to insist on what the groups of the communist left have in common: the shared heritage, the basic positions of principle. It remains the case that the CWO and the ICC are the only groups in this country who consistently denounce all the bourgeois gangs involved in the carnage in Ulster, and who defend an internationalist orientation for the working class. At the same time, our differences in the analysis of an evolving situation do have important implications. The ICC has identified the tendency toward an imperialist free-for-all, and shown how the antagonism between the US and Britain lies behind the conflict over the ‘peace process’. The CWO denies there is any real conflict as “British and American interests are able to accommodate to each other” (RP 18, p29). Where the ICC has tried to demonstrate what the period following the break-up of the blocs has meant in terms of meant in terms of the intensification of imperialist antagonisms, the CWO has clung to a view of the rational bourgeoisie examining the state of its accounts in order to determine imperialist policy - in so far as any nation can even be called imperialist. For us this approach makes dangerous concessions to the bourgeoisie’s campaigns about globalisation, a central aim of which is to mask the reality of imperialist conflict in the period since the disappearance of the blocs. Globalisation ideology repeats Kautsky’s fantasies of a world unified and pacified by the pursuit of commerce. Real life demonstrates that since the collapse of the blocs imperialism has increasingly employed military force, countries have fallen apart or are divided by warring factions, and the bourgeoisie has more and more resorted to archaic and religious ideology in the reinforcement of nationalism. Capitalism is not calmly putting aside its divisions and proceeding with the rational process of capital accumulation. It is driven by the economic crisis into increasingly destructive imperialist conflicts, which only the revolutionary struggle of the working class can prevent from escalating into total barbarism.
On 5th December 2000, 600,000 postal workers in India went on a nationwide strike. All sections of postal workers, in all corners of India, were involved in this strike that lasted till 18th December 2000. From day one of the strike the entire media and state machine, including the highest courts, were directed toward attacking and discrediting the postal workers as a selfish and irresponsible sector holding ‘society’ to ransom. The state used all the tricks short of direct violence to crush the militancy of the workers. It declared the strike illegal, proclaimed no work, no pay, enforced the ESMA (Essential Services Maintenance Act), called paramilitary and military units to man postal services. All this was accompanied by propaganda about how private courier service operators were managing the situation very well and the government was not bothered about the strike.
The postal workers are a particul workers are a particularly exploited and militant section of public sector workers and have often fought the bosses for better living conditions and better pay. The last time they went on strike, in 1998, it was one of the major episodes of class combat at the time. But the recent strike was the biggest since their historic 15 days strike in 1969. In 1969 postal workers had gone on strike in a context of massive and militant struggles of many sectors of workers. Faced with the militancy of the postal workers, at the time, the state had used naked and brutal violence against workers and their families to suppress the postal strike. This time around, alongside the direct oppressive instruments of the state, the unions played an insidious role in defeating and demoralizing workers.
As part of a round of ‘economic reforms’, the bosses have been talking of new attacks on the jobs and living conditions of postal workers. In line with different estimates put out by the bourgeoisie, due to technological changes more than 30% of postal employees have become surplus to requirements, so that postal services need ‘restructuring’. In addition, the bosses speak of privatisation of segments of postal operations. The present strike and the ferocious response it provoked from the bossesvoked from the bosses needs to be understood in the context of the extremely bad working conditions of postal workers and above all of the proposed offensive of the bosses.
Union sabotage
From the start the unions tightly controlled the strike. It was called jointly by all three main postal unions - the leftist NFPE (National Federation of Postal Employees) and NPO (National Postal Organisation) that control the majority of the branches, and BPEF (Bharatiya Postal Employees Federation), the union of the ruling BJP. It is significant that very little initial mobilisation was done among the postal workers. When the strike started most workers were not even aware of the demands. On the first day the participation was very low, often limited to union cadres. It was only later that workers jumped into the struggle - they thought this a good opportunity to fight for better working conditions and above all against the threat of redundancies looming in the background.
The demands that the unions framed did not even raise the issue of the threat of redundancies that is the main agenda of the bosses. Moreover, they were framed in such a way as to sow mutual suspicion and divisions among and divisions among the workers, especially between the 300,000 full time workers and an equal number of part time rural postal workers. Clearly, the unions had started with an agenda of dividing and defeating the workers and laying the groundwork for the bosses’ coming offensive. The workers were full of anger and militancy and persisted in their fight despite all threats of the bosses. But they were not strong enough to defeat this trap laid by the bosses and unions.
From the very beginning of the strike, the bosses were determined that workers should come out of the strike with a sense of defeat and surrender. This was akin to what the bourgeoisie did during power workers’ strike in Utar Pradesh in June last year. The difference is that the power sector workers had struck against the bourgeoisie’s offensive (the ‘reforms’) and the bosses were determined to crush the workers and push through their offensive, which they did after crushing the strike. This time, they have taken recourse to demoralizing workers before initiating ‘reforms’.
The strike is defeated
Thus the government was not at all conciliatory - they proclaimed that they have imed that they have conceded what they could. And the strike finally ended, not as customarily happens, with a promise of ‘sympathetically considering’ workers’ demands. On the contrary, the government proclaimed the strike illegal and prepared to enforce the ESMA, which entitles it to imprison and sentence any and every striking worker.
Faced with these threats of the government, the BPEF, postal union of the ruling BJP, asked workers to go back to work on 18th December 2000. Next day the leftists followed suit and asked all workers to return to work.
In the aftermath of the strike, the postal workers find themselves bitter and demoralized. Unions are now going around hammering the message that if workers could not win with the recent strike, nothing can now be done. Clearly, workers need to understand that the bourgeoisie had laid a trap for them and that they are preparing for a bigger offensive. The communications minister, Mr. Paswan has been saying that postal services need to be restructured to remain profitable. In these conditions, workers need to draw lessons from their recent experience and prepare to confront the bosses by breaking the union stranglehold and uniting with other sectors ofth other sectors of workers. It will be a difficult task given the recent setback, but it will be the only way.
Communist Internationalist, ICC nucleus in India
The deployment of British and American bombers to attack targets around Baghdad in mid-February was a fitting celebration of the tenth anniversary of the ‘end’ of the war against Iraq in February 1991. Ten years ago, Desert Storm, the military operation of the UN coalition of 29 countries led by the US, was unleashed against Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait. It was supposed to be in defence of ‘international law’ and ‘world peace’.
By the end of the Gulf War there were more than 550,000 US troops in the area. The British and French troops together amounted to about 45,000. The US forces were equipped with 2200 tanks, 500 combat helicopters and 1500 war planes. NATO deployed 107 warships in the region. The US navy had more than 700 nuclear weapons on its ships and submarines. The war removed the Iraqi forces that had invaded Kuwait. But Saddam Hussein, built up as one of the great tyrants of modern times, was not toppled. As we know, he has remained the leader of Iraq up to the present day. And the fact is that he was not the real target of the US-led offensive.
Following the post-89 break-up of the Russian bloc there was no way that the US could maintain the discipline of the western bloc, which fell apart as each country pursued its own interests. By launching the Gulf War, the US ensured that every country in the world knew the extent of its ability to mobilise at the military level. It was first and foremost a demonstration of its status as the only remaining superpower.
The military enforcement of the ‘no-fly’ zones with almost daily actions has continued ever since, but the bombings of mid-February were the biggest in more than two years. They were a reminder that while Bush has replaced Clinton (who in turn replaced Bush senior) the might of US imperialism continues. To a certain extent this reminder was well taken. A Russian general, Leonid Ivashov, called the recent air strikes "a challenge to the international community ... Today no state on earth can feel secure" (Financial Times 24/2/1).
Despite this, the support of the "allies" for the US has been dwindling, while opposing voices have multiplied. The recent bombings were condemned by a whole host of countries, from France, Russia and China to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It is also clear from the conflict in Israel/Palestine that the US is not successful in imposing its will in every situation regardless. As for the involvement of the devious British, it should not be seen as that of a "partner" to the US, but as the action of an imperialism with a long-established presence in the region, trying to advance its own particular interests.
Hypocrisy of the ‘humanitarian’ warmongers
Ten years ago, there were hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian and military deaths. Today once more, through the miracles of technology (in particular depleted uranium), the arsenal employed by the allied forces is the cause of malformations of new-born babies in the area, of leukaemias and cancers for the military personnel of the big powers and anyone else caught in the theatre of operations. And for ten years the almost daily bombardment by US and British forces has continued to spread terror and death across Iraq. In the last four years British and American aircraft have flown more than 16,000 sorties. In 2000 they dropped 500 bombs on Iraq, in 1999, 1500. The cost to Britain of patrolling the "no-fly" zones has been more than £900m so far, and continues to rise.
This is not the only consequence of the bourgeoisie's "crusade for peace". It is estimated that between 5000 and 6000 Iraqis die every month as a consequence of the economic sanctions imposed by the US and still supported by Britain. The suffering is worse for children, the sick and the old, deprived of food and medicine by the effects of the embargo. The US and Britain blame Saddam's regime for these deaths, claiming that the regime does gain adequate funds for food and medicine from the trade that it is allowed to engage in, but chooses to use this income to build weapons or line the pockets of the elite. But even if the shortages were not really as bad as many reports have indicated, why would you expect such a corrupt and repressive regime not to "misuse" scant economic resources in such a way? As always, the allies' real victims are not Saddam and his cronies, but the Iraqi population they are supposedly so concerned about.
The situation faced by the Kurds is a perfect illustration of the cynicism of the ‘democratic’ ruling class. During the Gulf war the airforces of Britain, the US and France distributed leaflets to the population of North and South Iraq, encouraging them to desert and revolt - letting them think that all the military potential of Saddam Hussein had been destroyed by the military operation. In fact, the allies deliberately left Saddam's best trained force - the Republican Guard - untouched. This gave the butcher of Baghdad a free hand to brutally massacre the Kurds of Iraq, and this was the allies' intention. By allowing Saddam to crush forces that were traditionally hostile to the current regime, the big powers were able to limit the risks of Iraq being totally dislocated by the formation of a Kurdish state, which would have severely destabilised the whole region. Furthermore, once the bloodletting had been accomplished it served as a new pretext to maintain the British and American airborne military presence over Iraqi territory, the "no-fly" zones to "protect" the Kurdish population, which has shared the appalling deprivations inflicted on the Iraqi population.
And when some Kurds recently tried to escape this hell and the rusty boat they were in ran aground on French beaches on the Cote d’Azur, it was not the end of their nightmare. Despite expressions of humanitarian concern, the French media focussed on the fight against illegal immigration, outlining the subtle distinction between political refugee and economic migrant. For the refugees there is only desperation in the face of ruling class hostility. The British government claims to be against the oppression of the Kurds, but British Home Secretary Jack Straw made it plain that he was determined that none of the Kurdish refugees would set foot on British soil. If they did he would invoke EU rules and send them back where they came from.
It should also be added that the British air force uses Turkish airbases to patrol northern Iraq. These are the same airfields as the Turkish air force uses as bases to bomb the Kurds in South East Turkey and in Iraq. Over the last 15 years Turkey has destroyed 3000 villages, killed 30,000 people and created three million refugees in its war on the Kurds. All the major imperialisms value Turkey as a significant power in the region.
Ten years after the Gulf war it can be seen that the "new world order", so dear to the great democracies, has led to a worsening of chaos and barbarity all over the world, with its refugee camps, its mass graves and increasing resort to military action to advance imperialist interests.
Late last year, the 520 workers at the Chef Cookers (domestic stoves) factory in Brunswick, in Melbourne, Australia, were told that the factory would be closed soon. Only one month before, the union covering these workers had "negotiated" a limitation in provisions for redundancy packages. This right wing union, the Australian Workers' Union, is notorious for its reactionary role. It has long been militantly pro-capitalist and, for at least a century, been a major source of racism and virulent Australian nationalism in the "labour movement". The State Government, currently run by the Australian Labor Party, parades as a sort of Aussie version of Tony Blair's "Third Way". In November last year, in fact, this government invoked draconian Essential Services legislation that the previous Liberal/National Party Coalition Government had not dared use, to help bludgeon power workers to end their wildcat strike (see World Revolution 240). Neither of these forces - neither the AWU nor the State ALP - was therefore able to pose as a militant opponent of the planned factory closure, when it was announced.
This created a potential problem for a ruling class which is all too aware that it is essential to deflect workers' anger at the worsening epidemic of factory closures down harmless dead ends. All was not lost, however: enter the Trotskyists. Public meetings, demonstrations, rallies and petitions condemning the ‘ruthlessness’ of the company have been organised, principally by the International Socialist Organisation (ISO). The ISO has spearheaded a campaign, which it describes as "a broad united front with the Australian Workers Union, local councillors, ALP politicians and concerned residents" (ISO web site). This has made it much easier for the union to wear down workers' resistance to the planned closure.
Anti-working class campaign
This anti-working class campaign has enabled the union and even the Labor State Government to appear as if they are prepared to stand behind the workers who are under the gun. Thus, when AWU State Secretary, Bill Shorten, claims that the workers themselves were responsible for the savaging of their redundancy provisions, the ISO dutifully repeats his arguments on their web site. When the workers need to develop links with other groups of workers, and begin talking to them of a common plan of action, the ISO proposes protest stunts and petitions. When ALP MPs ‘denounce’ the planned closure in the name of Australian nationalism and Victorian parochialism, the ISO reprints the MPs’ sickening appeals word-for-word on its web site. When the AWU proposes that the workers ‘blockade’ the plant if ‘negotiations fail’, the ISO concurs enthusiastically, and proposes that the workers use an even more ‘militant’ means to cut themselves off from other workers in struggle, by extending any blockade to an occupation.
Disagreements between the ISO, on the one hand, and the AWU and the Labor Party on the other, are presented as proof that the ISO are the only force prepared to go all the way for the workers. In fact, this is a convenient - and necessary - division of labour within the left wing of capital. The ISO’s principal role in this campaign is to provide pseudo-militant credentials to the AWU and at least some of the ALP MPs. But, for those workers who see through the lies and subterfuges of the traditional left, the ISO is there to divert them into the safe terrain of the radical left wing of capital. An ISO Socialist Worker article argues: “If Email still refuse to keep the factory open, the Premier, Steve Bracks, should come in and nationalize the factory, keeping it open and returning the profits to the people” - as if state monopolies ever belonged to the working class, and have not always been just another form of capitalism, which have been shedding workers in great numbers in all countries in recent years, just like the private sector corporations. Any worker who follows this, by identifying with nationalised industry, is tying himself, not to the interests of his own class, but to those of the capitalists.
Attacking workers’ consciousness
The ISO’s main slogan in this campaign has been the old Stalinist ‘people before profits’ - a sheer impossibility for capitalism at any time (such an enterprise would not see out a month of trading!), let alone in the middle of capital’s gravest ever economic crisis! In fact, the ISO sharply denies capital’s crisis, spreading the illusion that the closure is planned simply out of pure greed, by a corporation making record profits. By so doing, the leftists are severely attacking workers’ consciousness. After all, if capital is not in a serious crisis which threatens humanity with wars and worse, what need is there for a fight to the finish?
Indeed, the leftists are doing all that they can to restrict the Chef Cookers workers to ineffectual action in one suburb. The leaflets, articles and speeches of the AWU and the leftists alike are replete with references to the need to unite with the so called ‘Brunswick community’. The ISO have a ‘community telephone tree’, you see. What more could you want?
Only the ICC has spoken out against this reactionary nonsense. As the ICC leaflet distributed at the last rally put it, the threatened closure of the factory is “not a struggle by ‘Brunswick workers’ but a part of the struggle of the entire working class against the economic crisis of capitalism”. Chef workers, like all workers facing such attacks, need to understand their struggle in this context in order to see that all those, like the unions or the Labor Party or leftists, who would have them defend ‘their’ national or regional industry are their enemies. Their strength lies only in uniting with other workers.
ICC Leaflet
The stated purpose of today’s rally is to ask Email/Electrolux why it puts ‘profits before people’ and why it ignores ‘demands of the workers, the union and the local community to keep the factory open’. The organisers of this protest campaign include Bill Shorten, State Secretary of the Australian Workers Union, Labor MPs Carlo Carli and Kelvin Thomson, and the International Socialist Organisation (Socialist Worker).
No-one can doubt the sincerity of ordinary workers involved in this and earlier protests; we do not doubt that these workers simply want to stop the closure of the Chef Cookers factory — and the 520 sackings it will cause. The authors of this leaflet are just as determined to support any workers’ action which will fight against the rising tide of mass sackings. So we also believe that it is absolutely crucial to avoid tactics which have been shown time and again to not only fail, but to lead workers to disaster. We need to all do some hard thinking about how workers can begin to be successful. As workers opposed to all the capitalists’ plans to make the working class pay for the crisis of the bosses’ economic system, we also believe that it is vital to speak frankly about the traps being set for workers in the current campaign.
Chef workers’ situation is a problem for all workers
The first trap is to think that the problem of Chef Cookers’ workers is a problem just for ‘Victorian workers’ or the ‘Brunswick community’. The reality is that capitalism is in the grip of a very serious economic crisis all over the world. Workers are being sacked in every country; this is symptomatic of very serious economic problems for the capitalists’ system — not just a problem in Brunswick! So we need to look for methods of struggle which unite the mass of workers in action, instead of limiting ourselves to protests in one suburb.
Every worker can see that conditions are getting tougher — that is, that the capitalists are trying to make workers pay for this crisis of the bosses’ system. In every country right now, prices are rising, as the real value of our pay drops, social security is cut to the bone, and mass sackings occur. Even under the Federal Government’s dodgy figures, at least 44,000 full-time jobs were lost in December 2000 alone throughout Australia.
The Australian Workers Union and the MPs involved in the Chef Cookers campaign admit that employers are carrying out massive sackings. But the unions and the ALP MPs still claim that a solution can be found within capitalism. While AWU State Secretary Bill Shorten and even the ALP MPs talked vaguely about ‘action’ at the start of their campaign in order to give themselves credibility, they have shown their real intentions more recently. The ALP State Government and the AWU have written to Electrolux, proposing that it allow workers to buy the factory. This would entail workers handing over their pitiful redundancy payments to Electrolux. (Don’t forget that the AWU negotiated a reduction in such payments only one month before the announcement was made to close the factory!) According to the Herald Sun of 7 February, workers would make the factory viable then resell it to Electrolux: “My advisers believe it’s possible to structure a deal that would give Electrolux a healthy injection of cash with no risk”, says Shorten.
In other words, the ‘solution’ is to make Chef workers capitalists. But this could only be viable if the workers acted like capitalists everywhere who are faced with profitability problems. That is, the directors appointed to direct the factory must run it ruthlessly — like any other business— cutting the workforce, and speeding up production. This is the only way it could compete on the international market — as it must, or find itself being outsold by more ruthless international competitors. And there is no guarantee that this strategy would work even for the small group of former Chef employees not sacked by the new ‘worker directors’. This ‘solution’ has been tried in many countries and the end result is always failure as far as jobs preservation is concerned. And, by turning workers into two bob capitalists, it is also guaranteed to divide those facing sacking off from the rest of the working class.
The ‘solution’ being proposed by the union and the Labor Party is really a deadly trap: workers would hand back their redundancy payments, be compelled to act like capitalist bloodsuckers and still probably end up on the street! In the process, they would destroy any possibility of a united fight by themselves against the capitalists’ attacks, in conjunction with other workers.
Workers have only themselves to rely upon
Some others in this campaign say they agree that a buyout is not the solution and that the alternative is action. However, they propose signing petitions and occupying the factory. Petitions (saying ‘please’ to the boss) have never changed anything, but what about occupations? According to the leftists around the paper Socialist Worker, (Bulletin No. 3, in December 2000) an occupation would stop the transfer of machinery “and would be a beacon of resistance for workers across Australia”, allowing “other Email workers” to “build solidarity action”.
Once again, the history of workers’ struggles tells a different story. It is true that some very militant workers have occupied their factories throughout history, but the result is never that these factories become ‘beacons of resistance’ to other workers. The real outcome is that the workers lock-up their struggle inside their individual factories or corporations, cutting themselves off from other workers who could support them if asked to join them in united strike action.
This is not a struggle by ‘Brunswick workers’ as the organisers of this campaign claim. It is a part of the struggle of the entire working class against the economic crisis of capitalism. So it is time that Chef workers took the ‘campaign’ out of the hands of the community committee organised by their false friends the AWU, the Labor Party and Socialist Worker — who have all shown that they work for the capitalists’ interests — so that they can take real united action with other workers who want to fight back against the capitalists’ attacks. The unions, the ALP and the bogus socialists all serve the class enemy. All workers have only themselves to rely upon.
Instead of a so-called people’s campaign by the ‘community of Brunswick’, this means taking the fight out of the back streets of Brunswick, to other workers willing to consider taking fighting action. Instead of protests pleading with the boss to ‘put people before profits’, and to let the workers buy the factory, it is time for Chef workers to take their fight to other workers. Massive delegations can be sent to other workplaces, beginning in the northern suburbs.
A real workers’ campaign can be built on the basis of this bold action. Regular, frequent, general assemblies of all workers involved can decide on appropriate action to draw other workers into the fight. Action can include workers’ demonstrations and industrial action, including strike action. A working class action campaign is the only way that our class can muster its strength as a class, and potentially force the capitalists to retreat.
ICC, 14/2/2001
In last year’s US presidential elections Ralph Nader, standing in favour of a more ‘green’, less corporate, capitalism, persuaded more than 2.5 million people to vote for him, including many who would not otherwise have bothered turning up at the polling station. In Britain, the ruling class is also concerned about the growing lack of interest in capitalist politics. Learned professors from Essex and Sheffield Universities are concerned at the results of their research which “if this is confirmed by actual turnout in a few months’ time, electoral participation will look like it is in long term decline” (Guardian 1/3/01). They suggest that “the 2001 general election is set to have the lowest turnout of any since Lloyd George went to the country in 1918” (ibid). In this context the Socialist Alliance has just launched its general election campaign. Supported by celebrities such as Harold Pinter, Ken Loach, Linda Smith, Jeremy Hardy, Rob Newman, Mark Steel, Mark Thomas, Ricky Tomlinson and John Pilger, the SA exists because today, with discontent and suspicion in the working class, there is the possibility that beyond apathy with elections there lies the potential for a struggle against the whole capitalist system. Following on from the Nader example, a report from its opening press conference says that “the SA campaign claims that it will attract disenfranchised voters who would otherwise not vote at all - at least 100,000 overall” (Guardian 2/3/01).
The SA was originally a loose alliance established in 1997. Increasing numbers of groups became interested in participating in it. Candidates stood in the 1998 Euro elections, in the May 2000 elections for the Greater London Assembly, and in various local elections. The groups now involved include the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party of England and Wales (ex-Militant), the Alliance for Workers Liberty (Workers Liberty/Action for Solidarity), Workers Power, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Weekly Worker), the International Socialist Group (Socialist Outlook) as well as other groups and individuals. While all these groups are proud of their particular identities, one thing they’ve always had in common has been support for the Labour Party at election time. Indeed, while their current plans are for at least a 100 candidates, (and supporting the 72 (ex-Militant) Scottish Socialist Party candidates in Scotland) elsewhere they will be recommending staying in the Labour fold. One of the SWP’s election slogans, for example, is “Keep the Tories Out” (“we still prefer a Labour victory to a Tory” - Socialist Worker 3/3/01). So why are they standing, if they don’t even want a change in government?
At an SWP conference last November leading member John Rees said that “People’s disillusion with the electoral system - shown by low turnouts - and New Labour should not be left to others to exploit. We want socialists to gain from the anger in society” (SW 18/11/00). John Nicholson, a former deputy leader of Manchester Council and a leading member of the SA was reported as saying that “millions of working class people felt betrayed by New Labour and were looking for an alternative” (SW 7/10/00). Because of this “we have to make sure that alternative is a socialist alternative - otherwise the right wing, the Tories and the Nazis can gain from disillusion with New Labour” (ibid).
In fact the elements who constitute the SA know perfectly well that workers’ disillusionment can go in a very different direction from “the Tories and the Nazis”. The real alternative is to struggle as a collective class against the attacks of the Labour government, rather than the atomisation of the passive isolated individual in a polling booth. The SWP, for instance, published an article in Socialist Worker (28/10/00) on the question of elections and made a point of attacking the “‘left’ communists in Germany who were opposed to socialists contesting elections”. The article was headlined “Part of shaping anger with Blair” - that is, giving workers’ anger a shape which will be no threat to capitalism, and no benefit to the working class. The SWP say that: “Now you can hit back at Tory Blair” (SW 3/3/01) by voting Labour and surrendering to the charade of bourgeois democracy.
While the main reason for the SA’s existence is as part of the democratic charade, the detail of the points they’re standing on can’t be ignored. When Lenin mistakenly put forward the idea of (that contradiction in terms) ‘revolutionary parliamentarianism’, against the German Left Communists, he at least had the merit of wanting to make propaganda against the capitalist system. The various items agreed by the groups of the SA are all policies for the capitalist state to follow: changing the way hospitals, schools and council services are financed; ensuring state control of council housing, the London Underground, air traffic control and the Post Office; boosting local government; renationalising the buses, railways and water industry; changing the tax and welfare system.
In the SA there is an “80/20” formula, where they campaign on the 80% that they agree on and avoid debating the 20% they disagree on. The 80% are state capitalist policies. The 20% includes such details as the Weekly Worker’s request that the minimum wage “be decided on the basis of what is needed to physically and culturally reproduce the worker and one child” and that in prisons “cells must be self-contained and for one person alone” (25/1/01). The 20% also includes the fact that, during the war in Kosovo, some of the SA’s constituent groups supported the Serbian war-drive and others the NATO bombing. Their only difference was on which group of capitalist gangsters workers should die for.
One final point should be made about the SA campaign. It is curious that, after literally decades of disputes between all the different tendencies in the SA, the main leftist groups should finally have come together, for the first time since 1951, at this particular historical point. The explanation to this can be found in the current state of class consciousness. Over the last ten years workers have been disorientated, without even, in some respects, a sense of basic class identity. The confusion in the working class is accentuated when a unified force like the SA (claiming to be ‘revolutionary’ etc) insists that political life can take place in the framework of bourgeois democracy, and that the alternatives are nationalisation or privatisation, Left or Right. The reality of capitalist society is of the struggle of class against class, the working class against its exploiters.
The best hip hop is eloquently intelligent; lyrical, satirical, even politically critical; a worthy offspring of blues, jazz and soul.
But the hip hop scene has long been dominated by ‘gangsta rap’. And gangsta ideology is one of the many ways through which capitalism exerts its control over the exploited and the oppressed.
The gangsterisation of society is a typical expression of decomposing capitalism. In Russia the mafia is almost indistinguishable from the ruling political elite; in Liberia or Sierra Leone the gangs are armed to the teeth and engage in ‘civil war’; in the US urban ghettos, the gang has become the refuge for the most dispossessed, a pseudo-community offering them a means of day-to-day survival. But just as in Africa the armed gangs become instruments of competing imperialisms, so in New York or LA the gangs are in no way an expression of proletarian revolt, as the self-proclaimed ‘communists’ of Aufheben once suggested. On the contrary, they function as instruments of capital’s totalitarian occupation of social life.
This is obvious at the level of commerce: gangsta culture is a conduit for the drug trade, the weapons trade, and even the fashion industry. Nike, Reebok and the other labels are inseparable from the gangsta image. But gangsta is also a political ideology, a packaging of revolt, channelling rebellion into new forms of division. The rap group Public Enemy once chanted the slogan ‘Fight the Power’. But the influence of black nationalism on such groups ensures that the real power, which exploits all colours with equal zeal, remains hidden from view. Black nationalism – together with gangsta’s infamous demeaning of women and gays – is a means of dividing the proletariat, of obliterating its class identity.
Eminem, of course, has managed to cross the racial divide; and this, alongside his undoubted talents as a rapper, is one of the reasons why he has been made into a megastar. Eminem, we are told, is the voice of ‘white trash America’: codename for the most down-trodden section of the white American working class. And how is this section of the proletariat presented through the chain-saw wielding, blue overalls-wearing, drink and drug-guzzling posture adopted by Eminem in his controversial British tour? Not just as misogynist and homophobic, but above all as self-destructive and nihilistic: “I don’t give a fuck”. And nihilism is just another way of sterilising critical thought.
But what about all the shock and outrage vented by the Daily Mail, the Beckhams, or the politically correct Student Union puritans? More grist to the campaign, boosting Slim Shady’s subversive image. Real subversion lies elsewhere – in the rigorous criticism of this social order and the proposal of a revolutionary alternative. When the working class unites across all divisions, and calls capitalism into question, it will draw behind it the best of the artists, and put an end to the bourgeoisie’s cynical theft and manipulation of all forms of cultural creativity.
We are publishing here the theses on parliamentarism, drawn up by Amadeo Bordiga on behalf of the communist abstentionist fraction of the Socialist Party of Italy, the nucleus of the Communist Party of Italy, formed in 1921.
The theses were submitted for discussion at the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920. At this time there was a major debate within the CI about whether communists should take part in parliamentary elections, and work inside parliament if elected. The majority position, defended by Lenin, Trotsky and others, was that of “revolutionary parliamentarism” - the idea that revolutionaries could use the parliamentary forum as a “tribune” from which to denounce capitalism and advocate the communist revolution. The left communists - Bordiga’s fraction in Italy, the KAPD in Germany, Sylvia Pankhurst’s group in Britain among them - argued that the period of working in parliament was over. In the new period, when proletarian revolution was directly on the agenda, the ruling class was using parliamentary “democracy” as a means of opposing the workers’ struggle for the power of the soviets; if the Communist parties took part in the charade of elections and in the parliamentary “talking shop”, it would spread dangerous confusions within the ranks of the working class. In our view, history has amply confirmed this view, but we will look at this debate in more detail in a future article.
Today there are all sorts of groups which claim to be “revolutionary” - such as the various Trotskyist factions inside the Socialist Alliance - who claim that they are following on the tradition of “revolutionary parliamentarism” by standing in the forthcoming elections. This is false. As we show in the article in this issue, these “socialists” do not aim to destroy capitalism at all, but merely propose “radical” alternatives for its management.
Today it is rare to find any genuine communist groups advocating the old tactic of revolutionary parliamentarism. But precisely because the pseudo-revolutionaries of today use the errors of the past workers’ movement to justify their bourgeois politics, the theses of the left communists remain as relevant today as they were in 1920.
2. Communists deny the possibility that the working class will ever conquer power through a majority of parliamentary seats. The armed revolutionary struggle alone will take it to its goal. The conquest of power by the proletariat, which forms the starting point of communist economic construction, leads to the violent and careful abolition of the democratic organs and their replacement by organs of proletarian power - by workers’ councils. The exploiting class is in this way robbed of all political rights and the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. a government system with class representation, is set up. The abolition of parliamentarism becomes a historical task of the communist movement. Even more, representative democracy is precisely the first form of bourgeois society that must be brought down, and moreover even before capitalist property.
3. The same must happen with local government institutions, which should not be theoretically posed as an opposite to the state organs. In reality their apparatus is identical with the state mechanism of the bourgeoisie. They must similarly be destroyed by the revolutionary proletariat and replaced by local soviets of workers’ deputies.
4. At the present moment, the task of the communists in mentally and materially driving forward the revolution is to free the proletariat above all from the illusions and prejudices that were spread by the treachery of the old social democratic leaders. In those countries which have been ruled for a longer time by a democratic order which is rooted in the habits and thoughts of the masses, and also in the old socialist parties, this task is of special importance, and assumes the first place among the problems of the preparation of the revolution.
5. Participation in elections and in parliamentary activity at a time when the thought of the conquest of power by the proletariat was still far distant and when there was not yet any question of direct preparation for the revolution and the realisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat could offer great possibilities for propaganda, agitation and criticism. On the other hand, in those countries where a bourgeoisie has at yet only started and is creating new institutions, the entry of communists into the representative bodies, which are still in a formative stage, can have a big influence on the development of events in order to bring about a favourable outcome of the revolution and the final victory of the proletariat.
6. In the present historical epoch, which has opened with the end of the world war and its consequences for the social organisation of the bourgeoisie - with the Russian revolution as the first realisation of the idea of the conquest of power by the working class, and the formation of the new International in opposition to the traitors of the social democracy - and in the countries where the democratic order was introduced a long time ago, there is no possibility of exploiting parliamentarism for the revolutionary cause of communism. Clarity of propaganda no less than preparation for the final struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat demand that communists carry out propaganda for a boycott of the elections on the part of the workers.
7. Under these historical conditions, under which the revolutionary conquest of power by the proletariat has become the main problem of the movement, every political activity of the Party must be dedicated to this goal. It is necessary to break with the bourgeois lie once and for all, with the lie that tries to make people believe that every clash of the hostile parties, every struggle for the conquest of power, must be played out in the framework of the democratic mechanism, in election campaigns and parliamentary debates. It will not be possible to achieve this goal without renouncing completely the traditional method of calling on workers to participate in the elections, where they work side by side with the bourgeois class, without putting and end to the spectacle of the proletariat appearing on the same parliamentary ground as its exploiters.
8. The ultra-parliamentary practice of the old socialist parties spread the dangerous conception that all political action consists only of election campaigns and parliamentary activity. On the other hand the proletariat’s aversion for this treachery has created a fertile soil for the syndicalist and anarchist tendencies which deny that the political action and activity of the party have any value. Therefore the Communist Parties will never achieve great success in propagating the revolutionary Marxist method if they do not base their work directly on the dictatorship of the proletariat and on the workers’ councils, and abandon any contact with bourgeois democracy.
9. The excessively great importance ascribed in practice to the election campaigns and their results, the fact that the party dedicates to them all its forces and human, press and economic resources for quite a long period of time means on the one hand that all the speeches at meetings and all the theoretical statements to the contrary, the conviction is strengthened that this really is the main action for the achievement of communist goals. On the other hand it leads to an almost complete renunciation of any work of revolutionary organisation and preparation by giving the party organisation a technical character that stands in complete contradiction to the requirements of legal and illegal revolutionary work.
10. As far as those parties are concerned that have affiliated to the Communist International by a majority decision, further participation in election campaigns prevents the required sifting out of the social democratic elements, without whose removal the Communist International will not be able to carry out its historic role.
11. The actual character of the debates that take place in parliament and other democratic organs excludes any possibility of moving on from a criticism of the opposing parties to propaganda against the principle of parliamentarism, to action that exceeds the limits of the parliamentary constitution. In exactly the same way it is impossible to obtain a mandate that gives the right to speak if one refuses to submit to all the formalities of the electoral process.
Success in the parliamentary fight can be achieved merely by skill in the use of the common weapon of the principles on which the institution bases itself and by using the nuances in the rules, just as success in the election campaign will be judged more and more according to the number of votes and seats obtained.
Every attempt by the Communist Parties to lend the practice of parliamentarism a totally different character will simply lead to a bankruptcy of the energies that will have to be sacrificed to this labour of Sisyphus. The cause of the communist revolution calls summarily for direct action against the capitalist system of the exploiters.
The foot and mouth crisis in Britain, which is now spreading to the rest of Europe, is having a devastating economic impact. Nearly half a million animals have already been slaughtered, and the epidemic is still not yet under control. British food exports have been banned, while the closing of the countryside is losing the tourist industry a £100 million a week. The cost of the crisis is already estimated at 1.1% of GDP.
The present epidemic of foot and mouth is not a ‘natural’ catastrophe, any more than mad cow disease, swine fever, salmonella, E. coli, and other livestock infections are. It is the result of modern intensive agriculture: “The modern animal farm not only allows but paves the way for the outbreak of disease. We cram thousands of genetically uniform animals into unhygienic warehouses, generating a feast for microbes. We recycle animal manure and slaughterhouse waste as feed. We process meat at breakneck speed in the presence of blood, faeces and other contagion agents. Long distance transport of food creates endless opportunities for contamination.” (International Herald Tribune, 15.3.01)
The ‘we’ is not the population in general but the capitalist class in their frenetic search for capitalist profit. And the present degeneration of the farming industry is particularly the product of the crisis of the profit system, which takes the form of crises of overproduction. The consequent decay of the infrastructure of the capitalist economy, including agri-business, is the result of the capitalist attempt to lessen the impact of the crisis by all kinds of economies in production costs.
Mad cow disease was provoked by economies made in animal feed production, by adding abattoir waste, to offset the fall in the selling price of cattle on the world market. Result: a growing number of human victims of the agonising vCJD that turns the brain to jelly. Foot and mouth is an old disease, well known since the 16th century in Europe and one which ‘modern’ capitalism had seemed to be rid of. But Britain suffered a major epidemic in 1967. It had never used vaccination, preferring the cheaper method of wholesale slaughter. Yet in 1991 (while foot and mouth spread to Asia) other European countries also abandoned vaccination, because it was too expensive, and so other outbreaks have appeared on the continent in the 90s.
The present epidemic has expanded much more rapidly and extensively than in 1967 principally because of the recent practice of transporting animals for slaughter over longer and longer distances, within countries and over entire continents. In 1967 only one region was involved, this time it had spread to many before the first case was recognised.
Capitalism in decomposition is incapable of humanising the present system of agriculture. On the contrary, the present catastrophe, by getting rid of much of the huge surplus in livestock and by ruining the smaller producers, is only preparing for even more intense competition on the world market, and more intensive farming that will lead eventually to further disasters and more dangerous food.
In the face of the growing absurdity of capitalist production, the capitalist propaganda machine tries to hide the contradictions and puts forward all sorts of illusions to lull us into thinking that it is possible to have the present system without its convulsions. The politicians talk about making agriculture more ecologically sound and putting the emphasis on quality rather than quantity when they are preparing to further reduce the subsidies to producers that the different nation states can no longer afford. As the Financial Times, a business paper that is obliged to give some of the truth, said: “West European farmers obliged to convert to less intensive or organic production would need much greater subsidies than they receive today, or higher protectionist barriers in order to compete against their rivals in world markets” (5.03.01)
At the same time that the bourgeoisie is obliged to reduce the budget for the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU, the left wing of this class produces all sorts of laments for the golden past of self-sufficient local farming and pretends that it is possible to return to it by getting rid of ‘globalisation’. Some even blame the working class for demanding cheap food and not being prepared to pay the price for healthy produce! The working class isn’t to blame: in global terms capitalism benefits by cheapening food production since it reduces the cost of labour power overall, and so increases relative exploitation and profitability. Again the voice of capitalist truth from the FT affirms: “A steady supply of cheap food is a public good that should not be dismissed lightly [the workers have to be fed]. Europe, indeed the world, needs efficient farms deploying modern techniques to provide it. That means specialisation and trade, including arbitrage [carting animals long distances around the country to find the best price, or even just to avoid being sold at a loss] to take advantage of price differentials. There can be no return to a rural idyll of small-scale, local production.” (ibid).
As the economic crisis worsens, not only will the quality of food for the mass of the population continue to deteriorate, but its cost will tend to escalate as the weaker agricultural competitors are forced out of business, and those remaining try to offset the increasing loss of subsidy from the state.
It is only the abolition of the capitalist market at the world level and the installation of a society in which human needs will be the motors of production which will permit the emergence of rational methods of food production capable both of nourishing humanity and avoiding widespread disease and pollution.
Como 30.3.01
With the recent confrontations in Macedonia, yet another part of the Balkans is on the verge of imploding into chaos. After Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, this new theatre of war threatens to further destabilise a region which has been subjected to blood and fire for ten years. And once again, the local populations are exposed to massacre and barbarity through the confrontation between rival nationalist cliques.
In this conflict, it’s the Macedonian army and police against the UCK, the separatist Albanian guerrillas, a new armed wing of the same Albanian mafia which was at work in Kosovo but was officially dissolved.
Serbia has also been put on a war footing against other pro-Albanian militia, after a year of sporadic skirmishes which threatened southern Serbia from the valley of Presevo and Tanusevci, a frontier village between Macedonia and Kosovo. NATO, and the US in particular, have authorised the Serbian army to make an incursion into the security zone set up since July 1999 round the Kosovan frontier, This concession is aimed at preventing the pro-Albanian militia from acting directly against Serbia. In exchange, Serbia has presented a ‘platform’ of negotiations which on 12 March, under the aegis of NATO, resulted in a cease-fire with another pro-Albanian faction, the UCPMB. This led to the combat zone being displaced towards Macedonia, around Tetovo, the country’s second town, which is near to Kosovo and which is home to a population which is 80% Albanian-speaking (the population of Macedonia as a whole is about one third Albanian).
Ten years after proclaiming its independence in 1991, following the break-up of Yugoslavia, Macedonia is once again at the heart of the Balkans conflicts, just like it was in the wars at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. First it was at the centre of a popular uprising against Ottoman rule, which in turn led to the war between Greece and Turkey in 1897. Then, after its ‘liberation’, which marked a decisive step in the disintegration of the Ottoman empire following the first Balkan war in 1912, the ‘ownership’ of Macedonia was a major imperialist stake in the second murderous conflict which saw Serbia and Greece fighting against Bulgaria. This conflict was one of the immediate causes of the first world war. The same antagonisms are still waiting to resurface at the first opportunity. Not only the old rivalry between Serbia and Albania, which has been revived by the war in Kosovo - Macedonian territory is also claimed by Bulgaria and Greece.
In response to the recent evolution of the situation, we have seen a spectacular turn-around in the position of most of the great powers towards Serbia. Since the ousting of Milosevic and his replacement by Kostunica, this is a state which has become much more "presentable" for the western democracies, who have gradually "normalised" their relations with Serbia. They are trying to make us believe that the great powers within NATO (which has 42,000 soldiers in KFOR) are acting as the guardians of peace and democracy, as the defenders of civilisation against nationalist extremism and wicked people in general. Yesterday it was the Serbs who were in the grip of a dictator accused of wanting to restore ‘Greater Serbia’; today it’s the Serbs and the Slav population of Macedonia who have to be protected, and fingers are being wagged at the Albanians whose government is suspected of trying to set up a ‘Greater Albania’. But only two years ago the ‘international community’ claimed that it was defending the Albanian population of Kosovo. This humanitarian pretext was in fact the essential justification for NATO’s devastating intervention. But it was an out and out lie. By unleashing their military operations, the allied forces knew very well that they would push Milosevic into intensifying and generalising his policy of massive deportation of the local populations. What’s more, the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo turned the region into a pile of ruins. And the partition of Kosovo into different sectors under NATO control, which was supposed to put an end to Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing, has simply parked the local populations in barbed wire ghettos, where they live in miserable conditions in a climate of permanent ethnic hatred.
As in all the Balkan conflicts over the past 10 years, the great powers never get mixed up in the situation for the reasons they give, but only to defend their own imperialist interests in the region. The same imperialist appetites motivate all states, from the smallest to the largest. At the moment all the great powers are openly supporting the Macedonian government and NATO has called for extra troops to deal with the pro-Albanian guerrillas between the Serbian and Macedonian frontiers. But behind the facade of unity between the great powers lie the same cleavages and rival imperialist interests which have already been asserted in the previous Balkan conflicts this last decade. Each one of them makes use of the local nationalist cliques. As in Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo, the interests of the great powers diverge profoundly and while all of them hesitate to throw too much oil on the fire right now, each one is still seeking to draw whatever benefit it can from the present situation. And if the occasion arises, these divergent interests will come to the surface in Macedonia as well.
Thus France, for example, having been forced last year to take part in the bombing of Serbia in order to be able to maintain its presence in the Balkans (in the form of occupation troops who are holding part of Kosovo in the name of KFOR), is using this opportunity to go back to its traditional policies, on the one hand by renewing its ties with its old Serbian ally, and on the other hand by rushing to express support for Macedonia. As in the past, it is doing this in association with Britain. When the current hostilities began, it was Paris which ran to the president of Macedonia with offers of aid, while the foreign minister went to Skopje and proclaimed “we don’t want to allow the terrorist groups to endanger the stability of Macedonia and the whole region”. Another spokesman declared “we support the Macedonian government’s policy of moderation” - a sentiment echoed almost word for word by Mr Robin Cook at the exact moment that the Macedonian army (moderately, no doubt) began shelling Albanian villages. Meanwhile the British SAS has been seizing Kosovo Albanians on suspicion of being involved in the mass killing of Serbs.
As for Germany, which ten years ago was encouraging Slovenia and Croatia to go for independence, thus precipitating the break-up of Yugoslavia, and which in Kosovo actively supported the UCK, it has not changed its overall objectives in the region: to increase Serbia’s isolation and above all to surround it with a ring of pro-German states. But Germany’s imperialist aims are more long term: to deprive Serbia of access to the Mediterranean by provoking the secession of Montenegro.
The main interest of the US is to preserve the status quo, to act as the leader of NATO in order to contain the ambitions of the European powers - to remain master of the game in the Balkans, even though it is finding it harder and harder to keep control of the situation. One of the most recent examples of this loss of control can be seen in the Bosnian-Croat Federation established by the 1995 Dayton accords. Here the majority of Croat soldiers have left the common army in a move towards establishing a ‘third entity’ (Herzeg-Bosnia) which would leave Muslim areas caught between Serbs and Croats. This undermines the credibility of Dayton.
Finally Russia, by calling loudly for a firm intervention against the ‘Albanian terrorists’ is still trying to present itself as Serbia’s most reliable patron.
This is why counting on the ‘international community’ and on NATO to prevent things spiralling into chaos in the Balkans, which is the notion advertised by all the governments and the media, is a total illusion. Already each power is trying to play its own game behind the limited confrontations that have taken place. But they are also playing with fire. It’s obvious that the extension of the conflict to the whole of Macedonia, the possibility that Macedonia will fall apart, would increase the chances of a more active intervention by other states who have a direct interest in the situation, like Bulgaria and Greece. That would mark a real escalation of military tensions, spreading them outside ex-Yugoslavia for the first time since 1991. The fact that the bourgeoisie is conscious of such a danger is shown by an article which appeared in Le Monde on 18 and 19 March “If the upsurge of violence spreads to the whole Albanian community and if the integrity of Macedonia is threatened, it would then be very difficult to contain the appetites of many others and it could start a chain reaction” Why? Because capitalism is sinking inexorably into military barbarism. This is a clear manifestation of the bankruptcy of this system. But the bourgeois press never point that out.
CB 20.3.01
Regardless of delays in the date for the election, the campaign has already started, and it’s clear what’s in store.
The Labour Party’s mock horror movie posters, ‘Economic disaster II’ and ‘Son of Satan’, picturing Hague and other Tories, show that the strategy of making the campaign personal is no idle threat. “Even if we are criticised for being personal, we will be raising the profile of the election. We have got to give people a reason for voting and we will do that by stoking fear of the Conservatives” said a senior Labour spokesman (The Times 20.3.01). This follows on from Blair’s speech in Scotland in February condemning apathy, and Tony Benn’s farewell speech to parliament in which he said “The real danger to democracy is not that people will overrun Buckingham Palace and run up the Red Flag but that people won’t vote.” Academic studies have pointed to the possibility of the lowest electoral turn-out since 1918. The Socialist Alliance is trying to get workers interested in the democratic charade.
Labour is hardly mentioning its record on the economy and public services. It prefers to recreate the anti-Toryism that dominated the 97 election. The reasons for this are clear. Just look at the state of the economy and Labour’s management of it. It’s in perfect continuity with the government of John Major.
The capitalist economy in crisis
Capitalism has suffered 30 years of crisis. With the slowdown in the US, the world economy is heading for a further decline in the coming period. There is no likely candidate to play the role of locomotive and drag it out of the mire. Japan is still not able to crawl out of 10 years of economic problems. The Asian ‘tigers’ are clearly out of the picture, as is the ‘new economy’ whose speculative bubble has already burst.
“Gigantic debts at every level, ever increasing attacks on working class living conditions internationally, inability to integrate the growing masses of unemployed into capitalist relations of production, etc. these are the fundamental consequences of the capitalist economy. States, central banks, stock exchanges, the IMF, all the financial and banking institutions and all the ‘actors’ of world politics in general are trying to regulate the chaotic functioning of the casino economy, but facts are stubborn and capitalism’s laws always end up imposing their rule.” (International Review 104).
Here in Britain we are seeing the continuing decline of manufacturing industry with the 6,000 jobs due to go at Corus, the planned closure of Vauxhall, Luton as well as the cutback at Ford, Dagenham. Even that great British institution, Marks and Spencers, is announcing redundancies. Official unemployment has gone down to around 1 million - a level that was considered outrageous in 1970. But if those who want a job, but aren’t entitled to make a claim, and those on government training schemes etc, are added in, the true figure rises to 4 million. We could also mention the increase in temporary, insecure and part-time jobs.
The Labour government manages the capitalist crisis - by attacking the working class
Running the country means managing the national capital in the interests of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie. In the economic crisis this can only mean attacking working class living and working conditions, to make the country’s industry more competitive. The Labour government was always very clear about this. In 1997 they promised to keep to the spending limits set by the previous Tory government for the first two years.
One of Labour’s first achievements was to save money on benefit payments. The ‘New Deal’ combined an ideological attack (blaming the unemployed for not working), with measures to push people off benefits and into poverty. Together with increased means testing this has allowed the state to cut its social security spending in real terms. And, as the chancellor boasted in 1998, “we are cutting the costs to business of employing 13 million lower paid workers.”
The success of these policies can be measured in the increase in poverty, particularly among children, during the lifetime of the government. In particular there are now a million more people whose income is less than 40% of national average than in 1997 (see WR 242). The chancellor’s ‘war chest’ (from which he was able to make an electioneering ‘family friendly’ budget that was still ‘prudent’) is based on four years of attacks on the working class.
Workers are finding it very difficult to resist these attacks. Lacking self-confidence in their own strength as a class, having been battered by a whole series of ideological campaigns, they find it difficult to know how to respond to attacks such as redundancies. In particular there are no struggles on the scale of the mass strike in Poland in 1980 or the miners’ strike here in 1984-5 which give some idea of the real strength of the working class.
As the economic crisis continues to worsen all governments must attack the working class. Given the disorientation in the working class today Labour and left wing governments are in a very strong position to impose those attacks with a ‘caring’, or ‘third way’ ideology. It is for this reason that the Sun has thrown its weight behind Labour, as the best choice for the ruling class, in the next election.
However the working class, although disorientated, has not been defeated. There continue to be small but encouraging signs of the development of struggles that hold a promise for the future.
WR 31.3.01
All the politicians, from Hague and Blair to the Socialist Alliance, all the papers from the Sun to the Socialist Worker, are telling us once again that it’s time to exercise our ‘democratic rights’, to take an interest in the ‘debates and issues’ raised by a general election.
There was a time, back in the 19th century, when workers fought for the right to vote. The first real workers’ political party, the Chartists, focussed its struggle in Britain around this demand. It was opposed by the bourgeoisie, which feared that universal suffrage would result in the overthrow of capitalism.
But by the time that capitalism really was under threat - from the proletarian revolutions of 1917-20 - the ruling class had realised that parliament and elections were the best possible antidote to the revolutionary movement of the working class - with its direct democracy in the form of the workers’ own mass organisations: the soviets or workers’ councils. In Germany in 1919, the Labour party of the day justified its brutal suppression of the revolutionary workers with the argument that the parliamentary National Assembly was ‘democratic’ and the workers’ councils were ‘undemocratic’. At that same point, the ruling class in Britain finally granted ‘universal suffrage’, not only to women over 30, but to the 40% of men who did not yet have the vote. In other words, the working class as a whole got the vote when parliament had become a dagger pointed at the revolution’s heart, a cover for repression and counter-revolution.
‘Democracy’ can only be a sham in a society where one class holds the monopoly of wealth and weapons, where the media and the means of communication are in the hands of the ruling class and its state. As for the working class, it cannot express itself through capitalist elections, which atomise it in the polling booths and drown it in a sea of amorphous ‘citizens’. All the parties that workers are called on to vote for in parliamentary elections share the same basic agenda - defence of the national economy, sacrifices for the exploited, the continuation of capitalism. And parliament itself is no more than a talking shop, a show of discussion in a system where the real decisions are taken elsewhere. The true face of bourgeois democracy is seen less in parliamentary debates than in the massive police operation this May Day, which was designed as a warning to anyone who even thinks of calling the capitalist system into question.
The proletariat has no interest in being sucked into the false debates and non-existent alternatives offered by capitalist elections. It does have an interest in fighting the attacks on its living standards which any party whose job is to ‘manage’ capitalism is forced to impose, whether it talks about ‘socialism’, the ‘free market’ or some ‘third way’ between them. The exploited class, principal victim of these attacks, does have an interest in rediscovering its class identity and reaffirming its historical alternative: the revolutionary destruction of the capitalist state, ‘democratic’ or otherwise, and the radical reorganisation of social life. WR
The main political parties claimed to have agreed that ‘race’ wouldn’t be an issue in the election campaign. The party leaders signed a declaration prepared by the Commission for Racial Equality. And then, of course, the ‘debate’ on ‘race’ got under way.
Some leading Tories refused to sign the CRE pledge. In Dagenham a Tory leaflet accused Labour of “importing foreign nurses with HIV”. Robin Cook made a speech where he said that the British were not a race and that the national dish was Chicken Tikka Masala. Tory MP John Townend declared that “our homogenous Anglo-Saxon society” has been seriously undermined by immigration and that there was a danger of the British becoming a “mongrel race”. Black Tory peer Lord Taylor thought that Townend should be expelled from the Tory party. Asian peeress Lady Flather said that Hague was being ‘weak’ on Townend. Another Tory MP said that Townend was basically right. Norman Tebbit said he didn’t “know of any happy multicultural society”. Former Prime Minister Edward Heath denounced Hague for not expelling Townend, but wasn’t surprised at his behaviour as, in his view, the party was now “on the extreme right ... So many of them feel and think the same way.” All this has happened before the election is officially under way.
Keeping Labour in government
The turmoil in the Tory party on the eve of an election must have surprised some people. By appearing to be a divided party, riddled with extremists, it’s almost as if the Tories wanted to lose. Those who remember the 1980s will recall that it was a divided Labour party, arguing within itself for five years before expelling the ‘Militant extremists’, that kept the Tories in government, and ensured that neither Michael Foot not Neil Kinnock stood a chance of becoming Prime Minister.
In the present period there is no good reason for the ruling class to replace the Blair government. Labour is doing everything that could be expected from it, just like the other left-of-centre teams that are in government in the majority of EU countries. However, although Labour has been solidly ahead in the opinion polls almost continuously since the last general election, that doesn’t mean that the bourgeoisie is going to leave anything to chance. The Tory party’s well-publicised divisions over ‘the race issue’ paint it as ‘extremist’, something further enhanced by revelations of how many of their election candidates come from the right-wing ‘hanging and flogging’ tendency. The intention is to prevent the Labour vote slipping though voter apathy. Apart from Cook’s speech, Labour itself has hardly had to do anything.
Labour uses racism and anti-racism
The racist face of the modern Conservative Party should not make anyone forget what the Labour party is like. Its attitude to immigration, refugees and asylum seekers, for example, has always been based on putting the needs of the national capital first and last. They have introduced and enforced repressive legislation in the past, and the present government is most definitely no exception. They have followed on from the previous Tory government and introduced their own particular innovations.
For example, a recent ministerial instruction to immigration officers (under the provisions of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000) says that people should be refused entry if “there is statistical evidence showing a pattern or trend of breach of the immigration laws by persons of that nationality” (Guardian 24/4/01). In other words, if the British state wants to target some particular ethnic or national groups, they’ve now got another weapon at their disposal. And if there is someone who’s not familiar with the English language and they need information that “is not available in a language which the person understands, it is not necessary to provide the information in a language which he does understand” (ibid). Labour certainly has nothing to learn from the Tories when it comes to racism.
At the moment, although Labour is making a lot of being ‘tough’ on immigration and on ‘economic migrants’ in particular, it is anti-racism that is the dominant note in the ideology of the British bourgeoisie. Labour talks of the importance of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘social inclusiveness’, while a faction in the Tory party is portrayed as hopelessly reactionary.
Meanwhile, the leftists play a minor role in this campaign. The Socialist Workers Party, for example, enthused that “Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, was absolutely right to put forward an anti-racist message” (Socialist Worker 28/4/01). At the same time they criticise Labour’s position for being “shallow” and for having “given ground to the right”, because they don’t think its anti-racism is forceful enough. They want to mobilise workers behind the part of the bourgeoisie that uses anti-racist ideology. But workers have no interest in supporting any part of the bourgeoisie. Their only concern should be the defence of their own class interests. Car 1/5/01
Faced with another general election, and the calls by any number of so-called ‘socialists’ for the working class to chose between the capitalist parties standing for parliament, genuine communists have to reaffirm their total rejection of the whole ‘democratic’ circus.
In the previous issue of WR we published the Theses on Parliamentarism presented by the Communist Abstentionist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party to the second congress of the Communist International in 1920. The Italian left around Bordiga was in the forefront of opposition to the CI’s tactic of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’. But it was not alone. In Germany, the Communist Party originally rejected the parliamentary tactic; and when the left was expelled from the party and formed the KAPD, it continued to defend positions that were very close to those of the Italian left, as can be seen from this extract we are here publishing from the article ‘World Revolution and Communist Tactics’, by Anton Pannekoek, published in 1920.
It has often been argued by those who descend politically from the Italian left - the ‘Bordigist’ current - that the anti-parliamentary views of the Dutch/German left actually had nothing in common with the marxist analysis of the Abstentionist Fraction, and were more akin to anarchism’s ahistorical rejection of politics and authority in general. But as the extract shows, the clearest position of the Dutch/German left in 1920 was founded on sound marxist premises: recognition that parliamentary tactics had been useful during the ascendant period of capitalism, but were no longer so in the epoch of the proletarian revolution; overt support for the October revolution in Russia; unhesitating advocacy of the necessity for a communist party.
It is true that there was a tendency, even among the best elements of the German left, to pose ‘the masses’ against ‘the leaders’ in an abstract way that, in later years, was to degenerate into the excesses of councilism, with its rejection of the party and of centralised organisation. But the essential concern of Pannekoek’s text remains entirely valid and expresses a fundamental truth about the communist revolution: that it can only come about if the great mass of workers throw off their old habits of deference and passivity, and gain confidence in their own ability to overthrow capitalism and reorganise society.
The proletariat develops such confidence by struggling on its own class terrain, and through the decisive intervention of the communist vanguard in those struggles. The parliamentary terrain by contrast is completely alien to the working class in the period of capitalist decline, and any involvement in it can only serve to undermine proletarian identity and self-organisation. On this point there was complete harmony between the Italian and German left communists at the high point of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23.
The congresses of the first International Working-Men’s Association laid the basis of this tactic by taking issue with primitive conceptions belonging to the pre-capitalist, petty-bourgeois period and, in accordance with Marx’s social theory, defining the character of the proletarian class struggle as a continuous struggle by the proletariat against capitalism for the means of subsistence, a struggle which would lead to the conquest of political power. When the period of bourgeois revolutions and armed uprisings had come to a close, this political struggle could only be carried on within the framework of the old or newly created national states, and trade-union struggle was often subject to even tighter restrictions. The First International was therefore bound to break up; and the struggle for the new tactics, which it was itself unable to practise, burst it apart; meanwhile, the tradition of the old conceptions and methods of struggle remained alive amongst the anarchists. The new tactics were bequeathed by the International to those who would have to put them into practice, the trade unions and Social-Democratic Parties that were springing up on every hand. When the Second International arose as a loose federation of the latter, it did in fact still have to combat tradition in the form of anarchism; but the legacy of the First International already formed its undisputed tactical base. Today, every communist knows why these methods of struggle were necessary and productive at that time: when the working class is developing within ascendant capitalism, it is not yet capable of creating organs which would enable it to control and order society, nor can it even conceive the necessity of doing so. It must first orientate itself mentally and learn to understand capitalism and its class rule. The vanguard of the proletariat, the Social-Democratic Party, must reveal the nature of the system through its propaganda and show the masses their goals by raising class demands. It was therefore necessary for its spokesmen to enter the parliaments, the centres of bourgeois rule, in order to raise their voices on the tribunes and take part in conflicts between the political parties.
Matters change when the struggle of the proletariat enters a revolutionary phase. We are not here concerned with the question of why the parliamentary system is inadequate as a system of government for the masses and why it must give way to the soviet system, but with the utilisation of parliament as a means of struggle by the proletariat. As such, parliamentary activity is the paradigm of struggles in which only the leaders are actively involved and in which the masses themselves play a subordinate role. It consists in individual deputies carrying on the main battle; this is bound to arouse the illusion among the masses that others can do their fighting for them. People used to believe that leaders could obtain important reforms for the workers in parliament; and the illusion even arose that parliamentarians could carry out the transformation to socialism by acts of parliament. Now that parliamentarianism has grown more modest in its claims, one hears the argument that deputies in parliament could make an important contribution to communist propaganda. (1) But this always means that the main emphasis falls on the leaders, and it is taken for granted that specialists will determine policy - even if this is done under the democratic veil of debates and resolutions by congresses; the history of social democracy is a series of unsuccessful attempts to induce the members themselves to determine policy. This is all inevitable while the proletariat is carrying on a parliamentary struggle, while the masses have yet to create organs of self action, while the revolution has still to be made, that is; and as soon as the masses start to intervene, act and take decisions on their own behalf, the disadvantages of parliamentary struggle become overwhelming.
As we argued above, the tactical problem is how we are to eradicate the traditional bourgeois mentality that paralyses the strength of the proletarian masses; everything that lends new power to the received conceptions is harmful. The most tenacious and intractable element in this mentality is dependence upon leaders, whom the masses leave to determine general questions and to manage their class affairs. Parliamentarianism inevitably tends to inhibit the autonomous activity by the masses that is necessary for revolution. Fine speeches may be made in parliament exhorting the proletariat to revolutionary action; it is not in such words that the latter has its origins, however, but in the hard necessity of there being no other alternative.
Revolution also demands something more than the massive assault that topples a government and which, as we know, cannot be summoned up by leaders, but can only spring from the profound impulse of the masses. Revolution requires social reconstruction to be undertaken, difficult decisions made, the whole proletariat involved in creative action - and this is only possible if first the vanguard, then a greater and greater number take matters in hand themselves, know their own responsibilities, investigate, agitate, wrestle, strive, reflect, assess, seize chances and act upon them. But all this is difficult and laborious; thus, so long as the working class thinks it sees an easier way out through others acting on its behalf- leading agitation from a high platform, taking decisions, giving signals for action, making laws - the old habits of thought and the old weaknesses will make it hesitate and remain passive.
While on the one hand parliamentarianism has the counter-revolutionary effect of strengthening the leaders’ dominance over the masses, on the other it has a tendency to corrupt these leaders themselves. When personal statesmanship has to compensate for what is lacking in the active power of the masses, petty diplomacy develops, whatever intentions the party may have started out with, it has to try and gain a legal base, a position of parliamentary power; and so finally the relationship between means and ends is reversed, and it is no longer parliament that serves as a means towards communism, but communism that stands as an advertising slogan for parliamentary politics. In the process, however, the communist party itself takes on a different character. Instead of a vanguard grouping the entire class behind it for the purpose of revolutionary action, it becomes a parliamentary party with the same legal status as the others, joining in their quarrels, a new edition of the old social democracy under new radical slogans. Whereas there can be no essential antagonism, no internal conflict between the revolutionary working class and the communist party, since the party incarnates a form of synthesis between the proletariat’s most lucid class-consciousness and its growing unity, parliamentary activity shatters this unity and creates the possibility of such a conflict: instead of unifying the class, communism becomes a new party with its own party chiefs, a party which falls in with the others and thus perpetuates the political division of the class. All these tendencies will doubtless be cut short once again by the development of the economy in a revolutionary sense; but even the first beginnings of this process can only harm the revolutionary movement by inhibiting the development of lucid class-consciousness; and when the economic situation temporarily favours counter-revolution, this policy will pave the way for a diversion of the revolution on to the terrain of reaction.
What is great and truly communist about the Russian revolution is above all the fact that it has awoken the masses’ own activity and ignited the spiritual and physical energy in them to build and sustain a new society. Rousing the masses to this consciousness of their own power is something which cannot be achieved all at once, but only in stages; one stage on this way to independence is the rejection of parliamentarianism. When, in December 1918, the newly formed Communist Party of Germany resolved to boycott the National Assembly, this decision did not proceed from any immature illusion of quick, easy victory, but from the proletariat’s need to emancipate itself from its psychological dependence upon parliamentary representatives - a necessary reaction against the tradition of social democracy - because the way to self-activity could now be seen to lie in building up the council system. However, one half of those united at that time, those who have stayed in the KPD, readopted parliamentarianism with the ebb of the revolution: with what consequences it remains to be seen, but which have in part been demonstrated already. In other countries too, opinion is divided among the communists, and many groups want to refrain from parliamentary activity even before the outbreak of revolution. The international dispute over the use of parliament as a method of struggle will thus clearly be one of the main tactical issues within the Third International over the next few years.
At any rate, everyone is agreed that parliamentary activity only forms a subsidiary feature of our tactics. The Second International was able to develop up to the point where it had brought out and laid bare the essence of the new tactics: that the proletariat can only conquer imperialism with the weapons of mass action. The Second International itself was no longer able to employ these; it was bound to collapse when the world war put the revolutionary class struggle on to an international plane. The legacy of the earlier internationals was the natural foundation of the new international: mass action by the proletariat to the point of general strike and civil war forms the common tactical platform of the communists. In parliamentary activity the proletariat is divided into nations, and a genuinely international intervention is not possible; in mass action against international capital national divisions fall away, and every movement, to whatever countries it extends or is limited, is part of a single world struggle.
(1). It was recently argued in Germany that communists must go into parliament to convince the workers that parliamentary struggle is useless - but you don’t take a wrong turning to show other people that it is wrong, you go the right way from the outset!
Once the dry ice of the election spectacle has cleared, the new government can get on with its job: defending capitalism at the expense of the working class.
After every election it’s the same, regardless of which party gets in. The indications are that, this time round, the ruling class prefers Labour to provide the best team for looking after its interests.
Millions of people will not have voted in this election; millions more will have voted without enthusiasm or conviction, feeling in their hearts that ‘all the politicians are the same’.
These feelings are soundly based. All the politicians are fundamentally the same because all the parties that take part in capitalist elections are in favour of maintaining the capitalist system. This goes from the British National Party and the Tories on the right to Labour and the Socialist Alliance on the left. All are united in their devotion to the interests of the British national economy, the British state, British imperialism. Not one stands up for the working class, which has no country, no state, no economy to defend.
A capitalist government can never be anything but the ‘executive committee of the ruling class’. A party which holds the reins of a capitalist government can never do anything but run it in the interests of capital.
Today the prime necessity for every national capital is to keep afloat in the face of an economic crisis which has been gradually but remorselessly deepening for the last three decades. The phoney US ‘boom’ of the last ten years, fuelled by massive debts, has already reached its limits. This augurs very badly for the world economy as a whole, which has been desperately clinging to the US ‘locomotive’. Like any company facing bankruptcy, the national economy, Britain Ltd, and its board of directors, the government, has to take drastic action: cut the wage bill, lay off workers, close plants, slash benefits. This is what the Tory government under Thatcher and Major did; this is what Blair’s New Labour did after 1997, and it has every intention of doing it again, but even more so, after this election.
One of the reasons why Labour is the best team for managing British capitalism at the moment is that it’s more skilled at presenting attacks on working class living standards as ‘reforms’ in everyone’s interests. It ‘reformed’ the unemployment benefits system by calling it the New Deal and forcing hundreds of thousands of young people into low paid, insecure jobs, or simply depriving them of benefits altogether. Now it’s hinting at wide ranging ‘reforms’ of the health service which will certainly involve massive cuts wrapped up in the ideology of decentralisation and privatisation.
Workers (the vast majority of us, because the unemployed are also part of the working class) have no interest in choosing which gang of politicians is going to lord it over us for the next four or five years. But we do have an interest, a very urgent interest, in defending ourselves against all the attacks that the new government is going to unleash. Defending ourselves means opposing wage cuts, redundancies, reductions in benefits, elimination of basic services. It does not mean fighting for state ownership as against privatisation, a false demand which the unions have already put forward to derail the struggles of tube and postal workers, and which will be used even more in future struggles around the health service.
State bureaucrat or private boss; Tory or Labour these are just the forms which capitalism takes on at different moments. They are all the guardians of exploitation, and the exploited can only defend themselves by fighting against all of them. WR 2.6.01
In their election manifestos all the political parties made grand statements about Britain’s role in the world. Labour set out its “ten-year vision for British foreign policy”; the Tories talked of Britain being “one of the world’s most respected democracies, one of its most influential leaders” while the Liberal Democrats called for an “internationalist approach”. As ever, the reality behind such words is a brutal defence of national interests.
Ambitions for British imperialism
In the period since 1989, when the old bloc system fell apart, imperialist policy has become immensely complex, even apparently contradictory at times. Every imperialist power had to decide on the best way to advance its interests. For second rate powers like Britain and France the weight of the US and Germany affects all that they do, the US being militarily dominant around the globe, while Germany is economically dominant in Europe. The major part of the British ruling class sought to steer a policy between the two, tacking now one way, now another to advance their own interests. For example, in the first stages of the war in ex-Yugoslavia the Conservative government supported Serbia against Croatia and Slovenia, which were backed by Germany, whilst also co-operating with France to block attempts by the US to intervene.
The election of Labour in 1997 strengthened this policy since the party was united, unlike the Tories who had a significant faction that advocated closer links with the US at the expense of Europe. Throughout the last four years the British ruling class has been able to pursue its policy in a more consistently and determined way which, while it has not always been completely successful, has allowed British imperialism to largely maintain its place in the world.
In Yugoslavia, after the setback of the Dayton Accords in 1996, when the US stamped its authority on the region, British imperialism adopted a more cautious policy, generally seeming to go along with the US whilst still pursuing its own line. This was most evident during the conflict over Kosovo in the spring of 1999. Britain’s participation in the US-led bombing of Serbia, its traditional ally in the region, was a blow to its credibility but, through the very vigour of its participation, it retained an important position within the overall imperialist struggle.
In Africa, Britain has suffered setbacks, notably by being replaced by the US as the main backer of Uganda, one of the strategically most important countries in the area. In Sierra Leone, in contrast, it asserted its military capability by mounting a spectacular ‘hostage’ rescue, through which it reinforced its influence in the region.
In the Middle East it has pursued a generally discreet strategy, continuing to back the US against Iraq, whilst opposing the US in its central stronghold of Israel through expressions of ‘concern’ about the Palestinian uprising.
The US has put pressure on Britain in its own backyard through the ‘peace’ process in Ireland. Even if this pressure has been reduced recently, the potential remains for the US to cause further difficulty when it feels like it.
Common sense militarism
All of the parties are united in their defence of militarism. According to the Tories, the British army is “respected around the world”; while for Labour “Our armed forces are the best in the world at fighting if they have to, and keeping the peace where they can”. All promised to keep nuclear weapons while Labour boasted of its commitment to “investing more in real terms in our armed forces over the next three years” and the Tories of “making it a priority to achieve the armed forces full manning levels”.
In fact, one of the features of the last few years has been the increasing use of military force by British imperialism around the world, notably in the interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, where the skill and strength of Britain’s military counteracts some of its other weaknesses. Its forces have been reorganised to meet the new period, with the emphasis on flexibility, rapidity of response, and “the ability to project force at distance and speed” (Labour). This goes alongside a continued effort to sell arms around the world, where Britain has a 20% share of the market.
Differences over strategy
All parts of the British ruling class want to advance its imperialist interests. Its main faction has a policy of maintaining a position of independence from the US. There is also a minority, generally described as ‘Euro-sceptics’, which continues to believe that Britain should have a closer relationship with the US in order to oppose Germany.
This difference can currently be seen over attitudes to the European Union Rapid Reaction Force and the US National Missile Defence System, ‘Son of Star Wars’. The Labour manifesto set out the position of the main faction. While declaring support for NATO, it backed the intervention of European forces “where NATO as a whole chooses not to engage,” and that, “The European defence initiative is an important part of our defence policy. Europe spends two-thirds as much as the US on defence, but gets only a fraction of its effectiveness”. The position was developed in a speech during the election campaign: “The choice between the US and Europe is a fundamentally false one. We are stronger in Washington if we are seen to be leading in Europe. And we have more influence in Europe if we are seen to be listened to in Washington”. On the Son of Star Wars project, the Liberal Democrats were blunt, stating that they “Oppose the national missile defence system”, which they describe as “a threat to international stability and arms control agreements”. Labour didn’t openly oppose the project, but hinted at it through talk of the need to control the spread of nuclear weapons. “We will encourage the US to consult closely with NATO allies on its ideas for missile defence”.
The Conservative Manifesto opposed to these positions a pro-US stance. It argued that “our primary alliance, NATO, is being weakened by a concerted drive to create an independent military structure in the EU” while declaring, in language that could have been dictated from the White House, “We believe our close ally deserves our support in countering new threats from rogue states and terrorists equipped with weapons of mass destruction”.
There is a clear difference of emphasis in the strategy required for British imperialism. A Labour government will ensure that the strategy of the main faction of the British bourgeoisie will continue to operate. North, 28/5/01.
At the time of writing, the latest atrocity in Israel/Palestine is the suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv disco, which left at least 17 young people dead and scores more injured. By the time this paper comes back from the printer, it is more than likely that the Israeli state will have exacted its revenge � perhaps another air raid on a refugee camp charged with harbouring the terrorists of Islamic Jihad who have claimed responsibility for the Tel Aviv bombing. Sharon will pretend that this is an attack on a military target, but as ever it will be defenceless civilians who will die or see their homes reduced to rubble. This in turn will provoke new acts of revenge by the Islamic groups or even by hapless, despairing individuals, like the Palestinian bus driver who drove his bus into a line of Israeli passengers.
Faced with this endless spiral of nationalist hatred, there will be lamentations and pious declarations by those who paint themselves as the apostles of peace, the representatives of the ‘international community’. The US will provide further proof that it is not retreating into isolationism by calling on both sides to carry out the recommendations of the Mitchell plan (ceasefire, freeze on new Jewish settlements, return to the framework of the Oslo accords). The European Union, for its part, has pledged 60 million euros to shore up the Palestinian Authority, which is being reduced to bankruptcy by the Israeli blockade and bombing. All will talk about the tragic nature of the events unfolding in the Middle East.
We communists, internationalists, who owe no allegiance to any state or nation, we also say that this situation is a real tragedy; but not for the same reasons as the official spokesmen of ‘peace’ and ‘reason’.
It is a tragedy because every act of indiscriminate violence, every lynching, every hate-filled demonstration behind Israeli or Palestinian flags, is a new blow against the only solution to this murderous conflict: the international unity of the workers against their exploiters. Every new suicide bombing makes it more likely that Israeli workers will turn to the Israeli state for protection; every Israeli air raid makes it more likely that the victims will see their only salvation in the Palestinian Authority or the armed Islamic gangs.
It is a tragedy because this conflict, like so many others ravaging the world today, is reinforcing nationalism precisely at a time when nationalist ideologies are historically redundant and should be more discredited than ever. Just look at Zionism, whose claim that it would create a safe haven for persecuted Jewry is more ridiculous now than it has ever been. Today there is no less safe place to be Jewish than Israel. And look at how the ‘humanitarian’, even ‘socialist’ claims of early Zionism have melted away, to be replaced more and more by religious obscurantism and open anti-Arab racism, backed up by planes, tanks and the bulldozers which routinely obliterate Palestinian farms and villages to make way for settlements of the Chosen People. And this evolution is in turn mirrored by Palestinian nationalism: 30 years ago its ideology was ‘democratic’, ‘secular’, even ‘marxist’; the enemy was not Jews but Zionism. Today that mask is off and the cult of the suicide bomber, fuelled by Muslim fanaticism and directed against all Jews, is the real face behind it. Workers in the Middle East should be rejecting these ideologies with contempt like the Iranian workers who, in the 1980s, had the strength and consciousness to drive the Islamic Guard cops out of the factories and oil fields. Instead, they are being drawn more and more into the nationalist trap, and not one internationalist, proletarian voice seems to be raising itself in opposition to the sirens of patriotism.
Of course the mouthpieces of the grand democracies, the UN and other august international bodies, also declare that the growth of these irrational dogmas is a bad thing all round. They claim to stand above these conflicts and indeed to offer the only realistic way out of them. We reject these claims as false and hypocritical. The great powers have always stoked up the conflicts in the Middle East and used them for their own ends. Zionism gained a foothold in the Middle East first because the British wanted to create a ‘little loyal Ulster’ in the region, then because the USA needed Israel as its local gendarme in this key strategic zone. Palestinian nationalism was in turn armed and supported by other powers keen to upset the status quo: first Hitler’s Germany, then the USSR, today America’s European rivals. All the ‘peace solutions’ put forward by these powers are not aimed at peace but at securing their own imperialist interests in the Middle East. Are we really to believe, for example, that the US and the British ruling class, who have subjected the Iraqi population to ten years of bombing and starvation in pursuit of these same imperialist interests in the same region, really have the welfare of the Israeli and Palestinian population in their hearts?
Does this mean that there is no hope at all? That is not our position: on the contrary, the impossibility of any solution in the Middle East within the framework of capitalism is a further argument for the necessity of revolution. But revolution is not pie in the sky: it must be prepared by a practical movement, by the class struggle of the exploited. Today there is no doubt that, in Israel/Palestine, this movement is being drowned out by the tidal wave of nationalism. But it exists nevertheless, and the material basis for it is being made stronger by the terrible economic cost of this war, not only for the impoverished Palestinians but for the Israeli workers as well. And here and there we see small signs that there is still the ability to see things from a different angle: in the growing number of young Israeli reservists who are refusing to serve in the occupied territories, in the statements by Palestinian mothers and fathers who understand that their sons are being sent to their deaths by those who prosper from their misery.
The fact remains that the workers and the oppressed of the Middle East cannot break the nationalist spiral on their own. The working class alternative will only seem real to them when the proletarians of the main industrial concentrations, who are not divided up so deeply along national or racial lines, return loudly and massively to the terrain of the class war. Amos 2.6.01
In your guidelines to your website, you say that its aim is to “link to any site or document which we feel relates, in whole or in part, to discussion about communism, or to discussion based on a ‘communist perspective’, taking communist in the sense defined in the statement on the homepage for the site. (1)
We use the word ‘communism’ as shorthand despite the likelihood that it will confuse some people who will think that we are talking about the so-called ‘communist’ countries or the communist parties associated with or supporting those countries because we don’t have a better word. The political currents we feel a degree of affinity with have called themselves many sorts of things libertarian communists, anarchist communists, left communists, autonomists what could broadly be described as the ultra left”.
We note that your list of “journals, organisations and projects” you are linked to includes the ICC. But while, as far as we can see, all other journals, organisations and projects are presented in a neutral or positive way, the ICC alone is given an extremely negative definition as an “absurd new age sect which employs a conservative form of left-communist discourse to promote itself as a political community”
We would like to know why you have chosen to single us out in this manner. We also think that if you are going to make such serious accusations, a minimum of explanation or argumentation is called for, especially considering that many people will have only heard of the ICC through your website, and could easily be put off investigating our own site by such a description.
The labelling of authentic communist organisations as “absurd sects” is not limited to your website, nor to the plethora of publications some of which are advertised in your list whose main activity consists in denigrating precisely the organisations which descend most directly from the historical communist left. These are mere offshoots of the bourgeoisie’s grandiose world-wide campaign about the ‘death of communism’, which is aimed at proving not only that communist society is an “absurd” utopia, but also that there could be nothing more ridiculous than revolutionary militancy. In such a view, participating in collectively organised communist activity is the precise equivalent of joining “absurd sects” like the Moonies or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In this sense, it seems to us that your attack on the ICC falls directly into line with this campaign.
In any case, we await your reply.
Yours for communism,
The ICC, March 2001
(1) The homepage describes communism as “a society without money, without a state, without property and without social classes. The circulation of goods is not accomplished by means of exchange: quite the contrary, the by-word for this society is ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’” a definition which we obviously agree with.
In mid-June the number of foot and mouth cases in Britain reached 1,782, affecting 8,354 premises. Further cases have been found since. The latest estimate is that some four million animals will be slaughtered before the epidemic is eradicated, amounting to 7 to 8% of the national herd.
The foot and mouth crisis is only the latest example of the problems facing agriculture in Britain. Over a year ago the government wrote "�there is a crisis in British farming� Exchange rates and the legacy of BSE, and a fall in international commodity prices in recent years combined to drive down prices and support and drive costs up" ('Strategy for Agriculture' MAFF). Farm incomes are reported to have declined by 69% between 1995 and 2000, from £5.3bn per annum to £1.9bn. Between 1998 and 2000 the number working in agriculture fell by about 10%, from 608,000 to 556,000. The report continues, "But the crisis also reflects underlying structural problems in British farming. These result from a tradition of subsidy and protection under the Common Agricultural Policy�" This is only very partially true, since the CAP is not actually the cause of the problems of farming, whether in Britain or anywhere else in Europe, but rather an attempt to deal with problems that stem, not from the agricultural sector, but from the overall crisis of capitalism. The government's solution is the familiar insistence that the industry "must be competitive, diverse and flexible" and "must respond better to consumer demands". This is nothing but a demand to bow down before the laws of capitalism, whose rule across the world spreads hunger, poverty and disease.
Agriculture and capitalism in Britain
The present condition of agriculture in Britain can only be understood in its historical context. Since Britain occupied a central place in the development of capitalism this understanding will also contribute to understanding the general questions about agriculture, poverty and starvation.
It was the industrial revolution above all that determined the subsequent development of agriculture. 'The Agrarian Question', written by Karl Kautsky in 1898 shows how the impact of the industrial revolution subordinated all production to the market, changed the pattern of land ownership, wiped out the peasantry in its traditional form, and systematised production.
In 1800, agriculture still seemed to dominate the British economy, employing about a third of the workforce and accounting for the same proportion of the national income. It had been able to respond to a doubling of the population, largely through the application of better methods of cultivation (crop rotation, changes in patterns of animal husbandry to allow more to be kept over the winter etc). In 1830 90% of the food consumed was still produced in Britain. This had been achieved by a complete transformation of agriculture.
The driving force for this change was the development of capitalism, which destroyed traditional peasant industry. This led to fundamental changes in land ownership as peasants and small producers were forced off the land and farms increased in size in order to produce the surplus necessary to make a return. The growth of capitalist production created a demand for 'free' labourers: its impact on the previous feudal society created them and, in so doing, ended feudalism.
In Britain, one of the most important expressions of this was the gradual enclosure of the traditional open field system from about 1760 on. By the start of the 19th century the peasantry as a class had virtually ceased to exist in Britain.
The economic strength of industry was soon reinforced with political power. In 1815 the landed interest was able to pass the Corn Laws which protected the high profits they had enjoyed during the Napoleonic Wars by imposing tariffs on imports of wheat. Their repeal in 1846 reflected the dominance of the industrial interests that sought lower food costs in order to reduce the cost of labour.
Agriculture now became subservient and secondary to industry. Initially this led to a boom as the development of industry and urban areas increased demand, while the cost of transport and the difficulty of storage meant there were few imports to threaten the national monopoly. The application of industrial and scientific techniques brought substantial increase in production along with sharp reductions in manpower. In 1840 the number had already dropped to 25% of the working population and continued to decline, although it did not lose its position as the single largest employer until the start of the twentieth century. Its significance in the national economy rapidly declined: in 1851 it still accounted for 20% of national income, by 1891 it was less than 8%.
In the last quarter of the 19th century cheap imports began to come in, particularly from the Americas and this time demands for protection were swept aside. In the first years of the 20th century British agriculture entered a period of decline in which profits were largely maintained at the expense of investment.
Farming in decadence
At the time of the First World War agriculture only accounted for about 6 or 7% of national income, the amount of land cultivated had declined and British agriculture had become relatively less productive than Germany's. Imports had become increasingly important, exceeding home production in terms of monetary value and calorific content. The outbreak of war did not lead to an immediate change, although the government did encourage people to take on allotments. Subsequently the state took steps to guarantee prices to farmers and to ration food.
After the war state intervention was forced to continue in the face of the growing crisis. Domestic production was protected, prices to farmers were guaranteed and various Marketing Boards were established to boost sales. In 1936 £40m was paid in subsidies. However, imports now accounted for about 70% of food consumed and the contribution of agriculture to the national income continued to fall.
The Second World War saw an immediate and much more substantive response by the state resulting in a 50% increase in arable acreage and a consequent decline in meat production. The use of fertilisers increased two to three times and the number of tractors and combine harvesters quadrupled. The state dictated what was to be grown and allocated labour and machinery. Output almost doubled.
The impetus this gave to agriculture carried on after the war leading to a significant increase in productivity. State intervention was maintained, the Agriculture Act of 1947 continuing the protectionist policy and instituting an annual price review. Initial resistance to joining the European Economic Community turned to a recognition of the necessity of doing so after attempts to establish a rival trading bloc were dashed, although Britain was not accepted until 1973. This period saw a substantial industrialisation of farming, with increased use of fertilisers and chemicals accompanying the consolidation of large farms, with hedges being ripped out to turn small fields into big ones. In the 70s and 80s serious problems of overproduction developed in Europe, leading first to the stockpiling and destruction of food and then to paying farmers not to cultivate part of their land. The CAP now dominates the European Union's budget.
The importance of agriculture to the British economy has continued to decline. In the 1990s it averaged 1.4% of GDP. Last year it was just 0.8% and exports amounted to only £630m. Yet it continues to be heavily subsidised: the 'Strategy for Agriculture' details the subsidies the government plans to provide, including a £1.6bn seven-year programme. The main reason why agriculture, which is such a small part of GDP, gets so much state support is strategic: to abandon domestic production would leave Britain at the mercy of its imperialist rivals if a war broke out. It also plays the role of managing the countryside. This is implicitly acknowledged in the current policy of diversification, whether into niche production or non-agricultural activity.
How farming faces the crisis of capitalism
The crisis of British agriculture is only a particular expression of the general crisis of capitalism, in which immense productive capacity struggles to find profitable outlets. This may seem an absurd and obscene contradiction in a world where millions starve each year but in capitalism starvation and the overproduction of food go hand in hand.
"For revolutionaries, the real issue here is capitalism's own productionist logic, as Marx analysed in Capital: 'Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth�'. Here lies the logical and the unlimited cynicism of capitalism: the accumulation of capital and not the satisfaction of human needs is the real goal of capitalist production, and therefore the fate of the working class or of the environment, is of little import". (International Review 104, 'Only the proletarian revolution will save the human species').
In this respect, agriculture is just another capitalist industry. In response to the crisis of overproduction it has to cut costs, sell more cheaply. One capitalist gains the advantage, but once others catch up they are back to square one. Humans, animals, fish, trees, plants, mineral resources, water, air: none of it can count. Everything is secondary to the accumulation of capital. If animal feed is expensive, then give them the remains of their own kind. The use of this strategy for cattle feed, chiefly in Britain, led to the horrors of BSE. If vaccinating sheep and cattle against foot and mouth is not cost effective, run the risk and slaughter millions if things go wrong (which might give a temporary respite to the problem of overproduction anyway). If keeping animals in fields is too labour intensive, herd them into vast factory farming buildings so only a handful of workers need be employed.
Such is the nature of agriculture and food production in capitalism. As the crisis deepens the only perspective is for farming to become more harmful to farmworkers' health, more destructive to the environment, for more food scares and crises, and for greater hunger. The only way out is the destruction of capitalism. North, 24/6/01.
At the end of the 19th century Frederick Engels called anti-semitism "the socialism of fools".
You're poor, you're exploited, your life is miserable - so blame it on another group, the vast majority of whom are also poor, miserable and exploited, in the case Engels was talking about, the Jews. Who can benefit from this except the exploiters? It's exactly the same in Britain today with all the hatred being stirred up against 'asylum seekers', or Asians, or blacks - a hatred that has burst out into 'race riots' in a number of northern towns.
Those who stir up racial divisions most openly, like the British National Party, use the same old arguments: you're poor because of them. They get all the jobs, the housing, the welfare hand-outs. In 99 cases out of a 100 this is simply a lie: official statistics invariably confirm that poverty, unemployment and lack of housing are worse among 'immigrant' sectors of the working class. But even if it were true that immigrant workers got a better deal from the state, it would not alter the deeply anti-working class nature of such arguments. Aren't all workers, to one degree or another, faced with attacks on wages, jobs, benefits and housing? Do we have any other weapon to defend ourselves with except getting together as workers against our exploiters? Any ideology which sets worker against worker serves the capitalist class. The ruling class and its state don't give a damn about the colour of your skin as long as it can sweat surplus value out of you. But it is very interested in promoting racial divisions because they weaken the capacity of the working class to unite and fight back.
The BNP aren't the only racists
Faced with the provocative actions of fascist type groups like the BNP or the NF in Oldham, Burnley and elsewhere, there are all sorts of 'anti-racists' running around telling us that these groups are the number one problem we have to deal with. But the BNP are simply pawns in a bigger game. Wasn't it the major political parties who helped stoke up the current tensions with the whole campaign about 'asylum seekers', with its phony distinction between 'political' (acceptable) and 'economic' (not acceptable) asylum seekers - as if both weren't equally the victims of capitalism's world wide crisis? Wasn't it the major parties, backed by the tabloid press with its scare stories about asylum seekers living in five star hotels at the tax-payer's expense, who have been vying with each other to come up with more and more brutal ways of dealing with illegal immigrants? Isn't it the entire police force which, following the inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder, was charged with "institutional racism"? Racism is far too useful a weapon to be left to the likes of the BNP. It is manipulated and used to the hilt by the state as a whole.
And what's more, the whole ideology of anti-racism and multiculturalism also serves the interest of the state, because it too divides the working class up into racial and religious categories and calls on them to organise on the basis of their separate 'identity' or 'culture'. They - especially the most radical ones, like the Socialist Workers Party - claim that the nationalism of the oppressed is more progressive than the nationalism of the oppressor. This argument is another blow against workers' unity. Look what has just happened in the Balkans. Hundreds of thousands died because the bourgeoisie succeeded in getting people mobilised to fight each other along ethnic, national, or religious lines. In Kosovo one minute Serbian nationalism had the upper hand over Albanian nationalism, making it the 'nationalism of the oppressed'; the next minute, thanks to NATO, the Albanian nationalists had the tables turned and began persecuting the Serbs. Which nationalism was more progressive then? Answer: neither. Both are equally reactionary, because both are used to get workers to slaughter each other for a cause which is not their own - the cause of capitalist and imperialist war, which is plunging whole regions of the planet into barbarism right now.
Capitalism breeds racism because it is based on national divisions and competition. The capitalist class, from right to left, is therefore inherently racist. The capitalist disease of racism infects and affects the working class, weakening it and dividing it. But the working class is a truly international class. It has no nation to defend because it owns nothing but its labour power, and is exploited in the same way all over the globe. The working class struggle is therefore the only practical antidote to racism, both in the short and the long term. In the short term, because in their day to day struggle against the effects of exploitation, workers of different 'colours' either stand together or go down in defeat. And in the long term, because only a worldwide workers' revolution can finally free humanity from the insane national and racial divisions which threaten its very existence. WR, 30/6/01.
Protesters at June's EU summit in Gothenburg were met with the full force of Sweden's liberal democracy. The police attacked with dogs, batons, the cavalry and gunfire. 3 people were shot, 90 injured and 600 arrested. The EU leaders, including Tony Blair and Jack Straw, condemned the "thuggery" of the protesters and backed the police. The Danish Prime Minister thought it a "paradox" that there could be protests at a meeting "where we are working towards a better world". Blair said it was OK for protesters to protest, but, according to him, the way that capitalism was organised was universally beneficial: "The fact is that world trade is good for people's jobs and living standards".
At the same time that capitalist leaders say that they are working for a 'better world' they defend measures that ensure that the conditions of millions are deteriorating. They talk of the benefits of 'globalisation' while the IMF admits these don't extend to the poor. They defend their democracies and the right to protest, while all over the world governments are strengthening their repressive powers. They talk of 'humanitarianism' and the defence of 'civilised' values as they send troops into the Balkans, bomb Belgrade and Baghdad, and tighten the sanctions which continue to kill every day in Iraq.
The weapons of the ruling class
The reasons for the bourgeoisie's hypocrisy can be understood by looking at the way the ruling class dominates society. To maintain social order the capitalist class relies on repression and ideology, state power and propaganda, brute force and lies. Everything they do can be seen as a reflection of both aspects of their class rule.
For example, Blair blamed an "anarchist travelling circus" for being at the root of what happened at Gothenburg (and Seattle etc before it, with Genoa still to come in July). At the ideological level this is the old lie that there would never be any conflicts in society if it wasn't for a minority of 'troublemakers'. At the level of repression governments throughout Europe have swapped intelligence on 'anarchist ring leaders' and propose to treat them like football hooligans and take away their passports. The German and French interior ministers are looking at "a co-ordinated and hard response to this new form of extremist, cross-border criminality" (Guardian 18/6/1). Governments will be prepared to target the movements of anyone who they deem to be a potential cause of difficulty. You don't have to be an 'anarchist ring leader' for the state to keep tabs on you.
With the coming G8 meeting, set for July 20 in Genoa, you can see the bourgeoisie preparing for every eventuality. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, has said that up to 150,000 protesters are expected, and that exceptional measures will be required. George Bush will stay on an aircraft carrier, and other world leaders attending the meeting will be in a cruise ship moored offshore. The protection of meeting places will be rigorous. Access to Genoa will be difficult.
As for the demonstrators it will be an excellent opportunity for the Italian state to practice crowd control. The tactics of the state in London on May Day this year, where 6000 police held 1500 protesters helpless at Oxford Circus for several hours, show one approach. At Genoa they could try anything from cutting the city off from the outside world to a massive display of force to trying out new weaponry. The bourgeoisie is always keen to try out new tools. Even in Northern Ireland, where there has been direct military rule for more than 30 years, the army has just borrowed some water cannon from the Belgium state which might come in handy during any disturbances this summer.
Democracy goes with repression
The one thing that might have puzzled some people about the police violence in Gothenburg is how it tallies with Sweden's reputation as a progressive democracy. In reality democracy in Scandinavia behaves exactly as democracy anywhere. In Ancient Greece democracy was a form of rule by the slave owners. In the modern capitalist world democracy is a form of rule by the bourgeoisie in its exploitation of the working class. It will talk of 'human rights' and 'democratic freedoms' but its central concern is a social order in which it can pursue the goal of capital accumulation.
Violent state repression has been just as much a characteristic of the bourgeoisie in Britain, the home of 'free speech' and 'fair play' as anywhere in the world. It's hard to choose when there have been so many examples. In 1819 there was the Peterloo massacre, a crowd of 80,000 at a political reform meeting in Manchester were attacked by the forces of the state, 11 people were killed and 400 injured. In November 1887 troops fired on a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. In November 1910 the police and military attacked miners in Tonypandy and one worker was shot dead. In August 1911, in a series of attacks on workers' demonstrations and other actions in Liverpool, two workers were shot dead - two warships had been sent to assist. During the 1913 Dublin strike and lock-out police attacks left five people dead and hundreds injured. In the early 1930s the police attacked demonstrations of the unemployed all over the country. During the Labour government of 1945-51 troops were deployed against workers' actions on 18 occasions. In 1972, on Bloody Sunday, the army shot dead 13 demonstrators in Northern Ireland. Within the living memory of many are the police attacks on the miners and printers strikes in the 1980s.
Internationally, even without considering repression in the colonies of the European powers, or the horrors during times of imperialist war, when millions have died in the cause of capitalist democracy, there are even more dramatic examples of the violence of bourgeois repression. When the bourgeoisie defeated the Paris Commune in 1871 as many as 30,000 were murdered. In the repression against the German Revolution in the early 1920s, workers died in their tens of thousands. Against the Russian Revolution the armed forces of 14 countries were sent to back up the White Terror.
The examples from Britain are not as dramatic. This is because the bourgeoisie has a longer experience of maintaining social order than any other, and has developed many sophisticated means for defending itself. Take the situation in Britain in 1919, where there was widespread unrest and the bourgeoisie was deeply worried by events taking a 'Bolshevik' direction. Against a strike movement in Glasgow in early 1919, involving many sectors, there was uncompromising repression. A demonstration on 31 January was brutally attacked by the police. By the next day Glasgow was under military rule, occupied by troops armed with machine guns, tanks and planes. Against other major strikes in 1919, involving the miners and railwayworkers, the ruling class adopted a different approach, explicitly relying on the trade unions to undermine workers' struggles. The confidence that workers had in the unions brought about their defeat.
In Gothenburg we saw both faces of the bourgeoisie. There were the reassurances that they were really concerned with the welfare of all humanity. There were demonstrators being shot in the back. Workers should be aware that these are two sides of the same exploiting class. Barrow 28/6/1
The ruthless slaughter of thousands of civilians in New York and Washington, the majority of them workers, in the very heart of the USA, of capitalism's number one economic and military machine, was not only an abominable war crime. It also marks a giant step in the decomposition of the existing social order.
For this was not, as the propaganda merchants tell us, an attack on civilisation 'from the outside'. It was further confirmation that this capitalist civilisation, which not only reigns in the 'west' but over the whole planet, is a civilisation in decay which threatens the very future of humanity.
The events in the USA show that the free-for all military tensions which have racked the globe since the fall of the blocs a decade ago can no longer be kept to the margins of the system. From the Gulf in 1991 to the Bosnian war, then the bombing of Belgrade in 1999, the reality that 'capitalism means war' has been written in blood in one of its main nerve centres.
And how is the US ruling class - supported by Blair and the 'democratic allies' - exploiting the natural solidarity that millions have felt for those who died so horribly in the hi-jacked planes, or amidst the rubble of the World Trade Centre? By using it to drum up support for slaughter on an even bigger scale - for massive military action aimed at defending the most sordid imperialist interests.
There is much talk about a 'second Pearl Harbour' and the comparison is accurate. In 1941 the US state - which had been informed of the Japanese plans well in advance, and did nothing to stop them - used the attack to drag a reluctant population into the second world holocaust. Today the US ruling class will cynically use these events to try to stop the decline in its global 'leadership' (i.e., imperialist domination).
It's also the Gulf war replayed, on an even bigger scale: then Saddam was used as the whipping boy, but the USA's real motive was to make a huge display of military power, aimed at persuading all other countries in the world that it is the boss, the world cop. Prior to the terrorist assault on the US, America was facing increasing hostility from its former allies in Europe, over the Kyoto agreement, 'Son of Star Wars', and all the rest. Today America is using the crusade against 'international terrorism' to build a new coalition where countries like France, Britain, Germany and Japan will have no alternative but to fall in line behind the US.
And once again, as the US and NATO prepare a new round of carnage, the exploited and the oppressed of the world will be asked to take sides: for 'civilisation', for 'democracy', for 'national security'; or, if they live in the so-called 'Muslim' countries, they will be asked to support the 'holy war' of Bin Laden, or Saddam, or Hamas.
But Bush, Blair and Bin Laden are all cut from the same cloth. The only difference between them is that those who run the major states of the globe have much more firepower. The terrorists who attacked America killed thousands; the 'democracies' which bombed Baghdad and Belgrade killed hundreds of thousands, and have been doing the same thing all over the world, for almost a hundred years, from World War I to Hiroshima and Dresden, and from Vietnam and Cambodia to all the massacres of the past decade.
To understand the sickening hypocrisy of the 'anti-terrorist' democracies, you only have to look at Afghanistan, which is likely to be the main target of the USA's military response. This poverty-stricken country has already been through over 20 years of war. Bin Laden, the current devil incarnate, was set up by the CIA to fight Russian imperialism; and the Taliban regime which now shields him was also supported by the US against other Islamic factions when it first came to power. Furthermore, the extensive military action that the US and NATO are now planning for Afghanistan, and probably other parts of the Middle East, will only deepen the chaos in this war-torn region, just as it did in the Gulf and the Balkans. And once again, the victims of this 'punishment' won't be Bin Laden or Saddam, but the vast mass of an already desperate population.
But the fact that the US and the 'democracies' are the world's most powerful terrorists is no reason to support the Saddams and Bin Ladens of this world. They are not fighting capitalism and imperialism; they are part of it. Capitalism can only be only fought when the working class struggles for its own interests, which are the same in all countries.
The workers of the world have no state or country to defend. Against the war cries of their exploiters, our only interest is to revive the class war against exploitation, and finally to put an end to a 'civilisation' which is pushing humanity towards barbarism. 13.9.01
In Genoa, during the meeting of the G8 in July, Carlo Giuliani was shot and then run over by a police vehicle. Following the shooting of protesters at June's EU summit in Gothenburg - the first time since 1931 that the Swedish police have used live ammunition against demonstrators - Giuliani's death was the first fatality in 'anti-globalisation' protests.
As had been anticipated, the Italian state was prepared for massive repression, with the acknowledged force of thousands of riot police, the paramilitary carabinieri, snipers, satellite surveillance, a missile defence system, helicopters, planes, boats (including at least one submarine), tear gas, water cannon and 200 body bags, with no doubt other unpublicised weapons and tactics. Alongside the one death more than 500 people were injured, many of them hospitalised. When the police made their raid on the Genoa Social Forum more than 60 people were injured. In custody scores were beaten up or tortured.
Among the protesters there were differences of opinion about what had happened. Many Trotskyists said that some of the 'black bloc' anarchists had been allowed to do what they wanted by the police, had been filmed discussing with the police, were seen getting out of police vans, and were, at least in part, classic provocateurs stirring up the situation. Some leftists criticised the Tute Bianche protestors for being non-violent, or just plain 'clowns'. Stalinists had cast doubt on the credentials of 'Anti-Fascist Action' in Gothenburg; Genoa witnessed further criticisms by the 'conventional' left of the 'anti-capitalist' demonstrators. Meanwhile, a lot of anarchists were suspicious of the left, accusing it of just jumping on the bandwagon.
Seattle, Prague, Nice, Gothenburg, Genoa... the processions continue
Many of the observations from demonstrators were accurate. For example, the role of the 'black block' was suspicious, and the evidence for its links with the state is strong, not least the fact that the police actually acknowledged their infiltration. On another level the activity of pacifists like the Tute Bianche in Italy (or the Wombles in Britain) is futile in the face of state repression. As for the leftists, it is no surprise to see them at 'anti-globalisation' actions, as wherever they go, they always try to direct militant energies up blind alleys, and into the defence of bourgeois democracy.
The media said that the confrontations between police and demonstrators were predictable and not spontaneous. This is not said because the bourgeoisie wants to see unpredictable spontaneous struggles, far from it. The intention is to imply that there's a conspiracy behind every demo, but, more importantly, there's an attempt to portray the demonstrations as alien to the norms of bourgeois democracy. The implicit lesson is 'throwing stones never changed anything - when you're older you'll realise that the only real change comes through the ballot box.' In Genoa the likes of Blair and co. made a point of saying that those inside the conference rooms had been democratically elected. Outside the halls many demonstrators fell into disputing whether the forces of the state could really be called 'democratic', as if Genoa and Gothenburg were a new trend, rather than being typical of the attacks of the bourgeois state.
To really understand what's been happening at the 'anti-globalisation' demonstrations, as with any other question in class society, you have to look at the social forces, the classes and ideas involved. A demonstration can be staged to further the cause of any class. Workers can stage marches as a way of linking up with other workers, or to protest against repressive or other actions from the capitalist state, or, for unemployed workers, it can be a means of struggle when the workplace has been denied. On the other hand, demonstrations by the Countryside Alliance, the BNP and any number of nationalist campaigns show that any bourgeois cause can mount a demo if required.
For those involved in the skirmishes at each successive summit, whatever their motivation or social origin, the spectacular showdowns with the police have been futile confrontations. If there are people who are seriously trying to come to grips with the nature of capitalist society and how it can be overthrown, then any drive they have for understanding will be diverted by the ritual battles.
This is actually celebrated by Roger Burbach, Director of the Centre for the Study of the Americas, in Berkeley, California. He is an advocate of the "carnival of life" against the "opulent and grotesque world that has been foisted on us by the new corporate robber-barons". He says that "Most importantly, the anarchists and the anti-globalisation protests provide an outlet for the pent-up frustrations and the sense of alienation of a new generation" (in Anti-capitalism: a guide to the movement). This is crude stuff, but at least it's honest. When there are 'frustrations' and 'alienation' in 'a new generation' then opportunities to let off steam, without making any threat to social order, are valued by the ruling class. When you're only concerned with the next campaign, the next demonstration, the next battle with the police, then political reflection will not be your main priority. At Genoa the state intended that there should be violent confrontations, to provoke either disgust, pacifism or terrorism - all false alternatives.
The intervention of revolutionary organisations like the ICC, based on the historic experience of the workers' movement, insists that the violence of the modern capitalist state is no exception to some abstract democratic norm. The rule of the bourgeoisie can really only ever be a dictatorship over the exploited class, however democratic the fa�ade in front of it. For those who want to participate in the real struggle against this class rule, there is no substitute for serious political discussion about the nature of this rotting society and how it can be destroyed. The 'anti-globalisation' parades tend to hinder the possibility of such discussion; indeed they consistently march under the banners of the very democratic myths that are such an obstacle to the development of class consciousness.
Barrow, 30/8/01.
When the CBI announced recently that Britain would escape recession, this was hardly enough to inspire confidence, particularly once we take into account the fact that manufacturing in Britain is in recession, with a 2% slump in output last quarter. This was followed by the news that the US economy is also just staying out of recession but with a growth rate close to zero. It has cut its forecast growth rate severely and its forecast budget surplus by 50%.
The world's other major economies are no better off. Japan, after a decade of recession, has seen its Nikkei stock exchange fall to a 17 year low at the end of August. The Euro zone cut interest rates after the ECB announced it had underestimated the effects of the global and US slowdown. Clearly the economic problems we are talking about are global in nature.
The ruling class and its media have changed their tune. We are no longer hearing about the success of the economy, based on globalisation or the dot com companies, as we did at the end of the 90s. But even that 'success' was not all it was cracked up to be. If the USA enjoyed a decade of continuous growth in the 90s, the average growth rate was significantly lower than in the 80s, which was lower than growth in the 70s. Furthermore, this growth was largely based on the massive resort to debt, another fact that the ruling class is no longer able to conceal. The potential disasters contained in debt-fuelled growth were demonstrated at the end of the 90s, which saw the crash of the Asian 'tiger' economies in 1997, followed by further international economic convulsions as other second rank economies, such as Russia, defaulted on repayments. The 'boom' of the 1990s was nothing but a part of the global crisis of capitalism that has been developing slowly but surely since the end of the 1960s, with massive unemployment and economic convulsions that the ruling class claimed to have overcome 30 or 40 years ago.
The long slow decline in the economy world wide is not the result of any mismanagement or stupidity on the part of our rulers, but due to the fact that for a almost a century the capitalist system has been in decay. That is to say that it has no way out of its historic crisis, can only continue on the basis of increasingly massive debt, and can only reinvigorate its cycle of production on the basis of a bloody redivision of the world market, as occurred in 1914-18 and 1939-45. Since the end of the post-second world war reconstruction in the 60s, there has been a continuing escalation in imperialist conflicts, and things have getting worse since the cold war ended in 1989, as witness the wars in the Gulf, ex-Yugoslavia, Africa or the Middle East (see p3). The plans for the 'Son of Star Wars' defence system show the USA trying aggressively to maintain its status as the world's only remaining super-power (see p8).
While the arms industry does indeed employ workers, this does not mean it is in any way positive for the economy. Its products cannot be eaten or worn or make new products, but can only be used to destroy. Yet the vast resources eaten up by this industry must be taken from somewhere, particularly from social spending. The choice 'guns or butter' remains as relevant today as in the 1930s, and the bourgeoisie will always choose guns over the living conditions of the working class unless it is forced to do otherwise.
Job losses and other attacks on working class living standards
If the 'boom' of the 90s did not mean any respite for the working class, today's slowdown is definitely the signal for new attacks. In fact two recent surveys of consumer confidence, in the USA and in the UK, have shown a fall in confidence to levels similar to those in 1998, after Russia defaulted on its repayments, or 1992 after 'Black Wednesday'. One of the main concerns expressed was the fear of rising unemployment. The reality of this concern is illustrated in Japan where unemployment has now risen to the highest level since records began in the 1950s. And we also see massive job losses being announced.
Some of these job losses have been announced internationally, as with the 16,000 due to go from Fujitsu, some of which will be in Britain, to follow the 850 jobs already lost over here in the past year. Hitachi and Toshiba will axe 20,000 jobs, as will NEC.
Home grown companies are also shedding jobs. Postal sorting offices are being closed and the work moved out of London with over 2,000 jobs to be cut, and 6,000 jobs to go at BT, to take just two examples.
Job losses are always accompanied by worse conditions and increased exploitation for those remaining in work. And we must not forget the attacks on health services, with fewer services available on the NHS after increased state control through the National Institute of Clinical Excellence and the Primary Care Trusts. Nor the long process of cutting entitlement to social security payments.
There is a great deal of anger in the working class against the effects of the crisis and the attacks on it, which will force it to respond. In doing so it faces great difficulties. There are no important struggles to provide a beacon for the working class as there were with Poland in 1980 or the miners in 1984. The working class lacks confidence in its ability not just to change society, but even to defend itself on a day to day level. This gives much more scope for the trade unions and the left to pose as defenders of the working class through campaigns against privatisation (see p4) or within the anti-globalisation campaign (see p1 and 4). These are both used by the bourgeoisie to pretend it is not capitalism, but only this or that aspect of it (private ownership, multinationals etc) that is responsible for the crisis, and so to divert workers from struggling for their own needs into a dead end that is harmless to the ruling class.
However slow and difficult the development of workers' struggles will be in these conditions, this is the only way for the class to regain confidence in its own strength and to remember the lessons of the great struggles it has already engaged in. Faced with the impasse of capitalism today that is the only way out for humanity. WR 1/9/01.
The world wide success of the film Gladiator has generated a renewed interested in Ancient Rome and the role of gladiators. Any inquiry into this question has to raise the spectre of the slave war between 73 and 71 BC, which was lead by the gladiator Spartacus. Unlike the fictional Gladiator which opposes the central character and his small band of gladiators to the truly wicked emperor Commodus, the real slave revolt saw 100,000 or more slaves waging war on their Roman oppressors and defeating the seeming invincible legions time and time again. This revolt, though bloodily crushed, has inspired revolutionary movements. The main grouping of revolutionaries in Germany who opposed World War 1 adopted the name of the Spartacus League to express their determination to wage war on the ruling class; and like Spartacus and the slave army the revolutionary struggle of the workers in Germany was drowned in blood. Thus the name Spartacus became synonymous with the revolutionary aspirations of the exploited. Whereas Gladiator is about the hero and his small band of gladiators standing up for an empire based on 'justice' (no mention of the exploitation of slaves) against the oh-so-wicked Commodus: in short for democracy against dictatorship.
The aim of this article is not to make a critique of Gladiator or to produce a detailed history of Spartacus, but to show why the Spartacus revolt, though carried out by a different exploited class, can really only be understood and claimed by the movement of the exploited class in this society, the modern proletariat. By the same token we will show how the modern class of 'slave-owners', the bourgeoisie, has tried to distort the history of Spartacus and tried to use it for its own ends.
The Slave Wars
The rising of the slaves between 73-71 BC did not come out of nowhere. It reflected the wider social turmoil rocking the Roman Republic. By the second century BC the Roman army had conquered the Mediterranean and was extending itself throughout Europe. These ever-expanding conquests brought with them an increasing supply of slave labour, which was used to replace the peasantry that had been the bedrock of the Roman Empire. Instead of the old system of peasant smallholdings, there was a growth of huge estates that used slave labour to extract raw materials and produce agricultural goods. In the cities the artisans were increasingly being replaced by slave labour. At the same time, a very small minority of the ruling class was able to take over the control of the exploitation of the resources of the newly conquered territories. This produced powerful social tensions: between the ruling class and those driven into unemployment in the cities or to the cities from the countryside, and also between the different interests within the ruling class. We do not have space here to go into a detailed analysis, but would recommend readers to consult Karl Kautsky's The Foundations of Christianity. These tensions lead to a series of bloody civil wars from 130 BC. During that period the Gracchus brothers led movements of the dispossessed, particularly the former legionaries who had once received parcels of land for their years of service, against the state: "The private soldiers fight and die to advance the wealth and luxury of the great; and they are classed the masters of the world, while they have not a foot of ground in their possession" (Tiberius Gracchus, quoted by Plutarch, cited in M Beer's The General History of Socialism and Social Struggles. Russell & Russell, 1957). In 132 BC Tiberius and his supporters were slaughtered by the ruling party, and in 121 BC his brother Caius and his supporters met a similar fate. In the following years, massacre and bloody civil war became the norm as tens of thousands were killed as different fractions of the ruling class fought each other for control of the state.
It was in the middle of this turmoil that the slave war led by Spartacus broke out. But again this has to been seen in the context of the two previous slave wars that had taken place in Sicily (BC 134-32, 104-101). In these wars tens of thousands of slaves on the massive estates that covered the island rose up and defeated their Roman masters, and then fought wars against Roman legions until being crushed with great violence. At the time of the first war, in Asia Minor in the Kingdom of Pergamum, Aristonikos, the half-brother of the former king, faced with the Romans, freed the slaves and set up the Sun State, which was taken to mean a 'communist' order. There was "complete political democracy; the whole of the inhabitants, native and foreign, property-owning and disinherited, received the franchise and the independent administration of their State" (Beer, ibid, p153). From 133 to 129 the Romans waged war against the Sun State until they finally crushed it
Against this background of social turmoil and a succession of bloody slave wars, the 3rd great slave war broke out.
The course of the revolt
The information that we have on Spartacus and the slave war is very limited - a few thousand words, written by ancient historians from the ruling class: Sallust, a Roman Senator (1st century BC), Plutarch and Appian were wealthy aristocrats (2nd century AD). The very fact that these members of the ruling class felt the need to deal with this revolt demonstrates how important it was.
As we have said, our aim is not to give a historical account, but it is necessary to lay out the main aspects. Initially, Spartacus and 70 odd other gladiators broke out of their gladiatorial school in Capua, after their plan for a bigger break-out had been discovered. The fact that such a group of gladiators from different ethnic backgrounds, trained to kill each other, could have formed such a plan, testifies to a real solidarity between them. Once free they fled to mount Vesuvius. Here Appian says many slaves and some freemen joined them "Since Spartacus divided the profits of his raiding into equal shares, he soon attracted a very large number of followers" (Appian, in Spartacus and the Slave Wars, a Brief History with Documents, by Brent D. Shaw, p140). Such proto-communist measures marked Spartacus's leadership: "Spartacus did not permit merchants to import gold and silver, and he forbade his own men to acquire any. For the most part, he purchased iron and copper and did not censure those who imported these metals" (Appian, ibid, p 142). These measures must have been a very important feature of the slave war because the Roman Historian Pliny compares it to the greed of the Empire: "We know," says Pliny in the thirty-third book of his Natural History, "that Spartacus did not allow gold or silver in his camp. How our runaway slaves tower above us in largeness of spirit!" (quoted in Kautsky's The Foundations of Christianity). These actions cannot have been imposed on the mass of the slave army by Spartacus but must have reflected the desire of the majority for a more equal society. Spartacus was also against the wanton plunder carried out by sections of his army, particularly those under the command of the Gaul Crixus. "Spartacus himself was powerless to stop them, even though he repeatedly entreated them to stop them and even attempted by sending on ahead a messenger" to warn other towns (Shaw, p148).
It was these divisions within the slave army that appear to have been one of the main reasons for them not escaping Italy, even though the army reached the Alps twice. However, Florus (2nd century AD) said that after obliterating the army led by Lentulus in the Apennine Mountains and then attacking the camp of Gaius Crassus, Spartacus thought of attacking Rome itself.
In the end, after being forced into the very south of Italy by Crassus and with the arrival of more legions from abroad, Spartacus and the slaves were faced with either capture or making a last stand. The slave army chose the latter. They turned in full battle ranks and marched on the pursuing legions. 36,000 died on the battlefield and many more after, as the ruling class relentlessly hunted down all those that had had the audacity to defeat their legions, to kill their generals and nobles, and to stand up to the ruling class. As a warning to all other rebels, the ruling class crucified 6,000 survivors of the slave army along the main road to Rome.
The eventual defeat of the slave army was not simply the results of internal divisions or tactical errors. It reflected the historical limitations of the epoch: despite being the most advanced civilisation the world had yet seen, Roman slavery could never have developed the productive forces to the point where a truly universal communist society could have come out of it. The downfall of slavery could only have been replaced by a more progressive system of exploitation (thus, following its decline, there was the development of feudalism in Europe). Within this framework, it has to be understood that the slaves were not a revolutionary class in the sense of carrying within their struggle the foundations of a new social system, still less a conscious programme for its realisation. Their hopes for a society where private property would no longer exist were doomed to remain dreams, based on memories of a lost tribal order and on myths of a primordial golden age. This does not mean that marxists look down on the revolts or the communistic dreams of previous exploited classes: on the contrary, these revolts have rightly inspired generations of proletarians, and these dreams remain indispensable stepping stones towards the scientific communist outlook of the modern working class
The response of the bourgeoisie to Spartacus
The development of the bourgeoisie's response to the slave war is very enlightening. In 18th century France the revolutionary bourgeoisie held Spartacus as a hero and expression of their own struggle against feudalism; in 19th century Italy he was also adopted by the revolutionary bourgeoisie. However, once the bourgeoisie had established its undisputed supremacy, Spartacus became a dreaded figure, because the slave war was uncomfortably close to the class war now beginning to take shape between the bourgeoisie and its deadly enemy, the working class. This horror became manifest with the revolutionary struggles between 1917 and 27 when "Spartacism" became synonymous with Bolshevism and world revolution: "the name 'Spartacist' now adopted by the German Communists, the only party in Germany which is really fighting against the yoke of capitalism, was adopted by them because Spartacus was one of the most outstanding heroes of one of the very greatest slave insurrections, which took place two thousand years ago" (V. I Lenin, The State, in Collected Works no 29). Echoing Rome's bloody suppression of the original Spartacus movement, the Germany bourgeoisie crushed the modern day slave war with great brutality.
In the years of counter-revolution which followed, the ruling class felt less threatened by the spectre of class war, and by the 1950s, felt confident enough to recruit Spartacus for the cold war.
To this end the American ruling class used the vehicle of Hollywood and Stanley Kubrick's film Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas. This is not to deny the artistic merit of the film, which is vastly superior to the 'up-to-date' glut of special effects in Gladiator; indeed, it contains moments which beautifully convey the liberating power of solidarity, as in the portrayal of the original break-out from the gladiator school and above all in the immortal scene when the Roman victors are trying to identify Spartacus and thousands of captured slaves step forward proclaiming "I am Spartacus". Nonetheless the ideological intent of the film is never far from the surface. Spartacus himself is turned into a Christ-like figure leading the slaves to freedom. This is made clear at the end of the film when he is crucified. This is a deliberate lie used to pacify the memory of the slave war. Spartacus did not die on the cross but fighting his way towards Crassus, the very symbol of the Roman ruling class - he was the richest and most powerful man in Rome - in the final battle. "When his horse was brought to him, Spartacus drew his sword and shouted that if he won the battle, he would have many fine horses, but if he lost, he would have no need of a horse. With that, he killed the animal. Then, driving through weapons and the wounded, Spartacus rushed at Crassus. He never reached the Roman, although he killed two centurions, who fell with him" (Plutarch, ibid 136).
The film is used to boost the values of the "West" against dictatorship. The film drove home the message that dictatorship could only be opposed by freedom, democracy and Christianity. At the beginning of the film the voice-over says that whilst the war of Spartacus and the slaves was defeated, it was Christianity that eventually freed the slaves (while not mentioning that Christianity was a pillar of European slavery from the 16th to the 19th centuries). Slavery itself is presented as a 'stain' on Roman civilisation, rather than as its foundation.
It was also part of the US's drive to win the markets of the former British colonies. Kirk Douglas says in his autobiography The Ragman's Son that he insisted that all the main Roman ruling class characters were played by British actors whilst the slaves were Americans or others.
Stalinism also contributed to distorting the meaning of the Spartacus revolt. The film's screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, a Stalinist, equated Spartacus with Stalin and the hot headed Crixus, who in the film breaks away from Spartacus to attack Rome, as Trotsky.
The film is based on the novel by Howard Fast. In the film the slaves are shown as following Spartacus to the bitter end, but in the book the slaves are held responsible for the failure of the war. Fast, as a good Stalinist, had nothing but contempt for the working class. This is reflected in the book where the slaves are portrayed as not being up to Spartacus's revolutionary ideals. This is also the message driven home in Arthur Koestler's novel The Gladiators. Koestler had been a Stalinist in the 30s but had become openly disillusioned with the revolution and the proletariat. For him, as for Fast, Spartacus is the revolutionary leader leading a rabble not up to his ideals.
A more vicious recent attack is made by Alan Baker in his book The Gladiator: the Secret History of Rome's Warrior Slaves, a book that rides on the back of the success of the film. In a chapter on Spartacus Baker affirms the opinion of the historian Christian Meir that he was "a robber chief on the grand scale". This shows the low level the bourgeoisie will fall to in order to attack a movement that challenged their ancestors. The ancient historians had more dignity and, though hating Spartacus and all he stood for, still acknowledge his strength of personality. "Spartacus was a Thracian, born among a pastoral nomadic people. He not only possessed great spirit and bodily strength, but he was more intelligent and nobler than his fate, and he was more Greek than his (Thracian) background might indicate" (Plutarch, op cit p131-2).
At the beginning of the year Channel 4 had a programme on Spartacus. Again, although the programme was more balanced, it still showed Spartacus as not being up to his revolutionary image, because, on one occasion, he made captured Romans fight in gladiatorial games and even crucified a captured Roman. Perhaps more significant is that the documentary was made by a former military man and concentrated on Spartacus's extraordinary strategic and tactical abilities. It said nothing about the social ideals of the movement and still less about how such a huge mass of slaves and other oppressed strata managed to organise for the struggle (indeed, this remains almost completely obscure to this day).
The ruling class will certainly continue to make whatever use it can of the great class warriors of the past. But as for Spartacus, we will end with Marx's assessment, written in a letter to Engels: "Spartacus emerges as one of the best characters in the whole of ancient history. A great general, a noble character, a genuine representative of the ancient proletariat".
For Marx the greatness of Spartacus, in the final analysis, stems from the fact that he was "a genuine representative of the ancient proletariat": in other words, he was a product of the struggle of an exploited class which dared to challenge its exploiters. In a world still based on the exploitation of one class by another, Spartacus remains a potent symbol for the modern proletariat, which has the capacity to end all forms of slavery once and for all.
Phil, 17/7/01.
The range of issues raised at each 'anti-capitalist' demonstration is wide. The state of the environment, climate change, free trade, the role of big corporations, privatisation, Third World debt, economic policies of the G8, the role of the World Trade Organisation, the structural adjustment programmes of the IMF and the World Bank - these are all targets of the leftists, anarchists, greens, religious groups and non-governmental organisations that turn out for the 'anti-globalisation' protests.
If you take any item from the 'anti-globalisers' agenda you'll find something where neither diagnoses nor solution call capitalism into question. A currently popular example is the fact that, of the top 100 economic entities in the world, 49 are big corporations and 51 are national economies. What's implied is that if the big companies were not so big then we could all enjoy exclusive exploitation by an array of oppressive nation states. Many even say that poverty is caused by privatisation, while ignoring the reality of state-enforced austerity programmes. When workers struggle they take no account of the formal status of their employer - workers in Poland in 1980-81 staged massive strikes against a whole range of state-run enterprises, the miners in Britain in 1984-85 fought against the nationalised Coal Board, and today, when postal workers across the country fight, it's not against a private boss, but against the conditions enforced by the state-run Post Office.
The campaign against the big corporations is typical - and behind every other issue is raised the question of the nature of capitalism, its crises, competition and inability to satisfy the needs of humanity. While there are those who are beginning to make connections between the various aspects of capitalist society, the 'anti-globalisation movement' reduces all concerns to campaigns for changes within capitalism.
The perspective of revolution
In protests such as those at Genoa and Gothenburg, the religious groups, the charities and non-governmental organisations don't pretend to be anti-capitalist. Their actions are intended to put pressure on the ruling class to make its system of exploitation work for the benefit of its victims. Any 'concessions' made to such groups will be for propaganda purposes.
However, the description of 'anti-capitalist' doesn't apply to the leftists and most of the anarchists either. Trotskyists (and the remnants of Stalinism) are defenders of state capitalism. With anarchists there are many varieties of ideology (some indistinguishable from leftism) but what they have in common is a commitment to protest in itself. They have no perspective, and certainly no recognition of the conscious working class as the only force capable of overthrowing the dictatorship of capital. At the London May Day 2001 protests there was a banner reading "Overthrow capitalism and replace it with something nicer". Another popular motto is "Our world is not for sale" - which is plainly untrue, as everything in the world, in particular labour power, has become a commodity with a price, and the world is clearly not 'ours', as it is dominated by the ruling capitalist class. In Genoa one of the major catchphrases was "a different world is possible". Against the vague whimsy of such useless slogans marxism has always had a clear critique rooted in material reality.
Take the concept of 'globalisation'. Time magazine, on July 23, before the Genoa protest, approvingly quoted from the Communist Manifesto of 1848: "Modern industry has established the world market. All old-established national industries have been destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries whose products are consumed in every corner of the globe. In place of the old wants, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes ... All fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air." The Time writer implies that this describes the vibrant nature of capitalism over the last 150 years. In fact Marx and Engels saw the bourgeoisie's sweeping away of feudal and other pre-capitalist modes of production, and the establishment of a global economy, as being the historic task of capitalism. With this achieved the international revolution of the working class became a possibility. But, in the absence of workers' revolution, with capitalism having penetrated every corner of the globe for roughly the last hundred years, the bourgeois economy has not been a dynamic system that merely trades commodities. On the contrary, capitalism has long been an obstacle to the real development of the productive forces, which is the fundamental material cause of all the wars and catastrophes that have been plaguing humanity since the early 20th century. The global capitalist economy was a step on from pre-capitalist production, because it created the bases for an international workers' revolution and the creation of a communist society; but if this possibility is not realised, capitalism's continuation can only spell disaster for humanity.
A class for communism
One of the leading advocates of 'anti-globalisation', George Monbiot, has said that it is "in numerical terms, the biggest protest movement in the history of the world" (Guardian 24/7/1). He comes to this conclusion by affirming that "almost everyone agrees that the world would be a better place" without the activities of the big corporations, and that "most people would be .. happy to see the headquarters of Balfour Beatty or Monsanto dismantled by non-violent action". The 'protest movement' in Monbiot's mind is only 'big' because it includes just about anyone who's unhappy about an aspect of modern life. It includes everyone from people who are a bit worried about 'global warming', to those that donate to Oxfam or Christian Aid, to the leftists who want the role of the state in capitalism to be further strengthened, but also it includes those who are beginning to sense that the only real 'anti-capitalism' is one that involves the mobilisation of millions against the rule of the bourgeois state.
Better candidates for 'biggest protest movement' come from the history of the working class struggle. Every workers' struggle is a protest against the conditions of proletarian existence. Between 1917 and 23, for example, the working class took power in Russia, staged mass insurrections in Germany, shook Italy, Hungary and Austria to their foundations, and engaged in bitter struggles in Britain, Spain, the US, Argentina and Brazil. Or, more recently, between 1983 and 1989 there were significant, often massive struggles in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, the US, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Holland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, India, Tunisia, Morocco, Columbia, Bolivia, Greece, Israel, Rumania, Russia, Bulgaria, Poland, Yugoslavia, Japan, and the Dominican Republic, to cite only the main examples. Not only far bigger 'numerically' than Monbiot's 'protest movement', the actual significance of international waves of workers' struggle is greater because the working class, at the heart of the capitalist economy, has the capacity to destroy capitalism and build a society based on relations of solidarity. The struggle of the working class has the ultimate perspective of the establishment of a world human community. Because organisation and consciousness are the only weapons the working class has, the struggles and discussions of today are already important steps in making that perspective a reality. Barrow 30/8/1
The terrible bloodbath on the 11 September was not a sudden bolt out of the blue by “Islamic fanatics”. On the contrary, it was a new, and qualitatively more serious, link in a long chain of wars, acts of destruction, developing militarism and arms build up.
The lie of a ‘New World Order’ is once again exposed
10 years ago the present American president’s father promised a “New World Order” because the collapse of what his predecessor � Ronald Reagan - had called the “evil empire” had brought about the victory of “democracy” and “Liberal” capitalism. This was supposed to lead to a society where military conflicts would progressively disappear and all nations would live under Right, Law and Justice, in capital letters. With the appearance of the first serious convulsions in the old Soviet bloc a completely different perspective was opened up “Far from encouraging peace, the disintegration of the blocs which emerged from Yalta, and the decomposition of the capitalist system which underlines it, implies still more tension and conflicts. The appetites of the minor imperialisms, which up to now have been determined by the world’s division into two major camps, will only increase, now that these camps no longer dominated by their leaders before” (‘Presentation to the Theses on the Economic and Political crisis in the USSR and the Eastern Countries’, International Review 60). We insisted that we were not going towards a “New World Order” but towards “A world of bloody chaos, where the American Policeman will try to maintain a minimum of order by the increasingly massive and brutal use of military force” (‘Militarism and Decomposition’ International Review 64).
The Gulf War in 1991 was the first episode in this; then came Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leon, Congo, Algeria, Angola, Afghanistan, Timor, Chechnya, Colombia, Burma, Kashmir� This succession of violent convulsions form part of the dynamic that led to the terrible assault on the Twin Towers. This dynamic is based on a historically unprecedented explosion of imperialist appetites amongst both great and small states - appetites that had been more or less contained by the discipline of the blocs. But over the past ten years, in the absence of this discipline, and in the general context of an ever-deepening economic crisis, we have been plunged into a chaotic spiral of confrontations, which, if the proletariat does not react, will end up leading to the destruction of humanity.
What lies behind this dynamic? Will it be possible to reach a point of equilibrium that will allow these tensions to be contained with a framework of negotiations? The different factions of the ruling class clearly put forwards this idea. The official message of the Western governments is that the “democratic” great powers are seeking to set up just laws that will allow a “New World Order”. The only problem is that this praiseworthy effort is being torpedoed by a whole series of dark forces: dictators such as Saddam Hussein or Milosevic, international terrorism which now possesses terrible and secret weapons, the “rogue” states (North Korea, Afghanistan, Libya etc). In order for this much-promised “New World” to be achieved it will be necessary to mobilise behind the military crusade against these “new threats” and “new forms of war”.
The explanations given by the left of capital, although they are more insidious, are no less fragile. They certainly see the need to “struggle against terrorism” and the “new forms of war” and are therefore very enthusiastic about the military mobilisation. But at the same time they add a twist of criticism about the “excesses” of “neo-liberalism” and “globalisation”, which are obstacles to a more just world order.
Lastly, the message of the factions that support the “rogue” states and “international terrorism” is no less repugnant than that of their “civilised” opponents. They justify acts such as the attack on the Twin Towers by saying that they are “an action by the oppressed peoples against imperialism” and that they are retaliation against the populations of the opulent metropoles for the suffering of the Palestinian and Arab masses.
All of these political currents are expressions of a capitalist system that is leading humanity towards barbarism. Their crude claims not only don’t explain anything, but have the aim of tying the proletariat and the great majority of the population to the yoke of capitalism and imperialism, of stimulating the most base instincts of hate, revenge and massacre.
Military barbarism in the phase of capitalist decomposition
Only the historical method of marxism, the most advanced expression of the class consciousness of the proletariat, can provide a coherent explanation of the murderous disorder that reigns in the world, and put forward the only possible solution: the destruction of capitalism in all countries.
In 1989, faced with the collapse of Stalinism and the imperialist bloc organised around Russia, we demonstrated that these events signalled capitalism’s entry into a new and terminal phase of its decadence: the stage of decomposition. In the document ‘Decomposition, the final phase of capitalist decadence’, published in International Review 62 we showed that its roots lay in a new characteristic of the period opened up by 1968: on the one hand, the proletariat had revived its class struggle but had not been able to go beyond the merely defensive level. Nevertheless, this made it difficult for the bourgeoisie to impose its response to the endless crisis of its system: generalised imperialist war. All of which sucked world society into a morass: “As crisis-ridden capitalism’s contradictions can only get deeper, the bourgeoisie’s inability to offer the slightest perspective for society as a whole, and the proletariat’s inability, for the moment, openly to set forwards its own historic perspective, can only lead to a situation of generalised decomposition. Capitalism is rotting on its feet”.
This morass has profoundly marked the evolution of capitalism at all levels of its existence “to such an extent that the contradictions and expressions of decadent capitalism that mark its successive phases do not disappear with time, but continue and deepen; the phase of decomposition appears as the result of an accumulation of all the characteristics of a moribund system, completing the 75-year death agony of a historically condemned mode of production. Concretely, not only do the imperialist nature of all states, the threat of world war, the absorption of civil society by the state Moloch, and the permanent crisis of the capitalist economy all continue during the phase of decomposition, they reach a synthesis and an ultimate conclusion within it” (ibid).
At the level of the evolution of imperialist tensions, the world scene has been dominated by a series of particularly grave and destructive elements:
* The United States, whilst being the only military superpower, has been faced with its authority being increasingly challenged, not only by nations with their own aspirations (Germany, France, Great Britain�) but also by an increasing number of other states.
* Each state follows its own policy and virulently affirms its refusal to submit to the discipline of the more powerful states. This is the explosion of what we call “every man for himself”.
* Alliances between states have become circumstantial and lost all solidity and continuity. They are ephemeral and temporary, forming and falling apart at a dizzying speed.
* Conflicts fester without any remedy, beyond any possibility of stabilisation. The conflicts inherited from the Yalta epoch have not been resolved but rather have become indefinitely prolonged.
* Imperialist strategy � as a coherent and long-term political and military orientation � has become increasingly less possible. It has been replaced by immediatist, contradictory tactics, without stable alliances, that have worsened the chaos and destruction even more.
* A consequence of the former is that the policy of all the great powers � and even more so of the smaller ones - consists more of destabilising the allies of its rivals than constructing its own network of loyal states.
* The great powers are implicated in the use of terrorism as a means of war; the world situation is characterised by “the development of terrorism or the seizure of hostages, as methods of warfare between states, to the detriment of the ‘laws’ that capitalism established in the past to ‘regulate’ the conflicts between different ruling class factions” (ibid).
All this has aggravated the chaotic nature of imperialist conflicts, because as we demonstrate in the Resolution on the International Situation from our 14th Congress, which took place in May 2001 “..the fragmentation of the old bloc structures and disciplines unleashed national rivalries on an unprecedented scale, resulting in an increasingly chaotic struggle of each against all from the world’s greatest powers to the meanest local warlord�The wars characteristic of the present phase of capitalist decomposition are no less imperialist wars than the wars of previous phases of decadence, but they have become more widespread, more uncontrollable, and more difficult to bring to even a temporary close” (International Review 106) .
The United States is the biggest loser in this situation. Its national interests are identified with the maintaining of a world order built for its own advantage. However all of the pillars upholding such an order have been overturned by the evolution of decomposing capitalism:
* The threat of the Russian bear, which pushed the affluent bourgeoisies of Europe and Japan to voluntarily submit to American tutelage, no longer exists. This has encouraged them to pursue their own ambitions, and this can only lead to a widespread clash with American interests.
* The development of the economic crisis has whetted the imperialist appetites of all states, resulting in campaigns of conquest, in attempts to destabilise their rivals’ underlings, in risky adventures that can only end up by further spreading chaos.
* Social decomposition spreads through all countries, but above all the weakest ones. This generates all kinds of centrifugal tendencies and powerful movements towards dislocation and schism. All types of gangs and warlords terrorise the population whilst at the same time fighting against the central state. These fires have not only been fanned by neighbouring states but also by the world and regional powers through their thinly veiled support. Some examples of this situation are the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Russia, Colombia, Mexico, Sierra Leone, Liberia, etc.
Confronted with this blood-soaked mess, the world’s sheriff, the United States, has been obliged to carry out enormous displays of force, as we saw in the Gulf and Kosovo. These exhibitions of its overwhelming military power have forced its rivals to bend the knee and line themselves behind the great godfather. Nevertheless, when the effect of intimidation wears off, they all return to their old ways, forcing the US to react on an even bigger scale. It is certainly significant that just prior to September 11, tensions between Europe and America (over Kyoto, ‘Son of Star Wars’, the Euro-Army, etc) had never been so sharp.
The USA is compelled to use military force to reaffirm its world domination
It is difficult to work out who exactly was behind the bloody attack of 11th September. However, what is certain is that even while the bodies were still warm, the American state immediately began to loudly bang the drums of war. Taking full advantage of the terrible emotional impact of the massacre on the American population, it unleashed violent patriotic hysteria in order to carry out an unprecedented war mobilisation.
Simultaneously, the countries of NATO have had to stand to attention; not only that, they have also had to stomach the application of Article 5 of the Treaty that obliges them to show “solidarity” with any of the members countries that have been attacked. The United States has told them in no uncertain terms, through the words of a high-ranking diplomat, that “those who are not united with the coalition will be considered and treated as an enemy”.
Practically all the world’s regimes have unreservedly supported the USA’s plans. Only the Taliban, officially designated as being guilty of hosting the shady Bin Laden, have refused and called for a “Holy War”.
However, there are noticeable differences between the new military deployment being prepared by the US and the one carried out in 1991. Then it was fundamentally an exhibition of force, whereas today, as Bush has declared “it is not a question of vengeance, nor of a symbolic reaction, but of winning a war against barbarous behaviour”. Therefore in his televised harangue he said that “we ask you for patience because the conflict will not be short. We ask you for tenacity because the conflict will not be easy. We ask you for all our strength because the road to victory will be long”.
What is being laid out for the coming weeks is a widespread military campaign which will encompass several theatres of operations. The choice of Afghanistan as the main target is not an accident or simply the result of Bin Laden’s presence. This country has a fundamental strategic importance. It is situated at the crossroads between Russia, China, India and at the same time its immense mountains can serve as an observatory and a platform for putting pressure on the Middle East � Palestine and Israel, the Arab Emirates, Arabia etc - which is a crucial centre for the control of Europe. The United States has not only forced all of the states and especially its former allies to follow its plans; it is also seeking out more stable and durable positions which will allow it to have a much greater control over the world situation.
The period ahead will see a dramatic aggravation of imperialist tensions:
* Firstly because an act of war has struck massively and directly at the workers and population of the world’s main city, New York. A tendency that has prevailed since 1945 has come to an end: the workers of the main industrial centres are no longer going to be free from the scourge of war; from now on they are going to be exposed to reprisals comparable to the attack on the Twin Towers that could result in thousands of victims.
* Secondly, because the response that the USA is preparing will take the form of a much more prolonged military operation. This will involve a much greater deployment of military force than during the Gulf war.
* Thirdly, because this is inevitably going to lead to costly and difficult operations involving the occupation of territory, with the consequent use of infantry and their involvement in bloody struggles.
The qualitative leap in the evolution of imperialist tensions is more than obvious. We are not on the eve of the third world war as alarmist announcements have claimed. Nevertheless, this is not any consolation because these events dramatically confirm the tendency that war has taken on in the period of decomposition; and this in the long run can be just as dangerous as a Third World War. As we say in the International Situation Resolution from our last Congress “The working class today thus faces the possibility that it could be engulfed in an irrational chain reaction of local and regional wars�This apocalypse is not so far from what we are experiencing today, the face of barbarism is taking material shape before our eyes�Humanity today does not merely face the prospect of barbarism in the future: the descent has already begun and it bears with it the danger of gradually eating away at the every premises of any future social regeneration”
In the second part of this article we will examine the effects of these recent events on the class consciousness of the proletariat.
The American bourgeoisie has exploited the catastrophe of 11 September to try and reassert its imperialist power on an unprecedented scale. The British bourgeoisie has also not missed the opportunity to play its own imperialist game, to advance its own military, diplomatic and political position on the world arena at the expense of its rivals, cynically exploiting sympathy for its ‘own’ victims in the terrorist attacks.
Of course the British bourgeoisie, like most of the rest of the world bourgeoisie, rushed to denounce the terrorist attacks, to solidarise with the United States, to support the declaration of democratic war on terrorism, and invoke, along with other major powers, the ‘mutual defence’ article of NATO’s constitution. But, beyond that ‘solidarity’, even more than during the Gulf War or the wars in the Balkans, the differences between the major powers remain - particularly their resistance to the US, the one super-power among them. Britain, despite appearing to be the US’s poodle, is no exception.
The massive riposte planned by the US following the terrorist outrages is precisely aimed. Its target is not just Osama bin Laden’s network, an even feebler foe than Iraq was in 1991, but at the pretensions of other capitalist states, in particular the other major powers, that, since 1989, have begun to oppose and resist US world hegemony.
Britain, like France and Germany, in various parts of the world, but particularly the Balkans, have been trying to defend their own imperialist interests now that the threat of the Soviet Union no longer forces them to cower behind the United States. The planned European army, first proposed by Whitehall, is a barely disguised threat to the hegemony of US-led NATO in Europe. According to Henry Kissinger’s recent book, Does America need a foreign policy?, the most troubling threats to US dominance in the world are precisely ‘European developments’.(1) Conversely, Britain has much to lose in terms of world stature by an overwhelming display of US military force in the Middle East.
Why Britain proclaims its loyalty
American imperialism is well aware of what British imperialism is up to. “Tony Blair was not the first European leader to visit President Bush. But he was the most fervent in expressing unreserved support and in trying to rally round the other Europeans. In this he is simply following half a century of tradition. Virtually every British prime minister since Churchill has leapt at an opportunity of reviving his partnership with the president of the United States. It plays well electorally and gives a sense of world leadership.” (International Herald Tribune, 26.09.01.)
The British bourgeoisie is hoping, by running alongside the American military juggernaut, to limit the scope of the latter’s impact on its own imperialist prestige and grab for itself more of the kudos out of the coming carnage than rivals like France and Germany. That’s why, shortly after his Washington visit, Blair informed a meeting of Labour MPs that the object of British foreign policy was to ‘restrain’ America. Much of the British bourgeois media has echoed this theme.
The reason that the ruling class in Britain sustains the illusion of a ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US is to disguise the existence of imperialist and nationalist divisions and use internationally-shared ‘democratic values’ to try and mobilise the population for the sacrifices to come .
But Britain’s characteristically perfidious strategy on the world arena is fraught with danger.
Despite Britain’s diplomatic experience on the world scale as a former ‘superpower’, especially in the middle East, it will be destined for disappointment if it hopes to cash in without the underlying military force.
Foreign secretary Jack Straw has made the first high level British diplomatic visit to Iran since 1979, ostensibly to galvanise support for action against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. He met with Yasser Arafat for the same purpose. But his trip was also a pitch to be, in the words of the 1997 October Labour Party conference, the ‘best’, if not the ‘biggest’ imperialist power. But, if you are going to ‘punch above your weight’, be prepared for a black eye. Straw’s visit turned into a fiasco as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon initially cancelled a meeting with him because of his “anger, outrage and disappointment” at an article written by Straw for an Iranian newspaper which was taken as support for the Palestinian cause. Bush, speaking from the position of US strength, subsequently told the world that a Palestinian state was always part of the US “vision”, hitting back at Sharon when he compared US behaviour to 1930s appeasement of Nazi Germany.
British imperialism will receive more diplomatic humiliations as a result of the gap between its pretensions and its relative military impotence on the world arena.
The British military has sent an armada to Oman of comparable size to that used in the Falklands War. It’s officially on an exercise, but conveniently placed to intervene in Afghanistan. But the British military is far from integrated into the strategic plans of the Pentagon, as the assistant US Defence Secretary made clear at the recent NATO summit. The ‘allies’ will be called upon only when summoned by the United States. Despite its relative importance in comparison with the military strength of other European powers, the British armed forces are destined to be proved puny in comparison with those of the United States in the coming offensive. Not that this will stop it contributing as much as it can to the escalation of military barbarism and the growing chaos of international relations.
If there is one level at which British imperialism is still the ‘envy of the world’ it is in its propaganda expertise. The British media, particularly its newspapers, were exemplary in adding to the terror of the attacks on the US by giving them every conceivable echo. This was not because of any real human sympathy, but to help reinforce the passivity, fear and perplexity of the population. In the name of humanitarian outrage, it led the world in drawing phoney lessons to reinforce all capitalist states, insisting that the world is faced with two fundamental alternatives: not socialism or barbarism, but democracy or terrorism, good or evil, for which no sacrifice is too great.
The US tells it straight
While President Bush has welcomed British ‘loyalty’, he’s also made clear US determination to make the ‘crusade against terrorism’ a one horse race. You are either for America or against it. Despite the talk of a ‘coalition’ of states, this will not be like the allied coalition in the Gulf War. This time round the only role for other states will be to obey the diktats from Washington.
As the Washington Post (20/9/01) made clear ...
“If Washington broadens the focus beyond bin Laden and perhaps Afghanistan, it will lose the support it needs to carry out the surgical plan effectively. This is the message Mr Bush will hear from President Jacques Chirac of France, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud Faisal, and others this week��Listen to their concerns, Mr President, and be your affable, charming self. But leave your visitors in no doubt that America’s losses will be avenged and America’s vulnerabilities minimised � whether they ride in the posse or not”. Como 4/10/01
Note
(1) When Bush targets those who harbour terrorists as much as the terrorists themselves, he is letting the European powers understand that he is not just talking about ‘rogue’ states in the middle East. The revelations of the ease with which anti-US terrorist networks operated in Britain and Germany, for example, show that the European powers are not the allies of the US they pretend to be.
In response to the horrible war crime of 11 September, new and equally horrible war crimes are now being committed by the USA, which has come under direct attack for the first time in nearly two hundred years. Even before the first assaults were launched on an already ruined Afghanistan, tens of thousands of Afghan refugees were being condemned to death by starvation and disease. The death list will increase dramatically now the military strikes have begun.
We are being told that the coming war will be a war for the defence of democracy and civilisation against a network of Islamic fanatics led by bin Laden. But bin Laden and his breed, by deliberately setting out to slaughter as many civilians as possible, are only following the fine example already set by capitalist civilisation, which rules the entire planet today. For this civilisation, this mode of production, which has been in deep decay since the First World War, has already given us the terror bombing of London (the Blitz), of Dresden and Hamburg, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Vietnam and Cambodia; the majority of these slaughters were also carried out in the name of democracy and civilisation. In the last decade alone it has given us the massacres in Iraq and Kuwait, in Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro; in Algeria, Rwanda, the Congo, Chechnya and the Middle East. In every one of these horror-stories, it has above all been the civilian populations which have been held hostage, forced to flee, tortured, raped, bombed and herded into concentration camps. This is the civilisation we are being asked to defend - a civilisation which now lives in a state of permanent war, which is sinking deeper and deeper into its own decomposition, threatening the very survival of the human species.
The working class is the main victim of capitalist war
With the massacre of September 11 we have entered a new stage in global imperialist conflict, a stage in which war will become more permanent and more widespread than at any time since 1945. And as in all of capitalism’s wars, the working class and the poorest sections of society will be the main victims. In the Twin Towers, the majority of the dead were office workers, cleaners, firemen, in short, proletarians. In Afghanistan, it is the utterly dispossessed, press-ganged into the Taliban armies or fleeing for their lives from both the government and the US onslaught, who will pay the highest price.
And the working class is not only a victim in the flesh; it is also a victim in its consciousness. In the USA, the bourgeoisie is taking advantage of the legitimate outrage and disgust created by the terrorist attacks to stir up the worst forms of patriotic hysteria, to call for ‘national unity’, for solidarity between exploited and exploiters. Everywhere the Stars and Stripes is being used as a symbol of defiance against the bin Ladens of the world, tying the workers to the interests of the nation, and thus of the ruling class.
In Europe, we are being told that ‘we are all Americans now’, once again seeking to turn human sympathy for the dead into support for the new war drive. And if workers are not asked to take the side of civilisation against terrorism, they are asked to see bin Laden as a symbol of ‘resistance’ against oppression and to prepare for Holy War, as in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, or among ‘Muslim’ populations in the central countries. In this version of the events, the ‘Americans got what they deserved’. This is yet another way of preventing workers from seeing their true class identity, which cuts across all national frontiers.
Throughout the world, the proletariat is being subjected to state terror in the name of the fight against terrorism. Not only the terror imposed by the climate of national chauvinism, but also by the very concrete measures of repression being set up throughout the world. The very real fear generated by the events in the USA provides the ruling class with the perfect climate to increase its whole system of police controls, identity checks, phone-tapping and other ‘security’ measures, a system that will in future be used not against terrorist suspects but against workers and revolutionaries fighting capitalism. The issue of identity cards in Britain and the USA is just the tip of this iceberg.
The answer to war is not pacifism but the class struggle
The ruling class knows that it needs the loyal support of the entire population, but above all of the working class, if it is to take its imperialist designs onto a new level. It knows that the only real obstacle to war is the working class, which produces the vast majority of social wealth, which is the first to die in capitalism’s wars. And this is precisely why the workers must reject any identification with any national interest. To struggle against the march towards war, they must revive and develop the struggle for their own class interests. The struggle against redundancies being demanded not only as a result of the recession but also as a consequence of the terrorist attacks. The struggle against sacrifices at work, imposed to strengthen the ailing national economy or the war effort. The struggle against repression justified by the hunt for terrorists and subversives. It is this struggle alone which can enable the workers to understand the need for international class solidarity with all the victims of capitalist crisis and devastation; it is this struggle which alone can open up the perspective of a new society free from exploitation and war.
The proletarian struggle has nothing in common with pacifism, as exemplified by the new Coalition to Stop the War that has been set up in Britain by CND, the Trotskyists and others. The pacifists make their appeal to the UN and to international law; the proletarian struggle can only expand if it breaks the barriers of the law. Already in the most ‘democratic’ countries, any effective forms of struggle (such as mass or secondary pickets, decision-making by general assemblies rather than union ballots, etc) have, with the assistance of the trade unions, become illegal. The outlawing of the class struggle will become even more explicit in a period dominated by war.
The pacifists also make their appeal to ‘all decent minded people’, to an alliance of all classes opposed to the positions of Blair and Bush. But this is yet another way of drowning the workers in the population at large, at precisely the time when the number one problem for the working class is to rediscover its distinct social - and political - identity.
Above all, pacifism has never opposed the national interest, which in the epoch of imperialism can only be defended by the means of imperialism. This goes not only for the ‘respectable’ pacifists like Bruce Kent, but also for pacifism’s ‘radical’ wing, the leftists, who always seek to get the workers to ‘defend’ one nationalism or another. In the Gulf war, they defended Iraq; in the Balkans war they argued about whether to support Serbia or the Kosovo Liberation Army (and thus NATO); today they are scrabbling around to find some ‘anti-imperialist’ faction to support, if not bin Laden and the Taliban, then the ‘Palestinian Resistance’ whose ideas and methods are exactly the same.
Far from opposing war, pacifism is a necessary adjunct to the military coalition of the bourgeoisie, a way of delaying and diverting an authentic class consciousness about the meaning of war in this society. Humanity is not faced with the alternatives of war and peace. It is faced with the alternatives of imperialist war and the class war, of barbarism and the communist revolution. This was the alternative announced by Lenin and Luxemburg in 1914, and answered by the strikes, mutinies and revolutions which brought an end to the first imperialist world war. After almost a hundred years of capitalist decadence and self-destruction, that alternative stands before us with even sharper clarity.
WR, 8.10.01
The following text was written for a meeting of the No War But The Class War group in London on November 1st. The group has a continuity with groups under the same name formed during the Gulf war and the Kosovo war, but it has attracted new energies and, in our opinion, can serve as a focus for serious discussion about the meaning of the current war, and for proletarian intervention against it. The ICC’s contribution was thus put forward in a spirit of constructive criticism. On the whole the contribution was received in the same spirit: after it was presented, a number of comrades voiced unease at the lack of political discussion in recent meetings. It was decided that the next meeting would concentrate on a discussion about the effects of the war on the international working class - which for us is an absolutely key issue because an effective intervention in the real movement of the class can only be based on a lucid analysis of where that movement is to be found.
No War But The Class War meets every Thursday at 7.30, at the Sebbon Street Community Centre, Islington, London NI (behind Islington Town Hall)
As we did with its previous version, at the time of the Kosovo war, the ICC welcomes the reappearance of the ‘No War But The Class War’ group in response to the latest carnage. The leaflet that was distributed at the demonstration of 13 October essentially defended a proletarian position against the war and against pacifist illusions. We also think that the small section on the aims of the group is correct when it explains that the ideas in the leaflet are not the statement of a political programme, but “the basis of more discussion and action”.
The public meeting on 21 Oct was an excellent opportunity to discuss the significance of the September 11 attacks and the new Afghan war, which for us mark a very important step in capitalism’s ‘progress’ towards barbarism, and pose considerable difficulties for the working class and its struggle in all countries. We also welcome the fact that the meeting was open to the contribution of groups of the communist left.
The presentation at the public meeting raised many issues which needed a thorough discussion - particularly with regard to the current capacity of the working class to respond to the situation, the degree to which workers have been affected by the patriotic hysteria in the USA and the ‘Muslim’ frenzy in the east. In our view these difficulties were seriously underestimated in the presentation; but at any rate this was surely a matter for discussion. There is still a need to define what is meant by class opposition to war, and we are still convinced that this cannot be taken for granted. However, the impression we have got from the two meetings we have attended (it may have been different in the previous ones) is that within the group there is a strong resistance to really discussing the issues posed by the war, and a very strong leaning towards ‘activism’, ie the desire to ‘do things’ without really thinking them through. This could be seen in:
- the decision (which a lot of comrades seem to recognise was a mistake) to break up the public meeting into small groups around discussions on what to do, making it virtually impossible to have any coherent discussion about the presentation;
- the decision on Thursday to rush off to an army recruitment fair without any thought about the real aim of such an action, the security considerations in today’s heavy atmosphere of anti-terrorism, etc;
- the growing influence of what might be called the ‘anti-capitalist lobby’ within the group, who have not defined their politics but are extremely keen to get NWBTCW involved in forming an ‘anti-capitalist bloc’ within the next pacifist demo, or in music benefits with no indication about which political forces are benefiting; they have also proposed that NWBTCW should get on the podium at Trafalgar Square through some sort of deal with the Stop the War coalition.
As already mentioned, the ICC has more than once emphasised the need to discuss the most basic question posed by the war: what is meant by a class response to war in this period. To us it appears that this is almost taken for granted, but it would be extremely dangerous to do so. What happened in Brighton surely confirms this. As we understand it from the account by the comrade from Brighton, the NWBTCW group there was simply swamped by an arrival of elements from the Stop the War campaign; and even those who call themselves ‘autonomists’ and ‘communists’ simply went along with the idea of creating a broad front of all those ‘opposed’ to the war, which is precisely the approach of the SWP, CND, etc.
The SWP is also proclaiming that the best hope of opposing the war is to turn the ‘anti-capitalist’ movement into the anti-war movement, and to some extent this has been what has happened. Although in America some of the more openly bourgeois organisations like the greens and the AFL-CIO withdrew from the anti-war demonstrations after 11 September, the majority of the ‘anti-capitalist’, or more accurately, anti-globalisation groups have formed the basis for the pacifist pseudo-opposition typified by the Stop the War Coalition. In our opinion, we have to be very clear that just as the anti-globalisation jamboree is by no means a proletarian movement against capital, so the present ‘Stop the War movement’ has nothing to do with a working class, internationalist response to capitalist war.
We think that unless there is a real discussion in ‘NWBTCW’ about the nature both of the ‘anti-capitalist movement’ (which for us is to a large extent controlled by the bourgeoisie, even if there are undoubtedly some positive elements within or around it) and of the current ‘anti-war movement’, there is a danger that it could be dragged into functioning as a radical wing of pacifism.
There are times when decisive action is required and further discussion becomes a hindrance. But there are also times when the priority of the moment is to reflect, to understand, to analyse, to clarify. We are living through a descent into an era of unprecedented irrationality, where mythologies once thought forgotten have risen to the surface with swords in their hands. To resist these mythologies, and all the more familiar ones maintained by capitalism, we must not hesitate to defend the necessity for thought, debate, and theory.
We thus think the most important function for a ‘NWBTCW’ group is
- to act as a focus for all who want to understand how to fight the war on a proletarian terrain. It should be an open, non-membership circle of discussion, organised on a more or less local basis; there should be no distinction between internal and external meetings, unless specifically decided;
- to be a centre for activities and interventions which would as much as possible reflect the discussions within the circle. This may mean that some interventions would be done in the name of the circle as a whole, some by particular groupings within the circle.
Particular proposals
- publication of a bulletin with contributions from all the various groups, currents and individuals involved; perhaps the bulletin could be called Against Capitalist War (and perhaps the name of the bulletin could serve as the name of the group or network of groups). The first one could report on the story of the group so far and publish all the internationalist leaflets and statements which have circulated in and around the group;
- the eventual organisation of a national conference, where more time can be devoted both to political discussion and the coordination of activities;
- for Nov 18: we repeat our proposal for an autonomous meeting at Trafalgar Square. The only real moment that an alternative to the pacifists, leftists and nationalists can be posed is at the end of the demo; that’s the most favourable time for polarising questioning and dissatisfaction with the official opposition. At one level or another, this means not ‘joining’ the official platform but confronting it, although we mean confronting it politically, not provoking a punch up. Whether or not people are ‘in’ the march, our energies would be best employed in preparing to make a stand at this point in the demonstration. And we should discuss both the dangers and the advantages of such a course of action.
WR, November 2001
In the name of ‘fighting terrorism’, a deluge of bombs is raining on the impoverished population of Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of men, women and children are fleeing the horror, but what awaits them at the end of their flight is more horror: a beast-like existence in refugee camps, a slow death from hunger, cold and disease as winter sets in.
Once again we are witnessing the true face of the ‘humanitarian’ actions undertaken by the great powers. The barbarism they have unleashed will certainly outstrip the barbarism of bin Laden and his network of petty imperialist gangsters.
We have been told over and over again by the ‘civilised democracies’ of the USA and Britain that they are only targeting the terrorists, that they are doing all they can to minimise civilian casualties. This lie is already wearing thin: ‘accidental’ or not, the number of ‘smart’ bombs that have destroyed homes, schools or hospitals is mounting daily. As for the gesture of ‘humanitarian aid packages’ being dropped from the skies, this is just a sick joke when everyone knows that the bombing is not only creating a growing exodus of desperate people, but is also obstructing the transport of food and supplies to the hungry. And let’s not forget the mass of conscripts press-ganged into the Taliban army. Here there isn’t even any pretence: they are being ‘carpet bombed’ without mercy. And this also is a form of mass murder.
As for the ‘war aims’ of the ‘anti-terrorist coalition’, what are we to make of the announcement that it may after all be impossible to catch bin Laden, or that the ‘war against terrorism’ may last 4, 10, even 50 years? Is it that the great powers, and the US in particular, don’t know what they are doing � or is it that they are using the September 11 massacre as a mere pretext to pursue military and strategic aims that correspond to their own imperialist interests? Since an imperialist power can only act to defend its imperialist interests, we know what our answer is! (see the article on the back page for more analysis of the real agenda behind this war).
Meanwhile, back home, the fear of terrorist attack is being kept alive by the massive campaign about bio-terrorism and the anthrax alert. Whoever is actually addressing the envelopes of white powder, they are certainly a gift to the ruling class. Those who have died from anthrax infection have all been workers: what better way of proving that the working class has no choice but to rely on the state for protection against the sinister terrorists, and to rally behind the ‘just’ war against terrorism.
Workers: this is not our war!
‘Those who are not with us are against us’: this is how Bush demanded that all the USA’s imperialist rivals have to line up behind the world cop in its latest military adventure, its latest attempt to ensure it remains the world’s only superpower. But the same false choice is offered to the workers, to the exploited and the oppressed of the world. We must either support the ‘war against terrorism’ or line up behind bin Laden and the Taliban. Or we must support bin Laden and the Taliban because they are fighting the ‘Great Satan’, the US and its allies.
No! Bush, Blair, bin Laden all belong to the same class of gangsters. The capitalist class which exploits us, which profits from our labour power, and which throws us onto the dole, is the same class which regularly massacres us in its sordid imperialist squabbles. Useless to choose between individual leaders or states, because they can only embody the needs of this rotting social system.
Workers: we cannot afford any illusions. Capitalism is faced with an insurmountable economic crisis and war has been its method of survival for about a 100 years. After the two world wars and the ‘cold war’, the ‘new world order’ of peace and prosperity promised by Bush Senior has been a dark decade of war � in the Gulf, in the Balkans, in Africa, in the ex-USSR ... and in Afghanistan, which has not seen a day of peace for over 20 years. The fact that the ruling class is now telling us that the ‘war on terror’ will run and run is already an admission that we have nothing to look forward to but an endless spiral of wars and devastation. Peace is impossible as long as capitalism lasts.
The only alternative, the only perspective for the human race, is the destruction of this system before it destroys the planet bit by bit. And only the exploited class, the proletariat, the first victim of capitalist war, can make this perspective a reality. This above all is why workers must refuse to make any common cause with their exploiters; this is why they must refuse to be paralysed by the atmosphere of fear and terror which the ruling class is trying to perpetuate; this is why they must stick to their own class interests and fight against the degradation of their living and working conditions.
No to ‘sacrifices’ in the name of the national interest or the war!
No to collaboration with the capitalist state in the name of ‘fighting terrorism’!
No to support for the Taliban or bin Laden in the name of Islam or ‘anti-imperialism’!
Against the imperialist war of the exploiters, for the class war of the international proletariat!
Every day there’s another voice added to the chorus of criticisms of the bombing of Afghanistan. Not only is there CND, the Stop The War coalition, various MPs and left-wingers, but also major newspapers. “THIS WAR IS A FRAUD” read the front page of the Mirror (29/10/1). The Guardian has queried the objectives of military action, asked what the bombing has achieved so far, and if food deliveries can be increased, maybe with a pause in the bombing. There is opposition to the use of cluster bombs, calls for a greater role for the UN and concern for ‘innocent victims’ and ‘non-military targets’ such as hospitals, old peoples’ homes, Red Cross warehouses and UN facilities.
Many individuals want to do something against the war on Afghanistan, against the spread of the ‘war against terrorism’ - even if it’s not yet clear to them what would actually be effective against the insatiable appetites of the militarists.
But it would be wrong to have any illusions in any MP, editorial writer or those who dominate the ‘anti-war’ movement and insist on their ‘humanitarianism’ or ‘socialism’ when they add their few words of reservation on British foreign policy, as they are all just outpourings from a class of warmongers.
‘Criticisms’ of war that suit the ruling class
It is, for example, taken for granted by ‘critical’ MPs (and others) that the UN should take a significant role in the ‘war against terrorism’. It is also an assumption of US policy that any eventual post-war (post-Taliban?) regime in Afghanistan will be enforced by the UN, rather than having blatant US puppets in power. The UN will continue to be a tool of the major imperialisms, as it has been ever since its foundation.
Labour ‘critics’ say they’re worried about ‘innocent victims’, pretending to be shocked at discovering the capitalist war machine functions with indiscriminate brutality - as well as justifying the murder of anyone they deem ‘guilty’. All the fuss about ‘cluster bombs’ rather implies that death by other means would somehow be preferable. Paul Foot (Guardian 30/10/1) refers, in passing, to “daily military blunders in Afghanistan” - but fewer ‘blunders’ can only mean greater ‘efficiency’ in the process of destruction.
Foot was defending MP Paul Marsden from accusations of being like those who ‘appeased’ Hitler in the 1930s. They were both upset that anyone could suggest there was anything suspect in their anti-fascist credentials. Anti-fascism was one of the main ideologies used by the ruling class in Britain to mobilise the population to die in the service of British imperialism in the Second World War - a ‘just’ war in Foot’s view.
Marsden himself, in his own report of the interview with Hilary Armstrong, showed no reluctance in supporting the war: “the UN should take charge of the military action, not the US. It would be much more effective. By all means send in the SAS, but lets get the UN onside first”. His difference with the Labour leadership is only a matter of emphasis, a quibble over tactics.
There are other MPs who say they are concerned that US action is gradually spreading beyond the initial focus on bin Laden. This is hardly controversial within the British ruling class as Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, for example, has just been in Washington saying exactly that. One of the reasons that Britain has been running with the US is to try and influence the extent of US imperialism’s campaign - in the interests of British imperialism of course.
Whenever you scratch the noted ‘critics’ of the government you find a warmonger. In 1991 George Galloway got a lot of publicity for his thoughts on Iraq. This time round he has suggested that “if military action was seen as unavoidable, the target should have been the Arab legions in the mountains” (Guardian 20/10/1). On a historical note Galloway identifies with Aneurin Bevan and his criticisms of government policy during the Second World War. Bevan, like his latter-day followers, had no quarrel with British imperialism’s war aims, just the means to achieve them.
Meanwhile, the Mirror (29/10/1), answered the stock ‘what’s the alternative to bombing?’ question, with the example of Northern Ireland, and how brilliant it was that Britain “did not react by sending fighter jets to Belfast”. Their praise for British strategy, the use of MI5, MI6, the SAS and other regiments will not impress those who have lived in Northern Ireland during the last 30 years and witnessed the extensive militarisation of society. Paul Foot as well, “can suggest to Bush, Blair and the rest of them a whole series of policies” (Socialist Review November 2001). There’s this alternative for British imperialism to consider, for example: “Should not the entire diplomatic and political efforts of our government be directed instead to solving the crisis in the Middle East?” (Mirror 18/10/1)
Against all the lies which make out that somehow US militarism is an exception to the pattern of imperialist strategies, that capitalism can exist without war, that wars can take place without casualties, communists defend one essential truth. Only the international revolution of the working class is capable of destroying the economic system that gives rise to wars, and creating a society based on relations of solidarity, a human community. Bev 1/11/1
Imperialist war always puts revolutionaries to the test. Against the propaganda of the ruling class, which aims to win over the working class, or at least to silence it, the first duty of a revolutionary organisation is to denounce the war: to say as loudly and as clearly as it can that imperialist war is never in the interests of the working class.
Revolutionaries oppose the war
All of the groups of the proletarian political milieu in Britain have taken a class stand against the war in Afghanistan.
The proletarian political milieu is composed of those organisations that are part of the communist left, that is of those groups who trace their origins to the minorities that opposed the degeneration of the revolution in Russia, defended class positions against the rise of Stalinism and fascism and denounced the Second World War as being every bit as imperialist as the first. In Britain there are three organisations of the proletarian milieu: the Communist Workers Organisation1 (CWO), which is part of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP); the International Communist Party that publishes Communist Left2; and the International Communist Current, whose section in Britain is World Revolution. Following the barbaric acts of September 11, all of these organisations published leaflets and/or statements on the web denouncing the attacks and opposing the imperialist war that was immediately promised. They have all called on the working class to oppose the massacres of their fellow workers and other oppressed strata, and to join the class war against capitalism.
Immediately after the attack on the World Trade Centre, the ICC issued a statement for the web which was also distributed as a leaflet at meetings, paper sales and elsewhere (‘Bush, Blair and Bin Laden are all terrorist gangsters’). Once the USA launched its first air strikes on Afghanistan, we put out an international leaflet (‘Only one answer to imperialist war � the international class struggle’) which was distributed in more countries and in bigger numbers � at demonstrations and workplaces as well as smaller meetings and street sales. Both texts are available from our address.
The IBRP’s initial statement was entitled ‘USA Coalition Declares War on the World’. It is direct and unequivocal in its denunciation of the war and in its recognition that capitalism is the real cause:
“The devastating suicide attacks on key symbols of US capitalism’s financial and military might may have shaken the complacency of the most powerful state in the world but in no sense is it a victory for the exploited working class. Not only are ordinary wage workers amongst the thousands killed, but the assaults are being used to legitimise heightened state repression. The ‘war against terrorism’ will be used within the metropolitan countries as a weapon against internal oppositions and particularly against the working class, and any emerging proletarian political organisations. In that sense, organised state terror has already preceded September 11th’s events, with its police attacks on anti-globalisation protesters. However, the events of September 11th have increased the prospect of humanity being thrown back into barbarism.
This is not a rhetorical flourish or a question of mysterious ‘forces of evil’ leading the planet to Armageddon. On the contrary, it is the concrete calculated policies stemming from the rivalry between the very material interests of the capitalist powers which makes the 21st century just as dangerous and warlike as the last”.
There is nothing here of the hypocrisy of the ‘left’ and the ‘peace’ movement who say ‘yes, the attacks were terrible, but�the US had it coming to it’ and so excuse the slaughter of innocent people in America. The attacks and the US response are acts of barbarism; their cause is not simply US imperialism � as if no other country were imperialist - but capitalism itself. To say that the US is to blame is to let capitalism off the hook. Those who say such things become accomplices of imperialist war.
At the ‘peace’ demonstration of October 13, where the ICC distributed its international leaflet, the CWO comrades gave out their broadsheet Aurora which also made a clear distinction between class struggle against war and “the saccharine sweet sirens of pacifism�”, which calls for “prayer, candlelit vigils, e-mailing George Bush or Tony Blair or writing to the local MP”. Against these false solutions Aurora calls for the defence of workers’ living standards by struggling outside and against the unions, for the paralysis of capitalism’s economic and military apparatus, for reviving the perspective of the revolutionary overthrow of world capitalism. Or, again, from the IBRP statement: “Only the international working class, once aware of its own interests, is capable of changing the world. We have no interest in supporting either side in this ‘new war’ � if the ruling class has its way our only role will be as victims and cannon-fodder. All the bourgeois factions whether US-led, national liberationist or Islamist are equally against the working class. Only by paralysing these forces and politically defeating all the irrational ruling class ideologies will we be able to create a world without war, exploitation and terror. Socialism or Barbarism. There is no third road.” .
The ICP are equally clear in their denunciation of the way the ruling class has cynically used the attacks to try and get the working class to support war:
“Following the terrifying massacres in the United States, the regime’s spokesmen, both Right and Left, are loudly proclaiming that the war which is about to happen, or rather which has already begun, is between the North and South, between us � the rich, and them � the poor. A war to protect our civilisation, capital’s civilisation. [�]
“Whoever hijacked the Boeings it was certainly the right moment in terms of propping up capitalism, just as the choice of targets � a military building and buildings full of workers � will make it easier to weld together the opposed classes of American society. Bearded priests are playing their part in tricking the disinherited masses of the poor countries by channelling their class rebellion into nationalism and religious fanaticism.
“But the working class in the North of the World has nothing to gain from supporting this war either. Rather than safeguarding its miserable, non-existent privileges as citizens of the rich West, all it can really expect from the war is death and increasing poverty; as they should already know from the experience of two terrible world wars and two no less terrible post-war periods” (‘The capitalist regime uses Terrorism and Anti-terrorism to force the proletariat into the Imperialist War’).
Like the IBRP, the ICP is clear that war is an inevitable consequence of capitalism and that the only way to oppose imperialist war is to wage the class war: “Workers have to oppose this war, but neither cursing it nor relying on the pressure of public opinion is enough; what is needed is to oppose bourgeois power with the power of a mobilised working class”.
*************************************
In a second article we will look at the analyses the proletarian organisations make of the motives behind this war and the perspectives it opens up. Here we will find, alongside points of convergence, a number of disagreements. But these differences, significant though they are, do not diminish the importance of the fundamental class positions examined above. These positions are the product of many decades of political struggle and they are essentially what marks revolutionaries off from the world of bourgeois politics. They form the basis of proletarian solidarity against the derision, lies and outright repression which the bourgeoisie has above all aimed at communists in times of war. It is from this starting point alone that we can embark upon a fraternal debate about the areas that separate us. North
1 PO Box 338, Sheffield, S3 9YX. https://www.ibrp.org [44].
2 PO Box 52, Liverpool, L69 7AL.
The Taliban regime has been toppled. The followers of Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden have been driven from power in most of Afghanistan. We were told that the battle between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban would be long and hard, in particular for Kabul. But the Taliban have retreated without a real confrontation, crushed under American bombing, and are now under threat in their last stronghold in the region of Kandahar.
Faced with the apparently unexpected rapidity of events, the foreign ministers of the member countries of the UN met urgently in New York on the 12 November to call for the slowing down of military action and the acceleration of political action. Conversely America increased its pressure for the speeding up of the military offensive. Instead of trumpeting their satisfaction at the defeat of one the principle centres of ‘international terrorism’, and faced with a situation of growing anarchy, the imperialist powers in the security council of the UN made a worried appeal to the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban forces to “keep to their responsibilities concerning human rights” and to exercise power while “respecting people and assuring social peace”. We can only underline the sickening hypocrisy of these criminals giving lessons to the little gangsters and cliques that they supported for their own interests, when the great powers are the principle warmongers and their rivalries are directly responsible for the biggest massacres in history.
What the dramatic situation in Afghanistan shows once more is the free for all among the great powers. No consensus exists between them to eradicate international Islamic terrorism, which in any case is not the real game; nor are they interested in ‘humanitarianism’, which is only a pretext to settle their scores by bleeding populations white.
The pressure of American policy
The attack on the Twin Towers was the dreamt-for pretext for the US to apply a military policy already defined this summer by the secretary of defence Donald Rumsfield, i.e. pursuing its strategic priorities in Asia instead of Europe and the Mediterranean basin. In order to clearly affirm its authority in this part of the world, the United States has decided to crush the Taliban in Afghanistan by itself, with its own methods, only leaving a miniscule role to its best ally Britain, and excluding a country like France, which has been itching to take America’s hand in order to play its own pawns. Since September 11 Bush has constantly repeated that this war is going to be long, and that it’s not only against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The entire world is to become an ‘anti-terrorist’ hunting ground: “We have had a good beginning in Afghanistan, but much remains to be done (�) we will pursue them to the end” he declared a week after the taking of Kabul. Shortly after that he began growling menacingly towards Iraq, which many see as the next target, although a number of other candidates have been floated (Yemen, Somalia, etc).
The United States can boast today that it has won certain advantages. With the rapid victory of the ‘anti-Talibans’, it has for example silenced those European powers, headed by France, who criticised the validity of bombing and thus the whole of American strategy. By the same token it has gained a certain success with its own ‘public opinion’ by defeating the Taliban enemy with a policy of ‘zero deaths’. This has allowed Washington to better justify the dispatch of 3200 marines in addition to 500 special forces already on the spot, as well as a highly sophisticated and destructive military armada.
The imperialist free for all
However, everything is far from being a walkover for the White House. Contrary to the Gulf War where the US imposed its law on Saudi Arabia and brought to heel the western powers hostile to its intervention, the United States has clearly decided to act for itself. Looking at the different demonstrations of US force since the Gulf War, whether the spectacular defeat in Somalia in 1992, the attempt to bring American order to ex-Yugoslavia, or the massive war against Serbia in 1999 in the name of defending Kosovans, the US has been systematically opposed by their old allies of the western bloc. In such a context, in the breakthrough they have made in Afghanistan, the US policy is to ride alone. In order to block the pressure of its ‘allies’, the American government is presently supporting the Northern Alliance, until now supported more by Russia. At the same time Washington has deliberately not armed the more important but less dependable Pashtun factions closer to Pakistan.
Thus when Bush officially told the Northern Alliance on the 10 November not to enter Kabul, defence secretary Rumsfield at the same time told it to do as it wished, but “without committing exactions”. Faced with its rivals America throws oil on the fire of a chaotic situation.
The most eager bourgeoisie of all, the French, already eclipsed by the vote on the first resolution of the UN, has been able to justify its presence in Uzbekistan in the name of humanitarianism. It’s thus no accident that Paris has developed a whole press campaign on the danger of a relapse to the kind of anarchy we saw between 1992 and 1996, given the return to power of the Afghan warlords. Hubert Vedrine, French foreign minister, unblushingly addressed a threat to “those who are going to exercise power in Afghanistan”; henceforth they would be “under the vigilant gaze of the international community”. The French media, like the media in most of the western countries, who yesterday couldn’t find words bad enough to denounce the Taliban, has suddenly discovered their virtues since they at least established a state and a stable social situation. Another example of the vileness of the bourgeois class, whose truths vary according to its immediate interests.
The French army, presently isolated, rejected by the American pack leader, is thus impotent, back to square one, at the Uzbekistan border, whose head of state, supported by the United States, is dragging things out while waiting to draw profit from his part of the Afghan cake.
The consensus between the great powers is so uncertain that Great Britain itself, despite being in the first rank since the first day of the conflict, has decided “not to put its forces in place without the agreement of the United States and a clear understanding of what our troops will do in the framework of the military coalition”, and has stood down thousands of troops who were expected to be deployed. In fact, the British bourgeoisie, despite Blair’s declarations of allegiance, has been excluded by Bush from all the decisions taken about Afghanistan for the past two months (see the accompanying article in this issue).
The disappointment of France and Great Britain indicates the policy of the United States in this conflict: to elicit the ‘solidarity’ of its old cold war allies toward its own strategic vision, but to deprive them of any benefit that they might expect from this solidarity. Obviously the European powers who announced their support for operation ‘Enduring Freedom’ weren’t doing it to win Bush’s smile but because it was the only means of being there when the spoils were shared out. The little part of the cake that Blair or Chirac were hoping for was to deploy their troops on the spot. This would prevent the American godfather from enjoying the monopoly of military presence in this part of the world, which in turn would leave its hands entirely free to pursue its own exclusive interests. But Bush has apparently decided not to even grant them these crumbs. The only solidarity that the American gangster appreciates from his second strings is obedience.
Capitalism’s only perspective is chaos
The Bonn conference which began on 26 November between Europe and the different Afghan factions has the avowed aim of establishing a “multi-ethnic regime representing the diversity of the country”. In reality it is only an episode in the free for all now reigning in Afghanistan. But this conference is above all part of the wider free for all amongst the great powers who pretend to have a political solution for Afghanistan.
It is also significant that this conference is being held in Germany and not in Great Britain or in France who have been until now the most active in the military operation (even if modestly). By giving Germany the diplomatic prestige of organising this conference, the biggest power is trying to play its allies off against each other.
Not only is the Afghan powder-keg becoming one of the new zones of confrontation between the great powers, a major stake of the imperialist balance of forces in the period to come; it is also extending capitalist chaos further to the east. Afghanistan has always represented a key region between the Middle and Far East, and between three large countries, Russia, China and India, a region which has always been a stake between the eastern and western blocs during the cold war. Today the conflicts within Afghanistan are much more likely to spread to the neighbouring region. Thus the countries to the north, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, are trying to play off Russia and the United States. Pakistan’s rival factions, already wound up in the preceding period of American intervention, are going to tear into each other more than ever, while the loss of Islamabad’s Taliban ally will make it all the more vulnerable at the geo-strategic level. Meanwhile India is being caught between the pressure of the US and China, which has generously supplied its atomic capability to India’s arch-rival, Pakistan. The imperialist pretensions of India are thus pushing it to oppose the military presence of the US in a region where it wants to be one of the preponderant powers.
The future announced by the circling of all these vultures is sombre indeed. Once again they are going to sow death and chaos in the name of peace, humanity, and civilisation �in reality for the needs of a dying social system.
KW, 24 /11/01.
With the ‘liberation’ of Kabul, Kunduz and other Afghan cities, the ruling class is trying to paint the war in new colours. We are now being told that, thanks to American bombs, we can celebrate the fall of the Taliban regime and the arrival of Northern Alliance troops in these cities. The systematic bombing of Afghanistan is supposed to be a small price compared to the benefits obtained: women can throw off the burka (although very few have actually done so) and men can cut their beards and go to the pictures. This is the compensation the population is offered for the hundreds, perhaps thousands of ‘collateral’ deaths, the destruction of homes and of the already collapsing infrastructure, the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands who still face a winter of misery and starvation not to mention the political oppression that will undoubtedly be imposed upon them by the new gang that has taken over.
The Northern Alliance is the same clique which plunged the country into chaos after the defeat of the USSR. Its rule of rape and pillage resulted in many welcoming the Taliban as a better alternative. And already it has shown its real nature very clearly: pogroms against ‘foreign’ Taliban, the massacre of 500 prisoners after the so-called revolt at Marzer e-Sharif (aided and abetted by US air attacks), the execution of 150 prisoners at Takteh Pol, near Kandahar for ‘refusing to surrender’.
And yet we are being sold the line that the Taliban (supported by the US when it first came to power) was, along with bin Laden’s al-Qaida group, the real cause of the suffering of the Afghanistan population, the real cause of the present war - and that now at last the country can look forward to peace and reconstruction.
Lies! In Afghanistan, as in the Middle East, in Kosovo, in all the other so-called ‘humanitarian wars’, the civil population has simply been held hostage by the imperialist rivalries between different bourgeois states and gangs. The barbarism of war isn’t caused by a particular faction of world capital, but by world capital as a whole.
The defeat of the Taliban will bring no prospect of peace either in the short or the long term. On the contrary, ethnic conflicts are going to sharpen, further destabilising both Afghanistan and the region around it. The real perspective is one of growing chaos, whatever the ‘solutions’ cooked up by the UN or by the various imperialist powers, local or global. All of them, including the USA’s most ‘loyal’ ally, Britain, are trying to get a foothold in the country under the guise of ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘humanitarian aid’, and so prevent the US from achieving total and undisputed control of this key strategic region at the crossroads of Asia and the Middle East. The end of the present phase of the conflict will only whet the appetites of the competing imperialist sharks and thus prepare the ground for further competition and conflict.
War in the name of peace
War in the name of peace - it’s nothing new. The ruling class has been singing the same refrain since the beginning of the 20th century. The first world war was the ‘war to end war’. Balance sheet: 20 million dead. The second world war was fought in the name of democracy against fascism, civilisation against barbarism. Balance sheet: 60 million dead. Today, in the name of another noble cause, the ‘fight against terrorism’, capitalist civilisation has carried out new massacres that in turn will provoke even bigger massacres in the future, not only in Afghanistan, but throughout the entire region. Already the US is looking for the next target on its ‘anti-terrorist’ hit list, the current favourite being Iraq.
Peace is impossible in decadent capitalism. War has become the way of life of this doomed and dying system. Since the first world war, capitalism has demonstrated over and over again that it has exhausted all possibilities for peaceful expansion. At that point it entered into a permanent crisis of overproduction, and so into a state of permanent self-cannibalisation, acted out through the endless military rivalries of the various nation states, large or small. The more capitalism sinks into its economic contradictions, the more it rots on its feet, the more wars will multiply, revealing the utter bankruptcy of a system which has nothing further to offer humanity.
The only way to put an end to this hellish spiral is to put an end to capitalism before it destroys the planet. And this can only happen if the working class develops its struggles against the effects of the economic crisis, against poverty and unemployment, against the intensification of exploitation; if it comes to understand the intimate connection between war and the crisis of capitalism; if it reaffirms its own historic perspective, its political programme: the replacement of capitalism with a society without classes, frontiers and nations, a society based on the satisfaction of human needs and not on exploitation, competition, and the hunt for profit. Only in such a society can there be real and lasting peace on Earth. WR 1/12/01
From the very first moments, American bourgeois propaganda has likened the 11 September attack on the World Trade Center to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941. This comparison is laden with considerable psychological, historical and political impact, since it was Pearl Harbor that marked American imperialism’s direct entry into the Second World War. Like all bourgeois ideological myths, whatever the elements of truth that offer superficial credibility, this propaganda barrage is laced with half-truths, lies, and self-serving distortion. But this is no surprise. The politics of the bourgeoisie as a class are based on lies, deception, manipulation, and maneuver. This is particularly true when it comes to the difficult task of mobilizing society for all out war in modern times. There is considerable evidence that the bourgeoisie was not taken by surprise by the attacks in either case, that the bourgeoisie cynically welcomed the massive death toll in both cases for the purposes of political expediency in regard to implementation of its imperialist war aims, and other long range political objectives.
The machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie
All too often, when the ICC denounces the machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie, our critics accuse of us of lapsing into a conspiratorial view of history. However their incomprehension in this regard is not just a misunderstanding of our analysis, but � even worse � falls prey to the ideological claptrap of bourgeois apologists in the media and academia whose job it is to denigrate as irrational conspiracy theorists those who try to ascertain the patterns and processes within bourgeois political, economic and social life. However, it is not even controversial to assert that lies, terror, coercion, double-dealing, corruption, plots and political assassination have been the stock in trade of exploitative ruling classes throughout history, whether in the ancient world, feudalism or modern capitalism. Lying and manipulation, a mechanism employed by all preceding exploiting classes, have become central characteristics of the political mode of functioning of the modern bourgeoisie, which, utilizing the tremendous tools of social control available to it under the conditions of state capitalism, has taken machiavellianism to a qualitatively higher stage.
This is not to say all events in contemporary society are necessarily predetermined by the secret scheming of a small circle of capitalist leaders. But even with an incomplete consciousness, the bourgeoisie is more than capable of formulating strategy and tactics, and using the totalitarian control mechanisms of state capitalism to implement them. To turn a blind eye to this aspect of the ruling class offensive to control society is irresponsible and plays into the hands of our class enemies.
Machiavellianism of the American ruling class at Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor offers an excellent example of bourgeois machiavellianism at work. We have the benefit of more than half of century of historical research, and a number of military and opposition party-controlled investigations to draw on. According to President Roosevelt, 7 December 1941 was “a day that will live in infamy,” an example of Japanese treachery. It was used as a means to mobilize public opinion for war in 1941, and is still portrayed in the same way in the capitalist media, schoolbooks and popular culture. Nevertheless, considerable historical evidence demonstrates that the Japanese attack was consciously provoked by American policy. The attack did not come as a surprise, and the Roosevelt administration made a conscious decision to permit the attack both to occur and to sustain significant losses of life and naval hardware, as a pretext to secure America’s entry into the Second World War. A number of books and considerable material on the Internet have been published on this history. Here we will only review the highlights just to illustrate the operational aspects of bourgeois machiavellianism.
In 1941, the Roosevelt administration was anxious to enter the war against Germany. However, despite the fact that the American working class was firmly trapped in the grip of a trade union apparatus (in which the Stalinist party played a significant role) that had been imposed under state authority to control the class struggle in all key industries; and despite the fact that the working class was imbued with the ideology of anti-fascism, the American bourgeoisie still faced strong opposition to war within the population, not only within the working class, but even within the bourgeoisie itself. Public opinion polls showed 60% opposed to entering the war before Pearl Harbor, and the America First campaign and other isolationist groups had considerable support within the bourgeoisie. The decision to impose an oil embargo against Japan and the transfer of the Pacific fleet from the West Coast of the US to a more exposed position in Hawaii served to provide motive and opportunity for Japan to fire the first shots against the US, and thereby provide the pretext for direct American intervention in the imperialist war. As presidential advisor Harold Ickes put it in a June 1941 memo, “There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it not only possible but easy to get into this war in an effective way.” In November 1941, Secretary of War Stimson wrote about the plan to “maneuver them (Japan) into the position of firing the first shot without too much danger to ourselves.”
The report of the Army Pearl Harbor Board (October 20, 1944) described this conscious decision to sacrifice lives and equipment at Pearl Harbor, concluding that during “the fateful period between November 27 and December 6, 1941 numerous pieces of information came to our State, War and Navy Departments in all of their top ranks indicating precisely the intentions of the Japanese including the probable exact hour and date of the attack.” This information included:
� US intelligence sources learned on November 24th that “Japanese offensive military operations” had been set.
� On November 26, “specific evidence of the Japanese intentions to wage offensive war against Great Britain and the United States” were obtained by US intelligence.
� “A concentration of units of the Japanese fleet at an unknown port ready for offensive action” was also reported on November 26.
� On December 1, “definite information came from three independent sources that Japan was going to attack Great Britain and the United States, but would maintain peace with Russia.”
� On December 3, “the culmination of this complete revelation of the Japanese intentions as to war and the attack came� with information that Japanese were destroying their codes and code machines. This was construed�as meaning immediate war.”
This intelligence information was given to the highest-ranking officials in the War and State Departments, and shared with the White House, where Roosevelt personally received twice-daily briefings on intercepted Japanese messages. Despite the desperate urgings of intelligence officers to send a “war warning” to military commanders in Hawaii to prepare for imminent attack, the civilian and military brass decided against doing so, and instead sent what the board termed “an innocuous” message.
This evidence of prior knowledge of the Japanese attack was confirmed in numerous sources, including journalists and memoirs of participants. For example, a United Press dispatch published in the New York Times on December 8, included the following under the subhead ‘Attack Was Expected’:
“It now is possible to reveal that the United States forces here had known for a week that the attack was coming and they were not caught unprepared.”
In a 1944 interview, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, revealed that “December 7 was far from the shock it proved to be to the country in general. We had expected something of the sort for a long time.” On June 20 1944, British Cabinet Minister Sir Oliver Lyttelton told the American Chamber of Commerce, “Japan was provoked into attacking the Americans at Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history ever to say that America was forced into the war. Everyone knows where American sympathies were. It is incorrect to say that America was ever truly neutral even before America came into the war on a fighting basis.” Winston Churchill confirmed the duplicity of the American government rulers in the Pearl Harbor attack in this passage from his Grand Alliance:
“The President and his trusted friends had long realized the grave risks of United States neutrality in the war against Hitler and what he stood for, and had writhed under the restraints of a Congress whose House of Representatives had a few months before passed by only a single vote the necessary renewal of compulsory military service, without which their Army would have been almost disbanded in the midst of the world convulsion. Roosevelt, Hull, Stimson, Knox, General Marshall, Admiral Stark, and, as a link between them all, Harry Hopkins, had but one mind... A Japanese attack upon the United States was a vast simplification of their problems and their duty. How can we wonder that they regarded the actual form of the attack, or even its scale, as incomparably less important than the fact that the whole American nation would be united for its own safety in a righteous cause as never before?”
Roosevelt may not have anticipated the extent of the damage and casualties that the Japanese would inflict at Pearl Harbor, but he was clearly prepared to sacrifice American ships and lives, in order to arouse the population to rage, and to war.
In the second part of this article we will examine evidence for similar machiavellian intrigues around the Twin Towers horror.
JG, 1/12/01.
In WR 249 we reported the return of the ‘No War But The Class War’ group in response to the ‘war on terrorism’ and the first attacks on Afghanistan. As the basis of the group is opposition to war on a class basis, the ICC thinks that its re-appearance is positive and our militants have participated in the majority of NWBTCW’s London meetings. As in its previous manifestations NWBTCW contains all sorts of people. Some call themselves anarchists, some anti-capitalists, some communists and some who would resent any label being put on their views. This means there are a number of different approaches to the ‘anti-capitalist’ movement, to activism, and to political discussion. One thing that is shared by all NWBTCW participants is a rejection of the leftist campaign of the Stop The War coalition. In response Workers Power have attacked NWBTCW - at a meeting, in their November paper and in on-line discussion.
In the NWBTCW leaflet distributed at the 18 November Stop The War demonstration there is opposition to the leftist ideology of ‘anti-imperialism’ as it means giving support to capitalist regimes such as that of the Taliban, and leads into an anti-Americanism which writes off an important part of the working class. As the leaflet says: “That the left performs such a counter-revolutionary role does not surprise us - they are after all the left wing of capital”.
“This is sheer nonsense” says Workers Power. Their position is one of defending Afghanistan “without giving any political support to the Taliban”. This is what Trotskyists call ‘military support’, where workers and poor peasants are told they should die in the service of capitalism, without supporting the capitalists. The idea of ‘military support’ not being ‘political support’ is a completely false distinction in the face of the militarised class rule of the bourgeoisie. No faction of the ruling class is going to be upset that WP have withheld their ‘political’ support, just as long as workers are prepared to lose their lives in defence of their exploiters and oppressors. ‘Military support’ means military discipline against workers who struggle to defend their own interests. Workers Power preaches the unity of the classes for “a just struggle” in Afghanistan, against the class war on capitalism.
And the same applies in Britain. NWBTCW denounces the Stop the War coalition as a “cross-class alliance with religious leaders, MPs and other enemies of the working class”. WP thinks this is “startling” as they consider that it’s not necessary to be against capitalism to “defeat the government’s war effort”. But why do capitalism’s governments go to war? It’s in defence of their class interests. And it’s only by the working class becoming a conscious organised force to destroy the capitalist system that the imperialist war drive will finally be extinguished.
Workers Power condemns “the ridiculous alternative ... that the struggle against the war and the struggle against capitalism are one”. They attribute this view to ‘anarchism’, but in reality it is the view of marxism. In the First World War revolutionaries fought for the working class to turn the imperialist war into a civil war against the bourgeoisie - in contrast to the social democrats and anarchists who recruited for the war effort. In the Second World War revolutionaries defended the same perspective - in contrast to the Stalinists, Trotskyists, anarchists and anti-fascists who participated in the war drive of the Allied imperialisms. Today, revolutionaries are enthusiastic when people come together to discuss working class opposition to war and it’s only right that the Trotskyists of Workers Power should attack these efforts.
Car, 30/11/01.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/intreview.htm
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/economic-crisis
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-workers-organisation
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/128/historic-course
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/61/india
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/gulf-war-i
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/australasia
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/anti-globalisation
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/17/253/us-elections
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/263/culture
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/20/parliamentary-sham
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/collapse-balkans
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1846/macedonia
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/elections
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/anti-fascismracism
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/13/marxism-theory-revolution
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/56/middle-east-and-caucasus
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/58/palestine
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/intervention
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/16/state-capitalism
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/leftism
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/mobilisations-people
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/18/proletarian-struggle
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/29/class-consciousness
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/terrorism
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/war
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/afghanistan
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/911
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/32/decomposition
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/special-relationship
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/pacifism
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/nwbcw
[44] https://www.ibrp.org
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/135/internationalism
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/afghanistan
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-ii
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/trotskyism