In June, having wallowed in imperialist war under the pretext of 'humanitarianism', the bourgeoisie in the west claimed a great victory for 'democracy' over Milosevic. The so-called allies of the anti-Milosevic coalition were rushing to install anti-Milosevic coalition were rushing to install 'peace' and construct an 'independent, democratic Kosovo'. A grand project, but we saw very quickly what they really meant. The region has become one of the most militarised in the world. The great powers are staring each other out, lending rapid support to their own pitbulls, the local armed gangs under their control, in order to settle scores between themselves. And what about the dividends of peace? Before the military intervention, it was the Kosovans who were being massacred; for some considerable time the great powers were not unduly worried about it, until some of them saw it as a pretext for military intervention. Today it's the Serbs, under the 'protection' of the UN 'peacekeeping' force KFOR, who are being subjected to massive reprisals: 160,000 of them have fled Kosovo since the end of the NATO bombing and the entry of the 'allied' contingents. The tension between Serbs and Albanians has grown daily, fuelled by the various armed cliques who are under the orders of their bigger bosses.
Let's also recall the outraged cries of the western bourgeoisie when they uncovered the mass graves of the victims of the savage repression carried out by the Serbian army and militias. This was certainly yet another ghastly crime of nationalism. But the great western democracies are really poorly placed to denounce it. Weren't Karadic's Serb militias, responsible for the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, secretlyly supported by France and Britain? Since the outbreak of the war in Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 90s, the great powers have ceaselessly encouraged the rebirth of age-old ethnic tensions for their own imperialist interests. The noise they are now making about the horrors of war, even before the smoke from their bombings has cleared, is thus an expression of their extreme cynicism. But it has two very definite aims. In the first place, to again justify their military intervention whose professed objective - the return of the Kosovan refugees - doesn't stand up too well given the price being paid by the Serbian population in Kosovo. In the second place, to create an ideological smokescreen to forestall any questions by the population of the advanced countries, and by the working class in particular, about the real balance sheet of this operation. Questions such as: how many people were killed by the NATO bombings, what kind of misery will be endured by the survivors in a country which, according to the NATO strategists themselves, has been thrown back fifty years? The answer, that the bourgeoisie does not want us to come up with, is that the war has only aggravated chaos and suffering, and that this was totally predictable.
However much they tell us that Milosevic alone is responsible for all this suffering, the French, British, American, German and other imperialist bandits who are jostling foror influence in the region can't get off the hook. The Sarajevo summit, which legitimised the presence of their occupation troops in Kosovo, also expressed the local balance of forces between them, in the shape of the strategic importance of the zones attributed to each one.
At the same time, the bourgeoisie in the west also wants to hide the economic cost of its military intervention. At the beginning of the bombings, for example, figures like 200 million dollars a day were bandied around. Since then, silence. The air raids intensified, but there was no longer any question of evaluating their cost.
This is no accident. The bourgeoisie is paying close attention to the way this imperialist conflict is perceived by the workers. While the proletariat of the developed countries did not react openly against the war, neither did it adhere to the bellicose, democratic campaigns. And above all it did not give up the defence of its own class interests. This could be seen by the fact that even during the war itself there were struggles in different parts of the world in response to the economic attacks: for example, the railway workers' strikes in France in April, against the advise of the CGT and the CFDT; or, during the same period, the massive demonstration of 25,000 municipal workers in New York. In such a context, the ruling class does not want to throw oil on the fire and is doindoing all it can to prevent the proletariat from developing its consciousness on the following points in particular:
- it's essentially the working class which has to bear the cost of the war, through an accentuation of all kinds of economic attacks;
- the 'humanitarian' war in the Balkans is above all the expression of growing imperialist tensions between all countries, and in particular between the great powers;
- only the working class, through its struggle, can paralyse the murderous hand of the bourgeoisie.
The deepening of the capitalist crisis, and the resulting aggravation of economic attacks, will inevitably compel the working class to fight back. And it is in the development of the struggle for its conditions of existence that the proletariat will be led to understand that this struggle also demands that the military barbarity of the capitalist system be questioned and confronted.
September marked the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War. The ruling class has used the occasion World War. The ruling class has used the occasion to hold up the war as a defining moment of the 20th century, when democracy stood up to and defeated fascism in order to allow the development of human rights and democracy. This message has been given added weight by the Kosovo war, where we were also told that NATO was struggling against the 'new' Hitler and his fascist hordes. Communists would agree that the Second World War was a defining moment of this century but not for the same reasons. What the slaughter of 60 million people in the war showed was the depths of barbarity that decadent capitalism can plumb.
This war was not fought for democracy, but to defend imperialist interests. The mechanised destruction of World War One had marked the entry of capitalism into its decadence. By the beginning of the century capitalism embraced the whole planet and thus the only way that nations could expand was through the economic and military conquest of their rivals' markets and colonies. In 1914 Germany was a giant imperialist power with a minuscule empire; it launched the war to break the global grip of its main rivals, especially Britain. In 1939, Germany struck out again to overturn the humiliating limitations imposed on it by the victors of the previous war. On the other hand, its main rivals had the advantage of their huge economic power, in the case of the US. or their empire, in Britain's case. This enabled them to defend the status quo mainly y through economic and diplomatic means, and to appear as the innocent, peace-loving victims when Germany launched its desperate struggle for imperialist survival. "The democracies must never appear as the aggressor", as President Roosevelt said on the eve of war with Japan - which like German imperialism had to strike out because of its inferior imperialist position.
The myth of anti-fascism
In the First World War, Britain and its allies had justified the war as a struggle against the despotic "Hun" and for King and Country. To mobilise the population for the next war, after the experience of the Russian Revolution and the Depression, such unalloyed patriotism was not enough. The ruling class needed a much more sophisticated mystification and the fascist menace provided it. The war in Spain from 1936-39 showed the ideological power of anti-fascism as a means of mobilising the working class. The fact that all of the democracies had supported the rise of fascism in Germany, first as democracy's death squads against the German Revolution, then as a bulwark against Russia - Britain signed a naval treaty with Germany in 1935 - was carefully hidden. In this new alliance, Stalinist Russia (whose repression of the workers was no less bloody than Hitler's) became an honorary democracy and its pretensions to be being a socialist fatherland were uwere used as a further proof that the cause of anti-fascism was the cause of the working class.
Barbarism - fascist and democratic
For five years the world was shaken by an orgy of destruction and unprecedented levels of barbarity. The most obvious expression of this was the Nazi death camps and the wholesale genocide against the Jews, gypsies etc. But this barbarity was seized upon by the Allies at the end of the war to serve as an alibi for their own slaughter of millions of innocent people in the war. This slaughter took many forms: the policy of terror bombing all German cities ("An offensive of extensive bombing could sap the morale of the enemy providing it is directed against the working class areas of the 58 German towns which have a population of more than 100,000..." - Linndeman, Churchill's adviser, March 1942, quoted in International Review No 66); the bombing of cities in France and other occupied areas during the war and after D-day (for example Caen and St Malo were flattened in '44); the carefully calculated atomic liquidation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the forced starvation of millions in West Bengal in 1943 - approximately three million died when the crops were taken to feed the troops... As regards the death camps, the Allies didn't mention them until the end of the war, though they knew about them. In fact when theen the SS offered to release a million Jews in exchange for 10,000 lorries or other goods the Allies refused. In 1943, Roosevelt made clear the thinking behind such a refusal: "transporting so many people would disorganise the war effort" (Churchill's Memoirs, Vol 10). Thus, the refusal to help the Jews, the starvation and bombing of civilian populations were not signs of moral weakness but part of the logic of imperialism: nothing must get in the way of the war effort.
The war required the crushing of the working class
The defence of democracy was also the banner under which the international bourgeoisie crushed the revolutionary struggles of the world proletariat between 1917-27. This wave of struggle swept the ruling class from power in Russia, nearly toppled the bourgeoisie in Germany and rocked them internationally: it had been provoked initially by the horrors of the First World War. The ruling class, through a combination of brutal repression and the use of illusions in bourgeois democracy, smashed the revolution and so nullified the only force capable of blocking the road to another war. In 1939 the defeated proletarians were dragooned off to war in their millions; but towards the end of the war there was the beginning of a proletarian response to the war. In 1943, there was a massive wave of strikes in Northern Italy. The Allie Allies, seeing the class enemy raising its head, stopped their advance through southern Italy in order to allow "the Italians to stew in their own juice" (Churchill). This meant leaving the German bourgeoisie to brutally repress the strikes, while the Allies helped their Nazi class brothers by bombing Milan. Such acts of bottomless cynicism (fear of the German working class rising up at the end of the war was also a prime motive behind the terror bombing of German cities) enabled the Allies to strangle at birth the danger posed by the proletariat.
Even in these darkest of hours for the working class, revolutionary voices were raised against the war. Despite their small forces, groups of the communist left in Europe - who had make a complete break from both the official Communist Parties and the Trotskyists, political forces which had all enrolled in the anti-fascist war effort - carried out a determined internationalist intervention. They produced publications and leaflets calling for revolutionary defeatism; where possible these were distributed to troops on both sides. "Workers! The war isn't just fascism! It's also democracy and 'socialism in one country', it's also the USSR. It's the whole capitalist regime, which, in its death throes, is dragging the whole of society down with it! Capitalism can't give you peace; even when the war ends, it can't give you anything more.
Against the capitalist war, the class solution is civil war! Only through civil war leading to the seizure of power by the proletariat today can there arise a new society, an economy of consumption and no longer of destruction!
Against parasitism and the war effort!
For international proletarian solidarity.
For the transformation of imperialist war into civil war"
(The Communist Left, French Fraction - L'Etincelle (the Spark) No 1, January 1945, Quoted in International Review No 59)
Over the summer South Africa has been rocked by the largest wave of strikes since the ANC took power in 1994. With economic growth stagnant at 0.6%, unemployment running at 30%, and inflation at 7.3%, the new ANC administration led by Thabo Mbeki have committed themselves to "fiscal discipline", which can only mean attacks on the living and working conditions of the proletariat.
The working class is indeed coming under some very heavy attacks. While 350,000 new workers join the labour market each year, more jobs are being destroyed. Between 1996 and 1999, 365,000 jobs in the non-agricultural sector were lost. Between 1997 and 1999, 150,000 mining jobs went, with a further 28,000 scheduled to be cut in the next two months. In the same period, 110,000 manufacturing jobs, 22,000 textile and clothing jobs and 110,000 construction jobs have gone. Between 1998 and 1999, 110,000 service and transport sector jobs went, together with 10,000 in finance. The situation will continue to deteriorate as the economic crisis deepens.
If the recent election campaign served to divert workers' discontent onto the false terrain of 'democracy', this pent-up anger expressed itself very soon after the ANC's decisive victory. At the end of August, a two week strike by 26,000 Telecom and post office workers saw them win a pay rise of 8% from the Post Office. July saw some bitter struggles in the minefields with 4,500 workers on strike at the Oryx gold mine. The unrest continued in August with 12,000 miners on strike for a fortnight in protest against "retrenchments" due to the collapse in the price of gold. The mine owners con conceded an 8% pay rise. At the Columbus Steel mill in Middleburg 500 workers have been on strike since July 12; 150 workers have been arrested. There have also been strikes by railway workers, textile workers and Volkswagen workers.
But by far the largest strike was the two-day stoppage called by the public sector unions at the end of July. This involved up to 300,000 teachers, health care workers and others, in demand of a 10% pay rise. The ANC initially offered 5.7%, and then upped it to 6.8%, but with inflation at 7.3% this still amounted to a pay cut. After two weeks of further negotiations with the unions the ANC walked out of the talks and imposed the pay cut unilaterally. The unions' response was to call a day of 'protest' on August 24th that saw half a million workers out on the streets. Up to 35,000 demonstrators marched in Pretoria and in Cape Town 10,000 demonstrators brought the city centre to a standstill. There were also marches and mass meetings in Bloemfontein, Nelspruit, Pietersburg, Mafikeng, Durban and Bisho
Although these strikes show the depth of anger within the class the unions have once again done all they can to divide the workers and control their resistance to the economic attacks. The three public sector unions that called the two-day strike in July are affiliated to COSATU, the largest of the two main union federations. The other main union federateration is FEDUSA. One of its unions, the mainly white Public Servants Association, held a one day strike in early August which has helped to divide the workers in the public sector and keep them trapped behind their own unions. In the mines the NUM appear to have been provoking the bosses to sack 'rank and file' union officials and using this as an excuse to call out the rest of the workers. The CWU went to great lengths to keep the disputes against the Post Office and Telecom separate, using other tactics such as go-slows and working-to-rule in place of all-out strikes.
For the moment it looks as if the fire fighting tactics of the unions have worked and they have the situation under control. But the very existence of such struggles is significant in itself. The economic attacks by the ANC will help break the illusions many workers have in the 'peoples'' government, in black nationalism and democracy. The ANC are part of the bourgeoisie and will increasingly be seen as such. They have shown themselves to be ardent defenders of capitalism and will have no qualms in attacking the workers, whatever colour skin they have. But what of the unions? They continue to radicalise their image. At its recent congress, COSATU's acting president attacked the government for imposing its wage offer on the public sector workers. He was immediately rebuked by ANC Chairman Patrick Lekota, who said there was a "smell of a lack of revolutionary discipline, particularly since those opinions have never been raised in the movement". He added that complaints against the government should be made privately inside the alliance between the ANC, COSATU and the South African Communist Party (SACP). Lekota also suggested that public disputes between the ANC government and COSATU would confuse "mass based support". Any break-up of the tripartite alliance and criticism of the government was also opposed by SACP General Secretary Blade Nzimande: "The alliance still remains the only vehicle for taking forward the transformation in our country. To abandon the ANC would be to agree with those who try to present the ANC as a conservative, elite organisation". It is precisely because workers are beginning to see the ANC as a 'conservative, elite' (ie bourgeois) organisation that the unions have been compelled to take their distance from it. But it is the whole 'tripartite alliance' of ANC, unions and CP (together with a plethora of more radical leftist groups) which acts as capitalism's flood barrier against the proletarian tide.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/collapse-balkans
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/balkans
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-ii
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/south-africa
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/18/proletarian-struggle
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle