The ICC Section in France held its 20th Congress recently. Like all RI congresses, this plenary gathering of our territorial section had, of course, an international dimension. This is why delegations were present from different sections of the ICC, composed of comrades from several countries and continents, who were able to actively participate in the discussions. Also present at this Congress were a number of contacts and supporters of the ICC, invited to the various discussions (except those dealing with our internal functioning).
As with the plenary gatherings of our other territorial sections, an important part of the work of the RI Congress was devoted to the discussion of the activities of the ICC. Moreover, in the way in which in recent years our organisation has devoted its congress debates to analysing the evolution of the economic crisis and the class struggle in particular, this Congress of RI gave itself the task of conducting a specific discussion on the dynamics of the imperialist conflicts by placing them in a historical and theoretical framework.
The report and discussion on the imperialist conflicts gave itself the objective of making a balance sheet of the events that have unfurled since the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989 to see if it confirms the validity of the ICC's analyses.
After the collapse of the USSR, the ICC had asked the following question: with the demise of the Eastern bloc, would we now see the hegemony of one imperialist bloc and a decline in military conflicts? The ICC replied: No! Indeed, we have always rejected the thesis of ‘super-imperialism’, developed by Kautsky before the First World War, which was opposed by revolutionaries in the past (including Lenin). This thesis has been disproved by the facts themselves. "It was just as false when it was taken up and adapted by the Stalinists and Trotskyists claiming that the bloc controlled by the USSR was not imperialist. Today, the collapse of this bloc is not going to revive this kind of analysis: as a consequence of its collapse, the Western bloc is tumbling too." (International Review n ° 61, January 1990).
The debates at the congress showed that events have fully confirmed the validity of marxism: the disappearance of the Russian imperialist bloc was not going to open up an ‘era of peace and prosperity’ for humanity as claimed by the western ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie. Since 1989, the militarist barbarism of capitalism continued to unfold in the Middle East, in Africa, Pakistan, and even in Europe with the war in the former Yugoslavia.
The congress also examined the other analysis that the ICC had developed in 1989: if the historical tendency for the formation of imperialist blocs (characteristic of the period of capitalist decadence) was still correct, only Germany could be a new bloc leader opposing the United States because of its economic power and its strategic geographical location. But, as we said at the time, this hypothetical perspective could not be realised in an immediate sense, particularly because Germany has little military strength; it does not have nuclear weapons, needed to become the leader of a new imperialist bloc. Twenty-three years after the collapse of the USSR, the RI Congress noted that Germany has not emerged as a rival to challenge American power on the world stage (therefore this ICC hypothesis has not been verified). By contrast, it is China that is emerging as the main rival of the first world power. The congress has clearly stated that this is a new element that the ICC had not expected (and could not have foreseen) when the USSR collapsed. Nevertheless, although China increasingly shows its commitment to be a world power, it does not have the military might to oppose the imperialist aims of the United States. Its aggression towards the United States is expressed mainly on the economic and strategic level (as confirmed by the global competitiveness of its goods, its extensive international relations and its presence on the African continent).
The debates at the congress recalled that, although the military conditions for a Third World War have disappeared with the collapse of the USSR (which led to the collapse of the former American bloc created after the Second World War), armed conflicts haven't at all gone away and the death tally continues to rise globally. The only difference lies in the fact that these conflicts are no longer contained by a bloc discipline, as was the case during the period of the Cold War. Our analysis of the decomposition of capitalism, the final phase in the decadence of this mode of production, has also enabled the ICC to say that the tendency towards 'every man for himself' and the instability of the military alliances would form an obstacle to the formation of new imperialist blocs. If the militarist barbarism of capitalism has continued over two decades in the form of 'every man for himself' (including the emergence of terrorism as a weapon of war between states), it is precisely because no world power has been able in this time to play the role of world policeman and impose a new 'world order' as claimed at the time by U.S. President George Bush. The congress demonstrated that the predictions of the ICC and of marxism are totally confirmed: peace is impossible under capitalism. This is what we have seen since 1989 with the two Gulf wars, the massacres in the Middle East and in Africa, the conflict between India and Pakistan and for the first time since 1945, the outbreak of a European war, in the former Yugoslavia.
If the 20th RI Congress has found it necessary to remind us of the framework of analysis of the ICC, it is also to convey to young militants the method of marxism. Only this historical method and the scientific verification of the facts can enable us to avoid the pitfalls of empiricism based on a purely photographic picture of events from day to day.
The second discussion that animated the debates at the Congress was focused on the situation in France and led to the adoption of a resolution published in RI no.438. The 20th RI Congress was held shortly after the recent presidential elections in which François Hollande was the victor. The debates in the congress affirmed that this change of government would further increase the difficulty of the French bourgeoisie to manage the national capital. There is now a "socialist" government that will have to deal with the inevitable worsening of the global economic crisis. This "left-wing" government (that has moreover inherited the blunders of "Sarkozyism") can only continue to intensify the attacks against working class living conditions. The only "change" can come in the language and types of mystification used to implement the austerity policies of the new government, as the Resolution adopted by the congress clearly spelled out [1].
The debate on the report on the situation in France presented to the Congress also dealt with the dynamics of the class struggle. It showed that, despite the depth of the economic crisis and the significant deterioration of living conditions of the working class in France, as in all countries, the proletariat has not, as yet, launched itself into large scale struggles since the movement against pension reform in the autumn of 2011: "If, as in other countries, expressions of combativity are characterised by a dispersion of struggles, the brutal attacks on working class living standards that results from the economic crisis, will force workers into developing their struggles on a much broader scale. This is true for the working class of all countries but it is particularly true for France because the working class of this country has a long tradition of mobilising en masse. This tradition explains why, unlike what occurred in countries such as Spain and the United Kingdom, movements such as the Indignados or Occupy Wall Street have not taken place in France. The reason lies in the fact that, unlike the other countries, the militancy of the working class of this country had already produced massive mobilisations such as the struggle against the CPE in 2006 and more recently the one against pension reform. Thus, there was less of a feel for the need of such movements to express the discontent inside the working class, which tells us that the lack of movements similar to that of the Indignados in France, does not mean that the working class here is lagging behind, especially when compared to other developed countries. Despite the big handicaps that hinder the working class (loss of class identity and lack of perspective), the speed with which living conditions will continue falling in France, as in other countries, is going to push the exploited to try and develop their combativity in the manner we've seen recently with the massive protests that took place in Portugal, Spain and Greece. Even if the ideological garb which the bourgeoisie uses to push through its attacks will delay and make the explosion of struggles more difficult, it will not be enough to prevent them." (Resolution on the situation in France, Point 7).
The plenary assembly of our section in France is also the time when it must draw a balance sheet of its activities from the previous RI congress and draw up perspectives for the next two years. And, of course, in a centralised international organisation like the ICC, the activities of its territorial sections can only be examined in the general framework of the activities of the whole organisation. This is why the congress gave an important place in the discussion to the ICC activities (which we will report on eventually in our press after holding our next international congress).
On the basis of the report submitted by the central organ of the section in France, the Congress drew an undeniably positive balance sheet of all the RI activities (including its intervention in the class struggle, and among the politicised minorities). It was on the basis of this review that the Congress also had to examine with the utmost clarity the weaknesses and challenges that the ICC section in France had come up against in the last two years, and how it might overcome them:
The debates at the Congress, which took place mainly around the adoption of the Activities Resolution, gave an orientation for our section in France of improving its internal functioning to meet the challenges that lie ahead: the need to transmit to the new generation of militants the method of marxism and the acquisitions of the ICC at the political and theoretical level, as well as the organisational level. To ensure this transmission and the ‘organic’ link between generations, the Congress noted that the older generation is engaged in a permanent fight against the tendency to lose sight of its acquisitions (which we have already noted on several occasions previously). As the ICC has existed longer than any other international organisation in the history of the workers' movement, it is ‘normal’ that the acquisitions of its past experience can tend to be forgotten over time.
The Congress of the section in France adopted the perspective of having a better balance in its activity in order to allow all its militants to find time to read and reflect so that the entire organisation can collectively develop its theoretical debates (especially on new questions that can't be entrusted to ‘specialists’).
In the framework of rationalising our activity, the Congress also had a discussion on our territorial printed press and the Internet, and the role of these two media. Given that today our website is our main tool of intervention (our articles are put on line as soon as they are written), the Congress began a reflection about the reduction in the frequency/ regularity of the publication of the RI paper (whose sales only increase with interventions at demonstrations, while the numbers reading our articles on our website is not dependent on the vagaries of the class struggle).
Faced with the danger of immediatism, the Congress recalled that intervention in the ongoing struggles of the working class, as indispensable as it is, is not however our main activity. Like all revolutionary organisations of the past, the primary responsibility of the ICC is to prepare the conditions for the proletarian revolution, and in particular the conditions for the formation of the future world party. This is why our long-term work of building the organisation, must remain at the centre of our activity.
The Activities Resolution, adopted by Congress after a long debate (where all the militants were involved) said: "The activity of revolutionaries is not limited to the intervention in the immediate struggles of the working class and its minorities, but lies first of all in the ‘political and theoretical clarification of the goals and methods of the proletarian struggle, of its historic and its immediate conditions’. (see the point about our activity in our basic positions published on the back of our publications) (...) Our work of theoretical elaboration is by no means complete, far from it, and will never be completed. This theoretical clarification is still ahead of us and must remain our priority in the fight to build the organisation and in continuing to fulfill our responsibility as a vanguard of the proletariat. " (Point 14).
"...The struggle for communism doesn't just have an economic and political dimension, but also a theoretical dimension ("intellectual" and moral). It is by developing 'the culture of theory'; that is to say, the ability to permanently situate all aspects of the organisation's activities in a historical and /or theoretical framework, that we can develop and deepen the culture of debate internally, and better assimilate the dialectical method of marxism."
Clearly with this approach the ICC section in France has provided itself with the perspective of strengthening its organisational tissue and improving its functioning by developing a theoretical debate on the roots of its present and past difficulties.
"This work of theoretical reflection cannot ignore the contribution of science (and notably the social sciences, such as psychology and anthropology), on the history of the human species and the development of civilisation. In particular the discussion on 'marxism and science' was of utmost importance for us and we should continue with it and build on it in our reflections and in our organisational life." (Activities Resolution, Point 6).
As our readers know, in the year of the celebration of the ‘Darwin anniversary’, the ICC revived a tradition of the past workers' movement: an interest in scientific research and the new scientific discoveries, including those that provide marxism with a better understand of human nature. For it to build communism in the future, the proletariat must go to the "root of things" and, as Marx said, "the root of things for man is man himself." This is why we have conducted a discussion on "marxism and science" and have invited scientists to the last two ICC congresses.
Our interest in the sciences continued in the 20th RI Congress. A small part of this work was devoted to a debate with a scientist around a topic chosen by us: "Confidence and solidarity in the evolution of humanity: what distinguishes our species from the great apes?".
Camilla Power, teacher of anthropology at the University of East London (and collaborator with Chris Knight), had agreed to come to the RI congress and lead a discussion on this topic. In her very interesting and well-illustrated presentation, she explained the development of solidarity and confidence in the human species by recalling the Darwinian theory of evolution.
Everyone at the congress, including our contacts and the invited sympathisers, appreciated the materialist approach and the scientific rigour of the presentation, as well as the quality of the debate. For her part, Camilla Power warmly thanked the congress with these words before her departure:
"I just want to say thank you; it was very exciting for me to come to your congress. I learned a lot from the questions and answers from the different contributors. I was very impressed with the reading you have done, and what you have learned. I have always felt very committed to marxism and to Darwinism. I'm an anthropologist. We must combine an understanding of the natural history and social history. And anthropology is central to this. Marx and Engels spent a lot of time towards the end of their lives doing research in anthropology. It happened very late in life, but it shows that they recognised how important it is. It's very exciting to meet people who want to think scientifically about what it means ‘to be human’. This is a very important issue for everyone, for the international working class. For us, it is about rediscovering the nature of our humanity. We must not be afraid of science, because it is science that will give us revolutionary answers. Thank you very much, comrades."
We can now make a very positive assessment of the invitation of a scientist to our congress. It is an experience that our organisation will try and repeat as much as possible in future congresses.
The road leading to the proletarian revolution is a long, difficult and fraught with pitfalls (as Marx underlined in The 18th Brumaire [2]).
The work of the ICC is just as long and difficult as the struggle of the proletariat for its emancipation. It is all the more difficult as our forces remain extremely limited today. But the difficulties facing the communist organisations in carrying out their work has never been a factor of discouragement, as we see in this quote from Marx cited at the end of the Activities Resolution adopted by the 20th Congress of RI: "I've always found it in all those truly steeled characters, that once they have engaged in revolutionary work, they will continually draw new strength from defeat and become even more committed as the tide of history sweeps them along"(Marx, Letter to Philip J. Becker).
RI 22/12/12
At the start of 2013 the UK’s Coalition government voted in the latest tranche of austerity measures aimed at reducing the budget deficit. The Spending Review put forward by George Osborne factored in the planned attacks on welfare benefits and pensions. These attacks have been phased in by the British bourgeoisie over a number of years and didn’t start with the Lib-Cons coming to power. The attacks are plainly focussed on the working class.
To start, the government has placed a cap of 1% increase per annum for a period of three years on all welfare benefits. This has jettisoned the link of benefits to inflation that had previously been in place. When we consider that the present level for JSA is £71 (if you are 25 or over, £56.25 if under), an already impoverished situation is bound to get worse. The Department of Works and Pensions has insisted that this is not a cut, but is committed to establishing a further £10 billion ‘saving’ in the welfare bill in the coming period.
Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Works and Pensions, has promised to introduce a ‘Universal Benefit’ which will impose a £500 ceiling on all benefits for every household. This is currently being trialled in different boroughs in the country because the DWP does not have in place the infra-structure to implement it immediately. However, the cuts will still take place. These cuts will affect JSA, working tax credits, and pension credits. The Disability Living Allowance will be replaced by a ’Personal Independence Payment’.
The cuts to child credit payment will affect 2.5 million single women workers and a further million whose partners are in work. This in effect will be throwing millions of children into poverty. The Child Poverty Action Group has said that these changes will cut 4% from benefits over the next three years. The overall plan is to subsume all payments into the one ‘Universal Benefit’ payment. The government will thus cut its welfare bill. All the guff about lazy ‘shirkers’ versus hard-working ‘strivers’ is just so much camouflage to hide the attacks. According to another report, this time by the Children’s Society, “up to 40,000 soldiers, 300,000 nurses and 150,000 primary and nursery school teachers will lose cash, in some cases many hundreds of pounds” (Guardian 5/1/13) So much for targeting ‘shirkers’!
The government has placed a cap of £500 per household per week on the rent of a family home. In places like London this is impossible for many to find. According to the government’s own figures on risk assessment, this will affect some 2.8 million people. 400,000 of the poorest people will be included. 300,000 households stand to lose more than £300 per week.
The government in its ‘war on welfare dependency’ will hit the young hardest. The government intends to refuse housing benefit to the under 25’s. This is to effectively throw thousands of young people onto the streets.
The government is cutting its subsidies to local councils by 10% while leaving local authorities to implement the cuts in Council Tax payments. This will mean an average £10 per week that social tenants will have to find to supplement their rents. Those occupying dwellings which have a spare bedroom will have to find a minimum of £10 per week under the so-called ‘Bedroom Tax’ since they now fall into the “over occupancy” category. This will again hit young people the hardest. The homeless charity Shelter say that only 1 in 5 of rental homes are affordable to single people on benefits.
The Labour Party, far from being opposed to the cuts, have declared that they agree with the ‘basic principle’ that work for the jobless should be encouraged and should be part of a package for welfare benefits. In response to the government attacks Liam Byrne (shadow employment secretary) has come up with his own ‘workfare’ scheme. This scheme would see every claimant under the age of 25 who has been unemployed for more than two years forced into compulsory jobs. These workers would be paid the minimum wage only. Anyone who refused such Mickey Mouse ‘jobs’ would, under the Labour Party scheme, lose 13 weeks of benefit for the first time and 26 weeks of benefits for the second time. This would not only be a way of reducing the welfare benefit costs but would also force unemployed workers into the hands of unscrupulous bosses. It is reminiscent of the ‘Dole Schools’ of the 1930s where, to claim the dole, you had to attend ‘schools’ to perform menial work or lose what little benefit you could receive.
This Labour party scheme will only mean jobs for six months, after which workers will be back on the dole - and unemployment will still remain at the same massive levels, since most workers won’t qualify for the scheme anyway.
The attacks are only just beginning. The benefit cuts are part of a wider push to make the working class pick up the bill for their crisis. Governments all around the world, particularly in the centres of the Eurozone like Greece and Spain, are doing the same.
If the working class is to mount any resistance to this offensive, it must reject out of hand all attempts to make it feel responsible for the crisis of capitalism, and all the nauseating campaigns about shirkers and strivers, which are aimed at dividing the working class. Unemployment and poverty are the product of capitalism in crisis and the working class can only defend itself by developing its unity in the struggle against this system.
Melmoth 12/1/13
In September 2012 legislation came into force that made squatting in the UK a criminal offence. At the end of the month the first person was convicted under the new legislation and sentenced to 12 weeks in prison. He had come from Plymouth to London looking for work and had occupied a flat owned by a housing association.
Prior to this a number of Tory MPs and newspapers made much of cases where homes that were lived in had been squatted and used this to justify the new law, despite knowing that there were a number of laws already in place aimed at preventing squatting. This suggests that the new law is actually aimed at keeping squatters out of unoccupied houses, offices and other buildings, which are those usually squatted. It is also part of the wider campaign to divide and control the working class. This was given a new boost at the start of 2013 with the spat over ‘scroungers’ versus ‘strivers’ that preceded the vote to limit increases in most benefits to 1% a year.
No official figures on the number of people squatting have been collected since the mid 1980s, but a recent article in the Guardian reported that there are between twenty and fifty thousand people squatting, mostly living in long-term abandoned properties.[1] This is part of the larger picture of increasing numbers struggling to keep a roof over their heads. For example, the figures gathered about homelessness show increases in the last few years: in England 110,000 families applied to their local authority as homeless in 2011/12, an increase of 22% over the preceding year. 46% of these were accepted by the local authority as homeless, an increase of 26% over the preceding year. The figures for Wales and Scotland also show increases in both the numbers applying and being accepted.
The charity Crisis, from whose website the figures above are taken, underlines that these official figures are likely to be very inaccurate since the majority of those who are homeless are hidden because they do not show up in places, such as official homeless shelters, that the government uses to gather its data. Another indicator that housing is becoming an increasing problem is provided by the data about the numbers sleeping rough. In 2011 official figures show that over two thousand people slept rough in England on any one night in 2011, an increase of 23% over 2010. However, once again, the real figure is probably far higher as non-government agencies report that over five and a half thousand people slept rough in 2011/12 just in London, an increase of 43% over the previous year.
Globally, it is estimated that at least 10% of the world’s population is squatting. Many of the slums that surround cities such as Mumbai, Nairobi, Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro are largely comprised of squatters.[2] The types of accommodation, the services, or lack of them, available to inhabitants, the type of work undertaken and the composition of the population all vary, but collectively they show that, for all the goods produced and all the money swirling around the world, capitalism remains unable to adequately meet one of the most basic of human needs. The purpose of this article is to try and examine the reasons for this.
The starting point is the recognition that the form the housing question takes under capitalism is determined by the economic, social and political parameters of bourgeois society. In this system, the interests of the working class, and of other exploited classes such as the peasantry, are always subordinated to those of bourgeoisie. At the economic level there are two main dynamics. On the one hand, housing for the working class is a cost of production and thus subject to the same drive to reduce the costs as all other elements linked to the reproduction of this class. On the other, housing can also be a source of profits for part of the bourgeoisie, whether provided for the working class or any other part of society. At the social and political level, housing raises issues about health and social stability that concern the ruling class, while it can also offer opportunities for both physical and ideological control of the working class and other exploited classes. This was true in the early days of capitalism and remains true today.
The situation in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was a consequence of the full unfolding of the capitalist system that had been developing for several centuries previously. The industrial revolution that was a consequence of these early developments led to a transformation in all areas of life within the capitalist world, in the economy, in politics and in social life. The development of large factories led to the rapid growth of cities, such as London, Manchester and Liverpool, and drew in millions of dispossessed peasants, transforming them into proletarians. Advances in productivity and the cyclical crises that typified early capitalism periodically ejected hundreds of thousands of workers from employment while the expansion of production and its extension into new fields, driven on by the same crises, drew them back in. For the bourgeoisie this meant there was a readily available workforce: the reserve army of those ejected from work or newly driven from the land, that tended to help keep the cost of all labour down. For the working class the result was a life of exploitation, poverty and uncertainty.
The Condition of the Working Class in England [6] written by Engels after he moved to Manchester in 1842 and published in German in 1845, revealed the true face of the industrial revolution. A central theme of the work is an examination of the living conditions of the working class. Drawing on various official reports as well as his own observations he described the accommodation endured by workers in cities such as London, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Leeds: “These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of England, the worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns, usually one or two-storied cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as dwellings, almost always irregularly built…The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused method of building of the whole quarter, and since many human beings live here crowded into a small space, the atmosphere that prevails in these working-men’s quarters may readily be imagined.”[3]
He notes the gradations of misery within this overall picture. In St Giles in London, which was near Oxford Street, Regent Street and Trafalgar Square with their “broad, splendid avenues”, he distinguishes between the dwellings located in the streets and those in the courts and alleys that ran between them. While the appearance of the former “is such that no human could possibly wish to live in them” the “filth and tottering ruin” of the latter “surpass all description”: “Scarcely a whole window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-posts and window-frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed together, or altogether wanting in this thieves quarter…Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in stinking pools. Here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution, indiscriminately huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those who have not sunk into the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to resist the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings.”[4] In the new factory towns industrialists and speculators threw up houses that were poorly built, overcrowded and lacking in ventilation. Within a few years most had become slums, albeit profitable ones. From these and many other descriptions of the environment Engels goes on to consider the consequences on the physical and mental health of the inhabitants. He shows the link between mortality, ill health and poverty, examines the poor quality of the air breathed by the working class, the lack of education of their children, and the arbitrary brutality of the conditions and regulations of employment.
The pattern set by Britain was quickly followed by other countries such as France, Germany and America as they industrialised. Everywhere that capitalism developed the working class was housed in slums and in most of the great cities the working class areas were places of poverty, filth and disease from which the new bourgeoisie drew the wealth that allowed them to live comfortably and moralise according to their various tastes about the immorality and fecklessness of the working class.
In The Housing Question [7], published 27 years after the Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels acknowledges that some of the worst slums he described had ceased to exist. The principal reason for this was the realisation by the bourgeoisie that the death and disease that reigned in these places not only weakened the working class, and thus the source of their profits, but also threatened their own health: “Cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, small-pox and other ravaging diseases spread their germs in the pestilential air and the poisoned water of these working class districts… Capitalist rule cannot allow itself the pleasure of generating epidemic diseases with impunity; the consequences fall back on it and the angel of death rages in the ranks of the capitalists as ruthlessly as in the ranks of the workers.”[5] In Britain this resulted in official inquiries, which Engels notes were distinguished by their accuracy, completeness and impartiality compared to Germany, and which paved the way for legislation that began to address the worst excesses.
This was the era that saw the building of sewerage and water systems in towns and cities in Britain. If the impulse for these reforms came specifically from the self-interest of the bourgeoisie and more indirectly from the pressure of the working class and the need to manage the growing complexity of society, the possibility of realising them was due to the immense wealth being produced by capitalism. Engels notes that the interests of the bourgeoisie in this matter are not only linked to issues of public health but also to the need to build new business premises in central locations, to improve transport by bringing the railways into the centre of cities and building new roads, and also by the need to make it easier to control the working class. This last had been a particular concern in France after the Paris Commune and resulted in the building of the broad avenues that still characterise much of this city.
However, Engels goes on to argue that such reforms do not eliminate the housing question: “In reality the bourgeoisie has only one method of settling the housing questions after its fashion – that is to say, of settling it in such a way that the solution poses the question anew.”[6] He gives the example of a part of Manchester called Little Ireland that he described in The Condition of the Working Class in England. This area, which was “the disgrace of Manchester”, “long ago disappeared and on its site there now stands a railway station”; but subsequently it was revealed that Little Ireland “had simply been shifted from the South side of Oxford Road to the north side.”[7] He concludes: “The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place produces them in the next place also. As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist it is folly to hope for an isolated settlement of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the lot of the workers.”[8]
Subsequent developments in Britain seem, ultimately, to refute this since the slums of the 19th and early 20th century are gone. The First World War left a shortage of 610,00 houses with many pre-war slums untouched. In its aftermath local authorities were given powers to clear slums and to build housing for rent. Between 1931 and 1939 over 700,000 homes were built, re-housing four fifths of those living in slums.[9] Many of the new houses were built in large estates on the outskirts of major cities including Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and London. Some local authorities experimented by building blocks of flats. However, these efforts were dwarfed by the two and half million homes built privately and sold to the middle class and better off parts of the working class. Nonetheless, this did not mark the end of slums and severe overcrowding remained common in many working class areas. The Second World War saw a regression as house building all but stopped and inner city areas were exposed to bombing. The post war period witnessed the most concerted house building programme by the state in British history, which reached its peak under the Tory government of the late 1950s when over 300,000 council homes were built annually. The building of large tower blocks was a more prominent feature this time. Support was also given to private building and by 1975 52.8% of homes were privately owned, compared with 29.5% in 1951 (private rented properties fell from 44.6% to 16% during the same period).[10]
However, these developments were the product of their time and reflect the prevailing economic situation. In Britain and the other major capitalist powers, the post war period allowed some significant changes in housing. The post-war boom that was based on the very significant improvements in productivity that followed the destruction of the war gave the state the means to increase spending in a range of areas, including housing. As already noted, some important working class areas in cities that had been centres of production had been destroyed or damaged by bombing. The industries that developed after the war, such as car making, led to the building of new factories, often outside the old concentrations. This required the building of accommodation for workers. There was also a political motive in meeting social needs in order to reduce the risk of unrest following the war. In this the state drew on the failure of the policy of ‘Homes fit for heroes’ proclaimed after World War I, a failure that had helped to discredit the post-war government of Lloyd George.
However, the post war boom did not reach many parts of the world. These included some countries in the west, such as Ireland where severe poverty and slums remained until the economic boom that developed there in the 1980s. Above all, it encompassed what has been called the ‘Third World’, which essentially comprises those continents and countries that were subject to imperialist domination by the major capitalist countries. In short, most of the world. Looked at from this perspective it becomes evident that Engels’ argument is not just confirmed but confirmed on a scale he could not have imagined.
The present global situation is shaped by the structural crisis of capitalism that lies behind both the open recessions and the booms of the last 30 to 40 years, including the astonishing levels of growth seen in China, India and a number of other countries. This period has seen a reshaping of the whole world and its full analysis is far beyond the scope of this article. For many on the left this reshaping is a consequence of the triumph of neo-liberalism with its doctrines of reducing the state and supporting private enterprise. This is frequently presented as an ideologically based strategy and the crisis of 2007 as being of its making. While the critique of neo-liberalism and globalisation may describe aspects of the changes that have taken place in the global economy, it tends to miss the essential point that this transformation is the result of the response of capitalism to the economic crisis. It is the result of the unfolding of the immanent laws of capitalism rather than the outcome of ideology. It is this that links the situation in the old heartlands and the periphery, in the Third World and the first, in the countries experiencing economic growth and those not. The housing question everywhere has been posed anew by these developments.
Today, one billion people live in slums and the majority of the world’s population is now urban. Numbers continue to grow every day and the slums that surround cities of all sizes in these countries grow ever-larger. Most of these slums are in the third world and, to a lesser extent, parts of the old eastern bloc (what was once called the Second World). This is a new situation. In the book Planet of Slums, published in 2006, the author, Mike Davis, argues that “most of today’s megacities of the South share a common trajectory: a regime of relatively slow, even retarded growth, then abrupt acceleration to fast growth in the 1950s and 1960s, with rural immigrants increasingly sheltered in peripheral slums.” [11] The slow or retarded growth in many of these cities was a consequence of their status as colonies of the major powers. In India and Africa the British colonial rulers passed laws to prevent the native populations moving from the country to the city and to control the movements and living arrangements of those in the cities. French imperialism imposed similar restrictions in those parts of Africa under its control. It seems logical to see these restrictions as linked to the status of many of these countries as suppliers of raw materials to their colonial masters. However, even in Latin America, where the colonial hand was arguably less severe, the local bourgeoisie could be equally opposed to their rural countrymen and women intruding into the cities. Thus in the late 1940s there were crackdowns on the squatters drawn to urban centres such as Mexico City as a result of the policy of local industrialisation to replace imports.
This changed as colonialism ended and capitalism became ever more global. Cities began to grow in size and increase in number. In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with populations of over one million. By 2006 this had reached 400 and by 2015 is projected to rise to 550. The urban centres have absorbed most of the global population growth of recent decades and the urban labour force stood at 3.2 billion in 2006.[12] This last point highlights the fact that in countries such as Japan, Taiwan and, more recently, India and China this growth is linked to the development of production. One consequence of global significance is that over 80% of the industrial proletariat is now outside Western Europe and the US. In China hundreds of millions of peasants have flooded from the countryside to the cities, principally those in coastal regions where most industrialisation has taken place; hundreds of millions more are likely to follow. By 2011 the majority of China’s population was urban.[13]
This can give the impression that the process seen in the 19th century is continuing; that the early chaotic development will be replaced by a more steady progression up the value chain of production with resulting increases in wages, prosperity and the domestic markets. This is used to support the argument that capitalism remains dynamic and progressive and that in time it will lift the poor out of poverty, feed the starving and house the slum dwellers.
However, this is not the full story of the current period. In many other countries there is no link between the development of cities and the slums that go with them and the development of production. This can be seen by comparing cities by size of population and GDP. Thus, while Tokyo was the largest by population and by GDP, Mexico City, which was the second largest by population, does not figure in the top ten by GDP. Similarly Seoul, which is fourth largest by population also does not appear amongst the top ten by GDP. In contrast, London, which was sixth by GDP, is 19th by population.[14] Population growth in these cities seems more a consequence of wider economic changes, such as the reorganisation of agriculture to meet the requirements of the international market and fluctuations of the price of raw materials on the one hand and the often linked impact of war, ‘natural’ disasters, famine and poverty on the other. In some cities, such as Mumbai, Johannesburg and Buenos Aires there has actually been de-industrialisation. Davis also highlights the neo-liberal policies of the IMF as having a particular role in this process and in the impoverishment of many of the recipients of its ‘aid’ and ‘advice’.
The consequences can be seen in the shanty towns that encircle many cities in the south. While it is the megacities that hit the headlines, the majority of the urban poor live in second tier cities where there are often few, if any, amenities and which attract little attention. The accounts of the living conditions of the inhabitants of these slums that run through Planet of Slums echo parts of Engels’ analysis. In the inner cities the poor not only crowd into old housing and into new properties put up for them by speculators but also into graveyards, over rivers and on the street itself. However, most slum-dwellers live on the periphery of the cities, often on land that is polluted or at risk from environmental disaster or otherwise uninhabitable. Their homes may be made of bits of wood and old plastic sheeting, often without services and subject to eviction by the bourgeoisie and exploitation and violence by the assorted speculators, absentee landlords and criminal gangs that control the area. In some areas squatters progress to legal ownership and succeed in getting the city authorities to provide basic services. Everywhere they are subject to exploitation.
As in England in the 19th century there is money to be made from misery. Speculators large and small build properties, sometimes legally, sometimes illegally, and receive rents, which for the space rented are comparable to the most expensive inner city apartments of the rich. The lack of services provides other opportunities, including the sale of water. The inhabitants within the slums are divided and sub-divided. Some who rent shacks may rent a room to someone even poorer. Some may have jobs that are more or less precarious, others scrape a living through petty trading or providing services to their fellow inhabitants. This mass of proletarians, semi-proletarians, ex-peasants and so on constitute a reserve army of labour that helps to lower the cost of labour regionally, nationally and, ultimately, globally. They also pose a threat to capitalist order and offend the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie just as the slum-dwellers of Britain did in the 19th century.
The bourgeoisie continues to try to ‘solve’ the housing crisis that its society creates. Today as in the past this is always circumscribed by what is compatible with the interests of the capitalist system and of the bourgeoisie within it. On the one hand, there have been attempts simply to bulldoze the problem away, evicting millions of the poor, whether workers, ex-peasants, petty-traders or the cast-offs of society, and dumping them in new slums, or in the open countryside, away from the eyes, ears and noses of the rich. On the other hand, a whole bureaucracy has grown up aimed at solving the housing problem, including the IMF, the World Bank, the UN as well as both international and local NGOs; but they always do so within the framework of capitalism. Thus, new housing often benefits the petty-bourgeoisie and better off workers who have the contacts or can pay the bribes or afford the rent, rather than those it was nominally intended for. A priority is usually to keep costs low, resulting in either barrack-like housing schemes or reforming the slums without ending them. The latter has seen a particularly unusual alliance between would be radicals who want to ‘empower’ the poor and international capitalist bodies such as the World Bank who want to find a market solution that encourages enterprise and ownership.
Finally, there is the unspoken but ever-present objective of dividing the exploited through the usual mix of co-option and repression. Thus bodies that begin with radical demands, such as squatters’ groups, often end up collaborating with the ruling class once they have been given a few concessions. Amongst some ideologues there are even echoes of the past, such as the idea that the solution lies in providing the poor with legal entitlement to the land on which they are living. This echoes the ideas that Engels combated in the first part of The Housing Question that deals with the claims by a follower of the anarchist Proudhon that providing workers with the legal title to the property they are living in will solve the housing question. Engels shows that this ‘solution’ will rapidly lead back to the original problem since it does not change the basic premise of capitalist society that “enables the capitalist to buy the labour power of the worker at its value but to extract from it much more than the its value…”[15]
In the old capitalist heartlands of Western Europe and the US, the return of the open economic crisis at the end of the 1960s led to two major changes that impacted on the provision of housing for the working class. The first was the need to reduce the expenditure of the state, and especially the social wage paid to workers; the second was the shift of capital from productive investment to speculation where the returns seemed higher. We will focus on Britain in examining this, as we did at the start of this article, mindful of the fact that the particular form taken varies from country to country.
The tightening of state spending led first to a slow down in the number of council houses built and then, under Thatcher, to the selling of the council housing stock and the restriction of further building by local authorities. This is frequently portrayed as an example of Thatcherite dogma and it is indeed true that it was partly an ideological campaign to promote home ownership. But none of this began with Thatcher. We have already noted the efforts to promote home ownership by both Tory and Labour governments both before and after the Second World War, principally through tax relief on mortgages. The selling of council houses not only reduced the capital costs of building homes but also the revenue costs of maintaining them, since the new owner assumed individual responsibility for this. The idea that owning property would help to curtail the threat from the working class goes back further still. In The Housing Question Engels quotes one Dr Emil Sax’s paean to the virtues of land ownership: “There is something peculiar about the longing inherent in man to own land…With it the individual obtains a secure hold; he is rooted firmly in the earth…The worker today helplessly exposed to all the vicissitudes of economic life and in constant dependence on his employer, would thereby be saved from this precarious situation; he would become a capitalist…He would thus be raised from the ranks of the propertyless into the propertied class.”[16]
Financial speculation became ever more feverish as the struggle to find a profitable return on capital became more intense over the last 40 years. The financial deregulation that was a feature in both Britain and the US in the 1980s allowed the bourgeoisie to develop ever more complex forms of speculation. In the 1990s money flowed into a range of new instruments based on the extension of credit to ever larger parts of the working class. The development of sub-prime mortgages in the US typified this approach. Speculators thought they were safe because of the complex nature of the financial instruments they were investing in and the high rating given to them by rating agencies such as Standard and Poor. The collapse of the sub-prime market in 2007 exposed this as the illusion it always was and laid the foundations for the wider collapse that followed, whose effects are still with us. In Britain ever-larger mortgages were offered with ever-smaller deposits and relaxed financial checks. The result was that mortgages made up the majority of the growth in personal credit that helped to underpin the ‘booms’ of the 1990s and early 2000s (the longest period of post-war growth as Gordon Brown used to claim).
The first housing bubble burst in the 1990s and plunged many into negative-equity, resulting in a high level of repossessions. This time round the bourgeoisie has managed to limit the impact so there are less repossessions. However, housing has now become less affordable due to a combination of the lasting increases during the bubbles and the tightening of credit following 2007, with the result that many young people can no longer afford to buy. At the same time, the rented sector has reduced. Council provision is limited and tightly controlled, with eligibility criteria that condemn younger people to small and poor accommodation if not to B&B. The new limits on Housing Benefit will also force families to move away from their home area or face being thrown on the street where one of the few options is to squat one of the thousands of empty properties. Thus we return to where we began.
The housing question that confronts workers and other exploited classes around the world takes quite different forms in one country or another and often divides the victims of capitalism against each other. Between a young worker squatting on land prone to flooding or subject to industrial poisons on the margins of a city like Beijing or Mumbai and a young worker ineligible for a council flat in London or unable to get a mortgage on a house in Birmingham there can seem to be an unbridgeable gulf. Yet the question for all workers is how to live as a human being in a society subordinated to the extraction of profits from the many for the few. And for all the changes in the form and scale of the question the content remains the same. Engels’ conclusion remains as valid today as it was over a century ago: “In such a society the housing shortage is no accident; it is a necessary institution and can be abolished together with all its effects on health etc., only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned”[17]
North 11/01/13
[1]. Guardian 03/12/12, “Squatters are not home stealers”. Part of the ideological campaign whipped up to justify the anti-squatting law involved loudly publicising cases where individual homeowners retuned from a period of absence to find their house being squatted
[2]. Ibid.
[3]. The Condition of the Working Class in England, “The Great Towns”. Collected Works Volume 4, Lawrence and Wishart p.331.
[4]. Ibid., p.332-3
[5]. The Housing Question, Part ii “How the bourgeoisie solves the housing question”. Collected Works, Volume 23, Lawrence and Wishart, p.337.
[6]. Ibid. p.365.
[7]. Ibid. p.366.
[8]. Ibid. p.368.
[9]. Stevenson British Society 1914-45, chapter 8 “Housing and town planning”. Penguin Books, 1984.
[10]. See Morgan, The People’s Peace. British History 1945-1990. Oxford University Press, 1992.
[11]. Davis, Planet of Slums, chapter 3 “The treason of the state”, Verso 2006. Much of the information that follows is taken from this work.
[12]. Ibid., chapter 1, “The urban climacteric”, p.1-2.
[13]. UN Habitat, The state of China’s cities 2012/13, Executive Summary, p.viii.
[14]. Davis op. cit. p.13.
[15]. Engels op cit., p.318
[16]. Engels, op.cit. p.343-4.
[17]. Ibid., p.341.
On 11 January 2013, the French president François Hollande launched Operation Serval to wage the ‘war against terrorism’ in Mali. Planes, tanks and men armed to the teeth are now being employed in the southern Sahel. As these lines are being written, bombs and machine guns are speaking and the first civilian victims have fallen. The British bourgeoisie has pledged planes and logistical support to the French effort, and Cameron has not ruled out the deployment of British troops. And the ‘blow back’ from this conflict has already appeared in the shape of the blood-soaked hostage crisis in Algeria.
Once again the French bourgeoisie has thrown itself into an armed conflict in Africa. Once again, it is doing it in the name of peace. In Mali, it’s presented as a fight against terrorism and thus for the protection of the population. Quiet clearly, there’s no doubt about the cruelty of the armed Islamist gangs which reign in the north of Mali. These warlords sow war and terror wherever they go. But the motives behind the French intervention have nothing to do with the suffering of the local peoples. The French state is there only to defend its sordid imperialist interests. It’s true that the inhabitants of Mali’s capital, Bamako, have, for now, joyfully welcomed Hollande as their saviour. And these of course are the only images of this war which the media are disseminating right now: happy populations, relieved that the Islamist mafia’s advance towards the city has been halted. But this mood is not likely to last long. When a ‘great democracy’ passes through with its tanks, the grass is never green afterwards. On the contrary: desolation, chaos, and misery are the legacy of their intervention. The attached map shows the main conflicts which have ravaged Africa since the 90s and the famines which followed in their wake. The result is evident: each war – often carried out under the banner of humanitarian intervention, like in Somalia in 1992 or Rwanda in 1994 – has resulted in serious food shortages. It’s not going to be different in Mali. This new war is going destabilise the whole region and add considerably to the chaos.
“With me as President, it’s the end of ‘Francafrique’”. François Hollande’s blatant lie would make us laugh if it didn’t mean a new pile of corpses. The left has never failed to talk about its humanism but for nearly a century the values it drapes itself with have served only to hide its real nature: a bourgeois faction like all the rest, ready to commit any crime to defend the national interest. Because that’s what we seeing in Mali: France defending its strategic interests. Like François Mitterand, who took the decision to intervene militarily in Chad, Iraq, ex-Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda, Hollande has proved once again that the ‘socialists’ will never hesitate to protect their values – i.e. the bourgeois interests of the French nation – at the point of a bayonet.
Since the beginning of the occupation of the north of the country by the Islamist forces, the big powers, in particular France and the USA, have been egging on the countries of the region to get involved militarily, promising them money and logistical aid. But in this little game of alliances and manipulations, the American state seemed to be more adept and to be gradually gaining influence. Being outwitted in its own hunting ground was quite unacceptable for France. It had to react and react with some force: “At the decisive moment, France reacted by using its ‘rights and duties’ as a former colonial power. Mali was getting a bit too close to the USA, to the point of looking like the official seat of Africom, the unified military command for Africa, set up in 2007 by George Bush and consolidated since then by Barack Obama” (Courrier International, 17.1.13)
In reality, in this region of the world, imperialist alliances are an infinitely complex and very unstable web. Today’s friends can become tomorrow’s enemies when they are not both at the same time! Thus, everyone knows that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are the declared allies of France and the USA, but they are also the main suppliers of funds to the Islamist groups operating in the Sahel. It was thus no surprise to read in Le Monde on 18 January that the prime minister of Qatar had pronounced himself against the war France is waging in Mali and had questioned the pertinence of Operation Serval. And what can be said about superpowers like the USA and China who officially support France but have been whispering in the corridors and advancing their own pawns?
Like the USA in Afghanistan, there is every possibility that France is going to get stuck for an indefinite period in the quicksand of Mali and the Sahel in general (“for as long as necessary”, as Hollande put it). “While the military operation is justified because of the danger represented by the activities of the terrorist groups, who are well armed and increasingly fanatical, it is not exempt from risk in terms of getting bogged down and of instability throughout West Africa. Its difficult to avoid comparison with Somalia. Following the tragic events in Mogadishu at the beginning of the 90s, the violence in this country spread to the whole of the Horn of Africa and 20 years later stability has not returned there” (A Borgi, Le Monde, 15/1/13). This last point needs emphasis: the war in Somalia destabilised the whole of the Horn of Africa and “20 years later stability has not returned there”. This is what these ‘humanitarian’ and ‘anti-terrorist’ wars are really like. When the ‘great democracies’ brandish the flag of military intervention in defence of the ‘wellbeing’ of the population, of ‘morality’ and ‘peace’, they always leave ruin and the reek of death in their wake.
“It’s impossible not to notice that the recent coup in Mali was a collateral effect of the rebellions in the north of the country, which were in turn the consequence of the destabilisation of Libya by a western coalition which strangely enough has shown no remorse or sentiment of responsibility. It’s also difficult not to recognise that this khaki harmattan[1], which has swept through Mali, has also passed through its Ivorian, Guinean, Nigerian and Mauritanian neighbours” (Currier International, 11.4.12). Many of the armed groups who fought alongside Gaddafi are now in Mali and elsewhere, having stripped bare the arms caches in Libya.
In Libya too the ‘western coalition’ claimed that it was intervening for justice and for the good of the Libyan people. Today the same barbarism is being experienced by the oppressed of the Sahel and chaos is spreading. Alongside the war in Mali, it’s Algeria’s turn to be destabilised. On 17 January a battalion organised by an offshoot of Al Qaida in the Maghreb kidnapped hundreds of employees of the gas plant at In Amenas. The Algerian army’s reaction was to rain fire on both kidnappers and hostages, leaving dozens dead. After this butchery, Hollande spoke like any other warmonger in defence of ‘his’ side “a country like Algeria has responses which, it seems to be, are the most suitable because there could not be any negotiation”. This spectacular entry of Algeria into the war in the Sahel, saluted by a head of state caught up in the logic of imperialism, is an expression of the infernal cycle into which capitalism is falling. “For Algiers, this unprecedented action on its own territory has plunged the country a little deeper into a war which it wanted to avoid at all costs, out of fear of the consequences inside its own frontiers” (Le Monde, 18.1.130).
Since the beginning of the crisis in Mali, the Algerian regime has been playing a double game, as can be shown by two significant facts: on the one hand it is openly ‘negotiating’ with certain Islamist groups, even supplying them with a large amount of fuel during their offensive towards the conquest of Konna on the road to Bamako; on the other hand, Algiers has authorised French planes to fly over its air space to bomb the jihadist groups in the north of Mali. This contradictory position, and the ease with which the jihadists gained access to the most securitised industrial site in the country, shows just how much the Algerian state is succumbing to a process of decomposition. Like the states in the Sahel, Algeria’s entry into the war can only accelerate this process.
All these wars show that capitalism is descending into a very dangerous spiral which is a threat to the very survival of humanity. More and more zones are sinking into barbarism. We are witnessing a nightmarish brew made up of the savagery of the local torturers (warlords, clan chiefs, terrorist gangs...), the cruelty of the second string imperialist powers (small and medium sized states) and the devastating firepower of the big nations – all of them ready to get involved in any intrigue, any manipulation, any crime, any atrocity to defend their pathetic, squalid interests. The incessant changing of alliances gives the whole thing the look of a danse macabre, a dance of death.
This moribund system is going to sink deeper, these wars are going to spread to more and more regions of the globe. To choose one camp against the other, in the name of the lesser evil, is to participate in this dynamic which has no other outcome than the destruction of humanity. There is only one realistic alternative, one way to escape this hellish forced march: the massive, international struggle of the exploited for a new world without classes or exploitation, without poverty and war
Amina 19.1.13
In December 2012, the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported on a visit to Greece.
“In October 2012 the trauma therapist Georg Pier made the following observations in Greece: ‘Very pregnant women hurried desperately from one hospital to the next. But since they had neither any medical insurance nor sufficient money nobody wanted to help them give birth to their children. People, who until recently were part of the middle classes, were collecting residues of fruit and vegetables from the dustbins. (…) An old man told a journalist, that he could no longer afford the drugs for his heart problems. His pension was cut by 50% as was the case with many other pensioners. He had worked for more than 40 years, thinking that he had done everything right; now he no longer understands the world. If you are admitted to a hospital, you must bring your own bed-sheets as well as your own food. Since the cleaning staff were sacked, doctors and nurses, who have not received any wages for months, have started to clean the toilets. There is a lack of disposable gloves and catheters. In the face of disastrous hygienic conditions in some places the European Union warns of the danger of the spreading of infectious diseases.” (FAZ, 15/12/12).
The same conclusions were drawn by Marc Sprenger, head of the European Centre for the Prevention and Control of Diseases (ECDC). On 6 December, he warned of the collapse of the health system and of the most basic hygiene measures in Greece, and said that this could lead to pandemics in the whole of Europe. There is a lack of disposable gloves, aprons and disinfectant sheets, cotton balls, catheters and paper sheets for covering hospital examination beds. Patients with highly infectious diseases such as tuberculosis are not receiving the necessary treatment, so the risk of spreading resistant viruses in Europe is increasing.
In the 19th century many patients, sometimes up to a third, died due to lack of hygiene in hospitals, in particular women during childbirth. While in the 19th century these dangers could be explained to a large extent through ignorance, because many doctors did not clean their hands before a treatment or an operation and often went with dirty aprons from one patient to the next, the discoveries in hygiene for example by Semmelweis or Lister allowed for a real improvement. New hygiene measures and discoveries in the field of germ transmission allowed for a strong reduction in the danger of infection in hospitals. Today disposable gloves and disposable surgical instruments are current practice in modern medicine. But while in the 19th century ignorance was a plausible explanation for the high mortality in hospitals, the dangers which are becoming transparent in the hospitals in Greece today are not a manifestation of ignorance but an expression of the threat against the survival of humanity coming from a totally obsolete, bankrupt system of production.
If today the health of people in the former centre of antiquity is threatened by the lack of funds or insolvency of hospitals, which can no longer afford to buy disposable gloves, if pregnant women searching for assistance in hospitals are sent away because they have no money or no medical insurance, if people with heart disease can no longer pay for their drugs … this becomes a life-threatening attack. If, in a hospital, the cleaning staff who are crucial in the chain of hygiene are sacked and if doctors and nurses, who have not been receiving any wages for a long time, have to take over cleaning tasks, this casts a shocking light on the ‘regeneration’ of the economy, the term which the ruling class uses to justify its brutal attacks against us. ‘Regeneration’ of the economy turns out to be a threat to our life!
After 1989 in Russia life expectancy fell by five years because of the collapse of the health system, but also due to the rising alcohol and drug consumption. Today it’s not only in Greece that the health system is being dismantled step-by-step or is simply collapsing. In another bankrupt country, Spain, the health system is also being demolished. In the old industrial centre, Barcelona, as well as in other big cities, emergency wards are in some cases only kept open for a few hours in order to save costs. In Spain, Portugal and Greece many pharmacies no longer receive any vital drugs. The German pharmaceutical company Merck no longer delivers the anti-cancer drug Erbitux to Greek hospitals. Biotest, a company selling blood plasma for the treatment of haemophilia and tetanus, had already stopped delivering its product due to unpaid bills last June.
Until now such disastrous medical conditions were known mainly in African countries or in war-torn regions; but now the crisis in the old industrial countries has lead to a situation where vital areas such as health care are more and more sacrificed on the altar of profit. Thus medical treatment is no longer based on what is technically possible: you only get treatment if you are solvent![1]
This development shows that the gap between what is technically possible and the reality of this system is getting bigger and bigger. The more hygiene is under threat the bigger the danger of uncontrollable epidemics. We have to recall the epidemic of the Spanish flu, which spread across Europe after the end of WW1, when more than 20 million died. The war, with its attendant hunger and deprivation, had prepared all the conditions for this outbreak. In today’s Europe, the same role is being played by the economic crisis. In Greece, unemployment rose to 25% in the last quarter of 2012; youth unemployment of those aged under 25 reached 57%; 65% of young women are unemployed. The forecasts all point to a much bigger increase – up to 40% in 2015. The pauperisation which goes together with this has meant that “already entire residential areas and apartment blocs have been cut off from oil supplies because of lack of payment. To avoid people freezing in their homes during the winter, many have started to use small heaters, burning wood. People collect the wood illegally in nearby forests. In spring 2012 a 77 year old man shot himself in front of the parliament in Athens. Just before killing himself, he is reported to have shouted: ‘I do not want to leave any debts for my children’. The suicide rate in Greece has doubled during the past three years” (op cit)
Next to Spain with the Strait of Gibraltar, Italy with Lampedusa and Sicily, Greece is the main point of entrance for refugees from the war-torn and impoverished areas of Africa and the Middle East. The Greek government has installed a gigantic fence along the Turkish border and set up big refugee camps, in which more than 55,000 ‘illegals’ were interned in 2011. The right wing parties try to stir-up a pogrom atmosphere against these refugees, blaming them for importing ‘foreign diseases’ and for taking resources that rightfully belong to ‘native Greeks’. But the misery that drives millions to escape from their countries of origin and which can now be seen stalking the hospitals and streets of Europe stems from the same source: a social system which has become a barrier to all human progress.
Dionis 4/1/13
[1]. In ‘emerging’ countries like India more and more private hospitals are opening, which are only accessible to rich Indian patients and to more solvent patients from abroad. They offer treatment which are far too expensive for the majority of Indians. And many of the foreign patients who come as ‘medical tourists’ to the Indian private clinics cannot afford to pay for their treatment ‘at home’.
For a long time sport has represented a phenomenon that cannot be ignored from the fact of its cultural breadth and its place in society. A mass phenomenon, it's imposed on us through the tentacles of many institutions and results in a permanent hammering from the media. What significance can we give it from the point of view of a historical understanding and from the point of view of the working class?
In this first part we are going to try to give some responses by looking at the origins and function of sport in ascendant capitalist society.
The word "sport" is a term of English origin. Inherited from popular games and aristocratic entertainments, it was born in England with the beginnings of large capitalist industry.
Modern sport clearly distinguishes itself from the games, entertainments or physical activities of the past. If it inherited practices from them, it's because it oriented itself exclusively towards competition: "It was necessary that the development of the productive forces of capitalism were important enough for the abstract idea to make itself apparent to the masses from concrete works (...) similarly it was necessary for the long development of physically competitive practices so that little by little the idea of physical competition became generalised"[1]. The horsemanship of the aristocracy ended up with racecourses. It's around this that the stopwatch was invented, in 1831. From 1750, the English Jockey Club promoted numerous racecourses whose appearances continued apace. It was the same with running and other sports. Football came from the matches of Cambridge, 1848, and the Football Association appeared in 1863; tennis was transformed much later providing the first tournament in 1876. In brief, the new disciplines were all geared towards competition: "Little by little, sport broke free from the confused chaos and complexities of the time in order to form a coherent and codified body of highly specialised and rationalised techniques adapted to the mode of capitalist/industrial production"[2]. In the same way that wage labour is linked to production in capitalist society, sport incarnated "abstract materialisation made flesh"[3]. Very quickly the search for performance and records, along with bookmakers and betting, fed a diversity of sporting activity which became a real, popular infatuation, allowing the factory to be forgotten for the moment. This was the case for example with cycling and the Tour de France (a sort of a "free party") from 1903, boxing, football, etc. In line with the development of the capitalist system, transports and communications, sport took off in Europe as in the rest of the world. The extension and institutionalisation of sport, the birth and multiplication of national federations, harmonised with the heights of the capitalist system from the 1860s, but above all in the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the twentieth. It's a time when sport really internationalised itself. Football for example, was introduced into South America by European workers who were employed in the railway workshops. The first international sporting grouping was the International Union of Yacht Racing in 1875. Then others appeared: International Horse Show Club in 1878, International Gymnastic Federation in 1881, bodies for rowing and skating in 1882, etc. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894, FIFA (International Federation of Associated football) in 1904. Most of the international bodies were set up before 1914.
Contrary to accepted opinion, the capitalist version of sport doesn't represent a simple continuity with the ancient games. The Olympianism of the ancient Greeks was not at all based upon the idea of records or the obsession with performance against the clock. While confrontation with adversaries took place, it was connected with religious ceremonial and myth which had nothing to do with the material and mental universe of the contemporary games - even if the military aspect, the war between cities, and even the mercantile dimension. However, the modern Olympic Games, like those of Paris in 1900 or London in 1908, were already major commercial fairs. But, above all, these games took place in the context of the growth of imperialist tensions and thus helped to feed the ambient nationalism. The institution of the Olympic Games created in 1896, presented as a continuation of the tradition of the ancient Greeks, or corresponding to the democratic ideals displayed by Pierre de Coubertin and his celebrated saying, "the main thing is to participate", was just a con-trick. These modern games, reactivated in order to propagate chauvinist hysteria and militarism, are situated within the framework of capitalist alienation where everything rests on elitism and relations of domination linked to the production of commodities.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, sport is an almost exclusive practice reserved for the bourgeois elite, mainly around boarding school education. It's the occasion for the bourgeoisie to show-off, amuse itself and compete while allowing its ladies to ostentatiously exhibit their new outfits. It's the time of the big meetings at racecourses, aquatic sports. the first winter sports as at Chamonix and the proliferation of golf clubs. These creations are reserved for the bourgeoisie which then forbids access to them by the workers.[4]
From the very conditions of capitalist exploitation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the workers had neither the means nor the time to engage in sport. The frantic exploitation of the factory or the mine and the miserable state of daily life hardly allowed the reconstitution of labour power. Even the workers' children, frequently struck by rickets, had to be sacrificed in the factories from the ages of 6 or 7. The ten-hour day was introduced only later, not before 1900, and a day of rest was only obtained in 1906.
Initially the workers' movement showed a distrust towards the sporting practices of the bourgeoisie and kept a certain distance from them. But in striving to constitute itself into an autonomous class and with the development of its struggles for improvements and social reforms, the working class succeeded in wresting from capitalism some sporting activities which had been forbidden or inaccessible to it up until then.
The sport of the workers was born somewhat tentatively before the workers' sporting federations and clubs obtained through large-scale struggles were constituted[5]. Originally any gathering outside the factory, even of small numbers, was illegal. Popular games that risked disorder, like football, were forbidden by the authorities on public roads (the British Highway Act of 1835). The least attempt to play games appeared suspect and dangerous in the eyes of the bosses. The police saw them as 'troubling public order'. Initially confined to closed and discreet spaces, the sport of the workers was really born in the trade union movement and only developed after the Victorian era. In the workers' districts, sport was part of a whole ambiance of culture and sociability, a sense of belonging to a class. Physical activity was connected to the need to feed social bonds.
In a certain way, the workers associated sporting activity with a fraternal spirit which gave birth to mutual aid. On these grounds, workers' clubs multiplied (football and cycling) from the 1890s, and developed later in the 'red districts'. For the workers who were constituting themselves into an autonomous class, it was all associated with the struggle against the brutalisation of work, with the need to come together to educate themselves and develop their consciousness through political activity and propaganda. Thus in France, from its creation in 1907, the Socialist Sporting Union affirmed the necessity to "lay claim to the (...) the party, by organising sporting festivals and taking part in athletic events...". The Socialist Athletic Sporting Federation said the following year: "we want to create for the working class centres of amusement which will develop alongside the Party, and which will also be (...) centres of propaganda and recruitment"[6]. Through these sporting activities, militants of the working class were at the same time conscious of conducting a preventative struggle against the damage of alcoholism and the ravages of delinquency. For example, in its platform, the USPS (Sporting Union of the Socialist Party) underlined the necessity "to develop the muscular strength and purify the lungs of proletarian youth and give to young people healthy and agreeable amusements which can be a palliative against alcoholism and the bad habits among a part of young comrades (...) and develop among the young socialists the spirit of association and organisation"[7] .
In Germany, these same preoccupations were shared in the years between 1890 and 1914 by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was very influential in the education of workers, supporting the setting-up of clubs and sporting federations as well as union structures and labour exchanges. In 1893, the Gymnastic Union of the Workers came into being and was a counterweight to the ambient nationalism. Within a concern for unity and internationalism, the workers were even led to create a Socialist International of Physical Culture in Belgium in 1913.
Faced with these initiatives of the workers the bourgeoisie didn't stand with folded arms and looked to draw the workers, notably the youngest, into its own structures. The workers' movement was perfectly conscious of this as we see in France in an article of Humanité published in 1908: "The other political parties, above all those of the reaction, try by all means to draw youth towards them by creating patronages where athletics has a large role"[8]. For bosses with a paternal attitude, recuperating the physical activity of the workers to turn it to its profit rapidly became a major concern, notably in big industry. The baron Pierre de Coubertin was maddened by the idea of a 'socialist sport'. From this, in order to re-establish submission to the established order, sport became one of the major tools to hand. Thus the bosses created clubs in which the workers were invited to get involved. The mining clubs in England, for example, allowed for the stimulation of a spirit of competition between workers, of preventing political discussion and contributing to breaking strikes in the making. With the same spirit, bosses in France developed clubs like the cycling club of the enterprises of Lyon (1886), the football team of Bon Marché (1887), the Omnisport club of the motor factories of Panhard-Levassor (1909). There's also the case of Peugeot at Sochaux, of the Stade Michelin at Clermont-Ferrand (1911), etc: clubs intended as a means of social control, a way of policing the workers. We can note for example the boss of the Saint-Gobain mines "who wrote in its company notebooks who was present, attitudes during gymnastic work and political opinions". In the same spirit, the founder of Paris Racing Club in 1897, Georges De Saint Clair, thought that it was important to occupy sporting youth rather than "leave them to the taverns where they occupy themselves with politics and foment strikes"[9].
Much more fundamentally, and in a codified framework, sport allowed a body of workers to much more easily become an appendage to the machine and its nascent technologies. The body of the sportsman, like that of the workers, was in some way mechanised, fragmented, as in the various training moves. It was the mirror image of the division of labour and the movements inside the factory. The energy of the sportsman was like labour power in the factory; divided by discipline, and submitted to the rhythm of industrial time: "competition...presupposes that labour as been equalized by the subordination of man to the machine or by the extreme division of labour that men are effaced by their labour; that the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass."[10]. Modern sport fully participates in transforming man into a "carcass", into a record-breaking production machine. It allows the boss to exercise pressure over the worker which, at the same time, intensifies the discipline which tends to render the worker more docile and liable to forced labour. The workers' movement was capable of revealing and denouncing this capitalist reality of sport. It would do so for example regarding English football (professional since 1885) which was already becoming a form of commercial enterprise. The conditions of the players was seen as unacceptable and was compared to a kind of slavery[11].
Sport, as a cog of capitalist society, was also a privileged means of the dominant class in developing patriotism, nationalism and military discipline in the ranks of the workers. We already mentioned this with regard to the first Olympic games. If, on the margins, a public health current developed - under the impulsion for example of the Dr. Ph. Tissie (1852-1935) - concerned about the health of the population and more or less in line with eugenics, sport above all was used to strengthen the patriotic spirit and prepare for war. In Germany, 1811, Ludwig Jahn founded the Turplatz (gymnastic club) in a marked patriotic and military spirit. It succeeded in secretly creating a real reserve army, aiming to get around the lack of military manpower imposed by the French state. In the 1860's, the scholarly institutions militarised gymnastics and inculcated "order and discipline" (zucht und ordnung).
In France things went the same way with a chauvinist, military culture. L'Union des sociétés de gymnastique de France was created in 1873. And it's no accident that shooting developed as a complementary discipline at the same time (l'Union des sociétés de tir en France was founded in 1886). By June 26, 1871, Gambetta was already declaring that "We should have everywhere the gymnast and the soldier" in order to make "the work of patriots"[12].
After the defeat of Sedan and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, the French bourgeoisie prepared its revenge. Gymnastics entered schools through a law of January 27 1880. The famous Jules Ferry went on to be a great promoter of military education for the young sons of workers. From July 1881, the Parisian authorities organised children of communal boy's schools into 'scholarly battalions'. Four 'battalions' equipped (with uniform, berets of the fleet and blue jumpers) and armed, manoeuvred on the boulevard Arago surrounded by "a battalion chief of the territorial army" and 4 gymnastics teachers. On July 6 1882, following a decree legalising these practices, Jules Ferry addressed these children with the following: "Under the appearance of a trifling thing you are fulfilling a profoundly serious role. You are working towards the military force of tomorrow"[13].
This "military force of tomorrow", with all sporting forms, is what was served up as cannon fodder in the butchery of 1914. This led Henri Desgranges, the director of l'Auto to declare, flippantly and cynically, on August 5 1914: "All our little troops who are at the frontier at this time in order to defend the soil of our country, are they not re-living the adversity of international competitions?"[14].
During the massacres, we can recall an episode long passed over in silence, but depicted in the film Joyeaux Noël: an improvised football match in no-man’s land, between German and English soldiers who were trying to fraternise. They were brutally deported and repressed: this sort of sport the bourgeoisie and its officers did not want! The sole sporting 'contribution' to this monstrous war was to be the import by American troops in 1917 of volleyball and basketball. A poor consolation for more than ten million dead.
WH, October 29, 2012
Coming Soon! "Sport in Decadent Capitalism (1914 to today)".
Notes
[1]J-M Brohm, Sociologie politique du sport, 1976, re-edition: Nancy, P.U.N. 1992.
[2]Idem.
[3]Idem.
[4] There's a class cleavage then in the choice and practices of sport. Take cricket, we find within this discipline a similar cleavage in the choice of positions: thus the batsman came from a socially elevated class, whereas the bowlers and fielders are from the popular classes.
[5]Pierre Armand, les Origines du sport ouvrir en Europe, L'Harmattan 1994.
[6]The Socialist, no. 208, 9-16/5/1909.
[7]P. Clastres and P. Dietschy, Sport, societe et culture en France, Hachette Carre Histoire.
[8]Idem.
[9]Idem.
[10]Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.
[11]Le Socialiste, 8-15/12/1907 (https://chrhc.revues.org/1592#tocto2nl [17]).
[13]P. Clastres and P. Dietschy Sport, societe et culture in France, Hachette Carre Histoire.
[14]J-M Brohm, Sociiologie politique du sport: Nancy, P.U.N., 1992.
In the first article we saw that sport was a pure product of capitalism and that it had a real weight in the class struggle. In this part we will see that in the period of the decadence of this capitalist system it is an instrument of the state which is used to repress and keep down the exploited.
At the time of World War I, sport already had a global dimension. In a few decades it became a real mass phenomenon.
From 1914, in a totalitarian fashion, the state took charge of the great sporting events in each nation while at the same time organising, under the flags of the time, the mobilisation for global conflict: "World sport as a whole has become a vast organisation and administrative structure, a national business taken in control by the states regarding their diplomatic interests"[1]. Thus the states constructed and financed massive structures: the sporting complexes, stadiums of 80 to 100 thousand places, the biggest of which reached 200,000 (Maracana in Brazil), gymnasiums, race tracks and circuits (as the Indianapolis Motor Speedway its 400,000 places), etc. Real giant parks, cathedrals of concrete and steel rising up, full of supporters or "fans", as at the Olympic Games, football World Cups, or automobile Grand Prix, etc., each time using military organisation and the logistics of a real army in order to produce the spectacle. Means of transport and communication under the control of the state are used to channel the crowds towards the new, modern temples. A specialised sporting press was developed on an industrial scale in the 20th century, covering even the most minor sporting events. Radio, then television, became the privileged tool of propaganda to popularise sporting practices, to better promote the spectacle/merchandise and betting games. One of the symptoms of this reality is also the bureaucratisation of widespread sporting institutions: "to the point that today one cannot at all talk of sport without talking about sporting organisations (federations, clubs, etc.)"[2].
The change of towards mass sport from the 1920s thus operates in a context where state capitalism "has become this monstrous machine, cold and impersonal, which ends up devouring the very substance of civil society"[3]. Events are real commercial fairs of the state which each time is covered by a near-hysterical media. This explains the explosion of sporting players and spectators over the last 30 years. In France for example, there were only a million sporting licences in 1914. Forty years later these figures had doubled. They reached 14 million in 2000, seven times more than in the 1950s![4]. Today, some spectacles such as the Olympic Games can mobilise and hypnotise more than 4 billion television viewers in the world!
The capitalist states are the high priests of this new, universal religion of sport; a real 'opium of the people', a drug brought in over several decades with higher doses. In antiquity, the ruling class affirmed itself through religion and 'bread and circuses'. In the period of capitalism's decadence and mass unemployment, sport and its merchandise is itself a real religion aiming to console, distract and control pauperised working class families. More games and less bread, that's contemporary capitalist reality! For the populations and the working masses who still have the chance of a job, submitting to the timetables of the office or the factory, to the hell of exploitation and the depersonalisation of the large urban centres, the spectacle of sport or the practice of sport becomes, thanks to propaganda and marketing, 'indispensable leisure time'. Sport constitutes one of the privileged means to abandon oneself to the 'invisible forces of capital'. Thus sports, assimilated to 'free time', is only finally limited to a narrow simple means of subsistence and physiological conservation: "by degrading to the average the creative free activity of man, alienated work makes of his generic life an instrument of his physical existence"[5]. Lived as a sort of 'necessary de-stressing' for workers, sporting activity is only in reality a means of reconstituting the force of labour, as is sleep, food and drink! Moreover sport allows the workers to physically better resist the infernal timetables of the job. It thus allows one to face up to the conditions of exploitation, to 'forget' in the space of a moment the torments of capitalist society. The real paradox is that sport itself appears as hard work, timed by a clock, voluntary suffering closely linked to industrial rhythms and performance. For a growing number of adepts it's becoming a real addiction. Some workers even dedicate part of their holidays to collective sporting activity the content of which is close to army-type training. One again, sport expresses one of the realities of alienation by becoming, through its massive scope, almost indispensable and ends up generating a greater submission to capital. It's recognised that sport permits the growth of productivity and encourages the spirit of competition. From the daily grind of working to schedules, repetitive labour where workers are tired right out there's a real enterprise of guilt-making which is further accompanied by a moral lecture on 'health' and the necessity to 'fight against obesity' through sport. One should be 'competitive', 'dynamic' and 'performing'. This lecture is perfectly in tune with the necessities of the competitiveness of industry, which sponsors sporting clubs while, at the same time, looking to sell their cheap slimming products or other merchandise glamorised through the image of sport. During the summer of 2012 for example, at the Olympic Games in London, the British capital was turned into a massive commercial fair, a real hypermarket drowning us with all sorts of products. Everywhere in the stadiums and other sports complexes, the remotest corners were lit up with placards and publicity screens. The sportsmen and women were the sponsored sandwiches covered with publicity slogans for the big names and posed to show them off in the best light to the photographers and TV cameras. This mercantile exhibition was an integral part of the preparation for the games, in the same way as physical exercises. Sport is a product at the service of the casino economy, with TV rights, derivative products, managers, clubs close to the market, betting, etc. The increase in the number of competitions corresponds to an arena where the states and groups confront one another directly on a saturated market. Sport is no more about men and women, these are performing commodities who flit between clubs or federations, sometimes for astronomical sums without having a say. This commercialisation of depersonalised sport, where individuals are turned into deified stars, strengthens the cult of celebrity and is one of the expressions of the fetishism of the market. Whether he’s treated as a god or a mere thing, an object to be exchanged or exploited as capital, the professional sports-person is drastically subjected to the law of the market and profitability with the obligation of getting results. They are pushed towards a permanent extreme exploitation, pressured and constrained towards doping and planned self-destruction (we will confront these issues in a third article).
These robotic sports machines, in a context where the state plans de-politicisation and subservience, feed the grandiose spectacles to the extreme, for a sort of glorification, an apology for the established order and the ruling class. In all the big sporting spectacles, the politicians and people of the state are in the front rows in order to reap the political fruits of these stupefying grand-scale programmes. From the grand Nazi spectacles to the Stalinist exhibitions of yesterday, going into the mega-shows of the democracies today, these sporting masses conjure up a dream, facilitate idolatry, by promoting the effort of muscle and sacrifice. They serve above all to fog the spirits, as does religion, and divert all reflection on the conditions of exploitation under capitalism. They're often aimed at obscuring truths which might result in criticism or class struggle, even to the point of acting as recruiting sergeant for war, as was the case in the 1930s.
Sport is clearly a counter to any form of subversion, aimed mainly at youth, notably in schools where it's used as a form of brain-washing. If this was done to the point of caricature in the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, it is presented much more subtly in the democracies. After May 68 in France, "the short-lived Minister of Sport, M. Nungesser, explained (...) that it was necessary to make sport compulsory in schools" in order to maintain social peace. In the same sense, M. Cornec, president of the student parent federation, stated in 1969: "In just a year France has been overturned by the revolt of youth. All those looking for solutions to this complex problem should know that no equilibrium can be found without the preliminary solution of school sports"[6]. In the same vein, the journal explains that it's better "to be involved in sport" than "to physically confront the police and the CRS". Subduing youth, using sport through its symbols and its universe of superstitions - all that is very much in the optic of official democratic bourgeois ideology, with its myth of the "self-made man", of someone who can individually bring out his own qualities thanks to a military discipline. This egalitarian perspective, where 'everyone has a chance' conditional on their own work, can only dull the senses of those looking for a radical critique of society and those looking to develop a political critique of the established order.
At the same time as contributing to dulling the senses, sport prepares for a more direct repression. Sporting occasions have become pretexts for the deployment of imposing police forces in the name of the defence of public order and security. In the context of urban populations already submitting to a real police state, a total surveillance with the presence of armed police and soldiers regularly patrolling public places, stations for example, this strengthening of manpower around stadiums appears normal. Through the regular presence of cops and their vehicles, the state has gradually got people used to accepting the massive presence of the forces of repression of which it has the monopoly. We should remember that in the 1970's, the democratic states of western Europe didn't have words harsh enough to stigmatise the 'fascist regimes' and the 'dictatorships of Latin America' for organising the visible presence of the forces of order and the military in public places, notably around sports stadiums, as was the case in Argentina, Brazil or Chile at the time. In 1972, at the Winter Olympics of Sapporo in Japan, the presence of 4000 soldiers quartering the area was already noted. Today these same practices have not only been surpassed long ago in the lesson-giving democratic countries, but strengthened still more by much more draconian measures. It's no longer possible to go to a stadium without going through a real cordon sanitaire of cops, being hassled, body-searched and accompanied by security.
The Olympic Games of London in the summer of last year gave an illustration of this militarisation with the image of a real situation of war. Twelve thousand police and 13,500 military were active, that's to say more British troops than deployed in Afghanistan (9,500). More than the 20,000 soldiers of the Wehrmacht at Munich in 1936! To the British figures we can add another 13,300 private security agents. A ground-to-air missile was openly set up on top of a residential building in a densely populated zone for use as an armed air-shield. On the streets, special lanes were arranged for the official vehicles and forbidden to the hoi-polloi (with a fine of £135, 170 euros if you crossed the line). Finally, the security controls were worthy of the ordinary paranoia of all states: systematic body-searches on entering all sites, forbidden to bring water, drinks, etc., into the controlled zones, tweeting banned, sharing or posting photos of the event in whatever manner forbidden![7]
If one looks back, history shows that sporting complexes are real nerve centres allowing a part of the population to be penned in for repressive and even murderous ends. One of the most famous of these is the "Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv'" in France, a round up of Jews organised by French police and militias during summer 1942. This celebrated cycle-racing track thus served as a fortified camp where the Jews were penned in and held before their deportation to the extermination camp of Auschwitz where they were to meet the summits of horror. After the Second World War there are numerous examples of sporting enclosures at the service of death and state repression. In France, after the Vel' d'Hiv', other sporting installations were used for massacres of the Algerian opposition in October 1961. About 7000 of them were taken by force to the Palais des Sports de Versailles and the Pierre de Coubertin stadium in Paris, to be beaten up with a good number ending up as bodies thrown into the Seine! In June 1966 in Africa, opponents of the Mobutu regime were executed in front of a crowd in the stade des Martyrs in Kinshasa. In Latin America, stadiums weren’t only used as outlets for hungry populations. The Stadio nacional in Chile was also used a place for interrogations and a sorting-centre for the concentration camps after the coup of General Pinochet (September 1973). In Argentina at the time of the World Cup in 1978, with the military junta in power, the amplified noises of the terraced speakers covered up the screams of those being tortured. Still today a good number of stadiums have a macabre history. In 1994, the Amahoro stadium of Kingali was one of the theatres of the Rwandan genocide in which France was a big accomplice. This is shown in the witness of the commandant, R. Dallaire: "When the war began, the stadium was full and, at a given moment, there were up 12,000 people, 12,000 people trying to live. Everywhere you looked there were people and clothes, and the situation seemed to escape any control. It became like ... a concentration camp... We were there to protect them, but at this time they were dying in this great stadium of Rwanda"[8].
More recently still, the football stadium in Kabul has see numerous horrors: hangings from the crossbars, mutilations for those accused of thieving, women accused of adultery stoned on the ground, etc.[9] In South Africa, the new Cap stadium, inaugurated for the 2010 World Cup, includes cells to imprison 'agitated' supporters!
Even if sporting practice is not always directly implicated, there does exist some sort of link between control of the spirit by sport, the sporting infrastructures and the barbarity of decadent capitalism. The exacerbation of the contradictions between the classes means that the stadiums are more and more often places of confrontations and tensions, even during the course of sporting events. We've thus seen real killings, revolts break out in football stadiums. In Argentina, portraits of the disappeared have certainly been quietly brandished on the terraces at the time of matches. But as often, almost everywhere open tensions are expressed with violence, particularly at the stadium exits. Many are the situations where the worst ideologies, xenophobia and the most unbridled nationalism, have led to the real acts of barbarity..
In the next and last article in this series we will come back to these aspects in order to deepen the analysis.
WH (November 8 2012)
In this article, we said: “During the civil war in Spain, the Bernabeu stadium in Madrid served the Phalangists as a privileged arena in which to shoot Republican soldiers”. It seems that this information was doubly wrong. Firstly, the Bernabeu stadium wasn’t built and inaugurated until after 1945. Secondly, in order to instil a real terror in the population, planned executions generally took place in discrete locations: against the walls of cemeteries, near communal ditches, by the roadside, in the woods, etc. In short, anywhere where you could easily bury or ‘disappear’ opponents of the regime.
It was above all the arenas or the Plazas de Toros which were used for this kind of imprisonment. The most well known was the one in Badajoz where the Phalangists played at ‘bullfighting’ with the prisoners, sometimes giving them the ‘estocade’ with a sword. On a more secondary level the stadia made it possible to bring prisoners together when they were in transit. This was the case for example with the Metropolitano stadia (in 1939 in Madrid, this was the home of a rival to Réal), which served as an assembly point for those on the way to concentration camps. After the war, the function of the stadia was above all to provide circuses when there was not much in the way of bread.
Despite this factual error, we think that the overall sense of the article, which tries to show the link between the ‘practical’ side of the stadia in the work of repression and their symbolic dimension in the ideological subjugation of the masses, remains perfectly valid.
ICC 4.5.2013
[1]J-M Brohm, Sociologie politique du sport, 1976, re-edition: Nancy, P.U.N., 1992.
[2].Idem.
[3]The Platform of the ICC.
[4]C. Sobry, Socio-economie du sport, coll. De Boek.
[5]K. Marx, 1844 Manuscripts.
[6]Quoted by J-M Brohm, Sociologie politque du sport, 1976, re-edition: Nancy, P.U.N.
[7]See the article on the Olympic Games on our website: https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1301/olympic-games [77]
In the previous article in this series, we saw that sport concentrates nationalist ideology and that it is an instrument at the service of imperialism. It expresses all the monstrosity of decadent capitalism.
The "political neutrality" of sport is a myth! Along with the media, sport never ceases to cultivate the identification with chauvinism and nationalism. Sport is even a privileged means for distilling this noxious poison. After the trauma of the First World War, "the gap between the private and the public world was (...) filled in by sport. Between the two wars, sport as a mass spectacle was transformed into an interminable succession of gladiatorial combats between persons and teams symbolising the nation states"[1] .
Nationalism has thus been permanently maintained against the exploited by the rituals and symbolism which surround sporting encounters. Using sport for propaganda ends, contrary to what official history tells us, is not a particularity of Nazism or Stalinism, but a practice generalised throughout every country. To be convinced of it we only need to recall the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008 or London 2012, or the entry of the national football teams at big matches. The grand sporting spectacles provoke strong, collective emotions that are easily manipulated towards the universal codes of national symbols: "Which gives to sport a unique effectiveness in inculcating nationalist sentiments (...) it is the facility with which individuals (...) can identify themselves with the nation being symbolised"[2]. International competitions are often accompanied by military music and are systematically preceded or closed by hymns: "These matches are confrontations where the national prestige is at stake"[3]. In brief moments of sacred unions social classes are 'dissolved', denied, as spectators openly called to stand up and sing with their eyes fixed on the national flag or on the team which embodies it through its colours.
In South Africa for example, in the name of the fight against Apartheid, the colours of the rugby team were thus used by Mandela's ANC to channel the class struggle towards the national mystification[4]. Great sporting victories can also prolong this principle of blind submission in a sort of collective hysteria (as was the case with the victory of the Spanish team during the football World Cup of 2010, that of Italy some years earlier, or those of the French team in 1998...). The celebrations of these occasions are infested by flags and prefabricated national myths[5]. Finally, the war of titles, medals, nation against nation, tries to maintain, as at the front during military conflicts, this mental dependence by sowing the seeds of xenophobia and nationalist violence. Sport embodies the spirit of the state and is accorded the same ritual as the army: decorations, citations, medals, march pasts... As Rosa Luxemburg said during World War I: "The national interests are only a mystification having the aim of putting the labouring masses at the service of their mortal enemy: imperialism"[6].
Sport has always been used in imperialist confrontations. The Olympic Games in Berlin 1936, for example, were the spearhead of the militarisation prefiguring the aggression of the Axis military bloc which fought for its 'vital space'. For the Nazis, the champions had to be "warriors for Germany, ambassadors of the 3rd Reich". According to Hitler, the sporting youth of Germany should be "as resistant as leather, as hard as Krupp steel"[7]. Sport prepared you for imperialist war and thus justified the "superiority of the Aryan race", despite the victories of the black American sprinter Jesse Owens, who made the Fuhrer explode with anger[8]. Every sporting meeting was a means for the Nazi regime to symbolically wave its flag over its coveted territories.
For the opposing military camp, sports meetings were also a way to physically and mentally prepare the resistance. Stalinist and social-patriotic organisations tried to organise a 'counter-Olympics' in Barcelona in July 1936, aiming to dragoon proletarians behind the flag of anti-fascism. If this sporting project didn't happen, due to the Francoist coup d'etat, it didn't stop the ideological adhesion to the future bloc of the Allies. Sport thus made its own small contribution, in one way and the other, to what was to become a new world butchery resulting in over 50 million deaths!
On the still-smoking ruins of this terrible conflict, the world sporting arena would then be dominated by the Cold War right up to the end of the 1990s. International competitions were now marked by the context of East-West opposition, the latter not that far from turning into a nuclear holocaust. During the whole phase of decadent capitalism, sports meetings had all been marked by tensions of an imperialist nature. The universality symbolised by the Olympics is a sinister piece of hypocrisy; these games represent a real basket case of divergent capitalist interests. In the 1920s for example, the vanquished, like Germany, were removed from the Games through revenge and reprisal. In 1948, Germany and Japan were excluded. At the Games of 1956 in Melbourne, the boycott by some countries (Holland, Spain, Switzerland...) was allowed, demonstrating a political reaction against Russian tanks in Budapest and feeding Cold War tensions. Let's note, on the other hand, that at Mexico in 1968, during the massacre of 300 students at the Place of Three Cultures, the great democracies were allowed to participate without any concern for the Games! In 1972, the Olympic Games in Munich were the theatre of acts of war. The Israeli team was taken hostage by Palestinian commandos: the outcome was a bloodbath, the massacre of 17 people! In the 1980's, the Moscow games, a real military hymn to the glory of the Stalinist regime, was boycotted by a good number of western allies of the rival American bloc, including China, this time in opposition to the Russian intervention in Afghanistan! Balanced on the side of American imperialism, China also made use of the political dimension of sport with its "Ping-Pong" diplomacy. Today, the growth of the power of China onto the world imperialist scene, especially faced with the United States, is accompanied by very aggressive sporting records, revealing its heightened ambitions.
Every time, the states engaged have always presented athletes doped to the eyebrows as if they were 'at war', with 'the enemy', whether in the framework of rival military blocs, within the same bloc or, after their disappearance, between nations. Football has largely illustrated these tensions, feeding the climates of hatred in the crowds. Among the plentiful examples we can take up is the tragic episode of the match between Salvador and Honduras in 1969 for the 1970 World Cup qualifiers. This match was the prelude to a war between the two countries which ended up with at least 4000 deaths!
Sport more and more clearly expresses the rottenness of a bourgeois society without a future. The absence of perspectives, unemployment and misery gave birth in the 1970's, and above all the beginning of the 80's, to hordes of xenophobic hooligans under the influence of alcohol, sowing terror and hatred, particularly in the stadiums of the big cities hit by the crisis. They have regularly infested football matches in Britain and elsewhere, as was the case for example in May 1990 with the match of Dynamo Zagreb against Red Star Belgrade which ended up with an arranged battle resulting in hundreds of injuries and several deaths. This in itself contributed to the aggravation of the already existing nationalist tensions which eventually unfolded in the war in ex-Yugoslavia. Among the most radical Serb supporters was their war boss Arkan, specialist of ethnic cleansing and the nationalist later looked for by the UN for crimes against humanity.
Outside of this episode, of which there are many more examples, popular bourgeois sense has it that this growing violence comes from the fact that sport is more and more "gangrened by money and mafias". This obscures the reality that sport is itself a mafia and a pure product of capitalism! Football receives massive investments from a financially hypertrophied sector, from billionaires and broadcasting companies, behind which, in the final analysis, is the state itself. In the context of a catastrophic economic crisis, sport becomes a real casino game, the very symbol of a bankrupt mode of production. The big international sporting authorities, as the IOC (International Olympic Committee) or FIFA (International Federation of Football Associations), the big clubs that feed the hooligans and gangsters, some of which play the role of eminent representatives, the politicians and shady speculators, are involved in one scandal after another where the embezzlement of funds is only the tip of the iceberg[9]. Some brutal financial operations for building sporting complexes, as in China and South Africa in these last years, also witness the widespread violent practice of the expropriation of people living in misery who are thrown out onto the street for the occasion.
Every state and every kind of mafia speculates in the economic sector of sport and gambling. Some even buy entire clubs, like Qatar’s purchase of Paris-Saint-Germain, putting a great deal of money into this unproductive sector. It's the same in Britain for the big clubs. During the transfer window, a real 'meat market' of footballers, the transactions regularly serve to launder 'dirty' money. According to Noel Pons (a specialist in criminality): "Football clubs are of a type CAC 40, the phenomenon of money laundering must thus be at the same level as it can be for these enterprises"[10].
The other side of this coin is super-exploitation: aside from the overpaid stars and the shady agents, thousands of young sportsmen find themselves without contracts and pauperised. This is notably the case with some very young Africans who have been enticed with wonderful promises of life in Europe, who are then unscrupulously thrown onto the streets and who sometimes become paperless. Then there are the fixed matches which have affected an incalculable number of European and world matches. Italian football, which has a lot to answer for, shows that numerous players and leading figures are clearly linked to the political world and organised crime. Even sports which are presented as clean by the media, such as handball in France, are subject to some fixing and corruption. It's more the case with tennis, where the players paid in the corridors do not hesitate to lose matches in order to get more money.
All these gangster practices, which in the last instance are those of the state, don't stop there. They sometimes even threaten the security of the spectators, as for example in 1985 tragedy of the Heysel Stadium in Belgium. Here, under the weight of excited supporters, barriers gave way killing 39 with more than 600 injured! These tragedies are not unique. Built at low cost, overcapacity and crowd movement lead to catastrophes such as at Hillsborough, Sheffield in April 1989: 96 dead and 766 injured. At the Furiani Stadium in Bastia on May 5 1992, down to a question of profitability, a temporary terrace suddenly collapsed just before kick-off leading to 18 deaths and 2300 injured.
We don't want to finish without raising the frantic and scandalous exploitation of the athletes themselves, in particular being doped to their physiological limits and even to death. At the beginning of the last century, doping substances such as strychnine was already commonplace. Very soon, for the state, "sport became the experimental science of body output which demanded the creation of laboratories of sporting medicine, perfecting experimental material and various tools and opening specialised sporting institutes"[11]. In 1967, everyone was shocked by the death of the British cyclist Tom Simpson on the slopes of Mount Ventoux, but doping had been institutionalised for a long time. As the old doctor of the Tour de France, Jean-Pierre Mondenard underlined: "At this high level sport is a school for cheating". Today the medical aspects and doping are intimately linked. Steroids, anabolics, EPO, blood-transfusions are used all the time in competitions, surrounded by the medical teams of all the big stables. It goes without saying that this phenomenon affects all sports at the highest levels. Rugby for example is concerned with the formation of young players. This is shown in the testimony of a young player of 24 years old, today sick, his career broken: "We arrive at the training centre. Here there's much talk about ‘real’ doping. Some of my team-mates are injecting themselves with substances, some veterinary products provided by a doctor who tours around the club. There's talk of clenbuterol and salbutamol, calf and bull anabolics. You don't buy anything on the internet but try to meet the right person. The doctor makes the first injections and you do the next". He adds precisely: "Omerta is already very strong in the sporting milieu and it's even more so when it concerns adolescents"[12]. Used up and prematurely ruined, sports people suffer from very serious troubles: cardiac and circulatory incidents, renal and hepatitis insufficiencies, cancers, impotence, sterility, problems for pregnant women, muscular-skeletal sicknesses, etc. A good number of athletes of the highest level die before forty! The example of the East German women swimmers, which already revealed all the brutality and capitalist horror of state planning, has since been largely surpassed. All the same, we can recall that like other athletes, these swimmers were doped by force, unknown to themselves. Watched by the special services (Stasi, KGB) in all their movements, these athletes could not communicate with people in the west on pain of reprisals against their families. Some became 'men' on the hormonal level (strong pilosity, libido trouble, hypertrophied clitoris...) thanks to pills and daily injections given by specialised doctors[13]. They were subjected to all sorts of blackmail and to silence by the state. One survey counted more than 10,000 victims! Today we have the very well known case of cycling, the Festina affair[14]. Here the deception of the riders is as much as victims and scapegoats, as the cyclist Lance Armstrong who has recently been stripped of his titles with the loss of 7 of them including the Tour de France and his yellow jerseys. This is witness to the fact that the laws of capital stop at nothing in front of profit.
The 'sporting ethic' is that of capitalism! It can be summed up in a few words: ambition, cheating, corruption, hypocrisy, fight to the death, violence and brutality! The paraplegic sports and games show the same logic of a sordid competition unfolding into a sort of 'war of the prostheses'.
Sport today reveals itself only a pure illusion. It is at best a reactionary utopia and at worst a real swindle.
The attempts to utilise sport in decadence to promote workers' struggle has only accentuated an opportunist gangrene and stimulated conservative forces. There can't be any 'proletarian sport'. At the time of the world revolutionary wave of 1917-23, the setback of the programme of the Red Sport International (founded in 1921) was linked to the historical and political conditions of the moment, those of decadent capitalism and the tragic isolation of the revolution in Russia. The sporting Central Asian Games, organised in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) by the Bolsheviks in 1920, aroused nationalist sentiments and strengthened the local states, a real mosaic of the ex-Russian empire, which only increased political confusion. Worse, it solidified the cordon sanitaire of the Entente troops around the besieged Russian soviets. The Spartakiades of Moscow in 1928, completed the defence of the 'socialist country' through sporting games which already embodied the counter-revolution. The only real 'triumph' was that of Stalinism, exhibiting with pride his 'Bolsheviks of Steel'! Marx underlined that communist society would make "the practical demonstration of the possibility of uniting learning and gymnastics with work and vice-versa". This in the perspective of realising "the complete man"[15] If Lenin and the Bolsheviks defended such a vision at the beginning, they didn't have the time or the possibility of seeing this work accomplished. Stalinism created the opposite: a medicalised caricature of monstrous robots! It's naturally difficult to glimpse the communist society of the future. But it is certain that sport, such as it exists now, will disappear in a society without social classes. It's much more difficult for an amateur to conceive of that today because it's dependent on seeing a world without addictions[16]. To all sorts of artificial separations between physical and intellectual activity, to forced opposition between players and spectators, must be substituted a human world, unitary, creative and free. Thus, "the complete man" dear to Marx, will find in communism his true social nature: “Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being…Just as through the movement of private property, of its wealth as well as its poverty – of its material and spiritual wealth and poverty – the budding society finds at hand all the material for this development, so established society produces man in this entire richness of his being produces the rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses – as its enduring reality.”[17]. This 'rich' man will thus express his true individuality within a superior harmony, through the dialectical unity of body and mind.
WH (December 20, 2012)
[1]E. Hobsbawn, Nations and nationalism since 1780, History folio.
[2]Op. Cit.
[3]J-M Brohm, Sociologie politiqe du sport 1976, re-edition: Nancy, P.U.N., 1992.
[4]Note that we are now seeing German national flags in the crowds at sporting occasions, conforming to new German imperialist ambitions; this after years of quiet imposed by an awkward past.
[5]As for example the "black-blanc-beur" ideology in France: an allusion to the tricolore "bleu-blanc-rouge" and national unity, beyond skin colour and origins, behind the Republican state in a type of sacred union.
[6]Junius Pamphlet, 1915.
[8]There wasn't much more enthusiasm for him from the American bourgeoisie which was then marked by divisive and bloody racial prejudices. In fact, black minorities were marginalised from the 1904 Olympic Games in Saint-Louis. Special competitions called "anthropological days" were even organised and reserved for those the "officials" considered as "sub-human". Victims of segregation and lynchings, black minorities later reacted by struggling on the basis of identity, including the famous "Black Panthers", embodied on the podium of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, by the raised fists and black gloves of the runners Smith and Carlos.
[9]One scandal among others was the candidatures of Salt Lake City to the Winter Games of 2002, where members of the IOC accepted bribes to influence the election.
[11]J-M Brohm, Sociologie politique du sport, 1979, re-edition: Nancy, P.U.N., 1992.
[12]www.rue89.com [84]
[13]Note that the East German trainers even got their sports women pregnant; at three months, the women would have produced more testosterone and would have performed better!
[14]In order to give an idea of the phenomenon of doping today, an example: the record of the Australian Stephanie Rice (400 metres at Peking in 2008) is inferior by 7 seconds to that of the ex-champion of the east , Petra Schneider (1980 in Moscow), reputed to be loaded up with steroids!
[15]Marx quoted by J-M Brohm, Sociiologie politique du sport 1976, re-edition: Nancy, P.U.N., 1992.
[16]In July 1998, the boss of the cycling team Festina, Willy Voet, was arrested by customs. He was carrying ampoules of EPO, amphetamine capsules, solutions of hormone growth and flasks of testosterone.
[17] Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, ‘Private property and communism’
Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne restarted an old ‘debate’ when he said that all those dependent on the welfare state for their existence were ‘scroungers’. The Labour party along with some of Osborne’s LibDem coalition partners, were astonished at the apparently provocative outburst, which relegated the greater part of the working population to the same status as the unemployed. For Osborne, the unemployed are shirkers by definition of course, and most of his critics have difficulty distinguishing their position from his. It has become fashionable to be tough on the unemployed, and the Labour party is making sure that it fits in with the fashion. This means that in contemporary public discourse everyone has to look as though they believe that unemployment is always a matter of choice.
Thus the Labour party has launched its latest idea of giving some of the longer-term unemployed 6 months of guaranteed work experience. This is not a fixed idea – they are just talking about it. And it only actually seems to apply to a little over 100,000 of the unemployed. But the basic idea is to show how hard they are being on the unemployed, by insisting that anyone offered the opportunity will have to take the job. All media presentation concerning this initiative made it very clear that the purpose was to present the Labour party as just as unyielding as the Tories in attacking the unemployed.
But the main thrust of Labour’s response to Osborne has been to say that the majority of recipients of benefit are not unemployed and not feckless shirkers. It might seem very reasonable and persuasive to argue that those who are working for a living are not shirking and so should not be denounced as scroungers. But we should note that this argument contains, albeit very quietly, the implication that there is indeed a fundamental difference between unemployed and employed workers, and carefully does not address the question of whether unemployment is voluntary. Otherwise they would have to address the issue of how unemployment actually does arise – which is a very awkward question, since it puts into question the very viability of capitalism.
We can note, in passing, that in the 1930s, when the crisis was much less developed than it is now, but when unemployment was at a much higher rate in terms of the working population, the bourgeoisie were braver than they are now. They actually did have a real, public discussion on this very question. Keynes took the view that massive, long term unemployment could not be put down to workers refusing to accept lower wages, pointing out that workers could not actually negotiate their wages individually with a prospective employer as was assumed in the economic models of the time. It was this insight that was the foundation of the Keynsian revolution in economics. In his general theory Keynes tried to show that a capitalist crisis such as the Great Depression of the 1930s was actually possible. This was ‘revolutionary’ from the bourgeoisie’s point of view, because the economic theory of the day said that such a crisis was impossible. Keynes thought the conventional view unsatisfactory given the empirical reality of the Great Depression.
The reason that the bourgeoisie have to avoid the question today, as far as possible, as to whether unemployment is voluntary or not, is that they no longer have a perspective of doing anything about the gradually unfolding drama of mass unemployment (as to whether the unfolding is indeed ‘gradual’, it rather depends on which country one is living in – Greek, Spanish or Irish workers, for example, might not see matters that way). Keynes proposed a series of remedies to try and avoid a repetition of the nightmare of the 1930s. For several decades it looked as if unemployment had been dealt with in the major countries. It was certainly reduced to lower levels after the Second World War, whether due to Keynsian policies of ‘full employment’ or to other factors.
The re-emergence of the open crisis in the late 60s and early 70s saw the re-emergence of long-term mass unemployment and an explicit abandonment by the bourgeoisie of the perspective of full employment. Once it arrived at that point it paid the bourgeoisie, obviously, to be as evasive about the issue as possible. Since they cannot avoid referring to the problem of unemployment altogether, the only remaining option is to blame the phenomenon on its victims. Hence the pervasive implication in the pronouncements of the bourgeoisie, without being too explicit, that unemployment is indeed voluntary.
This takes us back to the situation before Keynes, except that there is no question now that the bourgeoisie knows that it is trapped by the crisis and it just has to make the best of it as far as ‘explaining’ what is going on. The British bourgeoisie can see that the early promises of the current government about a ‘recovery’, following stern measures to get the state’s deficit under control, have been swept away by the reality of the crisis, so that entire line of argument is dead in the water. The Labour party might like to say ‘we told you so’, but they dare not do this seriously because they may actually have to take over the responsibility of managing the crisis again quite soon. There is no point building up expectations that they could do better in terms of running the economy. There is so little room for manoeuvre, whoever is in charge. The bourgeoisie is already muttering about the possibility of a ‘triple dip recession’.
Having said all this about the bourgeoisie’s evasions, there is one true point in what Osborne said that we should note. All workers are indeed in the same boat. If the unemployed are scroungers then so are the working population. Destitution, in other words, is completely general. It affects all workers to more or less an extent, and it affects a great many employed workers profoundly as well as the unemployed. Many employed workers – especially in London where the price of accommodation is exceptionally high and getting higher – are completely dependent on state hand-outs to live at all. The rent for a modest flat for a family in London, even in the less expensive parts, is as much as two thirds or even the whole of the wages of many workers.
Even Labour leader Ed Miliband, despite his efforts to divide the working class into the deserving and undeserving poor, is right to point out that the majority of benefits go to those in work. We should follow Marx and always note when the bourgeoisie speaks the truth – they cannot always avoid it. The reason that workers are reduced to living on benefits is because their wages are below the level required to maintain the reproduction of labour power. In other words wages are not enough to live on. It is really as simple as that, and this is not an exaggeration. The London Evening Standard was shocked to discover that there are children in London who are actually starving. The dozens of soup kitchens set up across London don’t only feed those sleeping rough or in hostels for the homeless.
Marx, let us note, was well aware of these issues and how they affected the working class. In Capital Marx deals with employers who rely on the workers subsisting on ‘relief’ as it was then called, provided by the local councils, to be able to afford the required amount of bread for their families that was regarded as the subsistence level. Similarly Trotsky in the 1930s denounced the situation where workers in the US who were actually employed nonetheless had to live on charitable hand-outs because their wages were insufficient to maintain life. Neither Marx nor Trotsky deal with such employers kindly. But both these marxists were realistic – they knew that the first response of the bourgeoisie to a crisis is to try and reduce the wages of the workers below the level required to reproduce labour power – at least below the currently accepted level.
It is a pity that Marx did not live to pronounce on a state controlled system which, in a period of almost permanent crisis, has more and more been given the task of maintaining wages permanently below the basic requirement to maintain life for a great part of the working class. This is the system we now refer to as the ‘welfare state’. The product of the period of expansion after the Second World War, the welfare state was initially a vehicle for some significant improvements in working class living standards. But it was established at a considerable price: not only the horrors of the war itself, but a considerable increase in social control, since the mechanisms of welfare aim to reduce the working class to a mass of individuals whose well-being is confided to the paternalism of the state.
It is reasonable to think that Marx’s polemics against such a system, whereby the bourgeoisie foist their welfare and dependency culture on the working class, would be something to read – and no doubt he would be particularly scathing about those ‘radicals’ and leftists who never tire of telling us that the welfare state is a gain won by the workers in struggle and even a ‘socialist’ sector of the economy. The bourgeoisie’s supposed ‘denunciations’ of the welfare state – of their own monstrous system that reduces the workers to the status of permanent beggars – would pale beside the denunciations of the workers’ movement if the workers were better able to affirm themselves politically than they are at present. It is only the working class, after all, that contains within itself the historical perspective of ridding us of the capitalist state altogether.
Hardin 11/1/13
After the ill-treatment of people with learning disabilities was filmed by Panorama, Winterbourne View has been closed, more inspections have taken place, and 11 care workers have been convicted. Between 400 and 1200 ‘excess’ and ‘unnecessary’ deaths between 2005 and 2008 at Mid Staffordshire Hospital Trust have been investigated and reported on. Health minister Jeremy Hunt and the Chief Nursing Officer for England have emphasised the need for “care” and “compassion”.
The scandals have been exposed and investigated, scapegoats tried and convicted, platitudes uttered, and future inspections will be carried out by a new body with a new name, the Care Quality Commission. So we can all sleep confident in the safety and compassion of our health and care services … except for the small detail that the whole process takes us no closer to understanding why such things happen.
When things go wrong the ruling class are always quick to blame workers, whether they are nurses and care workers, as in these scandals, or train or coach drivers following an accident. This hypocrisy is truly nauseating.
When NHS services are shut down months before the end of the financial year (such as i-Health in East London) because there is no more money, leaving patients suffering from their illnesses for longer, where is the ‘compassion’ in that? When new treatments – that can protect sight in macular degeneration, or give a cancer sufferer a little longer – are judged on cost through the National Institute of Clinical Excellence, where is the ‘compassion’ in that?
Then there is the effect of all the targets that have to be achieved in the NHS: “For every condition there is a guideline to follow, a reward for doing so scrupulously, and a penalty for falling short. Patients matter less as individuals than they do as units in a scheme with a public health objective in mind.” (BMJ 18/12/12).
There was no golden age in the NHS. The British state only became interested in the health of the working class when it discovered they were unfit to fight in the Boer War. The NHS grew out of the Beveridge Report in World War II, and the need for labour in the years that followed. It was always limited by delays and underfunding. Now it is no longer in their interests to spend so much money on it.
Jeremy Hunt wants a special sort of compassion from nurses and doctors in order to be able to live within the limits on the NHS, and deny services that are not funded, in a kindly and considerate way. No wonder communication skills are now taught and examined – including, for GPs, the skill of saying “no”.
And no wonder burnout is such an important problem. This is not just a question of overwork but above all stress, which includes the stress of feeling unable to do the job as it should be done. Burnout makes it much more difficult to feel compassion, even if a professional is expected to behave in a proper professional manner regardless of how they feel at the time.
When doctors, nurses and care workers are unable to show appropriate compassion this is most often the result of the conditions they are working in, whether through lack of resources to make their compassion count, or the destruction of their normal compassion by years of working in a system characterised by daily banal and bureaucratic inhumanity.
As for resigning due to lack of compassion – just imagine trying to get Job Seekers Allowance after leaving, or refusing to take, a job on such grounds.
“Mencap and the Challenging Behaviour Foundation have just published a report ‘Out of Sight’ which details a number of serious incidents of abuse at other private hospitals including physical assault, sexual abuse and over medication. The report calls for the government to close these large institutions which are mostly operated by the private and not for profit sector”[2]. In other words the same lesson about care of people with learning disabilities and large impersonal institutions as was drawn from similar problems 30 years ago. The difference is that the institutions today tend to be privately run, with only 10% of those in residential care run by social services. Today it is all too easy to equate economy with private profit: “The private sector in particular recognised there was money to be made if you set up nice looking purpose-built homes for some of the most dependant and challenging people. The care could be provided more efficiently (cheaper) in large institutions. A simple case of the economies of scale that could be achieved in catering, care and management costs by replacing a dozen small homes each providing care for four or five people with a ‘hospital’ providing beds for 60 or more residents.” The use of such facilities, with their economies of scale, results from the need for social services departments to keep costs down in line with stretched budgets.
With the British economy, being much stronger than the Greek, we do not face the same level of cuts (see Curing the economy kills the sick [100]). Nevertheless, if we look at the plans to save money in the NHS being rolled out at the moment, we can see that the difference is one of degree and not principle. The plan is to make £20 billion in savings in the 4 years to 2014/15, with an estimated £5.8 bn saved in 2011/12. However despite freezing pay, freezing what Primary Care Trusts pay for healthcare and cutting back office costs (i.e. administration jobs), the National Audit Office has estimated that the real saving is more like £3.4 bn. Because of this shortfall, the cuts to come, we can be certain, will hit both patient care and healthworkers’ pay, conditions and jobs. It will also involve the regulation of health care assistants – people employed to take on aspects of the nursing role that used to be the province of more qualified staff. It used to be called ‘dilution’, now it’s called ‘skill mix’. All this will come in whatever compassion nurses and doctors have for their patients, or indeed the compassion the sick may feel for their carers.
Nurses compassion will be measured, according to Jane Cummings, chief nurse for England! As if you could trust the capitalist state to measure such things in a meaningful way! The Prime Minister wants patients in hospital to use the “friends and family test”. “Mark Porter, chairman of council of the BMA, said, ‘Doctors and the NHS, generally, welcome feedback from patients and their families. However, the friends and family test that has been piloted so far is based on a model developed to test satisfaction with consumer products. We would like to see a full evaluation of the pilot before it is rolled out more widely, as there may be better ways of getting useful information from patients in a form that allows the NHS to improve services’.” (BMJ 7/1/13).
These ‘reforms’ will do little if anything to improve care. They certainly won’t overcome the effects of the planned ‘efficiency savings’. But the media concentration on these scandals, and the campaign about ‘care’ and ‘compassion’, can undermine the confidence we feel in our doctors and nurses in the NHS, and create a climate in which they can be blamed for the inevitable failings that will happen as cuts in the health budget are rolled out.
Alex 12/1/13
[1]. Lorraine Morgan, president of the Welsh Nursing Academy, https://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=21708&utm_source=Maili... [101]
The 1980s was a period of important working class struggles in Britain as well as in the rest of Europe and the world. The ‘Thatcherite revolution’, capitalism’s response to the inability of Keynesian economics to deal with the economic crisis, was a means of ruthlessly culling unprofitable industrial sectors and involved a brutal assault on workers’ jobs and living conditions. The classic expression of this policy was the decision to decimate the UK mining industry, which provoked the year-long Miners’ Strike of 1984-5. This struggle was a focus for the whole working class in Britain, but although its defeat came as a bitter blow, the effects of which would make themselves felt even more strongly in the longer term, it did not bring an end to the wave of struggles in Britain. Between 1986 and 1988 there were widespread movements involving printers, BT workers, teachers, health workers, postal workers and others.
Given the historic strength of the trade unions in Britain, none of these struggles gave rise to independent forms of working class self-organisation on the scale of the movements of education workers in Italy or rail and health workers in France during the same period[1]. But even so, just as in other parts of Europe, these movements played a part in stimulating small groups of militant workers to get together outside of the union framework. As in Italy, France and elsewhere, communists often played a significant role in these groups, even if they were expressions of a wider process. But inevitably it is the communist minority – since it tends to have a more permanent existence than workers’ groups produced by the immediate struggle - which has taken on the task of preserving the memory of these experiences and drawing out their principal lessons.
What follows does not in any way claim to be a complete reconstruction of the experience of workers’ groups in the UK during the 80s. It is based mainly on articles published in World Revolution at the time, although the libcom library also contains articles written by other participants in the process and copies of bulletins and leaflets produced by these groups. Obviously we are writing it from our own political viewpoint, but we welcome further contributions, especially by others who can bring first hand knowledge from the time, in order to develop a broader discussion at a time when the formation of similar groupings is once again on the agenda.
Coming in the wake of the defeat of the miners, the 1986 Fleet Street printers’ strike was another major test in the battle between the classes. It was provoked by the attempts of Murdoch’s News International group to introduce new technology and working practices which meant job-losses and tighter work discipline. As in the miners’ strike, when the NUM concentrated the workers’ energies on achieving a total shut-down of the mining sector rather than going directly to other workers who were also on the verge of struggle (dockers, steel workers, car workers), the print unions kept the struggle locked up in one part of the newspaper industry by insisting on the tactic of closing down NI’s Wapping plant. But whereas in the miners’ strike there was little overt criticism of the NUM by the workers involved in the strike, the effective sabotage of the strike by the print unions was rather easier to see, especially their specious argument that the strike should not be spread to the rest of Fleet Street because by allowing the other newspapers to carry on and capture NI’s sales, the blockade of Wapping would force Murdoch to his knees.
It was in this atmosphere that the unofficial strike bulletin Picket appeared. Compiled by both printers and others, it provided regular updates on the progress of the strike and ran to 43 issues, all of which can be found in the libcom library[2]. It was very quickly condemned by the union officials, prompting the ICC (WR 95, June 1986) to publish an article expressing its solidarity with the bulletin:
At a time when the police and the print unions are trying to ram home the isolation of militant printworkers and complete their defeat, it’s no accident that they should create a minor witch-hunt against the comrades who produce Picket, a bulletin that’s a direct product of the printers’ strike. For months the TUC, the NGA and SOGAT[3] have tried to blame violence at the Wapping demonstrations on outside agitators (ie revolutionaries, workers, the unemployed expressing their solidarity). Now they have discovered an “enemy within”.
Bill Freeman, the print unions’ ‘national picket co-ordinator’ has said he “deplored its contents” and that “steps were being taken to locate its authors and prevent its publication” (Guardian 12/5/86). With the print unions more and more in collaboration with the police, militant pickets had better watch out for repression from the unions who won’t hesitate to finger them to the cops. We solidarise with Picket against any attempts by the unions or the police to silence it.
The hostility of the union leadership to Picket is a class hostility to any attempt by the workers to break from the hegemony of the left and the trade unions. That the leftist press has totally ignored Picket is characteristic, as it is not an ‘official’ trade union organ, nor the product of a leftist sect, nor a rank and file front group.
As they say themselves, Picket is produced by “printworkers”, “SOGAT/NGA pickets” and is “not connected to any group or party”. It is a workers’ bulletin which expresses criticisms of the TUC and the print union leadership at a national and branch level. It contains descriptions of the activities of the pickets in the print strike, letters from supporters and critics, tenants in Wapping and other practical information. While this kind of information is a vital component of any strike bulletin, this emphasis is at the expense of any analysis or attempt to use the bulletin as a focus for the organisation of militant printworkers.
Picket is not a political group with political positions and an orientation for the struggle, but an expression of militants who are trying to fight back against the capitalist offensive. However, hostility to the TUC, the police, the print unions and the bosses is not enough, nor is combativity on its own. But Picket refuses to offer any slogans, “which have come to be the method of hypocrisy”. This comes from a fear of being like the unions or the left whose slogans are not hypocrisy but lies to disorientate the working class. In fact Picket do have a perspective, that “the strike will be won by picketing”. This fixation on one form of action ignores the need to extend the struggle to workers in other sectors.
They criticise the TUC for having “worked overtime to contain the strike, stop it and then sink it. They want to get control over the growing picketing movement in order to demobilise it”. But there is no criticism that could not be found in the more extreme leftist press. In the end the touchstone of a working class orientation is the push for extension and self-organisation, which inevitably means outright opposition to the whole union apparatus. Picket says “the sacked printworkers need to build on their own organising abilities to picket. It remains for ordinary pickets to take complete control of the strike”. We agree with this, but Picket undermine their position by putting self-organisation as only rank and file action against union “sell-outs”. Today the production of Picket is a thorn in the side of the union leaders, but without an attempt to go beyond being just an information sheet with militant comments, tomorrow it could well end up as just another voice for rank and file unionism. RJ (address for contact with Picket supplied).
In World Revolution 103, April 1987, with the definitive defeat of the printer’s strike we published a balance sheet of Picket’s activities:
One of the most significant expressions of the maturation of the present international wave of workers’ struggles is the appearance of small groups of militant workers organising outside the unions in order to push forward the extension and self-organisation of the struggle. With the official winding down of the printers’ strike in Britain, it is an appropriate time to draw a balance sheet of the group Picket which emerged from this struggle.
The appearance of struggle groups is intimately bound up with workers’ growing distrust for the trade unions. After the railway strikes in France, for example, a group of workers from the electricity industry produced a leaflet ‘To all electricians and gas workers, to all workers and unemployed’ in which they showed how the railworkers’ general assemblies had functioned, and how the unions kept the strike isolated in one sector.
The ICC’s section in France pushed for the formation of such groups. In particular our militants in the post office participated in a group which put out a leaflet showing “it is necessary to prepare the struggle:
- by establishing contacts and information between different centres
- by preparing the largest possible unification at the base, between unionised and non-unionised
- by proposing the most unifying demands for all workers”
Membership of the group was open to all who agreed on the main lessons of the rail strike:
- that general assemblies take the decisions, elect the strike committees and the revocable delegates
- that it’s the general assemblies which are charged with extension to other sectors
These struggle groups are not new unions. They aren’t nor can they be the embryo of future general assemblies or strike committees.
However, such groups can play a very important role:
- making contact and forging links between different sectors during and even before struggles;
- drawing lessons from previous struggles;
- defending the need for all to struggle and not to stay isolated in one sector;
- not leaving the unions the monopoly of information.
The group Picket formed by printworkers and others around the struggle at Wapping was an expression of the same process within the class. It was by no means as clear about the anti-working class role of the unions as the groups in France, But precisely because of the strength of trade unionism in Britain it was of considerable significance that such a group should appear outside the structure of the unions, and that so many of the printworkers involved in the struggle should look to it as a valuable source of information and encouragement to their fight.
Picket above all reflected the workers’ distrust in the official structures of the unions. In contrast to the miners’ strike, which was characterised by a loyalty to the NUM, the print strike ended with the workers expressing a strong feeling of having been ‘sold out’ by the print unions, even if this was largely put in terms of criticisms of the Dean-Dubbins leadership of SOGAT and the NGA. The pages of Picket were thus frequently given over to bitter criticisms of the print union hierarchy and the TUC and other unions for sabotaging any solidarity with the printers.
In the same way, just as the printers’ strike in its most dynamic phase contained a real push towards solidarity and unity with other workers, so Picket expressed a certain understanding of the necessity for the extension of the struggle. In one issue, for example, they recognise that a weakness of the miners’ strike was that “most activists were sucked into the fund-raising circuit”; in another they insist, in response to a letter advising the printers to rely on the leadership of the London branch representatives, that “the pickets are the leadership of the strike...Extending the strike will be done by picketing, not as you outline it. And it is necessary to link the strike to other workers. Ours in a common struggle”.
It cannot be said, however, that this call for extension was central to Picket’s activities. On the contrary, the fundamental weakness of Picket was that it never seriously challenged the printers’ illusions that their demands could be won if only they could mount a really effective blockade of News International.
Unlike the leftists, Picket did not ask the workers to put their trust in union officials even at the most ‘rank and file’ level. But publishing page after page celebrating the initiative and self-activity of the pickets was completely inadequate when that activity was caught up in dead-end strategy. In fact, it could only mean tail-ending the most radical postures of the unions.
As one unattributed letter Picket received rightly said: “the organisation and activity of the strikers has contained elements both of autonomy from the structures and processes of capital, and of dependence on them”.
This equally applies to Picket itself, which on one page could attack ‘the unions’, on another criticise only ‘the leadership’ and very uncritically advertise the activities of rank and file union bodies; which could talk about extending the struggle while at the same time tirelessly propagating all the fixations on blockading Murdoch’s publications, on the battles with the police at Wapping, on abusing scabs – all of which became part of the union trap to prevent the extension of the struggle.
Such ambiguities are inevitable in a grouping thrown up by the immediate struggle. They can only be overcome through a continuous process of discussion and confrontation of ideas within the class. The last words of the last known issue of Picket (no 43) seem to indicate the beginning of an attempt to draw some lessons after the set-piece confrontations at the ‘anniversary’ celebrations: “But the real cause of it all, Murdoch’s production and distribution, continued totally unhindered, certainly making more than a few pickets go away thinking that they should have a rethink of strategy”.
Unfortunately, Picket itself does not seek to stimulate any such a rethink. In the previous number, months after the struggle has been effectively defeated, and two weeks before it was officially called off, Picket continues with its usual triumphalist proclamations: “we raised the stakes” and “if NI think they can beat is , they take on not just us, but our history”. Workers can hardly draw lessons from their defeats if they can’t recognise defeat when it’s staring them in the face! In fact this blindness was conditioned by Picket’s unwillingness to raise a discussion about the real needs of the struggle.
Symptomatic of this was that Picket never called for the holding of general assemblies to discuss the aims and methods of the strike. Equally significant was Picket’s extreme reluctance to engage in discussion with proletarian political organisations – those who most unambiguously defended the necessity for the struggle to break out of the Wapping trap. It is positive that Picket reprinted articles on the print strike or on Picket itself from World Revolution, Workers Voice and Wildcat. But these were printed without comment and without any attempt to distinguish them from similar reprints of articles from the leftist press.
In a previous article on Picket (WR 95) we said that if it did not seek to provide a focus for discussing and analysing the printers’ struggle, it could end up as another voice for rank and file unionism. Picket was indeed drawn deeper and deeper into this trap. But, at the time of writing, the main danger of this inability to draw out the lessons of the struggle seems to be that Picket will simply vanish without trace – precisely at the time when the most militant workers need to reflect on the causes of the defeat at Wapping and the perspective for participating in future struggles. This need exists not only in the print, but at British Telecom, among the miners, the teachers and throughout the class. Picket itself may not be equal to the task. But its very appearance shows that the development of other workers’ groups and struggle committees is now definitely on the horizon in Britain as elsewhere. L’A
In the second part of this article we will look at initiatives to form workers’ groups in others sectors during this period: health, post, and education.
[2]. https://libcom.org/history/picket-bulletin-wapping-printers-strike-1986-... [105]. For a discussion and recollections about some of the people involved in the group, see also: https://libcom.org/forums/history/anarchistscommunists-wapping-dispute-2... [106]
[3]. Society of Graphical and Allied Trades and the National Graphical Association – the two main print unions at the time
It’s always difficult - and unwise - to make precise predictions about the international situation, particularly as imperialist tensions and conflicts take on a more irrational and chaotic character. However, we can say with some certainty that, whatever the specifics of events in Syria, whether the regime falls or not, there will be more fighting, more bloodshed and the greater likelihood of the war worsening in Syria itself and extending beyond its borders. To a large extent outside forces are already involved in the dynamic towards greater bloodshed and instability: Russia, Iran, China and Hezbollah on one hand backing the regime, and on the other a whole basket case of interests, rivalries and potential conflicts: Turkey, the Gulf states, France, Britain, the USA, Germany, Jordan, Egypt, to name the major players, alongside, and often manipulating, the various rebel forces and factions, and then throw in al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Kurds and the Palestinian factions. The intervention of all these imperialist gangsters, big and small, augurs badly for the populations and stability of this region.
Various countries and bodies have been predicting the fall of the Assad regime for many months now. We are not military experts and we cannot draw on first-hand information from within the country, but the fall of Assad still doesn’t look imminent. On 6 January, in a Damascus opera house, Assad put forward what was billed as a ‘peace plan’ that was really a call to his military, which his clique is totally identified with, to deepen the war. He looks set to stay on whatever, to the point of implementing a scorched-earth policy, which would only be an extension of what’s already really happening. While his regime has been increasingly threatened and undermined by the rebels’ offensives against its positions, so far this has led to a contradictory situation. On the one hand Assad is more and more under pressure; at the same time, the more his falls seems likely those forces and groups (the Alawite, Christian, Druze and Shia elements) who fear that a take-over by the rebels – among whom the Sunni fundamentalist element has gained considerably in strength - will result in pogroms against them have been driven into a desperate attempt to cohere behind Assad.
What remained of the protests of 18 months ago has been broken. His military seems to be generally in control of the densely populated south-west, the main north/south highway and the Mediterranean coast. Although the opposition have taken some, the Syrian military hold bases throughout the country from which its helicopters and jets can destabilise rebel-held areas at will, making territorial gains for the latter tenuous. Another aspect of Assad’s speech that wasn’t directed solely towards his army was the overtures made towards the Syrian Kurds in order to strengthen their position, if not their full allegiance, against his own enemies. But the major backer of the regime is Russia and despite some diplomatic noises against their man (played up by the west), the Russians remain fully behind the regime for the foreseeable future. They, like the Iranians, have to cling to him desperately, and do so with some very heavy ordnance. The Guardian, 24/12/12, reported that Russian military advisers and crews are manning a sophisticated missile defence system, making a western ‘no-fly zone’ and the general situation even more problematic. These defences have been strengthened since the Israeli strike on the nuclear site of al-Kibar in 2007 and again at the start of the genuinely popular Syrian uprising in March 2011: “... the air defence command comprises two divisions and an estimated 50,000 troops - twice the size of Gaddafi’s force - with thousands of anti-aircraft guns and more than 130 anti-aircraft missile batteries”. The placement of long-range S-300 Russian missiles is a possibility but not confirmed. For the Russians, Syria also holds their largest electronic eavesdropping base outside its territory in Latakia and it has a naval base on the Mediterranean at Tartus. The Russians will not give up easily on the present Syrian regime and the assets it provides .
Unlike Libya, Germany was quick to become involved here, placing Patriot missiles and its troops on the Turkish border. These were followed by the USA, Dutch and Norwegians under the NATO umbrella. NATO is is hiding behind the defence of its member Turkey which itself is becoming more aggressive. American and European forces are thus getting directly involved, with differences amongst themselves, in a confrontation with not just Syrian forces but Iranian and Russian interests which have formidable military force to back them up. Germany increasingly has its own imperialist ambitions to put forward, even though it may antagonise Russia, and Britain and France have been at the forefront of promoting the opposition forces, including, along with the CIA, the use of their special forces and intelligence services. Again there seem to be rivalries here, expressed in diplomatic circles, between France, Britain and the USA - with the latter getting a freer hand now that the ‘fiscal cliff’ problem has been temporarily shelved and new foreign and security bosses have been put in place by the Obama clique. The appointment of Chuck Hagel to head the Pentagon and ‘terrorism adviser’ John Brennan to lead the CIA not only reinforces clandestine operations, special forces work, drone attacks against army ‘boots on the ground’; it also seems to be more bad news for Israel. Hagel has been accused by Republicans of being soft on Iran and weak defending Israel. This comes on top of the destabilisation of Syria, which is the last thing that Israel wanted to see; and now the latter is planning a wall on its borders along the Golan Heights to keep out the jihadists who are swarming into Syria. The recent Egyptian/Iranian intelligence services rapprochement must also be a worry to Israel and the United States.
Along with France, Britain has played a leading role in the anti-Assad front. In order to help reconstruct the discredited opposition forces of the Syrian National Council, and quickly following a conference in Doha, Qatar, meetings across several government departments were held in London in late November, including representatives from France, Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and US military personnel, with the aim of forming a general strategy and helping to reorganise the Syrian ‘revolutionaries’[1]. According to official accounts alone Britain has provided aid amounting to £57 million to the rebels up to October last year. This obviously doesn’t include the vast amounts spent on undercover activity, logistics and surreptitious provisions. The British army, under its chief of defence, General David Richards, is or has drawn up contingency plans to provide Syrian rebels with maritime and air support (Guardian, 12/1212), but given the obstacles outlined above this would be a major escalation of danger. One thing for sure though is that as British troops are being ‘drawn-down’ in Afghanistan, many are going to the Gulf, reinforcing British land and naval bases in Bahrain, strengthening forces in Qatar and the UAE and “forming close tactical-level relationships” in Jordan. And although there’s a great deal of state secrecy around the issue, there’s no doubting growing British support for the Muslim Brotherhood which is very active in the Syrian opposition and across the wider region (not least Egypt). Britain, along with the other western protagonists, has raised and kept the issue of Syrian chemical weapons alive in order to provide a possible motive for direct intervention. But even if intervention happens this can only lead to a further bloody fiasco.
The old Syrian opposition of the Syrian National Council, with its long-term exiles and links to the CIA and the US State Department, was totally discredited. The new opposition, to give it its full title, the Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces, is now recognised as ‘the legitimate representative of the Syrian people’. This new bunch of gangsters, formed in late November in a conference at Doha and consolidated at a meeting in Morocco on 12 December, from which the Free Syrian Army network was sidelined, and which was recognised by more than a hundred countries, reflects many of the problems of the current situation, including faction fights between the major powers of France, Britain, the USA and Germany, and the fact that Syria is a prized strategic crossroads. The most controversial aspect of the new opposition is its fundamentalist leanings, which shows the west, once again, playing with the fire of ‘holy war’. The nature of the opposition more closely reflects its masters in Saudi, Qatar and the other Gulf states where these Sunni leaders promote radical, religious-based ideologies that have fuelled anti-western sentiments for some time now. These regimes, as autocratic and vicious as Assad’s, have no time for the ‘democratisation’ process that the USA is attempting to foist on them and this represents a further division among the so-called ‘Friends of Syria’.
In Syria, jihadists are pouring in from everywhere, different poisonous fractions representing the interests of different countries; some brought in by the intelligence services of the US and Britain, some from the Gulf states, and a multitude of ‘freelancers’ from countries including Libya, Tunisia, the Balkans, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iraq. The most ruthless, organised and efficient of these groups has been Jahbat al-Nusra. These fighters were declared a ‘foreign terrorist organisation’ by the US State Department on 10 December. Despite promises made to the US by the opposition to break with them, “...coordination continued on the ground. This is why the US deputy secretary of state found himself isolated in Marrakech when he classified al-Nusra a terrorist organisation. The British and French remained silent, as did the EU” (The Guardian, 18/12/12) . We’ve underlined this last bit because of the clear divisions it shows between these countries and the USA. The leader of the new Syrian opposition, Mouaz al-Khatib, has even lectured the US on the merits of al-Nusra and the virtues of martyrdom. The Muslim Brotherhood also condemned the US decision as “wrong and hasty”. Al-Nusra, which has led the fighting in Aleppo and in the suburbs of Damascus, the overrunning of the Sheik Suleiman base in the north while spearheading gains elsewhere, is an al-Qaeda front. It has indiscriminately targeted all non-Sunnis, military or not, and in Syria we see a sort of Sunni accord with them, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists for the time being. The Gulf states are supporting all three with the British and French their silent partners. It’s long been thought that al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the expanding Sunni terrorist organisation, would get involved in Syria and now they have and are in the forefront of it. The leader of al-Nusra is Abu Du’a who is also the emir of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
We haven’t even begun to mention the Kurds who also play a major part on the imperialist chessboard in and around Syria. Just like al-Qaeda coming from Iraq to Syria, so too are Iraqi Kurds training Syrian Kurds to fight (New York Times, 7/12/12). This itself presents the prospects of a wider conflict with sectarian strife, pogroms and ethnic conflict among people who previously lived side by side. The working class exists in numbers in this region but it is weak and has been further weakened by this conflict which, far from being a ‘revolution’, is a bloody imperialist war. Tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands wounded and traumatised, possibly millions displaced and people in Syria starving to death or dying for lack of care. The more immediate successes that there are for the ‘rebels’, the more they are falling out amongst themselves: looting in Aleppo for example, assassinating and killing each other over the spoils. While the regime deals out its own form of death and destruction, the opposition have been engaged in their own atrocities, beheading and massacres. To call this inter-imperialist nightmare a ‘revolution’, as groups like the Socialist Workers Party have done, is obscene but this is not the first time that such groups have supported Islamic fundamentalism for their own sordid ends - just like the British government.
Baboon 9/1/13
(This article was contributed by a close sympathiser of the ICC.)
[1]. Foreign Secretary William Hague and the Socialist Workers Party are as one in supporting the imperialist butchery that they call the “Syrian Revolution”. See Socialist Worker 20/9/12 and the UK Mission to the United Nations statement, 11/11/12.
Links
[1] https://fr.internationalism.org/ri438/resolution_sur_la_situation_en_france_du_20_e_congres_de_ri.html
[2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/leftfootforward_analysis_of_benefits.jpg
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/victorian_slum_housing.jpg
[6] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/index.htm
[7] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/index.htm
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1361/housing
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/mali-bmp.jpg
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_wind
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1290/mali
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/worsening_conditions_in_greek_hospitals.jpg
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/health-care
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1359/crisis-greece
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/1876_football.jpg
[17] https://chrhc.revues.org/1592#tocto2nl
[18] https://books.google.fr/books
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1405/sport-capitalism
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1406/socialism
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1407/marxism
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1411/party
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1420/capitalism
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1433/class
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1447/bourgeoisie
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1451/man
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1452/labour
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1479/france
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1488/workers
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1489/time
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1625/olympic-games
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1626/trade-union
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1627/ancient-olympic-games
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1628/sport
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1629/sporting
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1630/games
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1631/football
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1632/clubs
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1633/spirit
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1634/hachette-carre-histoire
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1635/societe-et-culture
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1636/example
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1637/capitalist-industrymodern-sport
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1638/capitalist-society
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1639/sporting-activity
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1640/club
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1641/long-time-sport
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1642/sporting-union
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1643/sporting-activities
[50] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1644/sporting-federations
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1645/popular-games
[52] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1646/discipline
[53] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1647/labour-power
[54] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1648/autonomous-class
[55] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1649/physical-activity
[56] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1650/ascendant-capitalist-societya
[57] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1651/ambient-nationalism
[58] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1652/ancient-greeks
[59] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1653/international-sporting-grouping
[60] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1654/way
[61] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1655/jules-ferry
[62] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1656/competition
[63] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1657/j-m-brohm
[64] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1658/military-force
[65] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1659/p-dietschy-sport
[66] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1660/practices
[67] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1661/socialist-sporting-union
[68] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1662/origines-du-sport
[69] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1663/factory
[70] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1664/usps-sporting-union
[71] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1665/socialist-athletic-sporting
[72] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1666/international-gymnastic-federation
[73] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1667/english-jockey-club
[74] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/263/culture
[75] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/nationalism-sport
[76] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/jo_welcome.jpg
[77] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1301/olympic-games
[78] http://www.un.org/fr/preventgenocide/rwanda/pascal/img_4.shtml
[79] http://www.amnestyinternational.be/doc/s-informer/notre-magazine-le-fil/liberties-archives/les-anciens-numeros/385-Numero-de-Juin-Juillet-Aout/Dossier,235/Les-stades-un
[80] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1678/stadium
[81] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1679/amahoro-stadium
[82] http://www.memorialdelashoah.org
[83] http://www.lemonde.fr/sport/article/2012/08/30/blanchiment-d-argent-l-autre-mercato_1751790_3242.html
[84] http://www.rue89.com
[85] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1409/world-war-i
[86] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1423/world
[87] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1429/marx
[88] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1482/war
[89] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1668/nationalism
[90] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1669/cold-war
[91] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1670/international-olympic-committee
[92] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1671/summer-olympic-games
[93] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1672/united-states
[94] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1673/china
[95] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1674/moscow
[96] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1675/nancy
[97] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1676/south-africa
[98] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1677/ioc
[99] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/daily_express_on_scroungers.jpg
[100] https://en.internationalism.org/worldrevolution/201301/6242/greece-curing-economy-kills-sick
[101] https://www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story.asp?id=21708&utm_source=MailingList&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Health131212
[102] https://www.publicservice.co.uk/feature_story.asp?id=20505
[103] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[104] https://en.internationalism.org/worldrevolution/201211/5287/workers-groups-experience-1980s
[105] https://libcom.org/history/picket-bulletin-wapping-printers-strike-1986-1987
[106] https://libcom.org/forums/history/anarchistscommunists-wapping-dispute-28042006
[107] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1680/strike-action
[108] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1681/picket
[109] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1682/strike
[110] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1683/unions
[111] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[112] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/56/middle-east-and-caucasus
[113] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[114] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/syria