Below is the translation of an article written by our comrades in Mexico and published in Spanish in number 133 of Revolución Mundial (March-April 2013).
The terror and the degeneration of the Russian Revolution are often explained solely through the personality of Stalin, an uncouth individual, a careerist and an adventurer. It is certain that his character was an important factor in the historical role played by Stalin, but not the only one.
60 years ago, on 6 March 1953, the world press announced the death of Stalin. “The mad dog is dead, the madness is over”, was the popular adage employed in Spanish-speaking countries. But in the case of Stalin, such a statement was unjustified. If Stalin was at the helm of the physical and moral destruction of a whole generation of revolutionaries, if he openly contradicted all the internationalist principles of marxism and if he has been the leader of one of the major imperialist powers that presided over the division of world, his death in no way eliminated or halted the counter-revolutionary dynamic that he largely contributed to in his lifetime. This confirms that his role as a major player in the counter-revolution was made possible by the failure of the world revolution to extend. It was the isolation of the revolution that directly produced the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party and its transformation into a state party putting national interests above those of the world revolution.
The grim legacy of Stalin has served and continues to serve the interests of the ruling class. Winston Churchill, a well known figure of the exploiting class and bitter enemy of the proletariat, paid tribute to the services rendered by Stalin to the bourgeoisie, saying he “will be one of the great men in Russian history”.
In the revolutionary wave that emerged during and after the First World War, it was the Russian proletariat at the head of the revolution of 1917 that produced the most powerful dynamic of the international wave. The process continued in 1918 when the battalions of the German working class rose up, seeking to spread the revolution, but they were ruthlessly crushed by the German bourgeois state led by Social Democracy with the broad collaboration of the democratic states. Attempts to spread the proletarian revolution were thus stifled and the triumphant Russian revolution became isolated. The bourgeoisie of the whole world then erected a cordon sanitaire around the proletariat in Russia, making it impossible to hold on to the power it had seized in 1917 It was under these conditions that the counter-revolution arose from within: the Bolshevik party lost all its working class vitality, fostering the emergence and dominance of a bourgeois faction that was lead by Stalin.
Therefore, Stalinism is not the product of the communist revolution but rather the product of its defeat. Following to the letter the advice provided by Machiavelli, Stalin had no hesitation in resorting to intrigue, lies, manipulation and terror to install himself at the head of the state and to consolidate his power, strengthening the work of the counter- revolution by resorting to acts as ridiculous as rewriting history, doctoring photos by eliminating from them certain personalities he regarded as ‘heretics’ because of their oppositional stand. At the same time he promoted the cult of his personality and distorted the truth about the scale of repression and making this the core of his policy. This is why Stalinism is in no way a proletarian current; it is quite obvious that the means used and objectives pursued by Stalin and the group of careerists he surrounded himself with were overtly bourgeois.
With the ebbing of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, the counter-revolution opened the door to the actions of Stalin. Thus, persecution, harassment and the physical elimination of combative proletarians were the first services he rendered to the ruling class. The world bourgeoisie applauded his methods, not only because an important generation of revolutionaries was wiped out but also because it was done in the name of communism, tainting its image and throwing the whole working class into total confusion.
The charges trumped up by the political police, the use of concentration camps and other atrocities, were supported by all the democratic states. For example, even before the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev (in 1936) in which threats against their families and physical torture were used, the democratic states applauded the services that Stalin rendered to their system: through the medium of their ‘worthy’ representatives assembled at the League of Human Rights (headquarters in France), the bourgeoisie approved the perfect ‘legality’ of the purges and the trials. The declaration of the novelist Romain Rolland, Nobel Prize for Literature winner in 1915 and distinguished member of this organisation, is indicative of the attitude of the ruling class: ‘“there is no reason to doubt the accusations against Zinoviev and Kamenev, individuals discredited for quite some time, who have twice been turncoats and gone back on their word. I do not know how I could dismiss as inventions or extracted confessions the public statements of the defendants themselves.”
Similarly, before the forced exile of Trotsky and his subsequent hounding across the world, the Social Democratic government of Norway and the French government, in total complicity with Stalinism, did not hesitate to harass and ultimately expel the old Bolshevik.
The full extent of the decline of the Bolshevik Party was revealed in when Stalin introduced the doctrine of the possibility of building socialism in one country.
Immediately after Lenin’s death in January 1924, Stalin hastened to place his pawns into key positions in the party and to focus his attacks on Trotsky, who was, after Lenin, the most respected revolutionary, and in the front line of the organised mass mobilisation of October 1917.
One proof of the departure of Stalin from the proletarian terrain is in formulating, along with Bukharin, the thesis of ‘socialism in one country’. (Let’s not forget that, some years later, Stalin would have Bukharin executed!). As the self-proclaimed ‘supreme leader of the world proletariat’ and the official voice of marxism, the best service that Stalin provided to the bourgeoisie was precisely this ‘doctrine’ that distorted and perverted proletarian internationalism, that had always been defended by the workers’ movement. This policy discredited marxist theory, spreading and sowing confusion not only among the generation of proletarians of that period but also today amongst the current generation. For example, we are cynically presented with facts like the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), the crushing of the Hungarian uprising (1956), or the invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, as expressions of ‘proletarian internationalism’. A character like Che Guevara claimed that the shipment of arms to countries like Angola was a demonstration of proletarian internationalism. This is not at all a confusion but is a deliberate policy aimed at demolishing this central pillar of marxism.
In the Principles of Communism (1847), Engels clearly defended the internationalist argument attacked by Stalin : “Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone? No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilised peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.
Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilised countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilised countries (…) It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range”.
The Bolsheviks, with Lenin at the helm, conceived the revolution in Russia as a first battle in the world revolution. That is why Stalin was lying when, to validate his thesis, he said it was a continuation of the teachings of Lenin. The bourgeois nature of this ‘theory’ dug the grave of the Bolshevik party and also that of the Communist International by subjecting these bodies to the defence of the interests of the Russian state.
The growth of terror through the concentration camps and the surveillance, control and repression organised through the NKVD (the secret police), etc., symbolise the counter-revolutionary juggernaut oiled by Stalin. But this is only the backdrop to the profound role it would fulfil: permitting the reconstitution of the bourgeoisie in the USSR.
The defeat of the world proletarian revolution and the disappearance of all the proletarian life from the Soviets provided the conditions for the establishment of a new bourgeoisie. It is true that the bourgeoisie was defeated by the proletarian revolution of 1917, but the subsequent ruin of the working class allowed Stalinism to rebuild the ruling class. The bourgeoisie’s reappearance on the social scene did not come from the resurrection of the remnants of the old class (except in a few individual cases), or from the individual ownership of the means of production, but in the development of a capital that would appear depersonalised, with no individual faces, only in the incarnation of the party bureaucracy merged with the state, that is to say, under the form of state ownership of the means of production.
For this reason, assuming that the nationalisation of the means of production is the expression of a society different to capitalism or that it represented (or represents) a ‘progressive step’ is a mistake. Thus when Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed explained that “state ownership of the means of production does not change cow dung into gold and does not confer an aura of holiness on the system of exploitation”, he went on to insist on the fact that the USSR was a ‘degenerated workers’ state’, which was an implied appeal for its defence. This was from the outset a profoundly confused conception. Trotskyism, above all after Trotsky’s death, pushed this logic to its extreme by dragooning the working class behind the defence of one imperialist camp, that of the USSR, during the Second World War, which demonstrated the Trotskyist current’s abandonment of the proletarian terrain.
In fact, the behaviour of Stalinism during the Second World War openly demonstrated its bourgeois nature: in 1944 ‘the Red Army’ cynically stood by while the Nazis crushed the Warsaw Uprising and, together with the Allies, participated in the re-division of imperialist spoils at the end of the war.
As we said above, the world bourgeoisie has received and still benefits from the great service provided by Stalinism, even if hypocritically, it distanced itself from Stalin, calling his government evil, while not hesitating to use it to fuel patriotism and to justify the imperialist war of 1939-45. This policy has by no means exhausted itself.
The year 2012 was marked by an acceleration of the struggle in Georgia (formerly part of the USSR) between bourgeois factions. As part of this bourgeois quarrel, there was a return to invoking Stalin to feed a nationalist campaign .
At the end of 2012 and the first months of this year, the Georgian bourgeoisie, under the pretext of recovering its historical legacy, restored statues of Stalin to several cities. The Georgian bourgeoisie (mainly the ultra-nationalist party Georgian Dream) revived his memory for the sole reason that he was born in this region, but more particularly to spread numbing propaganda among the exploited and chain them to the defence of the local bourgeoisie.
Similarly, changing the name of the city of Volgograd to Stalingrad for six days during the festive commemoration of ‘the defense of Stalingrad’, more than just a provincial act, must be understood as a justification by the bourgeoisie of the imperialist war which ennobles the role played by butchers like Stalin.
But if the bourgeoisie pays tribute to the memory of its bloody guard dogs, the working class needs a better understanding of the world and how to change it. It needs to reclaim its own history and learn from its own experiences and to better recognise the anti-proletarian profile of Stalin and Stalinism; it has, above all, to discover the internationalist principles of marxism that the bourgeoisie has persistently distorted and attacked, because they are the key to real class action.
Tatlin, February 2013
When the state cuts benefits, when politicians or the media make a big scandal about how much those not in work are getting, it is always in the name of fairness. For Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, the long term unemployed will have to accept work placements, training, or just turn up and hang around in an office all day if there is no work or training for them, in order to be “fair for those who need it and fair for those who pay”. That’s when they are not claiming that toughness and a punitive approach is the kindest thing for those who are sick, disabled or unemployed. But is it true?
The attacks on benefits have accelerated since the recession of 2008, so that we have seen the cap on benefits, the bedroom tax, and the vilification of claimants. The economy has not yet recovered from that recession, with GDP still more than 3% below the level of the first quarter of 2008. And it certainly isn’t only the unemployed who face attacks. The whole working class is facing a rise in the state pension age, with teachers and firefighters the latest to face a rise in the occupational pension age as well as greater costs and reduced pension benefits. Young adults will no longer get housing benefit at all – adding to the number forced to continue living with their parents. The whole public sector is facing a 1% pay cap, with NHS staff facing a pay freeze. Many workers face the threat of their firm being shut down if they don’t accept worse pay and conditions and a number of redundancies, most recently those at Grangemouth. And we all face a rise of approximately 10% in energy prices from all the main suppliers – so much for competition and shopping around.
This is the ruling class idea of fairness – every part of the working class is affected by crisis, it’s tough, but it’s tough for everyone. In order for this argument to work we have to forget that we are part of the working class and accept the divisions and competition imposed on us: ‘strivers’ (those fortunate enough to have a job) against ‘shirkers’ (the unemployed); public sector against private sector; teachers against NHS workers in the struggle for scarce budgetary resources.
The reality is that we do have a common interest as workers. Let us take the example of making the unemployed work for their benefits and its so-called fairness to those who ‘pay’ because they are in work. If my job can be done by one of the unemployed on work placement, how soon do I either have to do the work for less or even lose my job? In capitalism there is always a larger or smaller number of unemployed, and every ‘striver’ with a job is also at risk of being forced into becoming an unemployed ‘shirker’.
It’s the same with every attack. If 18-25 year olds cannot get housing benefit that means very often they cannot get independent housing whether or not they have a job, especially in high cost areas such as London. This affects the whole family with the parents putting up their adult children.
Attacks on those in work are no exception. If the state caps pay rises at 1% in the public sector, significantly below the official inflation rate of 2.7%, then through competition this has a downward effect on wages and salaries in general. Of course, when it comes to the pay freeze in the NHS this has a much wider effect. Just like the attacks on the unemployed, it comes with a pretence of fairness and a vilification of the victims. The excuse is that those working in the NHS already get an annual increase due to seniority, which is doubly dishonest – firstly because Agenda for Change is being imposed to introduce performance related pay, and secondly because the annual increases only apply to some of the staff for part of the time; and overall as older staff retire they are replaced by younger on the lower pay scales. The vilification comes in the form of blaming those who work in the NHS for the deterioration that comes from poor staffing levels, poor training and perverse incentives imposed by the latest targets.
The attacks affect us all, so how can we all fight back against them? Recent strikes by school teachers, firefighters, and university lecturers and support staff show that there is a great deal of discontent. The issues are very similar when not exactly the same: an increase in pension age for both firefighters and teachers; the question of pay in schools, where performance related pay is being brought in, and universities, where a 1% offer goes nowhere near overcoming the 13% deterioration in real pay; as well as the issue of increased workload for teachers. Meanwhile the CWU has called off strike action in the Post Offices and Royal Mail in a joint statement with management about future negotiation over the threat to jobs (about 1,500 under threat with the proposal to shut 75 offices) and to pay and terms during the Royal Mail privatisation.
But the actual strikes have seen the workers kept completely separate from each other. The NUT and NAS/UWT teaching unions called a series of regionally divided, one day strikes in October, calling off further action for negotiation. The university unions and Fire Brigades Union called one day and 4 hour demonstration strikes respectively in the same week but on different days. As usual with union strike action workers have been kept separate even when fighting on the same issues at the same time. The strike has been taken out of the hands of workers and made into an adjunct to union negotiation. The chance for workers to meet and discuss with others facing similar attacks in different industries has been avoided – because what is a necessity for the workers in taking their struggle forward is a danger for the forces of the ruling class ranged against them, the bosses, the state and the unions.
Alex 2.11.13
The following article was written by a comrade in North America in the midst of the US federal government shutdown and debt ceiling crisis. While the immediate crisis has now passed with another temporary deal to kick the can down the road, the underlying tensions remain, virtually ensuring that the US political system will suffer further convulsions in the period ahead.
On October 1st, the US federal government entered a “partial shutdown” after Democrats and Republicans in Congress failed to reach an agreement on a continuing budget resolution (CR) to keep the government running for another six weeks. As a result of the shutdown, 800,000 federal workers are on furlough, national parks and memorials are closed and most ”non-essential” government functions have come to a halt. As we write, federal small business loans are not being processed, student loans are on hold and money appears to be running out for many federal “safety-net” programs, such as the WIC program, which provides emergency assistance to pregnant women and those with infant children. Bourgeois economists now worry that the shutdown is costing the US economy $160 million a day. 1
At this time, there appears to be no clear end to the shutdown in sight. Republicans, whose original rationale for not agreeing to fund the government was to defund “Obamacare,” seem unlikely to surrender without extracting some sort of concession from the Democrats, while President Obama says he simply will not negotiate with Republicans at the point of a hostage-taker’s gun.
What’s worse is that the shutdown is occurring as the deadline for the United States to raise its “debt ceiling” once again approaches. If Congress does not raise the nation’s statutory borrowing limit by October 17th, the United States will shortly thereafter default on all or part of its national debt, something which most professional economists agree would be the beginning of a global economic catastrophe. While elements of the Tea Party seem to be intent on forcing the issue, there are some recent signs that the Republican Party may soften its stance on the debt ceiling and agree to a temporary increase in the nation’s borrowing limit. Still, as we write, the resolution of this crisis is far from settled, and—as numerous analysts have pointed out—whatever the real intent of the Republicans, the closer the nation gets to the October 17th deadline without raising the debt ceiling, the chances of some kind of unintentional disaster increase. As one commentator put it, “If you keep wrestling at the edge of the cliff, eventually you will go over it.” The American bourgeoisie seems locked in a game of nuclear financial chicken with itself, putting an already fragile global economy at risk of a complete meltdown.
However this situation resolves, regardless of whether or not the more rational elements of the Republican Party win out over the Tea Party wing, this episode marks yet one more step into a deepening political crisis that has rocked the American ruling class since Obama’s election in 2008. Moreover, these events are just one more embarrassment for the United States on the international stage, coming on the heels of the revelations about NSA spying this past summer. Already, the Chinese officials have publicly called for “de-Americanizing” the global economy and suggestions have been floated of creating a new global reserve currency to replace the dollar, based on the Chinese Yuan but managed in London.
While it would be a mistake to overstate the nature of the political crisis—the American state is not on the verge of collapse just yet—it would also be an error to chalk these events up to just another contentious partisan fight over how to manage the nation’s deepening economic and imperialist difficulties. More than a mere policy dispute between various bourgeois factions, these events could possibly presage a major realignment in the American political system, potentially calling into question the stability of its two party structure and division of ideological labor.
So what is the nature of this political crisis and what does it say about the position of the United States in the context of continuing global economic difficulties? How does the political crisis of the US bourgeoisie fit with the theory of capitalist decomposition? In what follows, we will explore these questions, pointing out the danger for the proletariat in falling behind any faction of the bourgeoisie, even if the Democrats appear for the moment on the surface as the embodiment of order and rationality against the ideological decomposition of the Republican Party.
Although the political difficulties of the US bourgeoisie originate from at least the failed impeachment of President Clinton in the late 1990s and the botched presidential election of 2000, the current situation of Tea Party inspired mayhem stems from the election of Barack Obama as President in 2008. As we have analyzed in previous articles, although the main factions of the US bourgeoisie were behind Obama’s meteoric rise to the Presidency as a kind of anti-Bush, his election was not greeted with universal acceptance.2 Even before he was inaugurated, conservative groups were organizing to oppose his Presidency. The Tea Party, a loosely defined marriage of grassroots conservative organizations and corporate sponsors, rode white racist resentment of the first African-American President and paranoid fears of impending socialism to reach national prominence in 2009 and 2010.
Stoked by establishment Republicans who sought to use the grassroots energy of the movement to regain control of Congress, and by corporate money in search of a low regulation, anti-union business environment, the Tea Party had become a major player in national politics in advance of the 2010 mid-term elections. Although used by the Republican establishment to further its electoral agenda, the Tea Party clearly represents an element of the US bourgeoisie that is not traditionally counted among its “main factions.” Regionally, it is based in the South with some allies elsewhere, particularly in suburban and ex-urban regions of the Mid-West and West. Sociologically, it mostly represents small bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements with local and regional power that previously did not exert much influence on the national level. These are mostly small and medium sized business people: car dealers, doctors, etc, who feel shut out by the growth of federal authority in their regions and who were resentful of the giant federal bail-outs given to Wall Street in the aftermath of the 2008 meltdown. For many of them, the mandate contained in Obamacare - that certain businesses provide health insurance to their employees - feels like an onerous intrusion of the federal government into their local and regional economies.
Politically, the Tea Party counts on the “white backlash” against mass immigration, continuing white racism against African-Americans and anti-welfare and anti-tax demagoguery to stoke up a passionate electoral base among parts of the petty bourgeoisie and white working class with their talk of resistance and no compromises with the forces they oppose with religious like fervor. Ideologically, they represent a hodge podge of libertarian, authoritarian and traditionalist themes, united by a Manichean tendency to view their struggle as a kind of crusade and their opponents as the embodiment of societal decay, treason and foreignness. While the roots of the Tea Party go back generations, even to the reaction by local white elites against the rights won by African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil War, this faction of the American bourgeoisie has not enjoyed this level of political influence at the national level since their defeat during the Civil Rights era.
It was with this faction, which had gained a new insurgent energy in the wake of Obama’s election, that the establishment Republicans made a Faustian bargain in advance the of the 2010 mid-term elections. Moreover, Wall Street used the Tea Party as a hedge against any possibility that the Obama administration and its Democratic allies may develop a taste for raising taxes and imposing too many regulations on their casino economy in the wake of the 2008 meltdown. The Republican establishment legitimated the Tea Party, while Wall Street bank rolled it all the way to a Republican take-over of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms.
Since the 2010 midterms, despite President Obama’s successful re-election bid in 2012, the Tea Party caucus in the House of Representative has wreacked havoc within the US bourgeoisie. Now beholden to the “radicals” in his caucus, House speaker John Boehner has had to toe their ideological line, already taking the nation close to default in 2011.3 While the weight of the Tea Party within Congress has been useful for the main factions of the bourgeoisie in pushing an austerity agenda, including the painful sequester cuts that took effect earlier this year, the Republican refusal to compromise with the President has prevented a “grand bargain” that would attack the national deficit by cutting Social Security and Medicare and raising certain taxes. Moreover, the visceral hatred felt by many in the Tea Party caucus for immigrants has prevented any deal for comprehensive immigration reform from coming to fruition, frustrating the main factions of the US bourgeoisie’s search for a solution to these burning problems for the national capital.
However, perhaps most contentious has been the attempts by the Republican Party to undue President Obama’s signature health reform legislation.4 Despite its modest effect in mitigating the drag on the national capital represented by runaway health care costs, the Republican Party has fought tooth and nail, although so far unsuccessfully, to prevent the implementation of this law, leading to the current government shutdown. This is despite the fact that the law was a brainchild of Republican think-tanks and initially implemented on the state level by the Republicans’ last Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.
It is difficult to see the “material interests” at the level of the national capital that the Republican Party is defending with their opposition to the implementation of this law, leading many to conclude that their obstructionism is driven by the extent to which their party has been “captured” by Tea Party ideologues hell bent on repealing a law they see as a form of “socialism.” Whatever the small benefit to the national capital of Obama’s reform efforts, the implacable opposition to it from the right seems mostly to be an effect of ideological decomposition on the small bourgeoisie, enabled by the increasingly short-term political maneuvering of Wall Street and their Republican allies.5
While it may be the case that Tea Party positions are “locally rational” in the political context of their gerrymandered districts, this means little on the level of the national and global economies. In fact, one of the main features of the current crisis is the rise to power within the US ruling class of elements that appear to have no idea how a modern capitalist state must function or the requirements of remaining a hegemonic power in a globally integrated economy.
While there may be some long term “rationality” in the Tea Party’s concern about the US national debt (in the way a broken clock is right twice a day), this in no way legitimizes a seemingly suicidal opposition to raising the debt ceiling. If the US wants to maintain its global hegemony, it will simply have to continue to borrow money—such are the contradictions of a globalized decadent capitalism. Of course, the Tea Party may be right in one sense—it is indeed absurd that in order to maintain its global position the US must continue to sink further into debt. This fact only illustrates the historical bankruptcy of the entire capitalist system. Still, from the perspective of the national capital, this in no way legitimates the Tea Party’s seemingly self-destructive death wish with ending US foreign borrowing overnight, or the ridiculous obsession of the Paul family with abolishing the Federal Reserve.
Now that the American political system has wound itself into a position of “governing through crisis,” passing from one deadline crisis to the next, it is reasonable to ask, just as the more sophisticated bourgeois analysts do, if there is a way out of this mess? It is in the process of addressing this question that the American media has recently discovered the work of the Spanish political scientist Juan Linz.6 Linz, recently deceased, based his career on the comparative studies of democracies, arguing for the superiority of Westminster style parliamentary democracy over the Presidential system. Indeed, in the academic field of comparative politics the question of why many Presidential systems have been prone to collapse has been a burning issue for decades, particularly in the study of Third World “democracies,” many of who adopted a Presidential system only to shortly thereafter experience political impasse and a military coup. In Presidential systems, in which it is possible for the chief executive and the majority in the legislature to be from different parties, a crisis of democratic legitimacy, it was argued, was an inherent threat to the continuity of the state as neither the President nor the legislature could claim a full “democratic” mandate.
Of course, there was always one glaring exception to the tendency towards instability in Presidential systems: The United States of America, which despite experiencing a Civil War over slavery, had maintained a functioning and stable Presidential system for over two centuries. In the United States, the “checks and balances” inherent in the separation of powers appeared to work, preventing momentary majorities from enacting radical changes to the social and economic order. However, Linz argued that the exceptional nature of the United States was due more to the character of American political parties than a unique political culture. American parties have historically not been very well sorted according to “ideology.” Both the Democratic and Republican parties have tended towards pragmatism as each represent broad coalitions, which can recognize and act on common interests with elements of the other party. Should this change and the parties develop an ideological character, the United States would be prone to the same kind of political crisis that has led to the collapse of democratic state structures in other nations.
From the perspective of the current impasse in US politics, there is much to support in Linz’s analysis, in particular the increasing tendency towards “ideological sorting” in the US political parties. In many ways this analysis fits with our own, which has described an increasing “ideological hardening” in US society. However, from a Marxist perspective this only begs the question of what is driving this ideological sorting? In our analysis, it all comes back to the forces of capitalist decomposition and their reciprocal effect on the US political structure.
However, it is important to note that this process of ideological sorting has, to this time, disproportionately affected the Republican Party. Its bargain with the Tea Party—itself a reflection of an increasing tendency towards short term thinking—has allowed the forces of ideological decay to assert themselves in such a way that today the US bourgeoisie faces a virtual civil war within one of its major political parties, between the Tea Party insurgency and the remaining figures of the Republican establishment. Earlier this year, this war was expressed in the fight over immigration reform, in which it was expected by most pundits that the Republicans—out of electoral self-interest—would cut a deal with Democrats to overhaul the immigration system. Unfortunately, for the main factions of the US bourgeoisie in both parties, this has failed to transpire, mostly out of strong resistance from the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party who simply will not allow the US state to grant anything smacking of amnesty to those who have violated the law.
Although the Tea Party caucus in the House of Representatives constitutes only a minority of members, they have been able to direct Republican policy over the past several years through the threat of a primary challenge from the right to any Republican who appears too soft in negotiations with Democrats or who fails to toe the Tea Party line on important issues. The primary threat is enabled by increasingly gerrymandered electoral districts, in which Republicans face no real competition from the left and therefore are forced to lurch ever further to the right. Moreover, the influx of unregulated campaign money, coming mostly from right-wing billionaires like the Koch Brothers, which is now allowed under recent Supreme Court decisions, makes it possible for political neophytes from the right to upset many establishment Republicans in primary elections, drawing on the energy of an increasingly radicalized activist base intent on fighting back against the demographic change symbolized by the Obama Presidency.
Nevertheless, for all the triumphant media talk following Obama’s reelection about the demographic tide that is supposed to herald a new error of Democratic political dominance, the US bourgeoisie seems unable to surmount the difficulties posed by the right wing backlash. While the Democrats may now have a natural advantage in Presidential elections, this has not yet translated to off year and down ballot races. Couple this fact with the gerrymandering carried out by Republican controlled state legislatures and the Republican Party can continue to win control of the House of Representatives. Much dismay has been heard in the bourgeois media that however much the public at large is angry with Republicans over the government shut down and threat of default, the GOP is unlikely to feel much political pain at the ballot box.
Safe in their gerrymandered districts, Republican legislators have little to fear from Democrats at the same time they face an existential threat from a right-wing primary challenger should they stray too far from right-wing orthodoxy. Others argue that the Republican Party has basically given up trying to win the Presidency, preferring to enact its agenda through other means by weakening the office of the Presidency, using whatever tactics are necessary, including holding the global economy hostage. 7
There seems to be few good ways out of this impasse for the US ruling class. Although it is certainly possible that some temporary compromise will relieve the immediate threat posed by the debt ceiling limit and the government shut down, this will unlikely do anything to transform the underlying structural problems dogging the US bourgeoisie. Once again, the best the main factions of the bourgeoisie will likely be able to do is to kick the can down the road. The US ruling class is stuck with the fact that its state structure seemingly promotes a system of “locally rational, nationally foolish” for much of the Republican Party, and the traditional means for keeping the perverse incentives towards extremism under control have mostly broken down.
Perhaps the most damaging prospect for the US bourgeoisie of this political crisis is the calling into question of its traditional two-party democratic illusion and division of ideological labor. If ideological decomposition has turned the Republicans into an openly reactionary party representing a demographically doomed constituency, the Democratic Party is itself increasingly losing its image as the “party of the working class.”
Pushed by the Republican Party’s increasing rightward lurch, the Democratic Party has been forced to try to be both the party of the labor unions and at the same time that of neo-liberal corporatism. Within the broad Democratic coalition must co-exist such diverse political stances as the furthest left of the established unions like the Service Employee’s International Union (SEIU) and the so-called urban education reformers who push charter schools, merit pay and openly demonize the teachers’ unions. More and more, while the Republican Party enacts an enforced ideological purity, the Democratic Party appears to stand for nothing, except compromise itself, elevating deal making into an end in itself. In order to appear as the rational, “grown-up” party, nothing is off the table, not even Social Security and Medicare. But how can a party that acquiesces so easily to cuts in the meager social wage serve as a buttress against any social unrest that may emerge in the future? While for now, the Democrats can use the Republican Party’s meltdown as political cover, it is unclear for how long it can keep this charade going, especially when Obama is no longer the face of the party after 2016.
It is clear that the American state system is under severe stress at this time. Its two party democratic illusion is in jeopardy: one of its major parties is experiencing a serious upheaval that could possibly result in a split, while the other is increasingly called upon to shed its image as the protector of the working class. There appears to be fewer and fewer options open to the American bourgeoisie to repair the situation within the current structures of the state. While it is impossible to predict precisely how this will play out, it is important to note that each time the punditry has predicted that the Republican Party will come out of its ideological stupor in order to protect its electoral interests, it has only tended to dig in its heels further. While this allows the Democratic Party to claim to be the rational party, workers should have no illusions about what this means. For the Democrats, rationality means compromise, with each new compromise requiring the working class to bear the brunt of the pain. We should remember that in the current fight over the government shut down, the Democratic Party has already accepted the Republicans’ painful budget numbers. The budget, which is ostensibly at the heart of the current stand-off, is only several billion dollars more than that proposed by the Republican Party’s chief of austerity Paul Ryan. With each substantive crisis, the Democrats’ opening gambit is often already a restatement of its “opponent’s” position, revealing the true nature of both parties as enemies of the proletariat.
This should leave us with few doubts that in this contest between thieves both parties have austerity for the working class in mind. Thus, however more “rational” the Democrats claim to be compared to their Republican counterparts, it is necessary to grasp the meaning of their "rationality" in context. If rationality means enacting those polices that serve the interest of the US national capital, this will ultimately mean more austerity for the working class even if a deliberate blow up of the global economy is avoided.
All the political drama and media spectacle over these crises seems to include an important message that the media has tried to reinforce: the key to the functioning of any democratic political system is that all sides must be willing to compromise. Thus, compromise is set-up as an end in itself; it becomes the litmus test for rationality and good governance. Those who take a principled stand in favor of one position or another are ultimately painted with the brush of “extremism” and are said to act outside the boundaries of “democratic norms.” As a result of its recent behavior, many analysts have decided that the Republican Party is no longer a “normal” political party, but one bent on chaos and destruction. However much this is true, we have to be clear to separate this discussion from any attempt to turn this critique back on revolutionaries.
As descendants of the communist left, we are well aquatinted with the critique of those who refuse to compromise. Many of the charges thrown around by the pundits at the Republican “radicals” today are very similar to things Lenin said to dismiss the Dutch and Italian lefts within the Comintern. The refusal to compromise is labeled “juvenile,” “absolutist” and “impractical.” Compromises are supposed to be necessary in order to avoid premature confrontations, which one is likely to lose (as appears to be fate of the Republican Party today).
While we think any attempt to associate the communist left with the kind of intransigence at work in today’s Republican Party is not historically appropriate, it may very well be the case that the media is using the current crises to transmit a broader lesson about “radicalism” to the general population. Perhaps it is not for nothing that the phrase “Tea Party radical” has gained such currency? The message appears to be that anyone who steps outside the boundaries of normal politics is simply irresponsible, if not downright crazy, and should be summarily dismissed. “Grown-ups compromise.” They don’t refuse to negotiate when the pain for not doing is mutual ruin.
From our point of view, it is one thing to hold firm to the principles that delineate the boundary of bourgeois from proletarian politics as the historic communist left did, and another altogether for one bourgeois party to threaten the blow up the global economy if it doesn’t get its way. The communist left was a reaction to the growing political degeneration of the Comintern (as a result of the failure of the world revolution to spread from it Russian bastion) and its progressive reintegration into the state apparatus of capital. Today’s Tea Party intransigence is a reflection of the decomposition of the capitalist system and its centrifugal action upon the bourgeois political apparatus, which in turn pushes the underlying economic system to the brink of catastrophe.
For the working class, the lesson in the current crisis is clear. The bourgeois political apparatus is reaching the point of breakdown. While for now this process may be affecting one party more than another, there is no reason to expect deliverance from the Democrats. While the Democrats may not be interested in provoking a national default, they will most likely avoid this through a “compromise” that includes more attacks against the working class’s standard of living.8 There is only one way out of this morass and it starts with the working class returning to the path of its own autonomous struggles outside of the control of all capitalist political parties.
Henk, 10/14/2013
1 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-08/shutdown-costs-at-1-6-billion-... [4]
2 See the series of articles we have produced since the election of 2008 in Internationalism.3 For our analysis of the first debt ceiling crisis of 2011 see: U.S. Debt Ceiling Crisis: Political Wrangling While the Global Economy Burns https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201108/4459/us-debt-ceiling-cr... [5]
4 For our analysis of “Obamacare” see “Obamacare”: Political Chaos for the Bourgeoisie, Austerity for the Working Class. [6]
5 For an analysis that attempts to find the rational interests in Tea Party antics see this blog by Michael Lind: Tea Party Radicalism is misunderstood: Meet the “Newest Right” [7].
6 See Juan Linz, The Crisis of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) 1978.
7 Such was the analysis of MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell in yet another attempt to find the rationality in the Republican Party’s actions.
8 Of course, in the current crisis Obama and the Democrats have finally discovered that compromise has its limits. Not willing to repeat his mistake of 2011, in which he openly negotiated with hostage-takers, Obama has so far remained steadfast in his refusal to negotiate until the debt ceiling is raised and the government reopened, recognizing that do so would continue the negative precedent of rewarding economic terrorism. However, Obama and the Democrats have also been painfully clear that once the debt ceiling is raised and the government reopened, anything and everything is on the table in future budget negotiations.
The media are full of unbearable images of children and whole families dying of starvation in a world where vast amounts of food are being thrown away. The violence of this absurd poverty seems to have no limits. 10,000 people die of hunger every day. A child under 10 dies of starvation every 5 seconds. 842 million people are suffering from severe undernourishment. And this misery is spreading throughout the world, reaching part of the population of the ‘rich’ world, where food banks are becoming increasingly common. And if we are not immediately faced with hunger, we are being made to feel culpable for the horrors stalking the ‘third world’.
The ‘experts’ give us the most unbelievable explanations for all this. There are too many people. Our food regime is not adapted to the resources of the planet. We don’t have enough respect for these resources. In short, everything is geared to making us feel as guilty as possible, while those who are really responsible for this are never denounced. Is it their fault that modest families in the ‘Northern’ countries have to buy food at the lowest prices at the supermarkets? Shouldn’t we blame the ‘consumers’ for buying products made in the most dubious conditions? There are those who repeat this endlessly, and many of them tell us if we ‘consume in a different way’, everyone will be better off, including those in the poor countries. Our problem is that we are not being responsible. We eat too much and we eat badly, so it’s all our fault if others are going hungry.
There’s not much doubt that we eat badly, given all the colourings, sugars, and pesticides in our food. We will come back to that later on. But for now the question is this: how can we really understand this situation? Our planet is a very fertile place, blessed with an extremely rich and diverse ecosystem which contains vast potential. With more than 10Gha (10,000,000,000 hectares) of potentially cultivable land, it seems inconceivable that with the current technology so many people should be facing starvation. And yet they are. If we compare the resources available on the planet with the actual use being made of them today, we can see immense contradictions, contradictions which are threatening the very survival of our species.
Let’s look a bit more closely at these contradictions. As we said, the planet disposes of 10Gha of potentially cultivable land. According to a report published by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in Britain[1], the total amount of land actually being cultivated today represents 4.9Gha, i.e. around half of what is available for the production of food. This same report indicates that the average capacity of a one hectare field to produce grain or maize would make it possible, given current means, to feed between 19 and 22 people for a year, whereas the exploitation of a hectare destined for producing beef or lamb for human consumption makes it possible to feed around 1.5 people a year.
The existing productivity in the agro-food sector thus makes it possible to feed the whole world population. If millions of human beings are dying of hunger every day, the cause is this ignoble system which does not produce to satisfy the needs of humanity but to sell and make a profit. Here is the big difference with the famines of the Middle Ages: these were a result of the limited development of tools, of techniques, of the organisation of land and labour. Human beings continued to exploit every inch of land in order to make up for this lack of productivity. Today, under capitalism, humanity possesses extraordinary capacities which it is not using. Worse than that: the race for profit leads to immense waste:
“In South-East Asian countries for example, losses of rice can range from 37% to 80% of total production depending on development stage, which amounts to total wastage in the region of about 180 million tonnes annually...The potential to provide 60–100% more food by simply eliminating losses, while simultaneously freeing up land, energy and water resources for other uses, is an opportunity that should not be ignored.” [2]
In Europe, 50% of food products end up in the bin – 240,000 tons every day.
In response to famines, putting a stop to such waste, to the destruction of unsold food, would appear to be the immediate measures that need to be taken, even if they are largely insufficient. But even these basic measures can’t be taken by capitalism because in this society human welfare and the satisfaction of needs, even the most basic ones, is not at all the goal of production. Factories, machinery, capital only exist to make a profit and the workers are only fed so that they can produce surplus value, the source of profit. Measures that might seem simple and obvious can only be adopted by the proletariat in a revolutionary situation.
This said, in the long term, a society free from social classes and capital will have to take much more radical measures than this. The capitalist mode of production ravages nature, exhausts the soil, poisons the air. The majority of animal species are threatened with extinction if the destructive madness of this system isn’t halted.
Those who are conscious of this situation can only react with indignation. But many claim that the way forward is to reduce consumption, and to practice negative growth. But the solution is neither ‘productivist’ (producing more and more without concern for the aim of production), or negative growth (producing less so that each human being lives just above the poverty line, which is impossible under capitalism with its inevitable class inequalities). It has to be much more radical and profound than that. If production is no longer spurred on by the hunt for profit but by the satisfaction of human need, then the conditions of production will have to change completely. In the realm of food production, all research, the whole organisation of labour and the soil, the process of distribution...will be guided by the respect for humanity and nature. But this implies the overthrow of capitalism.
From what we know today, agriculture first made its appearance around 10,000 years ago, somewhere around the south east of what is today Turkey. Since then, techniques have continued to develop, sometimes resulting in major leaps in output. The use of animals to pull the swing plough became general in antiquity, while the development of the wheeled plough and of three crop rotation around the 10th century AD led to definite improvements in production. However, it is important to remember that despite the advances that marked this long period[3], the technical knowledge of the time did not make it possible to generate stable harvests from one year to the next. There were many examples of great famines that decimated the population: in 1315 for example, as a result of a particularly cold and rainy year, harvests in France were 50% below that of previous years, resulting in the deaths of between 5 and 10% of the population. To a lesser extent the same phenomenon could be seen in 1348, this time followed by the Black Death which struck an already weakened population. To simplify, during the 14th and 15th centuries when the climate was less favourable than in the previous period, there was a terrible famine every 20 or 30 years. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that agricultural production ceased to suffer so severely from blows delivered by the climate. The progress in machinery and the use of fossil fuels (coal and oil), the advances in inorganic chemistry and the introduction of mineral fertilisers led to a considerable increase in output. With the development of capitalism, agriculture became an industry, in the image of the textile industry, or transport. Tasks were rigorously planned and the concept of the manufacturing process, with the scientific organisation of labour, permitted an unprecedented increase in productivity. All this led people to believe that periods of crisis and famine would give way to centuries of abundance. Most of the scientists of the day swore by the progress of science and thought that the development of capitalist society would be the remedy for all ills. Most, but not all. In 1845 for example, when capitalism was in full expansion, a terrible famine struck Ireland. Mildew and humid weather led to a fall in the potato crop of nearly 40%. The consequences for the population were dramatic – it is estimated that there were a million deaths between 1846 and 1851. But even if the techniques of the day were still fairly rudimentary, it would be a mistake to see the potato blight as the sole cause of the catastrophe. In contrast to what happened in 1780, Ireland’s ports remained open due to the pressure of Protestant negotiators and Ireland carried on exporting food. While whole families on the island were dying of hunger, convoys of food belonging to the landlords, escorted by the army, set off for England. This is how England’s capitalist development took place. The boundless cruelty of the capitalist system led Engels to write in 1882:
“In the advanced industrial countries, we have subdued the forces of nature and harnessed them to the service of man; we have thus infinitely multiplied production to the point where a child today can produce what once took 100 adults. And what are the consequences? Growing over-work and mounting poverty for the masses, and every ten years, a huge debacle” (Dialectics of Nature).
In the next article [11]we will examine this subject in the context of the decadence of capitalism.
Enkidu 20/10/13
[1]. ‘Global food, waste not, want not’
[2]. Global Food
[3]. We can also refer to the work of Oliviér Serres (1539-1619) on the structure of agricultural practice
In the aftermath of the general elections of 22 September 2013 in Germany, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic, Angela Merkel and leader of the Christian Democrats, is presently negotiating the formation of a Grand Coalition with the Social Democrats. The new government will be the third in a row under the Chancellorship of Merkel. The first one was also a Grand Coalition with the second largest party in the Bundestag, the SPD. The second one was a coalition with the small liberal partner, the FDP. One of the results of the recent elections was that Merkel lost her coalition partner. For the first time since the foundation of the Federal Republic after the Second World War, the Liberals failed to gain entry to parliament. At the moment of writing, the formation of a coalition of the Christian Democrats with the SPD appears to be by far the most likely outcome. The course of the negotiations between these two parties already indicate that, although the Christian Democrats have a much bigger share of the seats in parliaments, the new coalition with the SPD, if it comes into being, will be “written in the handwriting of the Social Democrats”, as the media have already declared. In other words: the programme of the new government will not be to immediately and frontally attack the working class, although these massive attacks will of necessity follow in the course of time.
By far the most remarkable result of the recent elections however was the fact that the Chancellor and her party, who have already ruled the country for two full terms of office, could celebrate such an electoral triumph. In a country which, since the war, has, with one brief exception, always been ruled by coalition governments, Merkel came close to gaining an absolute majority – for Germany a sensation. This is all the more remarkable since, in most of the other countries of Europe, the economic situation is so serious, and the need to attack the working population so acute, that any government, whether of the left or the right, tends to rapidly lose popularity and even credibility and thus to be sent back into opposition at the next elections. This at least is the form which the social safety valve of capitalist democracy presently takes in Europe: The anger of the population is canalised and neutralised into a “protest vote”, which, for the “political class” has the consequence that the long-term continuity of a given governing team becomes increasingly unlikely. A dramatic example of this development is France, where the left wing government of Francois Hollande, not long ago celebrated by the media as the new hope for the working people of the whole of Europe, has suffered after only one year in office an all time loss of public sympathy. But what we see in Germany is the contrary development, at least for the moment. The question is: how is this to be explained?
Perhaps the most important “secret” of the lasting electoral strength of Angela Merkel lies in the fact that it was not necessary yet, under her chancellorship, to massively attack the population. And one of the reasons for this is that her predecessor, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and his left coalition of the SPD and the Greens, already did this so successfully that Merkel is still reaping the rewards. Schröder’s so-called “Agenda 2010”, unleashed at the beginning of the new century, was a huge success from the point of view of capital. It succeed in reducing the global wage bill of the country so radically that its main rivals in Europe, such as France, publically protested against the “wage dumping” of the continent’s leading economic power. It also succeed in enforcing an unprecedented “flexibilisation” of the work force, in particular through a breathtaking development of precarious employment, not only in traditionally low wage sectors, but at the heart of industry. Thirdly (and this was not the least of Schröder’s achievements) all of this was achieved through an attack which was absolutely massive, but not generalised. In other words, instead of attacking the proletariat as a whole, the measures were designed to create deep visions within the class, between employed and unemployed workers, between workers with regular contracts and those without. In the big factories a veritable apartheid system was established between the regular employees and the “casuals” doing the same job for only half or even only a third off the wage; in some cases they were not even allowed to use the company canteen. As a result, whereas in many other European countries such massive attacks had to be implemented without much previous planning under the hammer blows of the so-called financial crisis from 2008 on, Merkel was in the comfortable position that in Germany these measures were already in place and bearing their fruits for capital.
Another specificity at this level is that the attacks in Germany were not hatched out, for instance, by one of the infamous neo-liberal “think tanks”, but first and foremost by the trade unions. Agenda 2010 was worked out by a commission led by Peter Hartz, a friend of Schröder at the Volkswagen concern, with the direct participation of the trade union factory council of Volkswagen and the IG Metall, the metal workers’ union, the most powerful trade union in Europe, which (as many employers have publically admitted) understands more about successful management than the managers themselves. No wonder that today the majority of the German bourgeoisie, including the employers’ federations, is eager to have the Social Democrats (and with them the unions) join Merkel in a coalition government. And no wonder that Merkel, after losing her liberal coalition partner, is presently distancing herself increasingly from the ideology of neo-liberalism, singing songs of praise for the good old German model of the alleged “social market economy” (where the trade unions directly participate in running the country) and even beginning to advocate the extension of this model to the rest of Europe.
Another reason for Merkel’s success story lies in the strong competitive edge of the German economy. If this competitive edge were based solely on the wage dumping explained above, it would now be melting away in face of the drastic attacks elsewhere in Europe in recent years. But in reality it has a much broader basis in the economic structure of the country itself. There is a danger for marxists, confronted by the abstract mode of functioning of capital, of themselves being mesmerised by this abstract character, and thus falling for the impression that the relative strength or weakness of a national capital depends solely on abstract criteria such as the development of the organic composition of capital or the rate of indebtedness in relation to GNP etc. This leads to a purely schematic vision of the capitalist economy, where political, historical, cultural, geographical, military and other factors disappear from sight. For instance, if you look at the growth rates or the level of debts of the USA and compare them with those of China, you can only conclude that America has already lost the race against its Asiatic challenger and might even end up with some kind of third world status. But this forgets that the USA is still the capitalist paradise of innovative “start ups”, that it is no coincidence that the centre of the new media is the United States, and that the political culture of a Stalinist led country like China prevents it from emulating its rival.
In her polemic with the revisionist Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg (in her book Reform or Revolution?) explained that the “laws” discovered by Karl Marx concerning the rising organic composition and the centralisation of capital do not mean the necessary disappearance of middle sized enterprises. On the contrary, she explains, such smaller companies necessarily remain the heart of the technical innovation which is at the hub of an economic system based on competition and the obligation to accumulate. Germany is not a paradise for capitalist start ups like the United States (the heavy weight of its bureaucratic traditions prevent this). But it remains to this day the Mecca of the world engineering and machine construction industries. This strength is based on highly specialised, often family led companies, who pass their skills on from generation to generation, and on a highly qualified work force based on a unique apprenticeship system and on traditions which go back to the Middle Ages. In the past 20 years, in a coordinated operation between the employers’ federations, the government, the banks and the trade unions, these small and middle size machine-constructing enterprises, without necessarily increasing their size, have been transformed into world-wide operating businesses. But their base of operation remains Germany. Here again, the signature of the trade unions is evident. Whereas an employer will tend not to mind whether profits come from a plant in Germany or abroad, as long as there are profits, the thinking of the trade unions is almost viscerally nationalistic, since their primordial task is to control the work force in Germany itself, in the interests of capital, and this can best be done by maintaining industry and jobs “at home”. The metal workers’ union directly concerned, the IG Metall, is a fanatical defender of Germany as an industrial base (the “Standort Deutschland”).
All of this helps to explain why Germany, at least to date, has been better able to resist the terrible deepening of the world economic crisis of capitalism since 2008 than most of its rivals. But none of these advantages would have helped much had the structure of the capitalist economy not radically changed since the days of the terrible depression which began in 1929 and which ended in World War Two. At that time, the heartlands of capitalism, the most developed countries of the day, Germany and the United States, were hit first and were the worst affected. This is no coincidence. The crises of decadent capitalism are no longer crises of expansion, they are crises of the system as such, developing at its heart and naturally afflicting the centre directly. But as opposed to 1929, the bourgeoisie today is not only much more experienced, it above all has a gigantic state capitalist apparatus at its disposal, which cannot prevent economic crisis, but which can prevent the crisis from taking its natural course. This is mainly why, since the re-appearance of the open crisis of capitalist decadence at the end of the 1960s, the economically and politically strongest states have been the ones best able to resist. None of this prevents the crisis not only from coming ever closer to the historic centres of capitalism, but also from affecting these centres in an ever more serious manner. But this does not necessarily mean that there will be a partial economic collapse there in the near future like in Germany or the USA after 1929. At all events, the international and European management of the “Euro-Crisis” in recent years clearly demonstrates that the state capitalist mechanisms of pushing the worst effects of the crisis onto weaker rivals still function. Both the property and finance crisis which began in 2007/2008, and the crisis of confidence in the joint European currency which followed it, directly menaced the stability of the German and French banking and finance sector. The main results of the different European salvation operations, all the money so generously lent to Greece, Ireland, Portugal etc, was the shoring up of the German and French interests at the expense of weaker rivals, with the additional result that the workers of those countries had to bear the main brunt of the attacks. And whereas the reasons we gave at the beginning of this article to explain the electoral success of Merkel were not of her own doing, concerning this question it certainly was Merkel and her finance minister Schäuble who defended the German interests tooth and nail, so that the European partners were often driven to the brink of exasperation. And here it is clear that behind the high vote for Merkel there is a nationalist impulse which is very dangerous for the working class.
There are thus objective reasons which help to explain the electoral triumph of Angela Merkel: the relatively successful resistance of Germany, at least to date, to the deepening of the historical crisis, and Merkel’s capacity to defend German interests in Europe. But the most important single reason for her success was that the whole German bourgeoisie wanted her success and did all it could to promote it. The reasons for this do not lie in Germany itself, but in the world situation as a whole, which is becoming increasingly threatening. At the economic level, the crisis of the European economy, and the wavering confidence in the Euro, are far from over – the worst is yet to come. This is why the phenomenon of Mutti Merkel, the “wise and caring mother” in charge of the German state, is now so important. According to a popular school of thought within modern bourgeois economic “theory”, economics is to an important degree a question of psychology. They say “economics” and mean capitalism. They say “psychology” and mean religion, or should we say: superstition? In Volume One of Capital, Marx explains that capitalism is based to an important degree on the belief in the magic power of persons and objects (commodities, money) invested with purely imaginary abilities. Today, the confidence of the international markets in the Euro is mainly based on the belief that somehow the involvement of “the Germans” is a guarantee that all will be well. Mutti Merkel has become a world-wide fetish.
The problem of the common European currency is not peripheral, but absolutely central, both economically and politically. In capitalism, the confidence between the actors, without which a society with a minimum of stability becomes impossible, is no longer based on mutual confidence between human beings, but takes the abstract form of confidence in money, in the existing currency. The German bourgeoisie knows from its own experience with the hyper-inflation of 1923, that the collapse of a currency lays the basis for explosions of uncontrollable instability and insanity.
But there is also the political dimension. Here Berlin is extremely anxious about the long term development of social discontent in Europe, and about the immediate situation in France. It is alarmed by the incapacity of the bourgeoisie on the other side of the Rhine to come to terms with its economic and political problems. And it is worried about the prospect of social unrest in that country, since the German working class in the past decades has developed a particular admiration for the French proletariat and tends to look to it for leadership.
It is with full consciousness of its international responsibilities that today, with the results of the recent elections, the German bourgeoisie has chosen a government which embodies and symbolises strength, stability and continuity, and with which it hopes to face up to the coming storms.
Weltrevolution (the ICC's section in Germany). 4th of November 2013.
Our sympathiser, Baboon, analyses the recent struggle at Grangemouth.
The price for keeping the Grangemouth petro-chemical section, indeed the whole refinery, from shutting down: a no-strike agreement, a 3-year pay freeze, cuts in shift-pay and bonuses, less favourable conditions for new workers, “limited redundancies” and an end to the Final Salary pension scheme (more contributions from the workers, less pay out), has been “embraced, warts and all” by Len McCluskey and his Unite trade union. When asked on the BBC if this wasn’t a humiliation, McClusey said no, “we sort out problems like this all the time”. And indeed the actions of the trade union Unite go hand in hand with the bosses’ attack. The workers at BA will attest to this where, a few years ago, the Unite union brought in a two-tier wage system, divided workers at Gatwick from Heathrow and cut wages and conditions to the extent that some workers and stewards tore up their union cards in angry meetings with the union representatives. Like BA, the events around Grangemouth demonstrate both the attacks raining down on the working class and, at the very least, the uselessness of the trade unions in representing the interests of the working class.
Much is made by papers like the Trotskyist Socialist Worker and the Stalinist Morning Star about the billionaire boss of Grangemouth “blackmailing” the workers and about the “greed” of the owner, but this is what capitalism does as a matter of fact and is increasingly forced to do as the crisis deepens and its profits are threatened. For those on the Left one answer is the nationalisation of the plant, as if that would in any way attenuate the exploitation of the workers. One of the first coordinated actions of the banks nationalised after the 2008 crisis was the sacking of tens of thousands of workers. One might think that the oil industry would be profitable, but this is far from the case as it constantly tries to lower costs through reducing wages and making inroads on working conditions and safety measures (look at BP in the US and the neglect that resulted in the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010). The Swiss-based, half Chinese-owned Grangemouth oil refinery, like many in Europe and Latin America, is suffering from the intense cut-throat competition with the US and Middle Eastern refineries on the oil market-place, while local demand has declined because of the recession.
This free-for-all also makes a mockery of the Coalition’s recovery talk about new investments and bold energy policies. The writing was on the wall with the so-called ‘unthinkable’ closure of the Coryton oil refinery in Essex over a year ago despite a Unite spokesman saying at the time that “it was a going concern ready to make a profit” (BBC Business News, 24.1.12). 850 jobs went here when the plant shut down despite more generalised protests from workers that included those of Grangemouth and the Lindsey refinery in Lincolnshire – protests that Unite disowned. Quite a few Coryton workers went to Saudi Arabia but many upped and moved to refineries around the UK, including Grangemouth. The Coryton plant was run on such tight margins that the whole place was a disaster waiting to happen and it did on October 31, 2007, where a fire and massive explosion shook homes fourteen miles away. Luckily for the workers it happened out of working hours, though the cloud of poison given off was toxic for miles around. Since that incident the plant saw over 20 “serious” (Health and Safety Executive) incidents up until it closed last year.
The fragility of the oil industry is by no means confined to Britain as is shown by the strike by 40,000 Petrobas workers in Brazil against attacks on their wages - which the union turned into an argument about nationalisation - and strikes and protests by petro-chemical workers in Portugal against cuts in their wages and conditions. It’s the brutal logic of capitalism: if a firm doesn’t make the required profits then the business shuts down and the workers are thrown out of a job and possibly out of their homes. Not only are the trade unions unable to confront the laws of capital, they are complicit in their functioning as well as the policing of the workers under their joint agreements, procedures and ever-extending commitments to ‘flexibility’. The trade unions represent a completely false opposition to the bosses while being complicit in their attacks. What did the Unite union do at Grangemouth?
The threat to close the Grangemouth petro-chemical division would have cost over 800 jobs immediately and threatened another 2600 direct and contractor jobs if the closure extended to the refinery, i.e., 8% of Scotland’s manufacturing industry would have gone up in smoke. The company, Ineos, has been trying to change workers’ terms and conditions since it bought the plant from BP seven years ago, so it’s not like the unions were not warned of the impending attack. In April 2008, Grangemouth workers were involved in a strike over attacks on their pensions - the first strike at Grangemouth for 73 years. But here, this month, a clique of the Unite shop stewards organised a vote in one shop of a hundred workers, not against the attacks of the company, but against the actions of Ineos in enquiring into the time the union convenor was spending on Labour Party politics in Scotland. The attack on the workers was entirely secondary to the union which was more concerned with defending one of their own who was said to be involved in ballot rigging and other machinations around the corrupt politics of the Falkirk Labour Party. It’s often said that the union leadership is ‘out of touch’, ‘bureaucratic’ and the ‘rank-and-file’ is the real union. There’s something inescapably and intrinsically Stalinesque about the trade unions in that their structures and frameworks give rise to cliques and cabals of small minorities even with the best will in the world. They, and their practices, are the antithesis of the mass, open meetings of workers that can point the way forward.
The rank-and-file apparatus was indeed ‘the real union’ here at Grangemouth, reflecting the in-fighting and political machinations of the union leadership, which has nothing to do with the class struggle. Eighty-one of the workers balloted voted to strike for the steward and the other 1300 direct workers and more than a thousand contractors who were Unite members didn’t get a say. There’s no wonder there was a lot of residual anger amongst the workers against the union for its actions and its non-action. When the boss threatened closure the union called off its pathetic forty-eight hour strike, and the work-to-rule and overtime ban that the workers were carrying out “in the interests of maintaining production”. And when the closure threat was maintained the union capitulated, as evidenced by the words of Unite boss, McCluskey above and Unite’s Scottish secretary, Pat Rafferty, pleading for talks (Guardian, 21/10/13) and agreeing to the no-strike agreement the previous day.
The rejection of the company plan didn’t come through a Unite ballot but, as many reports said, from individual workers, about two-thirds of them, returning a ‘no’ to the company’s plans. This at least showed a combative potential of the Grangemouth workers who were involved in solidarity actions with Coryton (above) and also involved in solidarity actions with the 2008 Tanker Drivers’ strike. As the plant was ‘saved’ (for how long?) the TV concentrated on the justly relieved workers (though some criticism of the trade union came through), but there is a large core of workers here that have experience of solidarity actions and sometimes illegal struggle, who were clearly against the ‘survival plan’. In the summer of 2008, Grangemouth workers showed solidarity with Shell tanker drivers as picketing and ‘secondary actions’ took place from Plymouth, through Wales and Somerset up to Cheshire, Lincolnshire and Scotland. The victory trumpeted by Unite here was a deal stitched-up by them and the bosses which resulted in a pay offer just 0.7% more than the original offer to the Shell drivers. The real victory was in the often illegal solidarity actions of the workers across union divisions.[1]
Attacks have been raining down on oil industry workers, just like all workers, since the 90s particularly and we will see more Grangemouths and Colytons in the years to come as capitalism’s crisis intensifies. It is very difficult for workers to struggle effectively in today’s conditions, particularly when the firm is about to close down and your job is on the line, or in the face of what seems overwhelming odds and isolation. But these questions won’t go away for the working class because the attacks of capital will become relentless. At Grangemouth the workers had the whole gamut of the state ranged against them: the ‘evil’ boss, Alex Salmond and his brand of Scottish nationalism, Westminster politics and Falkirk Labour Party plotting and scheming, the Trotskyists and Stalinists denouncing “fat cats” calling for nationalisation and ideas of ‘workers’ control’ - and the Unite trade union also singing the left’s tunes with its leader Len McCluskey saying on BBC News (24/10/13) that “the future of this plant is paramount to the shop stewards (pause) and the workers” and that he wouldn’t allow “the future of Scotland to be put in peril”. And so he puts himself and his union, and his compromised clique of shop stewards, at the service of the company in its ongoing attacks on the working class.
Baboon 29/10/1 (This article was contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC)
The stabbing of Greek rapper Pavlos Fyssas in September by a self-confessed member of Golden Dawn has led to a wave of official actions against the neo-nazi party. Members, deputies and its leader have been arrested on charges of belonging to a criminal organisation, following the lifting of its parliamentary immunity. Individuals have been charged with murder, attempted murder, sex trafficking, money laundering, benefit and tax fraud. Its state funding has been suspended. Witnesses have given evidence of the involvement of the party in attacks on immigrants, extortion and arms smuggling.
Political parties have shown themselves united in their support of the measures taken, all agreeing that Golden Dawn (GD) is a serious threat to democracy. Alexis Tsipras, the leader of left wing opposition party Syriza supported the repressive measures: “The intervention shows that our democracy is standing firm and it is healthy” while suggesting that the ‘intervention’ had not gone far enough as Syriza called for all GD members to be arrested. The Greek Socialist Workers’ Party saw the actions of the coalition government as a “victory” and declared “We celebrate this development”, while demanding that there should also be a “cleansing” of the police.
The divisions in Greek politics have always run deep. Yet, on the economic level, the conservative New Democracy and the social democratic PASOK, after more than 35 years of alternating in government denouncing each other’s every move, joined together in a coalition government in November 2011 in order to impose even tougher austerity measures. Similarly, for all the different views of the economic calamity that Greece has been in over the last six years - whether or not, for example, to leave the EU - the parties have united in their defence of democracy. This is not before time for the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner Nils Muiznieks who produced a report in April this year which said that Greece had perfectly adequate legal grounds to ban Golden Dawn. In February he had called on Greece to do more against offences committed by GD and its links with the police. He also recommended investigations into police brutality.
The state of democracy in Greece has been a preoccupation of the international bourgeoisie for some time. In a recent report from the Demos think tank Backsliders: Measuring Democracy in the EU, Greece and Hungary come out as the most serious causes for concern. Greece is seen as “overwhelmed by extremely high unemployment, social unrest, endemic corruption and a severe disillusionment with the political establishment”.
On every count the report sees Greece coming out badly. It’s the most corrupt country in the EU, “… in countries like Greece and Italy corruption has risen in line with sluggish economic fortunes”. The catastrophic state of the economy is linked to widespread discontent – another recent report found Greeks now the most unhappy people in Europe. In the face of discontent “Some have argued that freedom of assembly has been challenged repeatedly by the Greek police, who have been accused of the use of teargas and violence against peaceful protestors and the incitement of riots since 2008”. The emergence of Golden Dawn is seen as pointing to a failing of the whole Greek ‘political class’. The links between GD and the police disturb the report’s authors.
The report is also concerned at the decline in turnout at Greek elections, although that is seen as a general problem: “countries across Western Europe are experiencing a sustained decline in voter turnout over the past 50 years, seemingly driven by increased apathy and a perceived absence of political choice.” In Greece, superficially, there might seem as though there was a tremendous range of choice, with a generous variety of parties from left, right and centre. However, as is seen elsewhere, the perception that in reality all parties stand for much the same has been dawning over a long period.
Although the Demos report is supposedly focussed on democracy, it has a wide-ranging brief. The treatment of immigrants is highlighted. “They can face tough conditions on arrival. Amnesty International has accused Greece of treating migrants like criminals and disregarding its obligations under international law. In January 2011 the European Court of Human Rights found Greece had violated Article 3 of the ECHR, which requires member states to prohibit torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, because of its poor asylum procedures”. Here the respectable parties of Greek democracy meet up with the neo-nazi Golden Dawn. Members of GD have physically attacked migrants, while the Greek government has undertaken an official campaign.
In August 2012 the Greek coalition government launched Operation Xenios Zeus. Tens of thousands of people, supposedly illegal undocumented migrants, have been subjected to abusive stops and searches on the streets, and hours-long detention at police stations. Of 85,000 detained about 4200 (about 6%) have been faced with charges of unlawful entry. Many have been sent to the Amygdaleza detention centre in northern Athens (the ‘Greek Guantanamo’). Here, officially, 1600 migrants are held, forced to live in inhuman conditions, subject to police abuse, denied proper health care, with Muslims being attacked while at prayer, until they are deported. The head of the Greek police union said that conditions were inhuman and unacceptable for the guards as well. Xenios Zeus is the Greek patron of hospitality.
While Golden Dawn have attacked migrants on the streets, there are other foreigners who are more generally blamed for the current situation in Greece. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel is widely described as the ‘new Hitler’ because of the role of Germany in the imposition of austerity measures. The Left is only marginally more sophisticated when it attacks the Troika of the EU, IMF and European Central Bank, while calling for withdrawal from the EU. As government repression cracked down on Golden Dawn its spokesmen hinted at ‘foreign influences’ or compared Greek Prime Minister Samaras to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan. The parties of the bourgeoisie have a similar approach in practice and in rhetoric.
What concerns the bourgeoisie outside Greece is the potential for instability and the unpredictable role of Golden Dawn. In the democratic campaign GD can be portrayed as the force that goes beyond the framework of parliamentary democracy. But what Greek history of the last hundred years shows is that it has not only been under the dictatorship of Metaxas and the rule of the Colonels that the repression has been a central concern for the ruling class. In 1929 the Liberal government of Eleftherios Venizelos, for example, introduced the Idionymon law. This was aimed at “a minority that seeks the violent overthrow of the established social status quo by disseminating its principles and attracting followers, often through essays and underground means, and has put in danger the security of society”. The penalty for those found guilty of having subversive ideas was imprisonment for six months or more, often on one of the islands of exile. Strikes effectively became illegal affronts to social peace. Venizelos specifically excluded using the law against fascists, and Metaxas used it as part of the legal apparatus of his own regime. Also, in the 1950s and 60s, in the period between the Greek Civil War and the advent of the Colonels, parties of the centre continued to preside over an apparatus that retained the camps and other instruments that had been used by the authoritarian dictatorships.
The rise of Golden Dawn was tolerated by the other parties of the Greek bourgeoisie until the killing of Pavlos Fyssas. GD had killed others before then, but the pressure to reinforce the apparatus of democracy became overwhelming. The new-found unity of the bourgeoisie against Golden Dawn has given an impetus to Greek democracy. However, this is not going to last forever. The early November killing of two members of Golden Dawn provoked much speculation on what would follow. One approach saw it as retaliation for the death of Fyssas and anticipated an escalation of tit-for-tat violence. This would not necessarily lead to greater instability as the Greek state would be in a position to say that further repression was required against other extremists, not just neo-nazis. It is a commonplace in Greek ‘moderate’ politics to see all ‘extremists’ being essentially the same. Not only are Golden Dawn portrayed as a threat to democracy, there are other forces that can be labelled ‘extreme’ in order to be confronted by the state. These will certainly include militant workers and revolutionary groups.
The bourgeoisie in Greece has shown how its major parties can be united to impose harsh economic measures. It has rallied to the democratic capitalist state in the name of anti-fascism. Its biggest enemy is the working class. When the bourgeoisie unites against protests and struggles that are impelled by discontent, the state is prepared for physical repression, while others will pose as the friends of the exploited. In struggle you can expect to be attacked by nazi thugs – the democratic state has a far wider weaponry, both repressive and ideological, and it is sophisticated enough to use the threat of fascism to bolster its own power.
Car 2/11/13
At the beginning of October, an overloaded ship went down near Lampedusa in Italy. More than 350 immigrants died. A few days afterwards, another boat carrying migrants sank, and another ten people drowned. Every year in the Mediterranean 20,000 people lose their lives on the verge of reaching the sought-after Fortress Europe. Since the 1990s, the corpses of human beings fleeing from poverty and war have been piling up at the frontiers, along the coasts, in the deserts of the Sahara – like the 92 women and children from Niger abandoned by people smugglers to die of thirst and exhaustion in the Sahara at the end of the same month.
The ruling class has shed copious crocodile tears about the Lampedusa tragedy because its scale, and its proximity to ‘home’, made it impossible to ignore. To have done so might have stirred up too much anger, too much thinking.
The sordid polemic about the failure of Italian fishermen to help the victims has also served to divert people’s attention towards the hunt for scapegoats – even though the current laws actually criminalise those who help illegal immigrants and in previous cases captains of fishing vessels have already been prosecuted for trying to “give assistance to illegal entry”.
The grand media coverage of the Lampedusa tragedy is aimed at creating a mental fog and obscuring the huge repressive apparatus set up by in a coordinated manner by the states. The ideological trap is made up, on the one hand, of overtly xenophobic propaganda and, on the other, by ‘humanitarian’ speeches which, by emphasising the ‘rights’ of the victims, serve to separate immigrants from other proletarians.
One thing should be clear: capitalism in crisis and its politicians are indeed responsible for this new tragedy. It’s they who compel thousands of hungry people to embark on ever-more suicidal adventures to get round the obstacles placed in their path. It’s therefore not surprising if these same politicians were jeered at the airport by a shocked and disgusted local population[1].
Like these immigrants, all proletarians are really those who have been ‘uprooted’. Since the beginning of capitalism, they have been torn away from the land and from artisan labour. In the Middle Ages the majority of the exploited remained tied to the land; the rising power of capital subjected them to a violent exodus from the countryside
“The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this ‘free’ proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition”.[2]
Historically capitalism developed on the basis of free access to labour power. To extract surplus value it generated enormous population shifts. It was the unity of the new conditions of the exploited that led the workers’ movement to recognise that “the workers have no country!”
In addition, without the slave trade from Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries, capitalism would not have been able to develop so quickly in its industrial centres and through the slave ports of Liverpool, London, Bristol, Zeeland, Nantes and Bordeaux. In the 19th century, with the black labour force ‘freed’ into wage labour, economic growth fuelled even more massive displacements of populations, especially towards the American continent. From the early 19th century until 1914, 50 to 60 million Europeans headed towards the USA in search of work. At the beginning of the 20th century, nearly a million immigrants entered the USA every year. For Italy alone, between 1901 and 1913, nearly 8 million people became immigrants. During the ascendant phase of capitalism the system was able to absorb this mass of workers whose labour power was needed by an expanding economy.
With the historic decline of the system, migration and the displacement of populations have not stopped. On the contrary! Imperialist conflicts, especially the two world wars, economic crises, and disasters linked to climate change have fed ever-growing migrations. In 2010, it was estimated that there were 214 million migrants in the world (3.1% of the world population[3]). On the basis of climate change alone, certain projections estimate that there will be between 25 million and one billion extra migrants by 2050[4].
Because of the permanent crisis of capital and the overproduction of commodities, migrants have come up against the limits of the market and the increasingly brutal rules imposed by the state. Capital can no longer integrate labour power on the same scale as before. Thus, in contrast to the period prior to the First World War when it opened its doors to the ‘huddled masses’, the USA has set up a whole system of quotas to drastically restrict entry, and is now building walls to halt the flow of migrants from Latin America. The economic crisis which opened up at the end of the 1960s has led all governments, especially in Europe, to set up heavy-handed patrols around the southern Mediterranean, employing an armada of boats to control the flow of migrants. The undeclared aim of the ruling class is clear: migrants should stay at home and rot. To ensure this, the good democrats of Europe, and notably France, have not hesitated to use the muscular services of a Gaddafi in Libya or the authorities in Morocco to make sure that those trying to reach Europe don’t get through the desert.
These controls at the frontiers, which have got tougher and tougher, are the product of decadence and of state capitalism. They are not new. In France for example:
“The creation of identity cards in 1917 really overturned administrative and police practices. Today we are habituated to having our passports stamped and we no longer think about the police origins of the process. But it was by no means neutral that the institution of identity cards was initially aimed at the surveillance of foreigners in a period of open war”.[5]
Today the paranoia of the state towards foreigners suspected of being troublemakers has reached unprecedented heights. Huge metal or concrete walls at the frontiers[6], topped with barbed wire or electrified, are a sinister reminder of the death camps of the Second World War. In 1989, the European bourgeoisies celebrated the fall of the ‘Berlin Wall’ in the name of freedom. This was indeed a barbaric materialisation of the ‘Iron Curtain’; but those doing the celebrating have shown that they too are builders of walls!
The decadence of capitalism has become a period of vast displacements which have to be ‘controlled’. It’s the era of deportations, of concentration camps, of refugees (the number of Palestinian refugees went from 700,000 thousand in 1950 to 4.8 million in 2005). The genocide of the Armenians in 1915 led to the first mass movements of refugees of the 20th century. Between 1944 and 1951, nearly 20 million people were displaced or evacuated in Europe. The partition of states and other divisions have also resulted in massive displacements. While the ‘Iron Curtain’ blocked an exodus from Eastern Europe, the search for cheap labour power led the European countries to draw on the southern Mediterranean and Africa. Economic impoverishment and the ‘national liberation’ struggles produced by imperialist conflicts during the Cold War also fed the distress and displacement of a ruined peasantry, serving to create vast megacities surrounded by slums in the peripheral countries. These have become breeding grounds for mafia gangs involved in prostitution and the traffic of arms and drugs. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, refugee camps have sprung up like mushrooms, especially in Africa and the Middle East, where the population lives on the edge of survival, prey to famine, illness, and gangsters of all stripes.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the eastern bloc, two major events have intervened, on top of the growth of military conflicts, to weigh on the labour market and increase the flow of migration:
For an initial period, workers from the eastern countries went west; this coincided with the first relocations of industry and it helped to exert a powerful pressure on wages. In addition, countries which had previously been on the margins of the world market, such as India and China, opened up the possibility of uprooting millions of workers who had come from the countryside, swelling the ranks of a reserve army made up of unemployed proletarians who could be dragooned for work when needed.
The very low level of wages paid to these workers in the context of a saturated world market makes it possible to put further pressure on wages and results in even more relocations. This explains the fact that in the central countries since the 1990s the number of illegal and clandestine workers has exploded in certain sectors, despite the strengthening of controls. In 2000 there were about 5 million clandestine workers in Europe, 12 million in the USA and 20 million in India. The central states make ample use of this workforce, generally poorly qualified and without official papers, and whose extremely precarious position makes them ready to do pretty much anything for very low wages. Under the watchful eye of the state a whole parallel market has been created, sustained by workers who are subject to all kinds of blackmail and live in atrocious conditions. The majority of agricultural harvests are now being taken in by foreign workers, many of them illegal. In Italy, 65% of the agricultural labour force is illegal. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, 2 million Romanians migrated to southern Europe for agricultural work. In Spain, the housing ‘boom’ which came before the crash was to a large extent based on the sweat of underpaid clandestine workers, often from Latin American countries like Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, etc. To this we must add the grey areas of the economy, such as prostitution. In 2003, in a country like Moldavia, 30% of women aged between 18 and 25 had gone missing! In the same year, 500,000 prostitutes from eastern Europe were working in western Europe.
In Asia and in the Gulf monarchies, we see the same phenomena for domestic workers and building workers. In Qatar, immigrants make up 86% of the population, and, as the recent scandal about the preparations for the 2022 World Cup has revealed, many are working in conditions of near slavery.
Today, with the development of military tensions, we can already seeing an influx of people escaping war zones, especially from the Middle East and Africa.
In the face of growing barbarism, of brutal police measures against immigrants and the xenophobic campaigns disseminated by the ruling class, the proletariat can only respond with indignation and with international class solidarity. This means rejecting any idea that immigrants and ‘foreigners’ are the cause of crisis and unemployment.
The media, especially those aligned to the Right, are constantly bombarding us with images of immigrants who foment crime and disorder and live as parasites from the ‘generous’ benefits handed out by western countries. In reality, it’s the immigrants who are the first victims of the system. This nauseating right wing propaganda has always been used to divide workers. But the more insidious traps are the ones laid by the ‘humanitarian’ Left, with its false generosity and good old common sense, which also divides the working class by treating immigrants as a special case.
Today, when factories are closing one after the other, when the order books are getting thinner despite all the talk of ‘recovery’, it is becoming increasingly clear that all proletarians are being hit by the crisis and growing poverty, whether immigrants or not. What meaning can there be in the idea of competition for jobs from illegal workers when jobs for everyone are disappearing?
Against this ideological offensive, against the policy of repression, the working class has to reaffirm its historical perspective. This begins with basic solidarity and advances towards recognising its own revolutionary strength in society.
WE 21/10/2013
[1]. Alongside the Italian Prime Minister A Altano, there was the president of the European Commission M Barroso and C Maimstrom, the internal Chargé d’Affaires, who had come mainly to stress that, in the name of humanitarianism, they supported a hardening of the surveillance of the frontiers by the forces of ‘Frontex’
[2]. Marx, Capital, Vol 1 chapter XXVIII
[3]. Source: INED
[4]. 133 natural catastrophes were recorded in 1980. The number has gone up to over 350 a year in the last few years. See www. unhcr.org
[5]. P-J Deschott, F Huguenin, La république xenophobe, JC Lattès 2001
[6]. For example, at Sangatte in Northern Europe, in southern Europe (Ceuta, Melila), on the US-Mexican border, in Israel faced with the Palestinians, in South Africa faced with the rest of the continent, or in Gabon where the authorities are in the process of constructing an electrified wall 2.40m high and 500 km long
The headline of the Mail article was ‘The man who hated Britain’ and the question of patriotism, of ‘love for one’s country’, was the central issue being debated by left and right. In an intelligent article published in The Guardian at the height of the furore[1], Priyamyada Gopal duly notes the squalid nature of the Mail article, with its subtly anti-semitic and anti-immigrant undertones, but she also asks some questions about the standard line of defence against the Mail’s attack.
“The defence of Ralph Miliband runs along wearyingly familiar lines – that he unambiguously proved his patriotism by fighting in the anti-Nazi war, which along with ‘no apology for the empire’ has become the principal litmus test for love of Britain. His lifelong commitment to a supple Marxism is noted but quietly skimmed over as an embarrassingly anachronistic aspect of an otherwise decent and loyal man. Yet a defence of Miliband senior which does not also challenge the red-bashing that often goes hand in hand with antisemitism is, at best, equivocal. More perniciously, it accepts the distorted terms set by the rightwing press which defines patriotism narrowly through obedient adulation of monarchy, militarism and elitism”.
You might think that the author is going to challenge some very big shibboleth’s here: patriotism itself, the Second World War.... But then you would have to have missed the article’s headline (‘The Daily mail may not realise, but Marxists are patriots’) and the argument developed in the ensuing paragraph, which is a left-wing apology for ‘real’ patriotism:
“Ralph Miliband was not a patriot because he served in the navy. He was a lover of this country and its people precisely because he understood that institutions like the monarchy and the House of Lords symbolise and perpetuate inequality, and that militarism usually encourages the poor to die defending the interests of the privileged. His patriotism has more in common with long progressive patriotic traditions in Britain, from the Diggers and Levellers to the Chartists and anti-privatisation campaigners. It was about claiming land and country for the majority of its labouring denizens rather than the plutocrats and the powerful who live off the fat of the land while spouting an insincere ‘nationalism’ which serves less to create collective wellbeing than to prevent their privileges being questioned”.
It’s true that the young workers’ movement was often tinged with patriotic ideas. This was entirely understandable in an epoch (from the 17th to the 19th centuries) in which the formation of nation states contained a progressive element, because capitalism itself was an advance over feudalism and other outmoded social systems. But what was essential to formations like the Diggers and the Chartists was their vigorous defence of the exploited against the exploiters, which cannot but challenge all divisions among them and thus tend towards affirming the international unity of the class struggle. This was already explicit with the Communist Manifesto of 1848, which proclaimed that “the workers have no country” and looked forward to a global association of the producers.
At that time, the Manifesto still foresaw the possibility of temporary alliances with the more forward looking elements of the bourgeoisie. But this kind of alliance lost all meaning as the entire capitalist system entered an epoch of permanent, world-wide inter-imperialist conflict, announced most definitively by the outbreak of the First World War. At this point, marxists pronounced the death sentence on the nation state:
“The nation state has outgrown itself – as a framework for the development of the productive forces, as a basis for class struggle, and especially as the state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Leon Trotsky, Nashe Slovo, 4 February, 1916)
In the last hundred years, humanity has been faced with a situation where it can only survive and move forward by breaking the chains of the nation state and rejecting all appeals to fight in its defence. This is why the question of internationalism has been such a fundamental dividing line in the history of the workers’ movement in this century. Support for the First World War was the end of the line for the majority of the social democratic parties. Support for its re-run in 1939-45 marked the death of many of the political currents whose origins lay in a reaction against social democracy’s betrayal in 1914: the Communist Parties, now entirely rotted by Stalinism, and even the majority of the Trotskyist organisations which had advertised their internationalism against Stalinism’s nationalist abortions, ‘socialism in one country’ and the Popular Fronts.
Marxists are therefore not, in any shape or form, patriots. To love one’s country, for the Daily Mail means loving the Queen, the church, the armed forces – evidently the ‘country’ of a small elite. But the left version of this patriotism is no less faithful to key institutions of the capitalist state: the nationalised industries, as well as the unions and the rest of the so-called labour movement, which have long been integrated into the present social system.
Ralph Miliband was by all accounts a very good university teacher and he certainly had a thorough grounding in the writings of Marx. But his ‘supple’ marxism never challenged the notion that the working class had something to defend in the existing state. Politically he acted as a critical supporter of the Labour left and even his more theoretical contributions on marxism and the state end up enlisting Marx into the defence of the democratic republic. In an article on Lenin’s State and Revolution, for example, he argues that Marx’s writings could be interpreted in different ways – some statements pointing to the need to smash the old state, others towards its radical democratisation[2]. This is true – even after the Paris Commune, Marx did not entirely abandon the idea that the revolution could take place in the framework of the democratic republic. But Miliband, rather than grasping the historical significance of Lenin’s ‘update’ on this position in the period of unbridled imperialism, takes Marx’s imprecisions out of their historical context and uses them to speak in favour of a policy of democratising the existing state rather than destroying it.
In this sense Gopal is correct (but not for the reasons she thinks) to link Miliband’s patriotism with his essentially democratic programme for capitalism:
“It is time to junk the cheap and facile propaganda that socialism is reducible to Stalinist depredations. In Ralph Miliband’s own anti-Stalinist understanding, socialism was about ‘the wholesale transformation of the social order’ by giving ordinary people control over the economic system, fully democratising a political system in which ordinary citizens feel disenfranchised and helpless, and ensuring ‘a drastic levelling out of social inequality’. It is the abandonment of these democratic aspirations for the craven pieties of the Daily Mail that must really ‘disturb everyone who loves this country’”.
In World War One, the idea of defending the democratic gains of the workers’ movement inside capitalism was used to justify the war against German militarism (or Russian Czarism); the same ideology was used on a much vaster scale to mobilise the working class for the Second World War. In the day to day struggles of the working class, slogans based on the same basic concept – defence of the nationalised industries like the NHS, defence of ‘trade union rights’ and all the rest – are used to line workers up behind one part of the bourgeoisie against another.
Gopal argues that “Ralph Miliband would also have found his son’s claim that capitalism can be ‘made to work for working people’ incoherent, and wilfully ignorant of how capitalism actually works”. But in reality, Miliband Senior himself never broke from the idea that the capitalist state and capitalist social relations – suitably nationalised and democratised – can be made to work for working people.
Amos 31/10/13
[2]. Socialist Register, 1970, republished here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/miliband/1970/xx/staterev.htm [23]
Jean-Pierre left us during the night of 13 September, following a long and incurable illness whose fatal outcome was recognised by everyone, including himself. For more than two years our comrade, who had greatly enjoyed playing sport, little by little lost the use of his limbs, his breathing and finally his speech. During this process, Jean-Pierre was always perfectly conscious of every moment in the evolution of his illness and its consequences. This lucidity obviously affected him profoundly because he knew he would have to give up so much of what he loved: physical activity, a direct contact with nature, in particular the mountains where he used to go on long rambles (he lived in the Alps), cooking....But he didn’t accept this fatalistically. He wanted to stay at home for as long as possible and no one could make him change his mind about this. He firmly insisted on staying in this familiar, human space to maintain the closest possible links with his family, friends and comrades. This space was his access to the world, the place where he had his books, the place where he could talk about politics and current events until the last moment, the place where he could watch a film and talk about it, the place where he could read the poetry he liked. His strongest wish was to put limits on the medical procedures aimed at keeping him alive. He struggled to the end for these wishes to be respected. A few weeks before his death Jean-Pierre agreed to go to hospital for palliative care. He knew that he wouldn’t be coming back home. Our comrade didn’t submit to this, he chose it and assumed it. But always his concern was to give the maximum space to those close to him, to his children and his comrades, and to continue the political struggle. The hospital staff and the militants who shared his last moments testified that our comrade departed “with great serenity” despite the considerable suffering which gripped him to the end. We, his comrades, know that developing this serenity was the last work in his life. He was one of those personalities who demand admiration because of their tenacity and the courage with which they face the end. We were all happy to be able to enter the personal and political space he so generously set aside for us. It gave us great pleasure and provided us with major lessons for our lives and our militancy. For all that, Jean-Pierre, we are infinitely grateful.
Jean-Pierre joined the ICC relatively late in his life. After being mobilised for the war in Algeria, which he experienced as a moment of unacceptable and unspeakable barbarism, he never stopped working for the perspective of constructing another society where these kinds of horrors would be banished forever. Holding on to this notion, he went through May 68 with all his hopes and all his confusions, in particular his communitarian ideas. He didn’t discover the ICC until the 1990s. There he found the theoretical and practical coherence of marxism, which enabled him to make a real political break with the confused ideologies he had maintained up until then. This encounter rooted him firmly in the “passion for communism” (according to his own terms). His indignation towards a world full of barbarism had finally found the meaning he had been looking for, the combat for the world proletarian revolution.
After that our comrade situated the political struggle at the forefront of his life until his last moments. He was animated by a deep conviction and despite the fatal advance of his illness, every visit to him included a political discussion. As long as he could he participated in the regular meetings of the ICC and carried out his responsibilities as a militant. At the end, from his bed, he did it via the internet. He was especially insistent on paying his financial contributions so that he could still be part of the functioning of the organisation as much as his means allowed.
But above all, his concern to be rigorous was shown by his determination to defend organisational principles and their spirit by taking position on this difficult political question throughout the last few years. The comrade was convinced that the construction of an organisation of the proletariat is a difficult art which has to be learned and transmitted thanks to a theoretical effort. Convinced as he was of the necessity for revolution, he sought to fight against all the obstacles that stand in the way of our class carrying out its task of emancipating humanity. He was always aware of the titanic, planetary dimension of this battle. A daily defensive battle, of course, but above all one that required a conscious approach, with a cultural element which can strengthen us for the offensive needed to overthrow the capitalist system. He was also profoundly aware of the weight of the dominant ideology pressing on the organisation and on the individuals within it, and of the perverse effects of social decomposition on relations between human beings. He knew that the real way to resist this pressure is to be found in the collective strength of debate in the organisation, based on moral principles and an intellectual depth. This concern never left him: how to struggle effectively, how to live up to your responsibilities, both as an individual militant and as an organisation, as a collective and associated body. It is because he had these concerns that he was so consistent at the level of the functioning of the organisation, always fighting against what as early as 1903 Lenin called the ‘circle spirit’, the vision of the organisation as a sum of individuals who come together purely on the basis of affinity. Such a vision was for him clearly and diametrically opposed to the real needs of a revolutionary organisation which can serve as a bridge to a real proletarian party in the future. The work of building the organisation thus has to be carried out in the ‘party sprit’. He always took a position against the temptation to get together on an affinity basis. For him the organisation could not be reduced to a ‘band of mates’, a circle of friends, even if he maintained warm and fraternal relations with all his comrades and had strong ties of personal friendship with some of them. To use his expression, he contributed to this combat “with just a little thread of a voice” to his final breath.
His devotion, his tenacity, his commitment remains alive in all his comrades. He was an example for us of what a convinced militant can be.
Jean-Pierre’s personality was so engaging that you can’t pass over it in silence. He was always curious, his mind was always developing and he had a lot of empathy not only for those closest to him but for others he met on the way. His company always testified to these qualities. He knew that everybody evolves, that everybody is in constant movement and goes through crises which can be moments for going forward. He recognised this in himself and often gave the evidence for it. He was happy to talk about his long, complex and chaotic journey towards marxism and class positions. It was by no means a tranquil river and no doubt this is what sustained his interest in others, his respect for their contradictions, which he always saw in a positive light as a potential for advance. He always had this vision of the future which went beyond any easy criticisms.
Jean-Pierre was a great admirer of Rabelais. He loved the frankness that his work exudes, his sensual, crude and even brutal love for life. A good meal, generously shared, was something sacred for him, as a precious moment of conviviality. He often opened up his universe through reading out the texts and poems he admired. Those who knew him were privileged to share his great pleasure in this. The silences which sometimes followed also had an active content, the sense of mutual communication through listening. Jean-Pierre was an example of a fighter devoted to the organisation and the perspective of the revolution, and his temperament was that of a person animated by the love of freedom. He has left us his passion, his tastes, and in doing so has drawn us a sketch of what it is like to be a human being who sees the other as an integral part of his own happiness, who participates in the artistic and scientific dance of humanity.
The militants of the ICC share deeply the pain of his children, of his family, of his friends. We have lost our comrade Jean-Pierre, but his memory is ever-present for those who have had the good fortune to know him and work by his side.
The ICC salutes you, comrade, as an exemplary militant for the cause of communism, to which you gave the best of yourself.
ICC 15.10.2013
We are publishing here an account by one of our comrades, who posts on our forums as Demogorgon, of his experience of the recent national strike in the Higher Education sector.
I work in Higher Education in a low-grade administrative function. My workforce is ‘represented’ by three unions: Unite, Unison and UCU. On the 31st October, and for the first time ever, all three unions called a sector-wider strike over the issue of pay.
The majority of workers in my office are not in any of the unions. One colleague, a member of the UCU, did support the ballot and voted to strike. As the strike neared it became clear that there was no effort whatsoever on behalf of the unions to publicise it to non-members. A Unison notice-board remained absolutely devoid of any information. My main source of information as to what was going on was my UCU colleague who forwards me anything she receives.
The response of the University was interesting, however. A couple of weeks before the strike date, they announced they were introducing the “Living Wage” for lower paid staff and that the senior management team were generously rescinding their “contractually and legally agreed” bonuses so that the Christmas bonus for staff could be reintroduced this year.
Nonetheless, it was only a week before the strike that any real awareness of it began to circulate in my office and that was mainly because I talked about it. The general response was negative. Most colleagues couldn’t see the point of action. Even the colleague who had voted for the action was beginning to have doubts. She still agreed with the action, but her issue was the workload that she had to deal with.
It’s difficult to convey the pressure our office is under this time of year. My UCU colleague is starting at 8 in the morning and leaving gone 6 at night, every day for months, then doing work at home evenings and weekends. Because of the nature of our functions, if we don’t do the work that’s assigned to us, it just doesn’t get done. And it doesn’t stop coming in if we’re not there. Going on leave is now a nightmare because you come back to the two weeks of work which isn’t even touched in your absence. She simply felt terrified at the thought of having to work another weekend to catch up if she missed a day in the office.
Two days before the strike, the unions issued a joint statement to all workers, relying on their members to distribute it around the offices. This is despite the fact that they are fully aware that many offices have no members.
The letter set out the reasons for the action but contained a shocking (if you don’t understand the true nature of the unions, that is) claim that non-members could not participate. It is, of course, something of a joke among left-communists that it is actually the unions that enforce all the anti-strike legislation.
In a previous UCU strike over pensions, I went to a mass UCU meeting to show solidarity and said I would not cross the picket line. The response of the presiding official was to tell everyone that people not involved in strike must go into work! I ignored the advice and joined the picket where I was welcomed - even the branch secretary was impressed enough and whenever I saw him always asked to make sure I had not suffered any reprisals. The regional official actually refused to speak to me on the picket!
In any case, while it is customary for the unions to enforce anti-strike legislation they are also in the business of enforcing anti-strike legislation that doesn’t even exist! In fact, non-union members can join strikes and, as long as the strike itself is a “protected action”, they enjoy the same right not to be dismissed as union members.
In response, I decided to issue my own leaflet. I kept it to one side of A4 and did not give 12 paragraph treatises on the role of the unions in decadence! I simply tried to answer the concerns of my colleagues and persuade them to strike. I challenged the assertion about non-member participation from the unions, but did not go further than that.
I distributed the leaflet, leaving copies on everyone’s desks first thing in the morning and waited somewhat nervously for my colleagues to come in. Several picked it up and read it and said nothing. As more arrived some discussion began. I was, naturally, teased a fair bit! My favourite comment was from our team manager who said while the University had asked people to report their strike status by 10am on the day, I had shown my dedication to the institution by doing it well in advance! It was meant in jest and I took it in that spirit.
Most colleagues were confused but there was some talk about the issues of the strike and although most agreed the cause was just either felt it didn’t affect them (we have a high proportion of young, temporary staff) or that striking would make no difference. My overworked UCU colleague was unable to overcome her ambivalence.
Then another colleague came to speak to me and she was clearly disturbed by my leaflet. Originally she hadn’t planned to join the action, but was no longer sure. She basically went through all the points in my leaflet and we discussed each of them. She was deeply disturbed that the unions would say something that was apparently not true (the point about protection for non-union members). She even thought I was a union rep and was a little confused when I said I wasn’t and I certainly wasn’t trying to sell the union! She asked me why I thought they had said what they said - she was clearly doubtful of my point but at the same time wasn’t able to rebut it as I’d sourced my claim. I replied - prefacing it by making it clear I was wearing a cynical hat! - that they didn’t really seem to be interested in pushing the strike and were more interested in making themselves the vehicle for discontent and hoovering up potential members than actually defending us. She was clearly disturbed by this (at one point I actually thought she was close to tears!) and said in her previous work-place she’d watched the unions do nothing while pay freezes were imposed and people continually laid off and that was why she hadn’t joined here. I agreed with her points and said this was why I wasn’t a member of the union, but that we still had to take a stand and this was an opportunity to do so.
The day of strike came and I went to one of the pickets, getting there early. While others picketed in shifts, I stayed for the full duration. Contrary to the union statement, I was not turned away. One member remembered me from the previous strike and welcomed me.
There was an initial tendency for people to picket in their own unions. I joined a UCU one and suggested moving to join a Unite picket further down the road but this was met with a bit of confusion and concern about the picket being “too big”. Over the course of the day though, we were joined by Unison and Unite members so the picket took on a far more mixed quality.
There was not a great deal of discussion. Throughout the morning I managed to put a few points about effective struggles into conversation organically and people listened although I’m not sure they understood. The most in-depth discussion was with an NUT functionary who turned up to show solidarity and I chatted to her about unions. She was saying it must be tough when we’re all in different unions, to which I pointed out I wasn’t in a union at all unless you count the biggest group ... workers! She was a bit taken aback but accepted all the points about being divvied up as she had raised them herself.
When the picket ended, I went to the rally. There were between 100 and 150 people there and it was the usual format of 45 minutes of branch secretaries and local and national functionaries giving more-or-less predictable speeches: workers are being dumped on, greedy bosses, greedy government, the unions have done a lot for everyone, get everyone to join the union!
The last 15 minutes was opened to the floor and more contributions from other officials and someone from the Socialist Party continued in the same vein. I finally plucked up courage to speak and asked a very simple question: are the unions going to carry on striking together or were they going to revert to the usual strategy of split strikes and instructing members to cross each others’ picket lines?
Embarrassed silence and ironic smiles from the panel followed. After what seemed like a very long awkward moment and after banging on for over half-an-hour about how the unions were standing together, the UCU national official finally said he had no information about that at the moment but the line at present is to stand together. The meeting was then wound up.
Back at work the next day, I learned that I had been the only one to join the strike. I wasn’t at all surprised, of course. My friend told me she had sat in her car overcome with guilt for 45 minutes before finally going in. Although everyone came in, the atmosphere was subdued. I told her I understood and I do - and the important thing wasn’t to cry over what was done but to understand what’s being done to us.
What did my small action achieve? On the face of it, very little. None of my colleagues were persuaded to join the strike. But I was able to prevent them from sleepwalking into their decision - they were forced to make a conscious choice about their decision. A tiny seed of consciousness that may, one day, flower into something more significant.
I also showed that being a marxist is more than “reading clever books at lunchtime” which is often how people see me. It means standing up for something, even if only in a very small way. I also showed that it’s possible to do so without brow-beating or being accusatory. At root, my colleagues were frightened and I understand because I was frightened too. I cannot judge others for crossing picket lines when I cannot honestly say if I will always have the courage not to.
Would my action have been any more effective had I been in the union? I can’t see how. I would still have spoken against them both in my leaflet and at the meeting. And, more importantly, why would I give money to organisations that tell workers to cross picket lines?
Demogorgon 2/11/2013
Official Strike Action 31/10/2013
As I’m sure you’ve heard, all three unions have called official strike action on Thursday this week. After considering the matter, I have decided to support our colleagues in their decision to strike.
As the unions have already argued, pay in Higher Education has been eroded by 13% in the last four years. In fact, the wider situation is much worse and has been going on for far longer: “Median wages in the UK were stagnant from 2003 to 2008 despite GDP growth of 11 per cent in the period. Similar trends are evident in other advanced economies from the US to Germany. For some time, the pay of those in the bottom half of the earnings distribution has failed to track the path of headline economic growth”[1].
Employers have been able to get away with eroding our working conditions for years because we have passively accepted it. As long as we continue to accept it, our pay will decline, our pensions will continue to be eroded and our workloads will increase. Taking strike action can send a powerful message that we won’t accept these things any longer. But it will only be effective if we all stand together.
I understand that many of you will feel uneasy about taking strike action.
Going on strike means losing a day’s pay and after years of declining pay, this is not a small problem! But we’ve already lost much more than that. How much more will we lose if we don’t fight back?
Others are concerned about their workload and having to catch up after a day out of the office. As we all know, things are frantic this time of year! But how did we get to this state? As real wages have gone down, work-loads have increased. And every time we accept extra work we encourage the University to push more onto us further down the line.
If low-pay and high workloads are such a problem then there is even more reason to take a stand!
I know some will be afraid that that going on strike may result in losing their job. Because this is an official action, you cannot be dismissed for joining it. This protection also extends to non-union members who participate. Although the unions claim in their recent letter that “non-members are not allowed to participate in the strike”, this is not true. In fact, according to the www.gov.uk [26] website, non-union members are allowed to join a strike in their workplace and receive the same legal protections: “Non-union members who take part in legal, official industrial action have the same rights as union members not to be dismissed as a result of taking action”[2].
It should go without saying that all workers, regardless of their union-membership, have the same problems and should fight together to solve them.
I hope that you will support my decision and, if you feel able, join our colleagues so we can resist the erosion of our pay and conditions together.
Me
[1]. Missing Out: Why Ordinary Workers Are Experiencing Growth Without Gain, The Resolution Foundation, July 2011
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/falsification.png
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/equal_sacrifics.jpg
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/usgovernmentshutdown550x355.jpg
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-08/shutdown-costs-at-1-6-billion-with-160-million-each-day.html
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201108/4459/us-debt-ceiling-crisis-political-wrangling-while-global-economy-burns
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/content/4927/obamacare-political-chaos-bourgeoisie-austerity-working-class
[7] https://www.salon.com/2013/10/06/tea_party_radicalism_is_misunderstood_meet_the_newest_right/
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/tea-party
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/us-debt-crisis
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/obese-junk.jpg
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201401/9415/junk-food-famine-system-poisons-and-starves-part-2
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/germany
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/worldrevolution/200807/2535/oil-tanker-drivers-strike-solidarity-fuels-struggle
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1870/grangemouth
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/greece
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/360/fascism
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1813/golden-dawn
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/italy
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/immigration
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1871/lampuseda
[22] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/02/daily-mail-ralph-miliband-marxists-patriots
[23] https://www.marxists.org/archive/miliband/1970/xx/staterev.htm
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1872/ralph-milliband
[26] http://www.gov.uk
[27] https://www.gov.uk/industrial-action-strikes/your-employment-rights-during-industrial-action