The contribution that we are publishing below was posted on our online discussion forum by an ICC sympathiser in response to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in early August, and the subsequent protests and unrest[1].

Among the strengths of the posting are that it criticises the rhetoric of black nationalism and left liberalism. It acknowledges that looting, setting things on fire, and undirected expressions of anger are not in themselves going to change the world. It identifies the violence of state repression as a global phenomenon. It sees the importance of workers’ struggle and the need for social revolution.

The shooting of a young black man by police in the US followed by protests is not unusual. The text obliquely refers to the shooting of  Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in 2012, and the shooting of Oscar Grant in Oakland in 2009. These are among the incidents that are known internationally, for the angry responses they provoked. In fact the latest available figures show that a white police officer kills a black person in the US on average 96 times a year. In total the figure reported by local police to the FBI of all killings by the police is typically more than 400 a year (and that self-reported figure is probably a great underestimation). It could be suggested that, alongside the protests, it is also significant the number of times that there have been no protests.

The text also insists that “working people have to continue to defend themselves against the brutal repression of the ruling class”.  We would add that, in the face of repression, elementary self-defence can be the beginning of self-organisation.  If you look at what happened in Greece with the December 2008 Athens killing of Alexandros Grigoropoulos and the subsequent protests, there were many occupations of universities and schools, which often devoted time to discuss questions way beyond the current situation. It is not just a matter of carefully considering “our tactics and methods and their effectiveness”, or finding out the best way to deal with tear gas and rubber bullets, important though that is. The extension of protests into a wider movement is posed with every struggle. The “more reflection and discussion” that is necessary is not limited to the tactics of struggle, but requires a serious attempt to understand capitalism, what it has become, and how the working class stands in relation to its exploiters and oppressors. The text asks what would happen “If one day we all woke up and just said, ‘No’”? In reality, the process that leads to revolution involves the development of class consciousness, drawing lessons from the setback of struggles, reflecting on the historic experience of the working class, and, ultimately, identifying the goal of communism. The protests of today can only be part of the movement toward a social revolution through the development of consciousness on a massive scale, a process that necessarily goes through numerous advances and retreats..

The post is right to point to the violence of state repression. In Ferguson armoured cars and snipers were routinely deployed. Local police throughout the US get military surplus equipment. The US has been in a lot of wars. That’s a lot of weaponry for a system desperate to defend itself. It also underlines the necessary scale and consciousness required of the struggle against it

There are a few formulations in the post that we would query. For example, the idea that “the wealthy American capitalist can’t afford a prosperous black nation” is contrary to the way capitalism actually functions. If  there ever is prosperity, a rising sector or national group with money to spend, then it offers capitalism possibilities to sell more of its commodities. Whatever the prejudices of individual bourgeois, capitalists like selling things, whatever the colour of the money, the buyer, or the government.

In terms of the repression of the bourgeoisie, this is posed worldwide, fundamentally because the working class is an international class, which can only threaten capitalist domination through an international struggle. As the text says “workers have to unite together across racial lines in order to save society and possibly all of human civilization from destruction”.

ICC

A Fire in the Master’s House is Lit

Immediately outside the confines of a tightly packed apartment complex in Ferguson, Missouri lay the crumpled corpse of a young teenager. His body was left in the street for four hours. He had been shot six times by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. This dead young man had no criminal record and the police did not have a warrant for his arrest. His name was Michael Brown. He was 18 years old.

So Ferguson joins the list, along with Sanford, Money, San Francisco, New York City, London, and so many other places in the United States and the world.

The response from the African-American community who are joined together with many other working people in St. Louis County has been fairly significant. However the rhetoric coming from people and the protests has ranged from black nationalism to “left liberalism” to libertarianism. Most of the dialogue has been based around the idea that race and human rights are the main issues in Michael Brown’s death.

But what other forces are at work here?

The repression of the protests and anger from the people of Ferguson, and across the country, by police and other government forces has struck a chord with many Americans. Among the many questions being asked, why are so many black youth being killed in similar situations in America? Is the life of an African-American valued less than others? Why aren’t the rights of African-American people better respected in the “democratic” system in America?

The capitalist system exploits all working people. Workers all over America are subjected to the same kinds of repression, even if the scale and drama of each situation varies.

There is a long tradition of the United States government violently suppressing street protests and assemblies by working class people! And all over the rest of the world!

Racism is at its core based on ethno-national divisions. The ruling class employs the police and the paramilitary (paid for by our taxes) who kill our children over bogus reasons because they themselves are inherently racist. Capitalism breeds racism. The wealthy American capitalist can’t afford a prosperous black nation, in Missouri, in California, in Africa or anywhere else. Capitalism means the competition of nations, races, economies and this relies directly on the elbow grease of all working men and women.

Ferguson, Missouri right now looks more like the West Bank than the United States. This is a common sentiment of the demonstrators, who have been talking back and forth with Palestinians and Egyptians about the best way to avoid tear gas and rubber bullets.

Why are the demonstrators in Gaza and Israel experiencing similar events to those of working class people in the “first world”? Why these experiences in a “developed” nation like the United States? Because working people have no borders, no countries. No matter where we live we are all subjected to the will of the state government, “democratic” or otherwise. It should come then as no surprise that the Ferguson police chief himself, along with many other St. Louis county police officers have actually trained weapons combat and guerrilla tactics in Israel in recent years.

Isn’t it Ironic? Nope, it’s just capitalism.

Working people have to continue to defend themselves against the brutal repression of the ruling class through the use of the capitalist state, whether it’s economic repression, the repression of people’s dignity, or the violent repression and murder of our youth.

But we have to carefully consider our tactics and methods and their effectiveness. Unchanneled anger gets us nowhere. More reflection and discussion is always necessary. Setting trashcans on fire and throwing rocks at armored personnel carriers and urban tanks is not the path to stopping the murder of black children. Neither is looting strip malls.

The only solution is a social revolution, which can only be carried out by working people like you and me. No matter how much we appeal to our handlers, the ruling class, to improve the condition of our lives it is fundamentally in their interest not to help. This decadent system can barely stay afloat in its current condition. And to demand from the government and the people who control us respect of our “democratic rights” and basic needs is to overload this system’s capacity. Unless we all want to go down sinking together, workers have to unite together across racial lines in order to save society and possibly all of human civilization from destruction.

What rights can they give us, democratic or not, that would stop our bosses from taking a cut of our work and our pay for their profit? As long as the exploitation of workers continues, and the extraction of profit from the labor of the working class continues, no amount of “civil” disobedience is going to stop poverty! We are being clubbed over the head by capitalism. It doesn’t help if the club was democratically elected.

We have to take away the stick.

What our rulers have continued to show us is that no matter how peaceful we are, there are always violent reprisals to be had at the hands of the state. Many times when people talk about social and economic justice, the redistribution of the wealth, it assumed the system is in a position to grant these reforms. But the wealthy are not just going to hand over their wealth! Do you think they store their billions under their mattress, or in massive piggy banks? No, their wealth is in hedge funds, stocks and bonds, and to demand economic justice is a direct hit to their money. Money extorted from the profit of our labor.

If all the people in Ferguson, including the police and the politicians, just stopped going to work, who would be around to protect us from each other? Would we be killing and stealing from each other? Or is it the system itself that encourages the killing? If one day we all woke up and just said, “No”, what would happen to the world?

Maybe places like Ferguson, Missouri could be a better place.   

Jamal 8.20.14 

Comrades,

I recently had a letter published in the CPGB Weekly Worker. It appears that there are some ‘Communists’ that consider such views as Ultra Left (I am quite happy with being Ultra Left) what would the ICC consider such views?

Below is a copy of my letter.

“In recent weeks there has been some debate as to whether believers can be members of the party or not. That is for CPGB members to decide. However, the CPGB is not the only group involved in revolution.

As a revolutionary socialist, I think that people who believe in god should be forewarned that all religious buildings after the revolution will be bulldozed and replaced with hospitals and decent housing for the working class.

The problem with god and religion is that it goes hand in hand with capitalism (in god we trust - and the US dollar) and monarchy, thus making god an enemy of the people. Even the Vicar of Rome does not really believe in god’s existence, as is proved by his lack of faith as he travels around in his bulletproof vehicle.

Religions create division even within the same religion, let alone between Christians, Muslims and Jews and others. Let’s leave this superstition where it should be - in the distant past. Let’s get on with the job in hand and get rid of this rotten system.

Now, if you can excuse me, I am off to start my present list ready to send to Father Christmas.”

From the ICC

Thank you for your letter, and our apologies for the delay in replying. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t discussed it. After some consideration, we decided to focus on the fact that you seem to have written to us as an expression of the ‘ultra-left’, since this poses some very basic questions about what we mean by the ‘left’ in general.

While we do refer to ourselves as left communists, we don’t call ourselves ‘ultra left’, since the latter has so often been used as a term of abuse hurled either by opportunists or outright bourgeois apologists at those who are seeking to defend and develop authentic communist politics. The term ‘communist left’ arose during the 1920s when the Communist Parties were entering into a phase of opportunist degeneration; and those like the tendencies around Bordiga, Pannekoek, Pankhurst and others who opposed this trajectory were frequently labelled ultra-leftists or infantile leftists[1] by those most caught up in the opportunist course. Since that time the Communist Parties haven’t stayed in a kind of opportunist half-way house: during the 1930s they became direct agents of the capitalist counter-revolution and of imperialist war. They were absolutely central in the mobilisation of the working class for the slaughter of 1939-45, and in the defence of the imperialist Russian state.

In our view, once an organisation has crossed the class line which separates the bourgeoisie from the working class, there is no going back. In general, crucial historical moments like war or revolution provide us with the criteria for judging whether this definitive passage has taken place. This was certainly the case with the ‘social chauvinists’ when they supported the war in 1914 and helped to crush the revolution (especially in Germany) in 1918-19, and history repeated itself with the Communist Parties originally formed to fight against this betrayal.

The organisation which you belong to, the CPGB, is an offshoot of the Stalinist CP in the UK and has never called into question its origins in a bourgeois party. The fact that it has subsequently veered first towards a kind of Trotskyism and then towards a strange attempt to revive pre-First World War social democracy certainly does not mean that such a fundamental self-critique has taken place. On the contrary: both social democracy and Trotskyism have also proved themselves to be part of what we call the left wing of capital – social democracy in 1914-18, Trotskyism with its participation in the second world war, its defence of the USSR and of wars of ‘national liberation’, and its critical support for the Labour and Stalinist parties. So moving from one variety of bourgeois politics to another does not mean that the essential question has been posed.

The characterisation of social democracy, Stalinism and Trotskyism as capitalist political tendencies is of course the ultimate in ‘ultra-leftism’ as far as any of these tendencies are concerned, but for us it is simply the necessary defence of class principles – the same path as that taken by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, or Luxemburg and Liebknecht, when they denounced those who had abandoned internationalism in 1914, and by the left communists in the 30s who understand that the Communist Parties had become the mortal enemy of the revolutionary movement. For these revolutionaries this was in no sense an academic or semantic dispute; it was the social democracy who directed the hunting down and murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht in 1919, and it was the Stalinists who carried out the assassination of thousands of revolutionaries in the 30s and 40s.

One of the main functions of the organisations of the capitalist left is to recruit people who are beginning to question capitalism and then turn this questioning into dead-end forms of thought and activity. This is why we have never rejected discussion with individual members of such organisations even though we reject any form of cooperation with the organisations as such. But equally we have always stressed that any political progress by such individuals cannot avoid a radical break with the organisations of the capitalist left and their whole world outlook.

We will not enter here into the questions about religion that you pose, except to make it clear to you that the policies you advocate – such as the destruction of cathedrals and, apparently, the forcible suppression of religion by the proletarian dictatorship – may be called ‘ultra-left’ by your fellow CPGB members, but they certainly have nothing to do with the real traditions of the communist left and of Marxism in general. In fact the state repression of religion has always been a feature of the Stalinist regimes and proof that they were incapable of addressing the problem of religion at its roots: the alienated social relations which are equally the source of capitalism, whether in its democratic or Stalinist forms. […]

For the ICC, A

Iraq and Syria are no strangers to capitalist war and the very existence of these countries comes directly from the imperialist war of 1914-18. Iraq and Syria were created by imperialism along the Sykes-Picot border drawn up by Britain and France in 1916 to carve up the region from the lands of the Ottoman Empire. These two countries were born in and from a war that in some ways has continued ever since. Both were assets for the Allies in the Second World War against Germany and subsequently subject to coups and manipulations by the British and Americans in the Cold War against Russia from the 50s. Iraq was again used by the West against Iran in the bloody war of 1980 and was the whipping boy in 1991 where many tens of thousands were killed in a failed effort to keep the western bloc together while the butcher Saddam Hussein and his Revolutionary Guards were left intact. The 2003 invasion, led by the US and Britain, saw thousands more killed and injured by fuel-air and cluster bombs, phosphorus bombs and uranium-tipped shells. The peoples of Iraq are not unfamiliar with the embrace and kiss of imperialism, particularly the American, British and French kind.

The taking of Mosul on June 10, a city of over one million people, by IS (the “Islamic State”, known until June this year as “The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”), has opened up a whole new descent into capitalist barbarity, chaos, terror and war across the already blighted region of the Middle East. IS is no rag-tag army of loose affiliations like Al Qaeda (which formally disavowed IS in February this year) but an efficient and ruthless fighting machine that is presently capable of waging war on three fronts: south towards Baghdad; east towards Kurdish territories and west into Aleppo, Syria. The Baghdad-based expert on IS, Hisham al-Hashimi says that the force is 50,000 strong (The Guardian, 21/8/14) and the same report says that it has “...five divisions’ worth of Iraqi military weapons, all of them US supplied” and suggests that “the large numbers of foreign fighters are increasingly holding sway in many areas”. IS has spread its particular reign of terror by growing from Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), then spread into the maelstrom of Syria where it absorbed, either willingly or under pain of death, other jihadist or ‘moderate’ anti-Assad forces; it now controls significant areas of the Euphrates Valley where it has established its ‘Caliphate’ across what little remains of the Iraq/Syria border, i.e., the Sykes-Picot line. The destruction of this border is significant of the deepening decay and chaos that is more and more the mark of capitalism across greater regions of the world.

With the regression into this particular shambles of the Middle East, comes a force, the Islamic State, whose tenets of a Muslim Caliphate are based on religious divisions and arguments of over a thousand years ago. The completely reactionary nature of this Caliphate is both a deepening and a reflection of the reactionary and irrational nature of the whole world of capitalism - a tendency in continuity with the First World War and all the subsequent imperialist massacres. The Islamic State has no possible future except as another destabilising gang of bandits, thugs and killers, an expression of imperialism which has stepped into the bloody mess of the wars tearing the region apart. Despite being a force of religious reaction, as shown in its brutal terror against civilian Shias, Christians, Yazidis, Turkmen, Shabaks, IS is fundamentally an expression of capitalism that has been supported and built up by local imperialist powers then assimilated into becoming the front line in an anti-Assad, anti-Iranian front. This development has been supported by the actions - direct or indirect, it doesn’t matter - of America and Britain.

Biting the hand that feeds you 

Surely not, some would say, where’s the sense in that? But capitalism has a history of creating its own monsters: Adolf Hitler was democratically put in place with the assistance of Britain and France in order to act as a force of terror against the working class in Germany primarily. Saddam and his killer regime were made in the west, particularly Whitehall. The same for Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. The Islamic fundamentalist madrasas and Osama bin Laden were essentially products of the CIA, and of MI6 with the Pakistani secret service ISI, acting on their behalf in order to confront Russian imperialism in Afghanistan – a concoction which then gave rise to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The establishment of Hamas was initially encouraged by Israel as a means of weakening the PLO and jihadi forces have been armed, encouraged and supported by the west in Libya and the ex-Russian republics.

All the above have turned and bitten the hands that reared and fed them, showing that it’s not a question of evil individuals, but efficient capitalist psychopaths armed and encouraged by democracy. And now in the Middle East, more than ever, everything that the local and major imperialisms do to try to confront their rivals, play their cards or shape events ends not just in failure but contributes to the general deterioration of the situation, piling up more profound and widespread problems in the longer term.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq has been a force for over ten years but its offshoot, IS, under the new leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi - released from US prison in the US Iraqi facility of Umm Qasr on Obama’s orders in 2009[1]- has been backed by Saudi and Qatari monies laundered through the compliant Kuwaiti banking system with their fighters given access to and fro across the border of Turkey. They have been armed, directly or indirectly, by the CIA and there are ongoing reports of IS fighters trained by US and British special forces in Jordan and the US base in Ircilik, Turkey[2]. Why? Because they wanted an effective fighting force against the Assad regime - much more effective than the ‘moderate’ forces. Even the Syrian regime has done business with IS and used it in the age-old strategy of supporting one’s enemy’s enemy. By supporting the forces of IS the local powers and the west sought to counter the growing strength of the Iran/Hezbollah/Assad fighting machine backed by Russia.

The Caliphate of IS doesn’t have much long term perspective but at the moment it is expanding and growing, particularly attracting a sort of ‘international brigade’ of nihilist youth. It has billions of dollars of equipment and a cash-flow from its many businesses. In another absurd twist US fighter power is ‘degrading’ its own material in selected areas. That’s not the only twist in events: US air power has given cover to the Kurdish PKK in their fight against the jihadis, even though it is a group designated as ‘terrorist’ by the US. Iran, Assad’s Syria and the West are in some ways now on the same side with reports (The Observer, 17/8/14) of Iranian warplanes operating from the massive Rasheed air base south of Baghdad and dropping barrel bombs on Sunni areas. There are undoubtedly Iranian forces on the ground in Iraq and Syria confronting IS. Turkey and Jordan, even the Saudis are now concerned about the threat of this organisation. Nothing is settled here; everything is in flux - imperialist flux.

When Sunni elements from Anbar Province joined IS to take Mosul in June, it was clear that the war in Syria had spread into Iraq. This was a complete reversal of the situation of 2006/7, where the Sunni tribal leaders of Anbar joined with US forces in the ‘Awakening’ to defeat Al-Qaeda. But the US-backed, Shia-dominated al-Maliki government in Baghdad excluded the Sunnis from any power, encouraged a pogrom-like attitude against them by Shia gangs, and treated their populations as would an occupying army. The new ‘inclusive’ government in Iraq can readmit some of its Sunni MPs but the latter are likely to be beheaded if they dare to go back to their constituencies. The US can hope for a stable government but the perspective for Iraq looks very much like a break up. The US cannot control or contain this chaos which it has, on the contrary, facilitated. For the moment it has decided to defend the Kurdish capital Irbil, where it has American ‘boots on the ground’, oil and other interests. There’s no ‘humanitarian’ intervention here, that’s just a blatant lie[3]. More lies from Cameron with “Britain is not going to get involved in another war in Iraq” (BBC News,18/8/14) alongside lies about the ‘humanitarian’ nature of its intervention. The decision to arm the Kurds by the US, France, Britain, Italy, Germany and the Czech Republic, though by no means a common policy, can only strengthen the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), strengthen the tendency towards Iraq’s likely break up and cause more problems in the region.

In Irbil there are 60,000 refugees and in Dohuk, one of the poorest regions of Iraq, there are 300,000 more. Over a million in Iraq and millions across the region. These unprecedented numbers on the move, along with collapsing borders, is an expression of the further decay of this rotten system. The Iranian regime has been strengthened, the borders of Turkey (a NATO member) and Jordan weakened and threatened and yesterday’s terrorists and evildoers become today’s allies. And the ‘blowback’ danger to western capitals and industrial areas, always a threat as Prime Minister Blair was warned of by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in 20054[4], is now much more acute as the eventually defeated Jihadis return to the major centres and look for ways to continue their brutal attacks. IS encapsulates the putrefying, regressive nature of capitalism and its flight into militarism, barbarity and irrationality: killing and dying for religion[5], the wholesale slaughter of civilians, the rape and slavery of women and children. The US and its ‘allies’ may be able to push back IS, but it cannot contain the imperialist chaos that has given rise to it. On the contrary, the major and local powers can only deepen this instability further. What they don’t want is exactly what they have worked for and will continue to work for, because the whole capitalist system drives them blindly in this direction. 

Baboon 23/8/2014

This article was contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC.

The Communist Party of Great Britain, which each summer hosts the “Communist University” in London, is different from the Socialist Workers Party. It’s extremely difficult for revolutionaries to speak at SWP meetings because they pack the floor with their own members who are pre-arranged to monopolise the brief period of debate that usually follows a lengthy introduction (or three). At the Communist University meeting titled ‘Left wing communism, an infantile disorder?’ the period of discussion was long enough and open enough for an ICC member to develop his argument. The SWP, in contrast, is not in the least open to critical theory. For example, internal discussion of the anthropological ideas of Chris Knight and Camilla Power, who have both spoken several times at ICC congresses, was ruled out by the SWP leadership. Both anthropologists gave talks at the Communist University and their ideas are given a regular airing in the CPGB paper Workers Weekly. When the SWP talk about the degeneration of the Russian revolution, they generally argue that it all went wrong under Stalin and readily agree with Lenin’s dismissal of the left communists as childish sectarians. At the meeting on left wing communism, several CPGB members or supporters agreed that the degeneration of the Soviet power began right from the beginning and expressed doubts about the leftist habit of using Lenin’s book Left wing Communism as a tactical manual for all occasions; one said that the Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 had been a kind of “friendly fire” tragedy.

Does this mean that there is a class difference between the CPGB and the SWP? We don’t think so. Both groups provide examples of a genuine crisis among the organisations that make up the ‘left wing of capital’: the SWP with its mass defections following the revelations about sexual violence by a member of the central committee against a female member; and (as we argue in this issue to a CPGB member who has written to us), the CPGB with its curious meandering trajectory that has led it from Stalinism (it began as a faction within the old CP) to a kind of Trotskyism and now towards a flirtation with Kautskyism and pre-1914 social democracy. But the CPGB has only moved from one location to another within the horizon of leftism without ever once questioning its historic roots in the Stalinist counter-revolution, and its adoption of a more ‘democratic’ approach than that of the more brutal SWP does not change this. This is a question we can come back to in another article but it is relevant to the sense of the intervention we made at this meeting.

The talk on Lenin’s book was given by David Broder, a former member of the Commune group which originally split from the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty to work on a synthesis between Trotskyism and a sort of libertarian or councilist outlook, calling for ‘communism from below’. This group was a further product of the crisis of leftism and although it gave rise to some interesting discussions in and around it, the group has never really broken the umbilical cord connecting it to the capitalist left. And although Broder has now left the group you can still say the same about his own political history.

The presentation by Broder, who had previously contributed an article on Bordiga and Bordigism to the Weekly Worker[1] and has been in Italy researching the revolutionary movement in Italy during World War Two, contained some very accurate observations about how the survival needs of the early Soviet state pushed the Bolsheviks and the Communist International towards opportunist tactics - in particular the United Front with the social democratic parties and organisational fusion with centrist currents in Italy and Germany . This criticism had a certain councilist flavour: at one point the October revolution was described as a “coup” and the Communist International defined more or less as a tool of the Soviet state from day one. But Broder did emphasise the importance of the left communists’ defence of principles against tactical concessions which essentially reflected the increasingly national interests of the Soviet state rather than the necessity for international revolution. The intransigent internationalism of the communist left in the revolutionary period that followed the First World War was emphasised, even if it was also pointed out that they were never unified into a coherent international fraction.

And yet when it came to sketching out the history of the communist left after the 1920s, the talk descended into caricature. There was virtually no mention of the communist left in the 1930s and during World War Two, and no mention at all of the still existing political organisations of the communist left which have, in one way or another, tried to develop the work initiated in the early 1920s by the KAPD in Germany or Bordiga’s Communist Party of Italy. The impression given was that the left communist tradition evolved as follows: Socialisme ou Barbarie, with its ideas about ‘workers self-management’ in the 1950s and 60s, then the ‘communisation’ current which is uninterested in the defensive struggles of the class and demands communism right now. Included in this trend were the TPTG and Blaumachen in Greece (already inaccurate because only the second group fits this category), but particularly well-known individuals rather than political groups: Gilles Dauvé, Jacques Camatte and John Zerzan. The latter two were surely added to make the subsequent history of left wing communism look as ridiculous as possible: Camatte because, while he did begin his political life with the ‘orthodox’ Bordigists and later developed an interest in other currents of the communist left, ended up deciding that capital had become so all-powerful that the only solution was to “leave this world”, and Zerzan, who was never part of the communist left anyway, because he drifted into a kind of deep primitivism which came to the conclusion that human beings began to go wrong when they invented language.

These criticisms of Broder’s version of the subsequent evolution of left communism were included in our intervention at the meeting. Some of the previous participants had criticised Broder for not clearly drawing out any political lessons from his presentation; in defending the real continuity of the communist left, we insisted on the vital theoretical work the surviving fractions carried out in the dark period of the 30s and 40s, which led the most clear-sighted tendencies to the lesson that the role of a communist party is not to take power on behalf of the workers or identify itself with the transitional state – an error which not only pulled the Bolsheviks towards crushing working class opposition but also towards their own destruction as a party of the revolution. In particular, we insisted that the left communists were the only consistent internationalists during World War Two, along with a handful of anarchists and dissident Trotskyists, and that those currents that supported the anti-fascist war passed to the other side of the barricade, as had the social-chauvinists in 1914. This question of the integration into capitalism of the organisations of the official ‘Labour Movement’ – not of the working class itself, as the communisation theorists tend to argue – was seen in embryo by the left communists of the 20s and developed by their political descendants, who had experienced first-hand that Stalinism, for example, was not an opportunist or mistaken trend within the workers’ movement, but a direct agent of bourgeois repression against workers and revolutionaries.

This affirmation – which implies that to be a communist today you have to stand outside and against the organisations of the bourgeois left - was aimed not only at the CPGB but also at Broder who remains within the horizons of Trotskyism. This was confirmed in his response to our intervention regarding the Second World War: although he has always maintained that, unlike the Trotskyists, he regards the 1939-45 conflict as an imperialist war on both sides, at this meeting he rejected the position of the communist left that saw the patriotic Resistance as an integral part of the imperialist war fronts and opposed working inside them[2]. For him, it was necessary to be ‘inside’ the partisans because that is where the workers were - a classically Trotskyist pretext, and itself a degenerated version of Lenin’s argument, in Left Wing Communism, in favour of working inside the reactionary trade unions.  

Amos 30/8/14

John Ball, as Melvin Bragg points out in his two-part documentary Radical Lives[1], was consciously written out of history for 300 years after the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Unfortunately the real message and meaning of the movement which John Ball gave voice to is also kept hidden in the present, and also in Melvin Bragg’s own programme.

Although Radical Lives is a well made and informative documentary, which does much to restore John Ball’s historical importance, it is also a piece of bourgeois liberal propaganda. Bragg from the outset states that he rejects the term ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ because although peasants took part so too did many other strata of society such as “artisans, administrators, one or two Knights of the realm”. This was certainly true, but he goes on to claim that the revolt was in fact a movement of the amorphous and comfortingly liberal/democratic but in actuality non-existent group the “commons of England”. This is an angle he is extremely keen to push, because he is in effect arguing that the Peasants’ Revolt was not an expression of the exploited class and their instinctive drive towards a communistic world view, but rather an early precursor to what marxists describe as a bourgeois revolution.

This idea may or may not have merit and it would require a much more in depth study to fully get to grips with what exactly the Peasants’ Revolt represents historically; I would suggest that it was more of an expression of the exploited peasants than of the emerging bourgeoisie. This is mainly because of the strength of its communistic tendencies and also the fact that it simply seems too early for a bourgeois revolution to really be a serious prospect - but all this is really a side issue for now, what is important to understand is the way in which Melvin Bragg’s views obscure the reality of the peasants’ revolt and it’s true legacy.

There is a conscious or unconscious policy throughout the show of ‘whatever you do don’t mention communism’; this is shown particularly clearly when he quotes Ball himself. The well-known quote

“My good friends, things cannot go on well in England, nor ever will until everything shall be in common, when there shall be neither vassal nor lord, and all distinctions levelled; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves. How ill they have used us!… They have wines, spices and fine bread, when we have only rye and the refuse of fine straw; and if we drink, it must be water. They have handsome seats and manors, when we must brave the wind and rain in our labours in the field; but it is from our labour they have the wherewith to support their pomp.… Let us go to the king, who is young, and remonstrate with him on our servitude, telling him we must have it otherwise, or that we shall find a remedy for it ourselves” (Typical sermon, described in The Chronicles of England, France, Spain, and other places adjoining by the contemporary historian Jean Froissart)

becomes “matters goeth not well to pass in England nor shall do until everything be common and the Lords be no greater masters than we be.” This rendering is nicely vague and democratic-sounding and can be understood as merely being a condemnation of the oppressiveness of the Feudal state and its undemocratic notions of the ‘divine right’ to rule. However the full quote and a half way thorough understanding of John Ball and the primitive Christianity which he turned to for his beliefs would make the condemnation of class society and private property in general much more clear; perhaps this is why it was avoided?

We are told by Bragg that John Ball’s vision of Christianity was a “kind of democracy in which men and women lived equally without being oppressed either by the Church or by the state.” He then quotes more of the quote above without seeing the contradiction between that and his ‘democratic’ ideology; namely the fact that the quote talks almost entirely about differences in wealth between the ‘Nobles’ and the poor and the fact that “it is from our labour they have the wherewith to support their pomp.” The implication being that the state in ‘democracy’ no longer oppresses anyone. John Ball was not a mere ‘democrat’. Rather, Ball and a few other Christians in history took seriously Jesus’ real teachings, representing the communist tradition which stretches back as long as human history.

The legacy of the 1381 Peasants Revolt

It can be said that I am nit-picking at an otherwise good documentary to point out what we communists would guess would be the case before watching any BBC programme - which is that it’s probably not going to have a clear marxist analysis. However it is still important to point these things out because it is ultimately a question of which class inspiring events such as the Peasants’ Revolt belong to - the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, the exploiters or the exploited. The Peasants’ Revolt, although ultimately a failure, as all our movements have so far been, remains highly inspirational and needs to be appreciated as part of our struggle and our history.

One of the most inspiring things about the Peasants’ Revolt, which the documentary brings out well, is its highly moral character. It is referenced a few times that there were very few instances of looting and that the violence that was carried out was almost universally done in a conscious and deliberate way against individuals known to have taken a serious role in the oppression and exploitation of the poor, rather than being allowed to descend into pogrom or riot mentality. The moral position against looting was taken in order to show that the rebels were not thieves but were interested only in gaining freedom from serfdom and oppression. This expresses both great strengths of the movement but also a few of its weaknesses. For example the peasants may have taken land from landowners they were opposed to but their attitude to wealth itself was largely one of dismissive anger. This is shown clearly in the order issued to those raiding the houses of noblemen in order to burn the documents and records which kept them in servitude: “None, on pain to lose his head, should presume to convert to his own use anything that was or might be found, but that they should break such plate and vessels of gold and silver, as were in that house in great plenty, into small pieces, and throw the same into the Thames or into the privies” (cited in The English Rising of 138, H Fagan and R H Hilton, Lawrence and Wishart, 1950, p120. This is a little known history of the revolt, but probably the best so far)

Another extremely inspiring aspect of the revolt is the way in which the peasants managed to co-ordinate their movement across large swathes of the country, especially in Kent and Essex, in a time before mass communication was easily achievable. The tendency towards ‘localism’ which this produced was always an issue for peasant movements and is an important reason why the peasantry are not seen by marxists as a revolutionary class as such. The fact that they could to some extent overcome this difficulty is an indication of just how inventive and powerful the exploited can be when they come together in a common cause.

In many of these aspects of the movement the role played by John Ball and Watt Tyler should not be underestimated. The movement was shaped massively by the teachings and worldview of John Ball in particular and his rhyming couplets such as the famous “When Adam delved and Eve span/ Who then was the Gentleman?” became extremely popular. Similarly his advice and moral demands such as his prohibition against looting were almost astonishingly (to us brought up in decomposing capitalism at least) strongly held to by the vast majority of those involved.

As a movement it clearly was not free of weaknesses and it was ultimately doomed to remain a glimpse of a dream which is still to be realised. This was largely because of the historical context, not yet truly allowing for the practical dismantling of class society, but this expressed itself ideologically also in a number of ways: for example firstly its vision of communism was still very much a ‘Christian communism’, a communism of poverty, and therefore there was little in the way of practical ideas about how to create and maintain the new society they envisioned. And the trust in the King and the failure to really question the idea of kingship in general proved a fatal mistake when the King repaid their trust with deception and savage repression. This trust in the King is a clear warning to all revolutionary movements: beware of and be on guard against any illusions fostered by the dominant class because any of these can become fatal in the struggle against their systems of tyranny. There are still ‘Kings’ or idols that we as a class still harbour illusions in today: democracy, the rule of law, the nation, or any of the countless lies perpetuated daily by the present day ‘noblemen’. Hopefully, when the proletariat does again rise up, it will not fall for any of these fatal lies.  

Jaycee, 29/8/14

(This article was contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC)

In Iraq and Syria Britain condemns the advance of the Islamic State while insisting it will not take part in any military intervention; in Gaza it supports Israel’s right to self-defence while freezing export licences for military equipment in protest at the growing slaughter; while in the Ukraine it supports sanctions against Russia so long as the impact on its financial sector is not too great. Such apparent contradictions are often seen in the opaque and convoluted manoeuvres of participants in the ‘international community’. However, for the British state today they express not just the usual twists and turns of imperialist tactics but a growing incoherence at the level of imperialist strategy. This has its roots in the growing fragmentation and barbarism that has come to dominate the international situation since 1989 and in the long term decline of British power.

The decline of a global power

The decline of British imperialism from global domination to a distrusted second rate power has often been analysed. Nonetheless, it is worth recalling that before the First World War the British Empire encircled the globe and its military power, especially naval, was superior to its nearest rivals. Even then, however, the economic dominance that this was based on had already been eroded by the rise of rivals headed by Germany and America. The ‘Great War’ revealed this weakness to the world, perhaps with the exception of the British ruling class. The inter-war period was one of turbulence and uncertainty, above all because the revolutionary threat posed by the international working class meant that the reshaping of the imperialist world order was effectively interrupted.

In this sense, the Second World War can be seen as a completion of the First, in that it confirmed America’s dominance and Britain’s demotion to the second rank. However, the division of the world into the two blocs that emerged from the ruins of the war created an unprecedented situation, characterised on the one hand by a confrontation which if unleashed could have destroyed the planet and, on the other, by a certain level of stability as the lesser powers curbed their ambitions in exchange for the protection of the bloc leaders. This in no way meant that this was some kind of peaceful balance of power; on the contrary, it was marked by endless and bloody proxy wars as the two blocs probed each other and sought to gain the upper hand. Nor, indeed, did it mean peace and harmony within the blocs: ambitions were curbed, not abandoned.

The British ruling class generally recognised that its interests were best served by staying close to the US. This both reflected the existence of real common interests against the Russian Bloc and acquiescence to a situation it could no longer challenge – as the US had made clear in the 1950s when it slapped down Britain’s attempt to act independently over Suez. One consequence of this was that Britain effectively maintained a position in the global order that its own economic strength no longer warranted. The unravelling of the Western Bloc that followed the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 changed this irrevocably.

British imperialism in the new world order

For many states this situation presented them with new possibilities. Old vassals of the USSR turned towards the US and Europe, others such as Germany and Japan that had been constrained after their defeat in the war began to stretch their muscles. The failure of American attempts to hold the line through the first Gulf War and beyond emboldened lesser powers, such as Israel and Iran, to assert themselves regionally.

For Britain however, this was less an opportunity than a threat because it was once again confronted by the full reality of its decline and the legacy of its past global swagger that had sown hatred and distrust amongst allies and enemies alike. At the same time, its ruling class not only had the imperialist ambitions common to all ruling classes, but also the pretensions of its past power and glory. In the new world order, the British state found itself caught between a US that was struggling to maintain its old authority and which was increasingly drowning parts of the world in blood in its attempts to do so, and a Europe that was increasingly dominated by a resurgent Germany. In our press we have charted British imperialism’s efforts to steer an independent line over the last quarter of a century and analysed the development of factions within the ruling class arguing for differing imperialist strategies. In the last decade we have shown the impasse into which the Blair government drove British imperialist strategy as a result of the turn towards the US that followed 9/11 and the disastrous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Cameron came to power with an idea of breaking out of this impasse by reaching beyond its parameters to new powers such as India, Pakistan, Turkey, Brazil and China, but this vision also foundered in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan. Today it seems that every move Britain makes backfires. The intervention in Libya in 2011 to help the rebellion against Gaddafi was hailed a success at the time because it achieved its aim rapidly and with no loss of British military personnel. Today, the country is torn apart by a myriad factions of former ‘freedom fighters’ and the British embassy has been closed and its staff have fled. As we show in other articles in this issue, barbarism is spreading in many parts of the world, being particularly concentrated in those places where the US has led efforts to defeat ‘extremism’ and restore ‘order’ and where its former protégés and pawns have gone freelance.

The result within the British ruling class has been to increase its divisions and to force them into the open. This was seen most explicitly a year ago when the attempt to sanction military intervention in Syria was defeated in the House of Commons (see “Syria intervention vote: Impasse of British imperialism” in WR 362, September/October 2013[1]). The impasse that now exists within the ruling class means that it has been unable to develop a coherent imperialist policy in the last 12 months and it is this, rather than tactical oscillations, that lie behind the apparent contradictions noted at the start of this article.

The growing incoherence of British imperialism

In Iraq and Syria, Britain has joined the condemnation of the Islamic State but has been hesitant in getting involved. Nonetheless, there has been a gradual move from initially only providing ‘humanitarian’ aid, to agreeing to transport weapons to the Kurds supplied by others and then to declaring its willingness to supply British military equipment. The fighter aircraft originally deployed to aid the humanitarian mission are now carrying out military surveillance while ministers repeatedly state there will be no ‘boots on the ground’. Divisions have already come into the open, with military figures, such as Lord Dannatt, calling not only for armed intervention, but also for direct talks with President Assad of Syria. He has been joined by the former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind who said Britain had to be “harshly realistic” and likened working with Assad to the wartime alliance with Stalin, arguing that “history judged them right in coming to that difficult but necessary judgement” (Guardian 22/08/14).

There have also been demands for Parliament to be recalled, which Cameron has resisted on the grounds that the intervention in response to the humanitarian crisis does not require an emergency debate. Most recently, the possibility of joining the US air strikes has been raised in a report in the New York Times (26/08/14), which quoted unnamed US officials saying they expected that Britain and Australia would be willing to participate. Britain’s position does not exclude this possibility since ministers have only ruled out the use of ground troops. Thus it is possible that Cameron is trying to move towards intervention gradually, testing out the level of opposition as he goes in order to avoid a repeat of the humiliation over Syria. The execution of the journalist James Foley, because it may have been carried out by a British member of the Islamic State, could help to provide a pretext, although Cameron did not immediately take this opportunity.

During the latest violence in Gaza the British Government has condemned the rocket attacks by Hamas and reiterated its position that Israel has a right to defend itself, while gradually increasing its criticism of Israel over the number of civilian deaths and the attacks on UN buildings. There have been divisions across the political parties, coming to a head with the resignation of Baroness Warsi who condemned her government’s policy as “morally indefensible” and claimed that it was no longer acting as an ‘honest broker’ in the region. She was attacked by some fellow Tories, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, for over-reacting, suggesting that it was more a matter of pique over her demotion in the recent cabinet reshuffle than of principle as she claimed. There have also been tensions in the coalition over military exports to Israel, with Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Trade Minister stating that exports would be suspended if violence resumed.

Turning to the Ukraine, Britain supported its move towards Europe as part of its long-term support of the expansion of the European Union as a way of counter-balancing Germany’s position. Thus it supported the protestors in Kiev, playing down the fascist sympathies of many of the organisations involved in it, and has been happy to portray Russia as causing the current conflict for its own territorial ambitions. It has also supported the imposition of sanctions, suggesting that the restrictions on the movements and financial transactions of various senior figures in Russia would somehow have a real impact. However, it was far less willing to impose effective financial sanctions because of the possible impact on Britain’s financial sector, which remains one of the few profitable parts of the economy.

The confusion and indecision currently evident should not be seen as implying any lessening of Britain’s imperialist ambitions. The challenge is over precisely what those ambitions are and how to achieve them. So, intervention, whether in Iraq, Syria or elsewhere should not be ruled out. Nor should further attempts to develop new relationships amongst all the competing powers. But the historic decline of British imperialism cannot be reversed and the impasse it has reached remains. On paper, Britain remains a strong military power, ranked sixth in the world in terms of expenditure. Despite recent cuts, the current level of spending at 2.3% of GDP is only slightly lower than a decade before when it was 2.4% (“Trends in world military expenditure, 2013”, SIPRI 2014). But this reveals the real problem for Britain: the disorder and uncertainty of the international situation and its own history means that it faces the possibility of under-performing, of punching below its weight.

Just as Britain has ordered aircraft carriers without aircraft to carry, so today it has imperialist ambitions without a coherent strategy to realise them.

North, 29/08/14

Until only one week ago, the inhabitants of the working-class neighbourhood of Gamonal [in the town of Burgos in Castile, central Spain] have daily come out onto the streets to demand a halt to building work of a major road. The mayor had continually refused to do anything, but faced with persistent demonstrations and the widespread solidarity across Spain (in at least thirty towns), he initially announced a temporary suspension of the work and then finally on Friday 17th [January] agreed to call a total halt to it. However, when the residents, met in their assembly on Saturday 18th, they decided to continue the struggle, demanding the unconditional release of everyone taken into custody and the removal of the anti-riot police.

Why and how did such a movement arise? What lessons does it provide? Is it part of the international struggle of the working class? We will try to answer these questions in order to stimulate discussion and to aid the development of the class struggle. That said, we also want to express in particular our solidarity with the struggle and with those who were imprisoned.

Frustration and indignation

The struggle appears to have arisen out of something quite small: the reconstruction of a boulevard (a large avenue), part of the unfolding programme of road work taking place in many cities, lining the pockets of the urban developers, and tainted by corruption, but with no concern at all for improving the lives of local residents.

But sometimes we can be deceived by appearances and only a serious examination of the background to the struggles can enable us to understand them and to support them. In much the same way, a significant social movement in Turkey arose after the felling of some trees in a park in Istanbul[1]

Gamonal is a working-class neighbourhood of Burgos built in the 1960s next to an industrial area of the same name. The enormous buildings are like rabbit hutches squeezed together to make vertical slums. But if suffering from such living conditions for many years has left a bitter after-taste, more recently unemployment has increased dramatically, social services have been cut, and municipal taxes have spiralled, and evictions have increased ... an accumulated burden of suffering reflected in the faces of people in signs of anxiety, worry and a fear of things getting even worse.

In this context, rebuilding a boulevard that shows a blatant waste of money, and the proposals for an underground car park that would threaten the fragile foundations of many buildings, was seen as the final straw to break the camel's back coming on top of unacceptable levels of unemployment, a bleak future, atomisation, “living on one's nerves”. This is not peculiar to Burgos, but is the daily experience of millions of workers and exploited around the world.

Assemblies, the brain and the heart of the struggle

The struggle of Gamonal can't be compared with other kinds of protest where people come along and make a lot of noise before quietly retreating to the whence they came, home to their atomised and solitary existence. Every day without exception the assembly was held at noon and at 7:00 in the evening following the day's demonstrations.

The assemblies were the brain and the heart of the movement. The brain, because here there was a collective reflection about how to struggle, about what actions to take next, about the decisions to make. The heart, because the assembly is a real expression of the means of communicating, developing understanding and establishing links to break the isolation and the atomisation, which are the terrible stigma of a society where everyone is trapped "in their own little world", dominated by the commodity..

As some people who actively participated in the struggle wrote on a blog[2]: "The failure of the old structures of pseudo-participation such as political parties and the creation of the self-organised assemblies, without leaders, everyone participating as equals, opens the door to a new world", but even more important was the insistence that "we all are needed, the elderly, youth, the mothers and fathers and children" and it is inside the assembly (the method specific to the working class) where they all have a place and can each make specific contributions.

The assembly aimed to deepen consciousness. The struggles which have unfolded around the world since 2003 have arisen in the context of the loss of working class identity; the class has lost confidence in itself and is unable to recognise itself as such.[3] However, this is what we read: "Today, Thursday [16 January], we have freed our imprisoned comrades. Local residents, parents, all kinds of people in solidarity, came to greet them upon their release from prison in Burgos chanting. ‘You are not alone’ (and)’ Long live the struggle of the working class’!" Realistically, we know that this is only an indication, but such proclamations highlight the fact that at least some minorities are beginning to have confidence in the power of the working class.

One graffiti stated: "Barricades close the street but open up the road, Paris May 68 - Gamonal 14 January". Let us repeat: there is no room for complacency but we must emphasise the relationship established between this movement in a neighbourhood of Burgos and the struggle of May 68. Marx spoke of the subterranean maturation of consciousness in the great mass of workers as an old mole digging his hole and advancing through the depths of the earth. Today, the working class seems to be buried in a dark well, but the struggle of Gamonal shows it entails a striving for consciousness. Diario de Vurgos reminds us: "We are carrying a new world in our hearts".

It is very significant that the movement did not stop after the final abandonment of the roadworks, stating that it is necessary "to go much further, extending the struggle for housing, against work-unemployment -insecurity ... and in creating a community of struggle that confronts the various attacks of the State". "It is always necessary to keep alive the flame of a phenomenon that is not at all new and is part of the collective heritage of all the exploited and oppressed of the world."

How to deal with repression?

The state responded quickly. The neighbourhood was surrounded on all sides by riot police. It was an undeclared state of siege, with the police checking identities, establishing roadblocks everywhere, breaking up any "suspect" groups. There were 46 arrests.

The democratic state, which we are told is the champion of respect for human rights, treated the detainees in a brutal and humiliating manner: "In the assembly this afternoon [Thursday, 16th], a young boy who was held in prison, spoke about his stay in the police station and prison. Beatings were dished out at the police station,  (...) This youth was carrying a backpack when he was arrested that the police subsequently filled with stones. When he protested saying it was not him who put stones in the bag, the police threatened to put him in a cell with more police and to beat him up as they had done with others".

The unions and left parties provide a false picture of the state. They recognise that it has a nasty face (politicians, the government of the day, the police and its excesses) only to bamboozle us with the other face, that of the "eminent" judges who would not hesitate in indicting the daughter of the King! But such fairy tales vanish when we look at the actual experience of Gamonal: "This morning, the judge of the court No. 3 in Burgos jailed four comrades held on bail of 3000 euros, accused of committing crimes against public order on the Monday evening. (...) At the time of his court appearance, [this youth] has said that the judge spoke to them, insulted them, distrusted them, not even listening to their statements about how they had suffered in the police station". With the state, it is not a matter of the "nasty face" and the "friendly face"; it is a machine for repression in the service of the exploiting class and all its institutions play their part in this from the police and the church to the judges and unions.

The best weapon against repression is the massiveness of the struggle and the search for solidarity. On each occasion the assembly asked the participants not to disperse individually on their own after the event, but to leave in the most compact groups possible so that the anti-riot police were not able to hunt down lone protesters at the end of the demo. The assembly was trying to avoid police provocations that try to create a melee, dispersing the protesters into isolated groups and using police power against them. Diario de Vurgos puts it very clearly: "Today was not a pitched battle, it was psychological: the forces of repression have used intimidation for hours, gradually, throughout the neighbourhoods, with their guns, batons and uniforms, oozing hatred, trying to send the message: 'we are in charge here' but we have not fallen into the trap. They are not in control, though they want to be. Today, more than ever, the street still belongs to the neighbourhood of Gamonal and it is the neighbourhood itself that sets the tone and pace of the struggle and only the neighbourhood that decides when we roar and when we bite".

The strength of solidarity

That said, Diario de Vurgos falls into a contradiction: "In Madrid, we went out into the street three days running and we continue to charge [against the police]. In Zaragoza, barricades were built, as well as in Valencia and Alicante; in Barcelona, the windows of banks inside the barricades were smashed and in the Ramblas the police station was attacked. There were twenty arrests across the country. It is now up to us to show solidarity with all those who showed it to us! "Previously, Diario Virgos showed very clearly how the Gamonal Assembly had avoided the trap of isolated clashes with the police, and now it highlights such clashes.

We offer our support to the 20 detainees. We do not condemn their actions, on the contrary, we understand their rage and frustration very well. What we condemn is the trap the bourgeoisie has set up to make us believe that the struggle can be fought on the terrain of street violence by small minorities.

What is the "Gamonal danger" according to the televised news? It seems that what shook the Interior Minister most was the sight of hooded individuals throwing stones, the burned out containers and the shattered windows. There are probably some stupid bourgeois experiencing the chills faced with such ''disorder''. But Capital is a cold and impersonal machine and its smartest managers (who are also the most cynical) know perfectly well what in truth worries them most. In other words, what the so-called ''communications'' media don't speak the truth about when referring to Gamonal: the massive nature and "assembly form" of this movement.

Let's look at a blog called El Confidencial that credits itself with informing politicians and the employers. Regarding Gamonal[4], this blog says: "Jobs, housing and residents' participation, as in the case Gamonal, are not defended anymore on the basis of the same logic of five or six years ago, when there was no alternative leadership to the unions or organisations directly linked to political parties. Since then there has been a process of discrediting and decomposition of these social agents in parallel with the success of the new forms of organisation and protest, which have less structure but, on the other hand, a clear capacity to mobilise". Further on, these gentlemen give a warning. "The new logic of protest took everyone by surprise. They do not fall within the traditional definition of organisations and social movements, they do not correspond in any way to the neighbourhood associations, let alone the trade unions". Not one word about the "terrible danger" against which we were hysterically alerted by the Minister of the Interior or the Commissioner of the Government of the Region of Madrid (the latter now considered as "progressive" because of his ''criticisms'' of the Gallardón Law[5]).

The strength of Gamonal rests on two pillars: the assemblies and solidarity. Solidarity with the 46 imprisoned in response to the fact that today, Monday, the struggle continues owing to the fact that the prisoners have not been released or the charges against them dropped. But this solidarity has taken on a greater significance owing to the extension of the movement all across Spain.

The Assembly of Gamonal decided to send some delegates to other towns to inform them of its struggle and to explain its key objectives and especially to show that there is an underlying mutual interest in struggling together. This germ has borne fruit and on Wednesday 14th at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, where 3,000 people, mostly youth, demonstrated in support of Gamonal. On the Thursday and Friday, the demonstrations spread elsewhere while continuing inside the country's capital city. There were demonstrations in more than 30 cities where it was mostly young people gathering together to shout slogans of support for Gamonal. The solidarity of the street has strengthened the commitment of the Gamonal residents. The profound experience of 2011 was not completely lost in the void of forgetfulness[6], and some traces of it can be seen here and there. Only two months ago, there was the cleaners' strike in Madrid, and there were expressions of working class solidarity from other sectors[7] that helped to cushion the blows felt by the strikers. In November 2013, a large wave of strikes rocked Bangladesh in solidarity with the textile workers there. Currently, there is a struggle of workers in the Lavanderias (laundries) in the Madrid hospitals outside and against the unions. Similarly, the workers of Tragsa (a public company carrying out 'environmental work' consisting of 4,600 people across Spain) have rejected the agreement signed by the unions proposing 600 redundancies.

Criticism makes us strong

But it would be a serious mistake to overestimate the movement.

The Assembly of Gamonal had its own dynamics that the opposition parties (PSOE and IU[8]) failed to stop. But if people rejected the PSOE, the IU was better equipped to exert its influence in the neighbourhood associations and, even if it was still not able to block the struggle, it was able, on the other hand, to stop any clear understanding of it. It did this by arguing that the current PP government was the cause of the problems, and that everything could be blamed on the detrimental effect of privatisations on the public sector, and the claim that "an alternative" was possible if the municipal administration was really linked "to the people". For those who think only in terms of "action" and what matters is that "people react" without clearly knowing why, with whom, and to what end, raising any other sorts of questions would amount to talking nonsense and making life more complicated.

In fact, this only serves to hide the need we all have - we, the proletariat - to make the effort to reflect, to reclaim our historical experience. If we are going to avoid the errors of the past, we need a revolutionary theory that is a real force for action.

This difficulty to provide ourselves with an orientation is rooted in the fact that the demonstrations in solidarity with Gamonal are not backed up by assemblies. This means that, while being very precious and full of promise, the solidarity has remained at the level of good wishes; it has not been made concrete, and the demonstrations have not gone beyond simple protest.

Despite what is signified by the slogan "Long live the struggle of the working class!", the movement has still seen itself as a "citizens' or people's" struggle (in the demos we often heard : "The people united will never be defeated"). The bourgeoisie and its parties impose this vision (and the unions too speak about "popular protest").

If we see ourselves as "citizens" or "the people", we become the class brothers of the politicians who deceive us, of the police who beat us, of the judges who imprison us, of Amancio Ortega, the richest man in Spain; we are all part of the "greater Spanish family". And if we accept this "Holy Family", we have to also accept insecurity, cuts in social spending, lay-offs, as is required to make the "Spanish brand" more competitive[9]. This is what the government, the employers and the right wing politicians proclaim in all their cynical frankness and what the left and the unions oppose with their idyllic vision of "trademark Spain" without cuts or redundancies, which they do not believe in themselves,  as is clearly seen whenever the left is in government or the unions sign agreements on redundancies and wage cuts.

As we said in our international leaflet on the balance sheet of the movements in 2011: ''However society is divided into classes, a capitalist class that owns everything and produces nothing and an exploited class (the proletariat) which produces all and has less and less. The driving force of social change is not the democratic game of ‘the decision of a majority of citizens’ (this game is nothing more than a masquerade that covers up and legitimises the dictatorship of the ruling class) but the class struggle. The social movement needs to join up with the struggle of the principle exploited class (the proletariat) that collectively produces most of the wealth and ensures the functioning of social life: factories, hospitals, schools, universities, ports, construction, post offices (...) There is no opposition between the struggle of the modern proletariat and the profound needs of social layers exploited by capitalist oppression.  The struggle of the proletariat is not an egotistical or specific movement but the basis for 'the independent movement of the immense majority to the benefit of the immense majority'(The Communist Manifesto)”.

It is clear that in so far as the struggles are considered part of a "citizens' movement", they will not be directed against the state but will engage in a desperate search, continually coming up against the same wall of so-called "reform", which amounts to "everything must change so that everything can stay the same", as the Prince of Lampedusa said. Beyond insights like seeing the link between Gamonal, 2014, and May 68, if the struggles are seen as a "popular actions", they will not be able to break out of the national shackles and will not put forward what is needed: being an active link in the broad international movement of the proletariat. It is obvious that in so far as the struggles do not integrate themselves into the class struggle, they will not be fighting against the global capitalist system, but they will lose themselves in allocating blame to each in turn, to the speculators, the bankers, the corrupt politicians and so on, like selecting from an interlocking nest of Russian dolls. 

The assemblies, the debates, the discussions in the streets, in the workplaces and in the schools, must address these dilemmas. We shouldn't be afraid either of problems or criticisms. "These present movements would benefit from critically reviewing the experience of two centuries of proletarian struggle, and attempts at social liberation. The road is long and fraught with enormous obstacles, which calls to mind the slogan oft repeated in Spain: 'It is not that we are going slowly, it is that we are going far'. By starting the widest possible debate, without restrictions or discouragement, that is consciously preparing the future movements, we will be ensuring that this hope becomes a reality: another society is possible!" (Excerpt from our international leaflet quoted above). Gamonal with its assemblies and solidarity is one more step on the long and difficult road.

Acción Proletaria (22 January 2014)

Humanity should weep to see this, and greatly fear what it foretells. But to paraphrase the great philosopher Spinoza weeping is not enough; it is necessary to understand.

This growing nightmare is getting out of control but it is not impossible to understand. The cause of this upsurge in barbarism is the same one that resulted in the First World War: imperialism. That is, the life and death struggle by each national capital for a greater share of the world market.

In the nineteenth century the emerging capitalist nations could gobble up the rest of the planet. Millions died in the process. The major powers armed themselves to the teeth from the end of the century as each advance by one threatened the interests of the others. This culminated in World War I when Germany was forced to strike out to counter its strangulation by the other main powers. Millions upon millions of proletarians were slaughtered on the industrialised killing fields of France, Belgium, Turkey, Russia. This was the barbaric price humanity paid for capitalism’s continued existence. A tribute that increased the longer capitalism continued.

The Second World War turned much of the Eurasian land mass into one vast battlefield where there was no or little difference between military and civilians. In this war the ‘other side’ was the entire population of the enemy countries; thus destruction of the men women and children became the ‘legitimate’ aim of the war. It was now total war for the total destruction of the enemy. World War I had slaughtered millions of men, World War II annihilated tens of millions of men, women and children. This barbarism did not end with the war. Europe and the US may have had ‘peace’ but the rest of humanity suffered endless war as the two imperialist blocs reduced one country after another to ruin. North Vietnam had more tonnage of explosive dropped on it than the US used in the whole of World War Two. If this was not enough imperialism held out the prospect of the total annihilation of humanity in a third world war.

The US faced with the end of the ‘old order’ of imperialism

The end of the old imperialist blocs was hailed as the end of the threat of nuclear destruction and the opening of a New World Order. However, the last quarter century has witnessed an accelerating process of the decay of the US’s superpower status. It could not have been otherwise. Freed from the threat of destruction by the other bloc, every capitalist nation has been compelled to place its national imperialist interest first. Initially the US could use its might to get its rivals to tow its line, as seen in the “international coalition” during the first Gulf War, but by the 2003 war in Iraq it was faced with open hostility from many of its former allies like Germany and France.

As its power has weakened so its rivals have become emboldened. Russian imperialism’s recent push into Ukraine would not have happened if it had feared the response of the US. The Russian bourgeoisie, confronted with the US and Europe’s efforts to pull Ukraine away from its sphere of influence, had no choice but to act. But the Russian land-grab in Crimea and part of Eastern Ukraine was encouraged by the US withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia has also used its support for the Assad regime to put pressure on the US. Its military, intelligence and diplomatic resources have propped up the regime. At the same time it blunted the USA’s efforts to step up its military campaign against the regime by agreeing to get rid of its chemical weapons.

At the global level the US has also been confronted by the rise of Chinese imperialism which is challenging its domination of the Far East, the Indian Ocean and even into Africa[1]. This growing imperialist power is also backing the USA’s main rivals in the Middle East: Syria and Iran. This has led to the US pivoting its imperialist policy towards the Far East. China is no military rival to the US, but it can certainly use the USA’s weakness to its own ends.

The weakening of US imperialism is being paid for in blood and suffering of millions around the world. Africa is another example. Only two years ago the US boasted about the ‘freeing’ of Libya from the terror of Gaddafi: this July the US ambassador, as well as the British, had to flee from Tripoli as this country went into free fall as rival militia, army units, and gangs fought for control of all the major cities in the country. The USA’s ‘freeing’ of Libya has certainly freed up the supply of looted arms from the collapsed Libyan army’s weapons dumps. These weapons have flowed across North Africa in order to feed numerous wars and armies, for example the upsurge of the jihadists in Mali last year was stimulated by the flow of arms and Islamist fighters from Libya.

In the Sudan, the US-backed break away South Sudan had no sooner declared itself as a new state, with great fanfare in the Western media, than it began to be  torn apart by a bloody war between parts of the bourgeois faction that had been supported by the US. This collapse of the USA’s effort to undermine the Sudanese government can only have stimulated the ambitions of Khartoum and its Chinese backers.

If the US cannot even stop some puppet government dependent upon it from falling apart, why would other countries and factions in the region have any confidence in the US?

In 1914 it was the weaker imperialism’s desperate effort to try and break the strangle-hold of its main rivals that struck the match of the conflagration, and the same scenario was repeated in 1939. Today it is the actions, or the inability to act, of the world’s main imperialist power that is stoking up barbarism. The American military is by far the biggest, most sophisticated and powerful in the world, dwarfing its rivals, but each time the US has used its military power it brings about more instability and barbarity.  This is evident in Pakistan where the increasing use of drones, cruise missiles and secret special forces operations to assassinate the “enemies of the US” (including 4 US civilians), and the consequent slaughter of civilians, is further shaking the foundations of a state like Pakistan which is already failing, whilst at the same time supplying ever more recruits into armed groups who claim to be fighting the US.

And the evolution of the “Islamic State” is the clearest proof that the USA’s efforts to manipulate different factions of the bourgeoisie are producing the disastrous phenomenon of ‘blow back’. Like al Qaeda before it, set up to oppose the Russians in Afghanistan but then becoming an avowed enemy of the USA, Isis or Islamic State was initially fed by the US and regional allies like Qatar as a force capable of confronting the ruthless Assad regime in Syria, but this ‘pawn’ has now become such a danger to the stability of the region that the US is now sending out feelers not only to Iran but also to Assad to see whether they can come to an agreement about fighting this new threat! This about-face speaks volumes about the increasing incoherence of US foreign policy, a reflection of its underlying weakness.

The USA will not be able to respond to this situation by retreating into a new isolationism. It will be forced, as the Obama administration is now being forced in Iraq and Syria, to launch itself into new military adventures. This is a spiral of barbarism which can only be halted by the elimination of its source: capitalism in its epoch of imperialist decline.

Phil 28/8/14

When Poroshenko was elected president of Ukraine he promised to defeat the “separatist terrorists” in the Donbass region, and in the last month the combination of Kiev’s regular army and irregular militias has gained a lot of ground particularly around Luhansk, with increasing cost to life as the fighting moved into more populated cities with more civilians caught in the crossfire. Estimates of the dead are all above 2,000. To this can be added the 298 killed when flight MH17 was shot down when Russia put powerful antiaircraft guns in the hands of separatists without the ability, or even the concern, to recognise civilian transponder signals, compounded by capitalism’s way of balancing the risk of flying over a war zone against the cost of extra fuel to go round it.

“Europe’s most serious security crisis”[1]

Ukraine is an inherently unstable and artificial country[2] grouping the majority Ukrainian population with a minority of Russian speakers as well as various other nationalities. The component populations are divided by historic hatreds going back to the famines of Stalin’s forced collectivisation, to the divisions in the Second World War, the expulsion of Crimean Tartars, all of which is played on by the extreme nationalist politicians and gangs. Added to this, with the economy already in disastrous straits the Ukrainian west of the country sees its salvation in closer trade with the EU while the East remains tied to trade with Russia.

For all that, this ‘civil’ war is not a fundamentally Ukrainian affair, but one whose genesis and implications are completely integrated into the wider imperialist conflicts in Europe and beyond. Before 1989 Ukraine was part of the USSR and divisions were held in check. Today Russia finds itself more and more tightly squeezed by the expansion of the EU and of NATO to include much of its former Eastern European sphere of influence, so much so that Barack Obama says the challenges Russia represents are “effectively regional” (The Economist, 9.8.14). But even with this former superpower cut down to regional size, there are some things it cannot give up, including its Crimean base on the Black Sea, a warm water port giving access to the Mediterranean and via the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean. Likewise it cannot allow Ukraine and its South Stream pipeline to fall entirely under the control of its rivals and enemies. Hence the encouragement and support to the separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. In this Russia has benefited from the fact that the USA’s attention has turned to the Far East and the need to counter the rise of China.

So no way could Russia stand by and let ‘Novorossiya’ be destroyed. Russia has not only supplied heavy weapons to the separatists, but also has 20,000 troops massing near Rostov and carrying out manoeuvres on the Ukrainian border. The incursion of an estimated 1,000 troops has not only gone to the rescue of Donetsk, but started to make a land corridor towards Mariupol in the south. Clearly the ‘Novorossiyan’ separatists are not doing enough towards Russia’s desire to forge a land bridge to Crimea, which it annexed last March, and perhaps also towards the pro-Russian separatists in Trans-Dniester in Moldova. For the moment, this is only a not-so-covert incursion, not an open invasion. The perspective for now is continued destabilisation.

Meanwhile Ukraine wants to join NATO. Poroshenko and Putin may have met in Minsk at the Eurasian Union meeting in Minsk, but there was no basis for negotiation.

The ‘west’ cannot let Russia get away with this incursion, even if it is now only a regional power, even when Obama admitted the US has yet to develop a strategy to counter it. First of all there is diplomatic condemnation. Then there are increased sanctions, this time affecting Russian banks, decided after the Malaysian airliner was shot down. Then the question of supplying Kiev with aid: $690m from Germany as well as $1.4billion from the IMF (the second instalment of $17billion promised when Russia cut off aid last winter). No doubt the aid will also include sale of weapons. Lastly, Britain is to lead a new multilateral Joint Expeditionary Force of 10,000 from 6 countries, none of them NATO heavyweights, and Canada may also become involved – at this stage this is largely symbolic and certainly does not presage a military response to the Ukraine crisis. While all the EU countries are united in their interest in countering the Russian offensive, we should not imagine that there is a united ‘international community’ or ‘west’. In fact the neighbouring countries and European powers are all busy protecting their own interests: France is still delivering helicopter carriers to Russia, Britain still wants Russian businesses to invest through the City of London, and Germany still depends on Russian gas, and each wants the others to bear the cost of any sanctions. There are also divisions with those countries which take a much more hawkish view of the Russian incursions, usually because they have their own Russian minorities and fear the same kind of instability could be fomented at home. Meanwhile Serbia is caught in the dilemma of trying to keep its old Russian ally while also orientating itself towards the EU, a situation that cannot hold.

Internal ruin

The conflict in Ukraine is very destructive. In addition to the loss of life and physical destruction of infrastructure, particularly in the East, there is the effect on the economy. Although the mining and heavy industry in the Donbass is out of date and dangerous, the loss of a region that accounts for 16% of GDP and 27% of industrial production is a disaster for Kiev, whose GDP is predicted to fall by 6.5% by the end of the year and whose currency, the hryvnia, has fallen by 60% against the dollar since the beginning of the year. It is truly dependent on the aid it is getting.  Things will only get worse in the winter if Russia withholds the gas it depends on – with particularly disastrous implications for the population facing a Ukrainian winter.

117,000 people have been internally displaced and there are nearly a quarter of a million refugees in Russia.

The nature of the fighting, with both sides depending on militias made up of some of the worst fanatics, mercenaries, terrorists and adventurers, not only inflicts these killers on the civilian population now, but is also creating a really dangerous situation for the future. Who controls these irregular forces? Who will be able to call them off? We have only to look at the proliferation of various fanatical gangs in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Libya to see the threat.

The working class and the danger of nationalism

The greatest danger for the working class in the Ukrainian conflict is that it could be recruited behind the various nationalist factions. One very concrete guide to the success or failure of this recruitment can be seen in the willingness of workers to allow themselves to be drafted into the army, and in Ukraine there have been a number of protests against this. Mothers, wives and other relatives of soldiers have blocked roads in protest at their deployment to the Donbass: “after six soldiers originally from the region of Volhynia were killed, mothers, wives and relatives of soldiers of 51st brigade blocked the roads in the region of Volhinya to protest against further deployment of the unit in Donbas… 
Demonstrations and protests organized by wives and other relatives of draftees asking return of soldiers home or trying to block their departure to the front meanwhile spread to other regions of the Ukraine (Bukovina, Lviv, Kherson, Melitopol, Volhynia etc.). Families of the soldiers were blocking the roads with chopped down trees in the region of Lviv at the beginning of June” (article by the Czech group Guerre de Classe posted on the ICC discussion forum)[3]. There have been occupations of recruitment offices, military training grounds, even an airport.

Not all protests have managed to avoid the siren songs of nationalism. For instance the same article reports demonstrations in the Donbass calling for peace and an end to the “anti-terrorist operation”, in other words only for the end to the military action by the other side. In spite of this they report strikes by miners in the region with demands for safety (not going underground when bombardment could lead to them being trapped) and for higher wages.

These protests reported by Guerre de Classe are an important sign that the working class is not defeated, that many workers are not willing to throw their lives away on such a military adventure for the ruling class. It does not mean that the working class in Ukraine and Russia is already strong enough to directly call the war into question and the danger of the working class being recruited by the various nationalist gangs remains. To truly put the war into question would require a much more massive and above all much more conscious struggle of the working class on an international scale.

Alex, 30.8.14