The end of 2004 brought with it an immense human tragedy in South Asia. An exceptionally violent earthquake caused a tidal wave in the Indian Ocean, which devastated no less than twelve countries around it. In a few hours, the tsunamis killed more than 160,000 people; tens of thousands are still missing, hundreds of thousands are injured, and five million have been left homeless or refugees. Tragically, this terrible toll is only provisional, since many areas, in Thailand, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka in particular, remain inaccessible as a result of the complete destruction of the road network.

In the coastal regions, whole villages have been razed to the ground, hundreds of fishing boats have been smashed to pieces, and salt water has filled the fields, leaving more than five million people without shelter, drinking water, or food, which can only cause more deaths. The humanitarian organisations worry that epidemics could kill tens of thousands more people. Once again, it is the poorest strata of the population, including the workers in the tourist industry, who have been the main victims of this tragedy.

Capitalism alone is responsible for the human disaster

As with every disaster of this kind, we are told that human beings are impotent in the face of “Mother Nature”, bad luck, fate, or the poverty of the affected countries which are unable to acquire the techniques to prevent such disasters.

Rubbish, and lies!

How and why has a well-known natural disaster like the tsunami been transformed in just a few hours into such a massive social disaster?

Obviously, capitalism cannot be accused of causing the earthquake which created the enormous tidal wave. But it is the cause of the negligence and utter irresponsibility of the governments both of the region and in the west which has led to this immense human catastrophe.

All of them were aware that this region of the world is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes.

“The experts on the spot knew that a disaster was imminent. During a meeting of physicists in Jakarta in December, a group of Indonesian seismologists brought up the subject with a French expert. They were perfectly aware of the danger of tsunamis, since earthquakes occur constantly in the region” (Libération, 31/12/04).

The experts were therefore aware of the danger. Moreover, we are told by the ex-director of the International Centre for Information on Tsunamis, George Pararas-Carayannis, that a major quake took place two days before the disaster of 26th December: “The Indian Ocean possesses the basic infrastructure and communications for seismic measurement. And nobody should have been taken by surprise, since an earthquake of 8.1 on the Richter scale occurred on 24th December. This should have alerted the authorities. What is lacking is the political will in the countries concerned, and an international coordination on the scale of what has been built in the Pacific” (Libération, 28/12/04).

Nobody should have been surprised, and yet the disaster came. But this was not the end of the ruling classes’ negligence!

Within 15 minutes of the earthquake, the American weather bureau in Hawaii warned 26 countries of the danger of tsunamis close to the epicentre, and yet the Japanese weather bureau failed to pass on the information, because the news did not concern Japan.

The Indian Air Force HQ received the information, but it then had to follow an extremely hierarchical and bureaucratic path. The warning fax got lost, because the weather bureau no longer had the correct fax number for the Research Ministry, which had changed since a new government took office in May 2004. “The same pattern of events occurred in Thailand, where the weather bureau dared not launch a national alert for fear of causing useless panic, and this despite the fact that they already knew that a major earthquake had occurred at 08:10, hours before the tsunami hit the beaches of Phuket” (Libération, 31/12/04).

Simple prudence (not to mention the principal of precaution) demanded that the population be warned. Even without the technical means of Japan or the United States, there was enough information available about the coming disaster for the governments to act and to avoid such a slaughter.

This was not negligence, it was a criminal policy which reveals the profound contempt of the ruling class for the population and the proletariat, who are the main victims of the bourgeois policies of the local governments!

Today it is clear and even officially recognised that the alert was not given… for fear of harming the tourist industry! In other words, tens of thousands of human lives have been sacrificed in the defence of sordid economic and financial interests.

This governmental irresponsibility is yet another illustration of the way of life of this class of sharks who run society’s productive activity. The bourgeois states are ready to sacrifice so many human lives in order to preserve capitalist profit and exploitation.

The policy of the ruling class is always dictated by capitalist interest, and in capitalism, disaster prevention is not profitable, as the media recognise today: “The countries of the region have so far turned a deaf ear to appeals to set up a warning system, because of the cost involved. According to the experts, such a system would have cost tens of millions of dollars, and yet it would allowed tens of thousands of human lives to be saved” (Les Echos, 30/12/04).

At the sight of these endless TV reports, showing the tens of thousands of dead, the decimated families, the orphaned children, we can only be revolted by the abject cynicism with which those responsible for the slaughter announce that now they will do everything in their power to equip Asia with the same system of earthquake and tsunami detection as exists in the United States and Japan.

The human tragedy in South Asia is yet another expression of the barbarity of a system which is leading humanity to its doom. For it is this decadent system that is truly responsible for the endless series of catastrophes. Last year, an earthquake in Iran left tens of thousands dead. Just before that, it was the turn of Turkey and Armenia. The population is massed in earthquake areas in precarious buildings, when all the technology exists to prevent such natural phenomena from turning into social disasters.

If the tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed so many tourists, this is because capitalism's development of tourist complexes has been completely anarchic, and in particular because it has destroyed many of the mangrove swamps which could have offered some protection from the tidal-wave and all the flotsam and jetsam it brought with it.

This is another expression of the aberrant situation in the industrialised countries, where housing is built in areas dangerously subject to flooding.

Because it is based on the frantic search for profit, and not on the satisfaction of human need, capitalism can only, more than ever, cause yet more disasters. Capitalist development has made possible the flourishing of a formidable technical and industrial capacity, and tends towards a certain mastery of nature; yet in its decadent phase, this system is no longer capable of offering any progress to humanity. On the contrary, just as technical development should make it possible for humanity to live in harmony with nature, the latter seems to be "reasserting its rights".

Capitalism today is a social system in decomposition. It has become a barrier to the development of the human species, and even a threat to its very survival. It is the duty of revolutionaries to answer the partial, but above all the base and cynical, explanations of the ruling class, with a marxist analysis.

"The more capitalism develops, then rots on its feet, the more it prostitutes the technology which should be a force for liberation to the demands of its exploitation, domination, and imperialist pillage, to the point where it injects its own rottenness into technical development and turns it against the human species (...) In every domain of daily life in the 'peaceful' phases that it allows us, between imperialist massacres or periods of repression, capitalism crams together, poisons, asphyxiates, mutilates and massacres human individuals with its prostituted technology, spurred on as it is by its ceaseless search for a better rate of profit (...) Nor is capitalism innocent of the so-called 'natural' disasters. While there are of course natural forces which are outside human control, marxism shows that many disasters are directly provoked or worsened by social causes (...) Not only does bourgeois civilisation directly provoke disasters by its thirst for profit and the domination of the administrative apparatus by racketeering (...) it is incapable of organising effective preventive measures, inasmuch as prevention is not a profitable activity" (Amadeo Bordiga, Earth's crust and the human species).

The hypocrisy and cynicism of the world bourgeoisie

Despite the gravity of the disaster, it took several days for the international ruling class to mobilise, and to despatch assistance to the affected countries. Once there, aid had to be transported to where it was needed: a campaign hospital sent to Indonesia by the French had to wait two weeks before the arrival of the helicopters needed to transport the personnel and equipment.

In defence of their imperialist interests, in so-called "humanitarian" wars, these states are always capable of a rapid reactions when it comes to despatching troops and ever more sophisticated equipment to bombard civilian populations at the four corners of the planet. All these capitalist gangsters have never hesitated to pour the most gigantic sums of money into arms production, and the destruction of entire countries.

As for the financial aid initially promised by governments around the world, and notably by the most developed countries, it was so miserly that the UN Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland even described the "international community" as skinflints.

Faced with the extent of the disaster, the various capitalist states have behaved like real vultures, bidding up their aid with the sole objective of appearing more "generous" than their rivals.

The USA has proposed $350 million, instead of the initial announcement of $35 million (while they are spending $1 billion a week on the war in Iraq, and $1 billion a month in Afghanistan!), Japan has offered $500 million, and the European Union $436 million. France, which spends €1 billion a year on its military interventions, even thought it could take the lead among donor countries with its $50 million; then it was the turn of Australia, Britain, Germany, etc.

Each state proposed a higher sum than its predecessor, as if they were at an auction.

This verbal upping the stakes is all the more disgusting, in that it is a pure sham, since the promised aid is seldom followed by payment. We should remember that the "international community" of imperialist gangsters promised $100 million after the earthquake in Iran (December 2003), of which only $17 million has been paid. The same thing happened in Liberia: $1 billion promised, $70 million paid.

There is no end of examples, not to mention all the armed conflicts sinking into oblivion and horror and for which no promises are made, despite the human suffering every bit as terrible as that caused by the tsunami: Darfur, the Congo...

As for the proposed moratorium on debt repayments for the countries hit by the disaster, this is a bubble that will soon burst, since it is merely proposed to put off payment of interest on the debt, not to wipe it out completely. Moreover, among the countries most affected by the tidal wave, five will have to pay $32 billion dollars of debt next year, in other words ten times more than they have been promised in "humanitarian aid" (and which is probably far more than they will actually receive). Of course, if these countries, like Iraq, enjoyed the privilege of being occupied by the US Army, then they could have benefited from a straightforward abolition of their debt.

Not only does the bourgeoisie tell the most outrageous lies about its so-called "generosity", it hides the real motives behind this "humanitarian" auction.

The governments' "humanitarian" aid is in fact nothing but a pretext to hide their imperialist appetites.

Behind the ideological smokescreen of humanitarian propaganda, it is striking to see the haste with which each state rushed to get its own representatives on the ground, before its rivals, whereas the disaster called for an international coordination of aid efforts. In fact, each national bourgeoisie is defending its own capitalist and imperialist interests in a region which is important strategically and militarily.

The same diverging interests that were present in Afghanistan and Iraq are clashing around the Indian Ocean. France has sent its Foreign Minister to accompany a first plane-load of medicines, and French President Chirac, supported by Germany, has proposed the creation of a "humanitarian rapid reaction force", controlled by the European states but at the service of the United Nations.

The US response was not long in coming: the United States not only sent its ships, helicopters and aircraft to the region, it announced the creation of an international humanitarian coalition (with Australia, India, and Japan) to "coordinate their assistance".

As with the war in Iraq, the aim of US policy is to demonstrate to the other powers that the United States is boss, and that it intends to defend its interests here as elsewhere. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, and President Bush's brother, have been despatched to the region to exalt "American values in action". Colin Powell, who commanded the American forces during the first Gulf War and was responsible, amongst other things, for burying alive the Iraqi troops caught in the front lines, even had the gall, as he flew over the devastated region of Banda Aceh to shed crocodile tears, declaring that "I've been in war and through a number of hurricanes, tornadoes and relief operations, but I have never seen anything like this" (USA Today, 5th January 2005).

The discord among the great powers, each state trying to gain an advantage over the others, are eloquent testimony to the humanitarian "concerns" of these capitalist vultures. As one US official pointed out: "This is a tragedy, but also an opportunity. Rapid and generous help from the United States could improve our relations with the Asian countries".

Given Indonesia's strategic importance in the Indian Ocean, it is obvious that the United States will try to profit from the disaster to gain a military footing in the region (something that the Indonesian armed forces rejected, accusing the USA of interfering in Indonesian affairs when Washington suspended its military aid to Jakarta in 1999, on the grounds of the massacres committed by the Indonesian army in East Timor). US "humanitarian relief" in Sri Lanka has taken the form of a "peaceful" landing by amphibious tanks (unarmed according to one officer), whose mission is "not to destroy but to help the population".

The European states would also like to establish a military and diplomatic presence in the region. China is trying to assert itself as a regional power, and in doing so is coming up against opposition from Japan. And if India has refused all foreign aid, even if this means leaving the victims of the disaster to die, it is solely because it wants to assert its own presence as a regional power to be reckoned with.

This is what is hidden behind the chaotic "humanitarian relief" offered by the world bourgeoisie: the defence of sordid imperialist interests! The hypocrisy of the bourgeois class that rules the world is truly vile!

It is capitalism that is the real disaster for humanity, its law of profit and its ruling class which pauses only to count the dead before unleashing the next round of barbarism. At the same time as capitalism leaves whole populations at the mercy of tidal waves, it has created chaos in Afghanistan, a bloodbath of terrorist attacks and state reprisals in Iraq and Palestine, famine in Darfur and slaughter in the Congo.

This bloody spiral shows that capitalism has nothing to offer but the destruction of humanity in ever more devastating disasters, ever more barbaric wars, more poverty, more famine, more epidemics. This rotting system can only offer the destruction of the entire planet, region by region.

What solidarity can we offer the victims of the disaster?

Confronted with this social and human tragedy, revolutionaries and the whole world proletariat must declare, loud and strong, their class solidarity with the victims.

They must salute the great élan of human solidarity that appeared immediately across the planet. The survivors did not wait for relief before helping each other. In the tourist areas, the local population helped out travellers who had lost everything, while tourists set to, to help clear debris and start rebuilding. Spontaneously, millions of people, and workers in particular, offered food, clothing, and money to help the victims.

But this natural solidarity, which is the basis for social existence and the preservation of the human species, has immediately been recuperated by the ruling class and its NGOs.

The steamroller of endless televised news reporting has the function of preventing any reflection as to the causes of this social disaster.

According to the ruling class, through its media and its humanitarian specialists, we are impotent in the face of such events, and can do no more than give money to this or that charity, in the hope that a gift will get through to the population in need of relief.

These "Non-Governmental" organisations have shown once again that they are in reality in the service of governments. We need only look at the shambles on the spot: fifty or more NGOs are present, and each national TV channel promotes different NGOs which in turn defend the competing interests of their governments, depending on the country they come from. And so, for the bourgeoisie solidarity is transformed into chauvinism.

The working class' indignation at these dramatic events and its spontaneous solidarity with the victims, has been manipulated and derailed by the ruling class in a disgusting "humanitarian" campaign. Thanks to its NGOs, the bourgeoisie has taken over a real élan of solidarity to turn it into the dead-end of charity donations. When the bourgeois states urge us to give money to help the populations suffering from the disaster, they want us to think that we can "buy" a "clean conscience" by contributing to the "humanitarian aid" offered by the governments.

This massive ideological campaign, conducted through daily media broadcasts, aims to cloud the consciousness of the workers and prevent them from thinking about the real causes of the disaster.

By preventing the workers from understanding that capitalism alone is responsible, these campaigns aim to adulterate their class solidarity and mislead it into a dead-end.

But class solidarity cannot be limited, as the ruling class and its NGOs would like us to think, to mere charity.

On the one hand, because the financial help offered will be no more than a drop in the ocean given the extent of the catastrophe.

On the other, because the money collected will never relieve the moral distress of the men, women and children who have lost their nearest and dearest, whose bodies have had to be dumped without ceremony in common graves.

Money cannot repair the irreparable.

Nor can these gestures of financial solidarity attack the problem at its root: the cannot prevent the repetition of new disasters in other parts of the world.

This is why the class solidarity of the workers cannot be that of the priests and the NGOs.

The aim of proletarian solidarity is not to buy a "clean conscience" or to save our souls, by giving in to the feelings of guilt that the ruling class is trying to spread.

Class solidarity can only develop on the basis of a denunciation of the capitalist system's ruling class: they alone are guilty of this disaster!

The workers of the world must understand that by resisting the ruling class, and by overthrowing its system of death, they alone can raise a worthy monument to all those human lives sacrificed on the altar of capitalism in the name of profitability.

They must develop their struggles and their class solidarity against all the states and all the governments, which not only exploit them and attack their living conditions, but then have the nerve to ask them to pay up in order to repair the damage caused by capitalism.

Only by a daily struggle against the system until it is overthrown can the working class demonstrate a real solidarity towards the proletarians and the populations in the countries devastated by the tsunami.

Such solidarity will obviously not have an immediate effect. But nor will it be a mere flash in the pan, unlike the relief proposed by the ruling class and the NGOs.

In a few months, for the ruling class and its charity organisations, this disaster will be lost in the dustbin of history.

The working class cannot forget it, just as it cannot forget the massacres perpetrated by the Gulf War and all the other wars and so-called "natural" disasters.

The workers of the world can never consider this disaster "resolved". It must remain in their memory, and spur on their determination to develop their struggle and their class unity against the barbarity of capitalism.

The working class is the only force in society today which can offer a real gift to the victims of the bourgeoisie by overthrowing capitalism and building a new society, based not on profit but on the satisfaction of human need. It is the only class whose revolutionary perspective can offer a future to the human race.

This is why the solidarity of the proletariat must go much further than an emotional solidarity. It must be based, not on feelings of impotence or guilt, but above all on class consciousness.

Only the development of proletarian class solidarity, a solidarity based on the awareness of capitalism's bankruptcy, will be able to lay the foundations for a society where the crimes that the bourgeoisie presents to us as "natural" disasters can no longer be committed, where all this abominable barbarism can at last be overcome and abolished.

"Capitalism in its death throes wants to accustom us to horror, to make us consider the barbarism for which it is responsible as somehow “normal”. The workers can only react with indignation against such cynicism, and with solidarity towards the victims of these endless wars and the massacres perpetrated by all the capitalist gangs. Disgust and the rejection of everything that decomposing capitalism imposes on society, solidarity among members of a class all of whose interests are common, are essential factors in the development of a consciousness that another perspective is possible, and that a united working class has the strength to impose it" (International Review n°119).

The workers of the world can only express their solidarity to the victims of the disaster by their struggles against capitalist exploitation, poverty, and barbarism: by giving life to the slogan: "Down with all governments! Down with capitalism! Workers of the world, unite!"

DM, 8th January 2005

The commemoration of the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp is providing the bourgeoisie with a new opportunity to obscure the responsibility of the "democratic camp" in the atrocities of World War II, by bludgeoning us with horrifying images and testimonies, bearing witness to the appalling and all too real horrors of fascism.

Hitherto unpublished documents have been dug out to illustrate once again the abomination suffered by the deportees, and the unimaginable barbarity of their Nazi torturers and executioners. But it is certainly no accident that the search for truth and "authenticity" comes to a grinding halt as soon reality threatens to compromise the "democratic camp". For the Allies, who were perfectly aware of the reality of the Holocaust, did nothing to hinder the execution of the Nazis' macabre schemes. It is up to revolutionaries to bring this reality to light, as we do here through the republication of extracts from an article first published in the International Review n°89: "Allies and Nazis jointly responsible for the Holocaust".

Moreover, the barbarism of the democratic camp during World War II lived up to that of the fascist camp, in both the horror of their crimes and the cynicism with which they were committed: the bombing of Dresden and Hamburg, or the nuclear devastation visited on an already defeated Japan. This is why we declare, together with our comrades of the Gauche Communiste de France (in their leaflet of June 1945 which we publish below: "Buchenwald, Maideneck: macabre demagoguery"), that it was not the German, American, or British workers who were responsible for a war they never wanted, but the bourgeoisie and capitalism.

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From 1945 to the present day, the bourgeoisie has constantly exhibited the obscene images of the heaps of corpses found in the Nazi extermination camps, and the starving bodies of those who survived that hell. By contrast, during the war, the Allies were very discreet about the camps, to the point where they were completely absent from the wartime propaganda of the “democratic camp”.

The Allies hide the existence of the camps

This might be explained by the Allies’ ignorance, not of the camps’ existence but of their use for systematic extermination from 1942-43 onwards. After all, spy satellites did not exist in those days... This fairy story, according to which the Allies only found out what was really happening at Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka etc, will not stand up to the slightest historical study. The secret services existed already, and were very active and efficient, as we can see from certain episodes of the war where they played a determining role, and the existence of the death camps could not have escaped their attention. This is confirmed by the work of numerous historians of World War II. Thus in the French paper Le Monde of 27th September 1996 we read: “A massacre [ie that perpetrated in the camps] whose extent and systematic nature were contained in a report by the Jewish social-democratic party, the Polish Bund, was officially confirmed to American officials by the famous telegram of 8th August 1942, despatched by G. Riegner, representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva on the basis of information supplied by a German industrialist from Leipzig named Edward Scholte. We know that at this time, most of the European Jews doomed to die were still alive”. It is thus clear that the Allied governments were perfectly aware, from various sources, of the existence of the genocide under way by 1942, and yet the leaders of the “democratic camp”, Roosevelt, Churchill and their henchmen, did everything to avoid these revelations being given any hasty publicity, and even gave strict instructions to the press to maintain an extreme discretion on the subject. In fact, they lifted not a finger to save the millions condemned to die. This is confirmed in the same article of Le Monde, which writes “(...) in the mid-1980s, the American author D. Wyman, in his book The Desertion of the Jews (Calmann-Lévy) showed that several hundred thousand lives could have been saved were it not for the apathy, or even the obstruction, of certain organs of the US administration (such as the State Department), and of the Allies in general”. These extracts from the thoroughly bourgeois and democratic Le Monde only confirm what has always been said by the Communist Left. As for the loud and virtuous cries of horror - after 1945 - from all the champions of the “rights of man” at the horror of the Holocaust, the Allies’ silence during the war shows just how much they are worth.

Is this silence to be explained by the latent anti-Semitism of certain Allied leaders, as some post-war Jewish historians have maintained? Anti-Semitism is certainly not restricted to fascist regimes but this is not the real reason behind the silence of the Allies’, some of whose leaders were either Jews themselves, or close to Jewish organisations (Roosevelt for example). No, the real reason behind this remarkable discretion lies in the laws that regulate the capitalist system, whether its rule be covered by the banner of democracy or of totalitarianism. As in the enemy camp, all the Allies’ resources were mobilised for the war. No useless mouths, everybody must be occupied, either at the front or in the production of armaments. The arrival en masse of populations from the camps, of children and old people who could not be sent to the front or the factory, of sick and exhausted men and women who could not be immediately integrated into the war effort, would only have disorganised the latter. So the frontiers were closed, and such immigration prevented by every means possible. In 1943 - in other words at a time when the Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie was perfectly aware of the reality of the camps - Anthony Eden, minister of His Most Gracious and Democratic Britannic Majesty decided at Churchill’s request that “no ship of the United Nations can be affected to transfer the refugees to Europe”, while Roosevelt added that “transporting so many people would disorganise the war effort” (Churchill, Memoirs, Vol 10). These are the real and sordid reasons that led these accredited anti-fascists and democrats to remain silent about what was happening in Dachau, Buchenwald, and others of sinister memory! The humanitarian considerations that were supposed to drive the anti-fascist camp, united against fascist barbarism, had no place in their sordid capitalist interests and the demands of the war machine.

However, contrary to the laments of this bourgeois paper, the “democratic camp” was not an accomplice to Holocaust merely out of “bad faith” or bureaucratic sloth. As we will see, this complicity was wholly conscious. At first, the deportation camps were essentially labour camps, where the German bourgeoisie could benefit from a cheap labour force entirely at its mercy, directed entirely to the war effort. Although the extermination camps existed already, at the time they were more the exception than the rule. But after its first serious military reversals, especially against the terrible war machine set in motion by the USA, German imperialism could no longer properly feed its own troops and population. The Nazi regime thus decided to rid itself of the excess population in the camps, and from then on the gas-ovens spread their sinister shadow everywhere. The abomination of the executioners carefully gathering their victims’ teeth, hair, and finger-nails to feed the German war machine, was the fruit of an imperialism at bay, retreating on every front, and plumbing the depths of the irrationality of imperialist war. But although the Nazi regime and its underlings perpetrated the Holocaust without a qualm, it brought little benefit to German capital, desperately trying to gather together the wherewithal to resist the Allies’ inexorable advance. In this context, there were several attempts - in general conducted directly by the SS - to make some profit out of these hundreds of thousands, even millions of prisoners, by selling them to, or exchanging them with the Allies.

The most famous episode of this sinister bargaining was the approach made to Joel Brand, the leader of a semi-clandestine organisation of Hungarian Jews, whose story has been told in the book by A. Weissberg, cited in the pamphlet on Auschwitz, the Great Alibi. He was taken to Budapest to meet the SS officer in charge of the Jewish question, Adolf Eichmann, who instructed him to negotiate with the British and American governments for the liberation of a million Jews, in exchange for 10,000 trucks, but making it clear that he was ready to accept less, or even different goods. To demonstrate their good faith, and the seriousness of their proposal, the SS even proposed to release 100,000 Jews as soon as Brand obtained an agreement in principle, without asking anything in exchange. During his journey, Brand made the acquaintance of British prisons in the Middle East, and after many delays which, far from being accidents were deliberately put in his way by the Allied governments to avoid an official meeting, he was finally able to discuss the proposal with Lord Moyne, the British government’s representative in the Middle East. There was nothing personal in the latter’s utter refusal of Eichmann’s proposal: he was merely following the instructions of the British cabinet. Nor was it a moral refusal to bow to a revolting blackmail. There is no room left for doubt when we read Brand’s own account of the discussion: “I begged him to give me at least a written agreement, even if he failed to keep to it, which would at least save 100,000 lives. Moyne then asked what would be the total number. I replied that Eichmann had spoken of a million. “But how can you imagine such a thing Mr Brand? What would I do with a million Jews? Where would I put them? Who would take them in?”. In desperation, I said that if the earth no longer had room for us, there was nothing left for us but to let ourselves be exterminated”. As Auschwitz, or the Great Alibi so rightly says of this glorious episode of World War II, “unfortunately, while the supply was there, the demand was not! Not just the Jews, but even the SS had been taken in by the Allies’ humanitarian propaganda! The Allies did not want these million Jews! Not for 10,000 trucks, not for 5,000, not even for nothing”.

Democratic propaganda to mystify the proletariat

Some recent historiography has tried to show that this refusal was due above all to Stalin’s veto. This is just another attempt to hide the direct complicity of the “great democracies” in the Holocaust, revealed in the misadventure of the naïve Brand, whose veracity nobody seriously contests. Suffice to say in reply that during the war, neither Churchill nor Roosevelt were in the habit of being dictated to by Stalin, while on this particular point they were on the same wavelength as the “little father of the peoples”, demonstrating the same brutality and cynicism throughout the war. The thoroughly democratic Roosevelt refused other, similar attempts by the Nazis, for example when at the end of 1944 they tried to sell Jews to the “Organisation of American Jews”, demonstrating their good faith by deporting 2000 Jews to Switzerland, as is detailed by Y. Bauer in his book Jews for Sale (published by Liana Levi).

None of this is an accident, or the fault of leaders rendered “insensitive” by the terrible sacrifices demanded by the war against the ferocious fascist dictatorship - the explanations usually put forward to justify Churchill’s ruthlessness, for example, of certain inglorious episodes of the 1939-45 war. Anti-fascism never expressed a real antagonism between on the one hand a camp defending democracy and its values, and on the other a totalitarian camp. This was never anything but a “red rag” waved before the workers to justify the war by hiding its classically inter-imperialist nature as a war to divide up the world between the great imperialist sharks. The Communist International had already warned that this war was inevitable as soon as the Treaty of Versailles was signed; anti-fascism made it possible to wipe this warning from the workers’ minds, before enrolling them for the biggest slaughter in history. While it was necessary, during the war, to keep the frontiers firmly closed to all those who tried to escape the Nazi hell in order not to disorganise the war effort, once the war was over it was another matter entirely. The publicity suddenly given to the camps’ existence after 1945 was manna from heaven to the bourgeois propaganda machine. Turning the spotlight on the awful reality of the death camps allowed the Allies to hide their own innumerable crimes, and to attach the proletariat firmly to the defence of a democracy presented by all the bourgeois parties, from the right to the Stalinists, as a value common to working and ruling classes, something defended against the danger of new Holocausts. This was all the more important in the desperate situation of the “Liberation”, as the bourgeoisie confronted the possibility of proletarian resistance to their wretched rations.

In attacking the Communist Left as an ancestor of “negationism”, the bourgeoisie is following faithfully that old adage of Goebbels, that the bigger a lie the more chance it has of being believed. Workers should remember who it was that ignored the terrible fate of the deportees in the death camps, who cynically used them as a symbol of the democratic system’s superiority, and to justify the system of death and exploitation that is capitalism. Today, the bourgeoisie is making every effort to use anti-fascism to revive the democratic mystification, in response to a working class which is tending to return to the path of struggle. The proletariat should remember what happened to the workers in the 1930s, who let themselves be trapped in anti-fascism, only to be turned into cannon-fodder under the pretext of “defending democracy”.

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L'Etincelle no.6, June 1945

Buchenwald, Maidaneck: Macabre Demagoguery

The role of the SS, the Nazis, and their camp of industrialised death, was to exterminate in general all the opponents of the fascist régime, and above all the revolutionary militants who have always been in the forefront of the combat against the capitalist bourgeoisie, in whatever form: autocratic, monarchical, or "democratic", whether led by Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Leopold III, George V, Victor-Emmanuel, Churchill, Roosevelt, Daladier or De Gaulle.

When the Russian Revolution broke out in October 1917, the international bourgeoisie tried every possible and imaginable means to crush it; in 1919, they broke the German revolution with an unprecedentedly savage repression; they drowned in blood the insurrection of the Chinese proletariat. The same bourgeoisie financed fascist propaganda in Italy, then that of Hitler in Germany; the same bourgeoisie put into power in Germany the man they had appointed as the gendarme of Europe. And today, the vary same bourgeoisie is spending millions "to finance the creation of an exhibition on Hitler's crimes", with photos, and the public projection of films on "German atrocities", while the victims of these atrocities continue to die, often without any medical attention, and those who escaped are returning home without the means to live.

It is the same bourgeoisie that paid for Germany's rearmament, and then dragged the proletariat into the war with the anti-fascist ideology; that helped Hitler to power, and then used him to crush the German proletariat and then hurl it into the bloodiest war, the vilest butchery imaginable.

It is the very same bourgeoisie that today sends its representatives to kneel hypocritically, with their floral bouquets, on the tombs of the dead that they themselves caused, because it is incapable of running society, and because war is its only way of life.

We accuse the bourgeoisie!

We accuse it for the millions of deaths that it has caused and which are, alas, no more than an addition to an already too long list of the martyrs of "civilisation", of a decomposing capitalist society.

It is not the Germans who are responsible for Hitler's crimes. They were the first, in 1934, to pay for Hitler's bourgeois repression with 450,000 deaths, and who continued to suffer this merciless repression even when it was exported abroad. Neither are the French, the British, the Americans, the Russians or the Chinese responsible for the horrors of a war they did not want, but which their rulers forced on them.

Millions of men and women died slowly in the Nazi concentration camps; they were savagely tortured and now their bodies are rotting somewhere. Millions died fighting in the war, or were struck down by a "liberating" bombardment. These millions of corpses, mutilated, amputated, torn apart, disfigured, buried in the ground or rotting in the open, these millions of dead, soldiers, women, old people, children, all cry out for vengeance. And they cry for vengeance, not against the German people, who are still paying, but against this infamous, hypocritical, and unscrupulous bourgeoisie, which did not pay for the war, but on the contrary profited from it. Today, their pigs' faces stuffed with the fat of the land, they are teasing their still hungry slaves.

The only position for the proletariat, is not to respond to the demagogues' calls to continue and heighten chauvinism through anti-fascist committees, but the class struggle in direct defence of their interests, their right to life: the struggle every day, every instant, until the destruction of this monstrous régime, capitalism.

(This letter is published as a supplement to World Revolution 281, February 2005)

Following the immense earthquake and its terrible effects radiating from and around the Indian Ocean, communists can only express their solidarity and commiserations with the great numbers affected. The tales of life saving, assistance and sustenance from local populations and tourists alike in the midst of the most terrible suffering contradicts the ‘each for themselves’ of the ruling class. This solidarity, with the vast majority of workers and poor who took the brunt of the grief, stands in stark contrast to the hypocrisy, parochialism and charity of the bourgeoisie.

Some newspaper columnists are already talking about the “no-blame” disaster. Of course it was a natural disaster but one whose effects were made a thousand times worse by a decomposing system of production for profit. Local nuclear powers and other local regimes who spend fortunes on the military decided only last year that a relatively cheap and effective warning system was “too expensive” (an advance warning of typhoons from weather stations in Bangla Desh involving people going out on push bikes and blowing whistles has reduced the loss of life from flash floods by 90%).

Two of the regions hit are major war torn areas: Aceh, Indonesia and the Tamil region of Sri Lanka. Already here the majority of the populations were on the floor mentally and physically. Tens of thousands of land mines have been churned up here to add to the ongoing carnage. There have been hints that the governments involved have been restricting aid to these areas thus making full use of nature’s “dirty bomb”. Outside of the war zones, most people were making a precarious living at best in countries with little infrastructure and welfare and dominated by corrupt politicians who work with the Godfathers of the major imperialisms.

We once again see clearly that capitalism is not set up to save people in danger. In the first day and a half after the event, dozens and dozens of aircraft left the European metropoles to pick up stranded tourists. Apart from the flight crews every one of these planes were empty, while the wide ranging scale of the disaster was obvious after a couple of hours of the news breaking. Only after 4 whole days did the first help begin to trickle in.

The UN has shown it is worse than useless. Kofi Annan, the great champion of the poor, carried on with his holiday and made his first – empty – statement over 4 days later. The British government was forced to up its paltry “aid” in the face of a massive response from individuals who wanted to help. As with the Bam earthquake of a year ago the majority of this promised aid will not materialise. Five days later and no British military aircraft have even been put on standby in order to assist (6 days later and Hilary Benn, Minister of Overseas Development, has said that that military transport will be “ made ready” at “the Government’s expense”), i.e., for some two weeks later.

Imperialist rivalries have inevitably reared their heads: European diplomats criticising the US and vice versa. The US taking the lead in setting up a “coalition” of itself, India, Australia and Japan has annoyed the British bourgeoisie and led to anti-US leaks from them to the British media. This important military alliance undermines the UK’s position in the region.

In short, while expressing solidarity with the victims, communists can only denounce the bourgeoisie and their system of production for profit which has laid the basis for and exacerbated the toll of death and misery here, and will continue to do so as long as it exists.

Fraternally, E

In October 2004 delegations of the Hungarian group Barikád Kollektíva and the International Communist Current met for a discussion around the following points:

- Russian Revolution, role and character of the Bolsheviks and the left fractions of the Komintern

- Decadence of capitalism

- Current situation: imperialism and the class struggle.

 

In spite of important political divergences on almost every question, the atmosphere of the discussion was friendly and open and it was possible to explain the respective points of view at length. This was certainly due largely to the fact that both groups want to achieve the same goal, i.e. the classless society, and both are also agreed that this can be realised only through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism on an international scale.

In addition to this there are a number of common programmatic points:

- the only class that is able to carry out such a revolution today is the proletariat;

- in the process towards revolution the proletariat cannot ally itself with the bourgeoisie or any part of it;

- revolutionaries defend an internationalist position on imperialist war;

- the so-called national liberation movements and anti-fascism are bourgeois and have nothing to do with the proletarian struggle;

- the working class is an international unity that transcends national boundaries; revolutionaries have to emphasise the common and general interests of the working class;

- an expression of the unity of the working class is its tendency to centralise its struggle.

 

For reasons of time and space it is not possible here to draw a balance sheet[1] [6] of every point discussed at this meeting. Instead we will concentrate on two points which are particularly important today: firstly, the defence of the historic materialist method and hence the question of the objective and subjective conditions for the proletarian revolution; secondly, the responsibility of revolutionaries to mercilessly expose the lack of perspective and the barbarism of capitalism today.

 

On the Marxist method

One of the points on the discussion’s agenda was the question of the decadence of capitalism. The Hungarian comrades reject the ICC's view that every mode of production has gone through an ascendant and a decadent phase. The ICC defends the position that approximately 90 years ago capitalism ceased to be able to offer the conditions necessary for the further development of the productive forces and that the first world war, with its destructive fury , showed that the capitalist mode of production had entered its decadent period. This was also the view of most of the revolutionaries in that period and during the working class struggles that followed it (especially in Russia, Germany, Hungary etc), that is, in the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. The Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD), for example, stated in its programme of 1920: “The world economic crisis, born from the world war, with its monstrous social and economic effects which produce the thunderstruck impression of a field of ruins of colossal dimensions, can only signify one thing: the Twilight of the Gods of the bourgeois-capitalist world order is nigh. Today, it is not a question of the periodic economic crises which were once a part of the capitalist mode of production; it is the crisis of capitalism itself; (…) It appears more and more clearly that the ever-growing antagonism between exploiters and exploited, that the contradiction between capital and labour, the consciousness of which is becoming more widespread even among those previously apathetic layers of the proletariat, cannot be resolved. Capitalism is experiencing its definitive failure, it has plunged itself into the abyss in a war of imperialist robbery; it has created a chaos whose unbearable prolongation places the proletariat in front of the historic alternative: relapse into barbarism or construction of a socialist world.

 

(…)

In conformity with its maximalist views the KAPD equally declares itself for the rejection of all reformist and opportunist methods of struggle, which is only a way of avoiding serious and decisive struggles with the bourgeois class. The party doesn’t seek to avoid these struggles, but on the contrary actively encourages them. In a State which carries all the symptoms of the period of the decadence of capitalism, the participation in parliamentarism is also part of these reformist and opportunist methods.”

The comrades of the Barikád collective defend the position that dividing history into ascendant and decadent phases does not make any sense and is rather mechanistic. Their view is that ever since the emergence of private property, there have been those who are oppressed and who rebel against exploitation and the ruling class; the Spartacus insurrection of the slaves in ancient Rome or the peasant wars in Germany in the 16th century are proof of this. As there has always been class struggle, the revolutionary overthrow of the dominant class has been possible at any time. For Barikád, to say that the proletarian revolution was not yet possible in 1871, at the time of the Paris Commune, is to be diverted from this revolutionary task.

As the Barikád collective refers a great deal to Marx and Engels in its texts, the ICC delegation tried to establish to what extent (if at all) there is agreement on this question with the founders of dialectic materialism. Marx and Engels considered parliamentarism in the 19th century as a necessary weapon in the arsenal of the working class; they also supported various national struggles in this period as necessary for the development of the conditions for the proletarian revolution. In the decadent phase of capitalism these means and struggles are not only useless, but are also counter-revolutionary. The reply made by the Hungarian comrades to this is that Marx’ and Engels’ support for certain national struggles was a “sin”; Barikád Kollektíva does not consider the method of Marx and Engels valid.

For the ICC too the name or the person in itself is not decisive. We do not think that each sentence of Marx or of other revolutionaries should be accepted automatically as the truth. Even from a superficial point of view this is not possible because sometimes they contradict each other or they defend different ideas in different periods. There are revolutionaries who were able to contribute more to the advancement of revolutionary theory than others, but this does not mean that the errors made by the latter necessarily make them counter-revolutionary. However for us the historical and materialist method of Marx and Engels is indispensable for analysing the past and present relationship between the classes and the conditions for reversing the domination of the bourgeoisie. After the insurrection of 1848 Marx recognised, quite correctly, that he and the other comrades of the Communist League had overestimated the possibility of revolution: "With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois productive forms come in collision with each other." (Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-50, Part IV, The Abolition of Universal Suffrage in 1850)

For a successful revolution to take place, certain objective and subjective conditions must be fulfilled. The old order that is to be overthrown, must be unable to offer a real perspective any longer. It must have lost its vitality and be seen to be so empty that even the dominant class is unable to defend it convincingly any longer. At the same time there must be a class which embodies the new perspective, the future society, and which is both able and willing to make the revolution. To go from the general to the specific conditions at least four historical conditions for the success of a revolutionary movement can be identified:

A) The old social order must have become too narrow for the development of the productive forces.

B) The dominant class must have lost its legitimacy to continue its rule. It cannot continue to govern.

C) The revolutionary class must refuse to be suppressed any longer. It does not want to go on being governed.

D) Geographically the balance of forces between the dominant and the revolutionary class must shift so strongly in favour of the latter that it can be victorious on the military level as well (as the proletarian revolution is a world revolution, the balance of forces must change in favour of the proletariat at an international level).

In reality these factors cannot be completely separated from each other, they are related, but they can be distinguished from each other and they show that a revolution must fail if even one of these four conditions is not fulfilled. Marx and Engels realised that after both 1848 and 1871, the situation was such that capitalism’s mission had not yet been completed and so it was because the first of these conditions had not been met that the June 1848 insurrection and the Commune ended in defeat.

The revolutions in Germany and Hungary 1919/20 cannot be seen in isolation; they were part of the international revolutionary wave. The third factor is crucial in order to understand why they failed; the will and ability of the revolutionary class and its vanguard to lead the revolutionary process to a successful conclusion, were not sufficiently developed and so the ruling class succeeded in firmly establishing a new government (second factor).

It is the fourth factor that was decisive in the failure of the Russian revolution: the proletarian revolution cannot be realised in one country alone. It was necessary for the balance of forces to tilt internationally in favour of the proletariat. In Russia alone the capitalist mode of production could never be abolished; the affirmation that this was in fact possible was fraudulent and opened the door to the (Stalinist) counter-revolution.

The fact that Marxists examine the conditions for the revolution using this historical materialist method cannot by any means be mistaken for a mechanistic approach. The examples given above are enough to show that we consider the subjective as well as objective factors. In the long run everything depends on the proletariat, its consciousness, its will and its unity. If we speak of capitalist decadence as a necessary precondition for the proletarian revolution, it has nothing to do with fatalism; we know that the capitalist social (dis-)order will not vanish without the conscious action of the working class. "The collapse of capitalism in Marx depends on the act of will of the working class; but this will is not a free choice, but is itself determined by economic development." (Anton Pannekoek, The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism)

 

Illusions about the present situation

Barikád Kollektíva and the ICC felt that it was important to discuss the analysis of the present situation as well. Because we had little time we concentrated on the question of imperialism.

On this question too there were differences. Both groups defend an internationalist viewpoint in relation to imperialist war and so draw the conclusion that there can be no support for any side in any imperialist conflict: neither Israel or Palestine, no faction in the Iraq war, in Chechnya or elsewhere - the proletariat has nothing to gain from any of these wars. We also agreed that pacifism does not help stop wars, rather capitalism itself must be overthrown in order to put an end to them.

However, there was no agreement on how to explain the causes behind the imperialist conflicts. Whereas the ICC insists on the fact that there are material contradictions between the opponents in the various wars, particularly between the main powers, and that they want to weaken the others and strengthen their own position, the Barikád collective defends the view that these contradictions are only apparent and that wars are really directed against the working class. The comrades say that capitalism suffers from overproduction, in particular it produces a surplus of workers and it is the aim of the bourgeoisie to eliminate proletarians by means of its constant wars. It is also the workers who are the victim of the massacres in the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East. The second world war was the international bourgeoisie's answer to the struggles of the working class in Spain, France and China during the 1930ies. On the question of the massacre of the Jews in the concentration camps, they say that the allied forces as well as the Nazis were responsible. In addition to this, the crushing of the rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto reveals the complicity between the different imperialists, specifically Hitler and Stalin.

The ICC replied to this argument with a criticism along two lines: firstly that the Barikád collective underestimates the gravity of the condition in which capitalism finds itself; secondly that it overestimates the ability of the bourgeoisie to control its descent into chaos and/or to postpone it ad infinitum. It is certainly true that the bourgeoisie is able to unite against the working class and it always does so when there is a proletarian threat to the dominant social order. The division of labour between the Nazis and the Russian Army in relation to the rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto is an example; the complicity of the bourgeoisie of all countries against the proletarian struggle in November 1918 is another one; the war was ended immediately in order to leave the dominant class in Germany, Austria and Hungary with its hands free to fight against the developing power of the workers' councils. And for the ICC there is no doubt about the joint responsibility of the Allies and the Nazis in the Holocaust; even in 1945 our political predecessors of the Communist Left of France attacked the whole of the international bourgeoisie and its macabre demagoguery around the concentration camps.[2] [7]

But the fact that the bourgeoisie is able to band together against the proletariat should not blind us to the reality that the dominant class today is tied to the nation state and that the contradictions between the different nation states cannot be overcome under capitalist rule. Only the working class is a really international class which has the same interests which reach across all borders. The bourgeoisie on the other hand always acts according to the laws of competition: every man for himself. In particular, from the beginning of the 20th Century, when the world market had been divided up and there were essentially no more extra-capitalist markets to be conquered, this competition sharpened into a murderous battle in which each nation state had continuously to defend its sphere of influence against its rivals and try to increase its area of influence. It is precisely for this reason that, since then, there have been more numerous and destructive wars than ever before in the history of mankind. The barbarism of capitalist exploitation in its decadence is reflected not only in the hell of the factory and mass misery, but also through the uncontrollable conflicts between nation states and between the various bourgeois factions. It is a dangerous illusion to think that there is somehow an economic rationality behind this slaughter of the proletariat in the wars that have been waged after 1914.

The situation is extremely serious and only the conscious act of a united proletariat can put a stop to the destruction of mankind (and perhaps to all life on the planet).[3] [8] It would not only be stupid to delude ourselves, it would also be irresponsible because time is not on our side; if the barbarity of massacres, military destruction, the predatory exploitation of nature goes on, then we will reach a point of no return and the perspective of a classless society will be definitively lost simply because the soil on which such a society should grow, is destroyed - literally as well as metaphorically.

As Pannekoek said in the contribution quoted above: the removal of the old illusions is the first task of the working class!

31/01/05

 

To all the Parisian members of the group called the “Internal Fraction of the ICC”

We took note of your text published on your web site in which you support a "Declaration", dated October 2nd 2004, of a "Circulo de Comunistas Internacionalistas", which is presented in the form of a successor of the NCI of Argentina, to denounce the "ignominy" of "these bastards" (according to your own words) who direct the ICC. In this text, you denounce slanders of which you have been victims and that were used to justify your exclusion from our organisation. The "Declaration" of October 2nd, which you published in three languages, affirms that our charges related to your political behaviour are null and void with the following argument: "the charges of the ICC against the Internal Fraction (…) are not based on an independent investigation".

So that our charges can be examined by an authority independent of the ICC, we reiterate once again the proposal we made to you during your exclusion: we ask you to ensure your defence in front of a Jury of Honour by addressing a formal and public letter to the other groups of the Communist Left explicitly asking for their participation in such a Jury. As soon as you make this step, we will transmit to the members of this Jury of Honour all the elements of the file we hold concerning your intrigues at the centre of the ICC, and that it will rest on each one of you to refute in front of this authority of the proletarian political milieu.

You will find on our Internet site an article [16] (which we published in 1996), based on the experience of the workers’ movement, which recalls the duty of communist militants to convene a revolutionary tribunal each time that they estimate themselves to be victims of slanders or that their honour and their probity are called into question (as you affirm that it is your case today).

The ICC,

15/10/2004.

Our section in Spain produced the following questions and answers as a preparatory text for a day of study held in Barcelona last year on the question of ‘precarious’ or casual labour. These questions are those that workers most frequently ask in relation to this question, not only in Spain but in all the industrialised countries today.

1. Why the growth in casualisation?

Since the end of the 60's world capitalism has been going through a permanent crisis, one of whose most flagrant manifestations has been mass unemployment. There have been successive waves of lay-offs, and a total inability to integrate the new generations of workers into the productive process. To try and mask this enormous unemployment and to seek to avoid its explosive growth, which could expose the bankruptcy of capitalism, the exploiters have used the trick of filling a post using five, ten or even twenty different kinds of temporary contracts. In Spain, in October alone nearly one and a half million contracts were registered with the Employment Offices, and this despite the fact that the number of unemployed increased by more than 30,000 workers!

2. Is casualisation only a feature of some countries or certain governments?

The answer is NO, despite what the “left” parties or the “anti-globalisation” movements tell us about casualisation being the fault of right-wing governments or of “neo-liberalism”. What is true is that countries famed for their “social awareness”, such as France or Germany, have been developing the use of such contracts under preposterous names such as “insertion contracts”, “replacement contracts” etc. In Spain, the process of casualisation was begun by the “Socialist” Gonzalez government with the whole series of measures that it began to impose in 1984. The leading proponent of casualisation in Spain is the public sector. “Left-wing” regional and town councils have carried this out on a large scale.

3. Are casual workers the “new proletariat”?

From the trade unions to brainy sociologists, they try to sell us the idea that “the working class is not what it was”, since there is a division between: the “privileged” workers with “fixed” contracts, with redundancy pay and higher wages, on the one hand; and those with temporary contracts without any form of “security” on the other. The aim of all this ideology about the “new composition” of the proletariat is to sow divisions and conflicts within the proletariat's ranks, to the great rejoicing of the capitalists.

The proliferation of “temporary contracts” is a very pointed expression of the precariousness that is quintessential to wage labour. If by precariousness we mean insecurity about one’s own existence and the future, then the proletariat is the class of precariousness. Workers are totally separated from the means of life and production. If they want to eat they have to pass through the ordeals of wage labour. However, getting a job does not depend on one's will, nor the individual will of the capitalist, but the laws of the market. If this is expanding then more workers will have the “privilege” of eating in exchange for increased exploitation; but if it is contracting, as has been happening for the last 30 years, exploitation will continue growing but less workers will be able to earn a living or will have to put up with increasingly insecure work.

Unlike the exploited classes of previous modes of production such as slavery or feudalism (who despite all their poverty at least had their existence insured due to personally belonging to the master or to the feudal lord) the proletariat does not belong to any boss in particular but to the capitalist class as a whole. Workers have “freedom of work”, that is to say no individual capitalist has the commitment to guarantee their existence for life. This supposed liberty, as characterised by bourgeois propaganda, is, on the contrary, the worst kind slavery, because it is based on the most terrible insecurity and precariousness.

4. Does this mean that casualisation is not something recent, the product of “new capitalism”?

Indeed yes. Precariousness has always been part of workers’ existence. The existence of an important layer of the population needing work and therefore the means to procure its existence (what Marx and Engels called the “reserve army of labour”) is not only a consequence but a necessity, a pre-condition, of the capitalist economy itself. The present massive process of casualisation is not the expression of a “new way” found by capitalism in order to “reinvent itself”. It is the most patent manifestation of its terminal crisis.

5. Are some sectors of the working class protected from casualisation?

Absolutely not. Permanent work is on the way to becoming a museum item. In Japan and Germany the myth of a “job for life” is crumbling. In China – which for years was presented as a “proletarian revolution” and which today is sold as a “capitalist miracle” - not only is unemployment growing, but for the “fortunate” ones with jobs in the “new industries” working conditions are frightening. Not to mention the other countries of the Third World where permanent work never became a mass reality in the first place! Neither in the technologically “cutting edge” industries, or in the more traditional sectors, are workers guaranteed the means of survival.

Time and again we are told that the “casuals” are in a very different situation from those with “permanent” jobs: the latter can at least count on the safeguard of redundancy pay or unemployment pay. The truth is that such benefits are progressively being reduced, as has recently happened in Germany with the measures against the unemployed imposed by the “progressive” Social Democrats and Greens. As for redundancy payments or early retirement, they are nothing more than the deferred wages of workers exhausted by working for years in miserable conditions. It is also necessary to remember that very often these retired workers have to maintain or at least support their children and grandchildren whom capitalism condemns to unemployment, precariousness and the denial of access to a livelihood.

In the history of the proletariat we can only talk about a short period of time (from 1945 to the end of the 1970's) where it was true that there was “guaranteed work”. This has to be put into parenthesis because the economic reconstruction that followed the slaughter of the imperialist Second World War was an exception in the existence of successive generations of workers.

6. Permanent and casual workers have the same interests then?

Yes, of course. Being subcontracted, casual or “on the pay roll”; being active or retired, working in the great factories of the capitalist metropolis or in the filthy workshops in the slums of the Third World, these are the conditions that capitalist exploitation imposes on workers. This means that whether active, unemployed, retired, casual, immigrant, in the most advanced or in the most underdeveloped countries, proletarians everywhere belong to the same class.

The exploiters and their ideology try to destroy this class identity through creating all kinds of confrontations and divisions between some workers and others. To workers with temporary contracts they say that their situation is caused by the “privileged” workers with “permanent” contracts. On the other hand, temporary workers are presented to the latter as “competitors” who drive down working conditions and put pressure on their wage levels. “Temporary” contracts are more abundant amongst the youngest workers: the capitalist propaganda machine seeks to use this situation in order to create a generational division, a confrontation between young and veteran workers, through recourse to stale “sociological” considerations. Not to mention the confrontation they want to create between workers of one country and their brothers that have emigrated there!

The whole class suffers the same slavery and insecurity: wage labour. The whole of the working class is the collective producer of the immense majority of the social wealth which is appropriated by our true enemy: the capitalists. No part of the working class lives at the cost of another.

7. Do the unions “allow” casualisation because they only defend permanent workers?

This is another great lie with which they try to create new divisions between workers, whilst at the same time putting forward the idea that the unions “at least” defend one part of the working class. For decades, since capitalism became incapable of providing improvements and reforms to workers, the unions have been turned into an instrument of the bourgeois state destined to co-manage exploitation and to sabotage workers’ struggles. On the one hand, they are the accomplices of the bosses and state in the signing of the whole class to agreements that destroy our living and working conditions; on the other hand, whether their highly manipulated “strikes” and “demonstrations” are passive or “radical”, they have the same aim: the sabotage of workers' unity and fighting spirit. The two faces of union action have been shown to us yet again with the shipyard workers.

Only the real struggles of the working class can defend worker's interests. To call on the unions to help casual workers is to ask the fox to guard the hens. A “Union of Casual Workers” would integrate them into the same machine as the others, and stoke up even more opposition between them and permanent workers. The unions have underwritten the measures against permanent workers and helped to develop casualisation. When they cry crocodile tears about the “high level of temporary workers” they are demonstrating the cynicism that is typical of the class that they serve: the bourgeoisie.

8. How can we struggle against the impact of casualisation?

It would appear that the unions, politicians, and the capitalists are “worried” about casualisation. In Catalonia there are negotiations between the unions, the government and bosses in order to put forward a pact in which “stability” of work is exchanged for the unions’ offer of “labour flexibility”. Nor is this a question of “made in Catalonia”, since the same things has recently taken place at Volkswagen in Germany. In fact this policy of “stability in exchange for flexibility” is presently very fashionable in German and French capitalism.

In reality the bourgeoisie knows full well that casualisation, the replacing of expert labour with temporary workers who continually come and go from the productive process, can only end up damaging productivity. Therefore the most intelligent parts of the bourgeois understand that they can further ratchet up exploitation through imposing more working hours for less pay. In order to bring this about they offer the dishonest present of “stability of work”.

There is only one way of putting an end to unemployment and the precariousness of labour: to put an end to capitalism

9. But how do we put an end to capitalism?

What allows capitalism, a social system condemned by history and one which will not stop causing endless suffering for the whole of humanity, to continue to survive is the division, confusion and disorganisation of the working class. There will have to be a hard struggle in order to overcome these divisions, which keep the working class tied hand and foot to exploitation.

In order to struggle against divisions within the working class it is necessary to break with the ideas that the unions always impose on the struggles: the struggle is to “save the business”, “to save the sector”, “to save the national economy”. The business, the sector, the nation are the framework through which the different factions of the bourgeois carry out their life and death struggle to divide up the world. To defend these entities is to accept the sacrifices demanded by their interests and to integrate oneself into the competitive struggle between the capitalists that are causing such havoc for humanity. The first aim of the struggle must be to achieve maximum solidarity and unity of the working class faced with divisions of contract, sector, nationality, race, etc. Only then will we all have the strength we need.

In order to struggle against confusion it is necessary to unmask false friends and alternatives. The Tripartite government in Catalonia and the Zapatero government are as much enemies of the working class as the Partido Popular (the previous right-wing government in Spain). The question is not to pressure them to “fulfil their promises” or to “take up the defence of the workers” but to impose a balance of forces against these agents of the capitalist system.

In order to struggle against the disorganisation of the workers it is necessary to take the struggles into our own hands and to start breaking with the unions and unionism. We can only organise our forces through general assemblies and elected and revocable committees that are responsible before all the workers. These organs, precursors of the revolutionary workers’ councils of tomorrow, can develop the unity and strength needed to successfully struggle against exploitation.

December 2004

Introduction (October, 2004)

At the time of its 15th international congress, in April 2003, the ICC excluded from its ranks several elements who had openly behaved like informers and who, under the name of "Internal Fraction of the ICC", had gathered around the individual Jonas (himself excluded from our organization for "behaviour unworthy of a communist militant", see 'A communique to our readers [47]'). With regards to the attitude of Jonas and the members of the "FICCI", which consistied of refusing to defend oneself in front of the Congress of the ICC, our organisation, in accordance with the tradition of the workers' movement, had applied a policy of the defence of proletarian principles: it had proposed to them to call upon a Jury of Honour (which they refused) composed representatives of other organizations of the Communist Left, in order to make clearn the nature of their behaviour and the causes of their exclusion.

Today, the members of this alleged "Internal Fraction of the ICC" present themselves to the whole world as the victims of our "policy of liquidation" (and persist in demanding their reintegration into our organisation). To put an end to at all this din, the ICC made the decision to publicly require of the members of the IFICC to call upon a Jury of Honour of the proletarian political milieu, which could have all the elements enabling it to come to a conclusion about the cogency of our charges. The article that we republish below (from WR 205, June 1997) points out why the workers' movement always considered Juries of Honour as being a weapon of defence of comminst militants and organisations communist. Alongside this article, we publish the letter which we addressed to the Parisian members of the "IFICC".

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Introduction (June, 1997)

At its April 95 11th International Congress, the ICC had to take the grave decision to exclude one of its militants, the ex-comrade JJ, for his destructive behaviour incompatible with belonging to a communist organisation, notably the constitution within the ICC of a secret network of adepts of Masonic ideology. This exclusion led our organisation to publish a warning to our readers (see “Statement of the ICC” in WR no.194) in order to put the whole proletarian political milieu on guard against the actions of this element. JJ rejected the arguments given for his exclusion, notably the conscious and deliberate character of his actions, by attributing to the judgement of the ICC a “collective delirium” and an “interpretive paranoia”. Faced with this attitude the ICC, conforming to the tradition of the workers movement, applied a policy of the defence of proletarian principles by urging this ex-militant, following his exclusion, to appeal to a Jury of Honour composed of representatives of other organisations of the revolutionary milieu, so as to throw the greatest light on the nature of his behaviour and the causes of his exclusion.

The necessity for militants to defend themselves against slanders and accusations has always been part of the principles regulating the life of revolutionary organisations. The latter cannot, in fact, tolerate suspicion within their ranks. Confidence between comrades, loyalty of militants towards the organisation and their engagement to serve the interests of the working class alone, are basic organisational principles of the avant-garde of the proletariat. This political confidence between militants and of each militant towards the organisation is the precondition for the unity and solidarity between fighters for the communist cause. It is for this very reason that one of the weapons used by the bourgeoisie to destroy revolutionary organisations is the infiltration of adventurers or agents provocateurs whose function consists of destroying this confidence (notably by circulating rumours and lies against-the organisation, against its militants and against its central organs elected by the congress).

Faced with this danger which has always threatened communist organisations, the latter have had the responsibility to nominate a special commission charged with undertaking an investigation each time that they have found themselves confronted with destructive behaviour from within. This was the case in the First International which, at the Hague Congress of 1872, nominated a special commission of inquiry to examine the case of Bakunin and his Alliance.

The political function of a Jury of Honour

When a militant is the object of serious accusations, he has the duty and responsibility to show the loyalty of his engagement by making an appeal to a jury of comrades charged with leading an in depth inquiry into his trajectory and actions. Any member of a communist organisation who, faced with these accusations, refuses to defend his militant communist honour can only give credence, through this attitude of capitulation, to the suspicions which weigh on him, and thus assist the dissemination of the poison of mistrust within the organisation. In fact, one of the criteria permitting a judgement on the loyalty of a militant is rightly his determination to want to throw as much light as possible on the nature of his behaviour in front of a Jury of Honour.

But the necessity to appeal to a Jury of Honour (or Revolutionary Tribunal) is not imposed solely to safeguard militants or for the moral health of the organisation. This political process equally constitutes a weapon for the defence of the proletarian political milieu faced with disturbing elements, whether agents of the state or simple adventurers acting on their own account.

In fact, when a revolutionary organisation discovers the existence of such elements within itself, it is its responsibility to assure the protection of other organisations of the proletarian political milieu. The holding of a Jury of Honour thus aims to prevent these other organisations themselves becoming victims of the destructive behaviour of such elements.

The history of the workers’ movement, notably at the beginning of the century, is rich with examples where, faced with certain situations putting the life of revolutionary organisations or the reputations of militants at stake, revolutionary tribunals have been constituted, either on the request of the Party, or on the initiative of the militants who were victims of campaigns of slanders (as was the case with Trotsky in 1937 who was accused by the Stalinists of being an agent of Hitler).

We will cite here only two examples of a Jury of Honour among those known in the history of the workers movement: that requested by the Social Revolutionaries (SR) in 1908 concerning the case of Azev and that organised in 1912 by the SDKPiL (Polish and Lithuanian Social Democratic Party) charged with pronouncing on the “Radek affair”.

The protection of revolutionary organisations faced with infiltration by agents of the state

Concerning the case of Azev, who was an agent of the Tsarist police (Okhrana) infiltrated into the SR Party, it was a journalist and historian, a fellow traveller of the SR, Bourtzev, who unmasked Azev following an inquiry personally undertaken by him on the trajectory and actions of the latter (Bourtzev was in fact a specialist in the research of Okhrana agents infiltrated into revolutionary organisations in Russia). When these suspicions were confirmed, thanks to a confession from an old boss of the Okhrana office in Warsaw who had just resigned, Bourtzev presented himself to the Central Committee of the SR and warned the Party. The latter accused Bourtzev of wanting to discredit the Party by throwing mud at the exemplary militant Azev. Not for one second did the possibility of Azev’s guilt cross the mind of the Central Committee who considered Bourtzev’s revelations as a manoeuvre aimed at destabilising the Party.

In his book ‘What every revolutionary should know about repression [80]’, Victor Serge recalled the attitude that revolutionary organisations must adopt when faced with suspicions which could arise about their militants: “It is necessary - and it is moreover the preliminary condition for a victorious struggle against a real provocation for any slanderous accusation made against a militant - that a man is not accused lightly, and that an accusation formulated against a revolutionary is never pigeonholed. Each time that the least suspicion is aroused, a jury of comrades must pronounce and rule on the accusation or on the slander. Simple rules to observe with an inflexible rigour if one wants to preserve the moral health of revolutionary organisations.” Thus, the Central Committee of the SR took the decision to convoke a Jury of Honour composed not only of SRs but equally of militants known to belong to other political organisations (including the anarchist Kropotkin). This Revolutionary Tribunal had the principal objective of clearing Azev of all suspicion and denouncing Bourtzev who had just published an article in his paper Byloe (“The Past”) in which he made public the accusations against Azev. With the appearance of this article, Azev, apprehensive about the verdict of the Jury of Honour, asked General Guerassimov of Saint-Petersburg to release him from his functions in the service of the Okhrana. But this resignation of Azev wasn’t sufficient to shake off the suspicions surrounding him. So in order to maintain the confidence of the SR and continue to dupe it, he decided to foment an attack against the Tsar. This manoeuvre allowed Bourtzev, along with the old Director General of the police, Lupukin, dismissed for his lack of grip in the repression of workers’ demonstrations in 1905, to denounce Azev as a double agent. Following a confidential conversation with Lupukin in September 1908, which confirmed that Azev really was an Okhrana agent, Bourtzev convinced the revolutionary tribunal of Azev’s unquestionable guilt and thus refuted the indictment borne against himself by the SR (Lupukin, although having refused to bear witness in front of a Revolutionary Tribunal, nevertheless agreed to sign a letter compromising Azev which was subsequently published by the SRs).

This responsible attitude of the SRs, consisting of convoking a Jury of Honour faced with the accusations against Azev, unfortunately wasn’t shared by Lenin in 1914 when faced with the case of Malinovski. When Malinovski was suspected of working for the Okhrana, the Bolsheviks proposed treating his case in front of a Revolutionary Tribunal. Lenin rejected this on the basis of a totally subjective belief that Malinovski was a militant entirely devoted to the cause of the proletariat. It was only after the revolution of October 1917 that it was proved, thanks to the opening of the Okhrana’s archives, that Malinovski really was an agent of the Tsarist police infiltrated into the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and whose mission consisted of establishing links of affinity with Lenin in order to gain his confidence.

Thus, even Lenin, who had the greatest rigour on organisational questions, let himself be fooled by the apparent “sincerity” of the worker Malinovski.

The attitude of revolutionaries faced with anti-organisational behaviour

It was quite another situation concerning the Jury of Honour charged with treating the Radek affair. This jury did not have the mission of clearing a militant suspected of being a state agent, but of penalising the political behaviour of Radek within the Party. In December 1911, the SDKPiL nominated a commission responsible for examining the case of Radek, who was accused of several thefts: of the clothes of a comrade, of books belonging to the Party library, and of money. This commission led to nothing (although Radek ended up admitting having stolen the books and clothes) and was dissolved July 30, 1912. In August 1912, a Revolutionary Tribunal of the Party was set up and expelled Radek not only because of the thefts he was accused of but above all because of his trouble-making, in particular exploiting on his own account the dissensions within Social Democracy.

Within the SDKPiL, Jogiches and Rosa Luxemburg were the most determined to exclude Radek. The leadership of the German Party (SPD) of which Radek was also a member, was immediately informed of this exclusion and Rosa Luxemburg, despite her disagreements with Jogiches on how to treat this affair, obtained the authorisation to send to the SPD a resume of the dossier on the accusations against Radek. At the Jena Congress of 1913, the SPD in its turn had to pronounce on the exclusion of Radek. The severity of this sanction revealed the intransigence that revolutionary organisations of the past could have faced with questions of political behaviour. Thus, in April 1912, Rosa Luxemburg, several months before the meeting of the Party Tribunal, advised her friend in the SPD, Zetkin, not to trust Radek in the following terms: “Radek is a type of whore. Anything can happen when he’s around; it’s much better to keep him out of the way”.

Whatever the political positions of Radek (which, in 1912, were very close to those of Rosa Luxemburg on the question of imperialism) and the service he sincerely gave to the cause of the proletariat, notably within the Bolshevik Party during the revolutionary period, his anti-organisational behaviour within Social Democracy, his actions worthy of a petty crook, incompatible with those of a communist militant, merited being judged and penalised through a Party trial.

These two examples show the different circumstances in which a Revolutionary Tribunal can and must be convoked. It is not only the honour and loyalty of militants upon which a Jury of Honour must pronounce, but equally the defence of the organisation against the infiltration of state agents or against destructive behaviour which could induce distrust and undermine organisational tissue.

This type of political process can either be constituted within one organisation, or be composed of members of several organisations, particularly when the fear of a bias exists or when the destructive behaviour of a militant could mean a threat to other revolutionary organisations.

Thus, it is in reappropriating this experience of the workers’ movement that the ICC, confronted with the case of JJ, has urgently invited this ex-militant, inasmuch as he contested the motives of his exclusion with the argument that this decision revealed “the serious drift of the ICC”, to appeal to a Jury of Honour composed of several revolutionary organisations. In the second part of this article, we will see how JJ reacted to our proposal of a Jury of Honour, and we will then look at the response of the groups of the Communist Left.

The ICC (December 21, 1996).

At its 11th Congress in April 1995, the ICC took the grave decision to exclude one of its militants, the ex-comrade JJ, for destructive behaviour incompatible with member­ship of a communist organisation, notably his attempts to create within the ICC a secret network of adepts of the ideology of freemasonry (see WR 194). JJ rejected the arguments given for his exclusion, claiming that this decision was the result of a “serious deviation” by the ICC, the result of a “col­lective paranoiac delirium”. Faced with this “alternative analysis”, the ICC, in conform­ity with the traditions of the workers’ move-meat, has for two years continually at­tempted to push this ex-militant to defend himself by calling for a Court of Honour composed of representatives of other revo­lutionary organisations in order to allow the proletarian milieu to pronounce on the validity of this exclusion and to shed as much light as possible on JJ’s actions.

In the first part [16] of this article, published in WR 201, we provided various historical examples to show that calling a Court of Honour is part of the tradition of the workers’ move­ment. We pointed out that any militant, when he considers that he has been unjustly accused of faults that he has not committed, has the duty and responsibility to defend his honour as a communist militant, by appealing to a revo­lutionary tribunal.

Any militant who refuses to engage in such a public political confrontation can only con­firm the validity of the accusations raised against him.

From JJ’s suspension to his exclusion from the ICC

When JJ’s secret propaganda for Masonic ideology (in particular among comrades who had recently been integrated into the ICC) was first discovered, in autumn 1994, the organi­sation did not immediately take the decision to exclude JJ from its ranks, but suspended him from all militant activity . This suspension was accompanied by a demand that he must pronounce in writing on an ICC resolution which affirmed that the esoteric ideologies he had disseminated in the organisation were totally alien to Marxism. For four months JJ remained silent, refusing to make a political critique of his actions, refusing to take a written position on the class nature of the ideology and methods of freemasonry, with the one and only argument: “I have a block about writing”.

At the same time, while recognising a certain number of the overwhelming facts revealing his destructive policies towards the organisa­tion, he rejected the accusations of the ICC with the sole argument that he had acted in a completely “unconscious” manner. His deni­als were accompanied by attacks on the ICC, which he accused of making him into a scape­goat. It was not his own activities, notably those in favour of Masonic ideology, which represented the serious deviation from Marxism, but the extremely firm reaction of the ICC in defence of the class principles of the prole­tariat which had to be denounced and attacked as a “collective paranoiac delirium” and as a neo-Stalinist deviation.

Faced with JJ’s disagreements with our analysis of his anti-organizational behaviour, the ICC kept on exhorting him to defend himself within the organisation, notably by opposing our “interpretive paranoia” with his own interpretation of the charges against him. In particular, in conformity with the statutes of the ICC, he was called upon to appeal to the 11th Congress of the ICC if he considered that his suspension was unjustified. Unfortunately, JJ refused to present himself at our Congress to refute the political arguments which had motivated this sanction. He preferred to send the ICC a letter of resignation which called on the Congress not to pronounce his exclusion because such a decision “would be very grave for the ICC”.

On 17 April 1995, just after his exclusion, unanimously voted by the Congress (follow­ing a long debate in which all the sections of the ICC took up very detailed positions), the ICC continued to demand that JJ, given his disa­greement with the decision of the Congress, should assume his own defence by calling for a Court of Honour composed of groups of the proletarian political milieu in order to remove any suspicion of partiality. JJ categorically refused to do this, putting forward the follow­ing two arguments:

1. “In any case, the ICC has a thick dossier on my account” (interview between JJ and the ICC, June 95);

2. “I have no illusions in the proletarian political milieu. The milieu will say the same about me as the ICC” (interview between JJ and the ICC, 17 April 95). Why such cer­tainty? JJ knew quite well that any proletarian organisation worth its name would not tolerate in its ranks an element who had made secret propaganda for Masonic ideology, and that it would be impossible to convince the revolu­tionary milieu of the unconscious nature of such activities.

But JJ was not content to just play dead and refuse to assume his defence. Through his very noisy and active silence, he carried on with a policy aimed at the destruction of the organisation. Since his suspension, this indi­vidual had been putting considerable pressure on his closest friends within the ICC. By constantly presenting himself as the victim of a degenerating organisation, he was using the emotional ties with those close to him to get them to take up his cause against the ICC, to assume his defence in place of him. Thus, while refusing to come to the 11th Congress of the ICC, JJ was pressurising his two closest friends by explicitly calling on them to “de­fend their divergences” and to not “submit” to the ICC’s analysis of his case. Apart from the evident political cowardice of such behaviour, it is clear that this was a very skilful example of manipulation and emotional blackmail aimed at pushing militants to adopt JJ’s thesis: the ICC, having fallen prey to a “collective para­noiac delirium” had entered into a phase of degeneration that had to be fought. His exclu­sion was a sort of “purge” comparable to the Moscow Trials.

Such an attitude of ‘sentimental solidarity’ was to lead certain JJ loyalists not to constitute a minority or oppositional tendency on clear political bases, but to attack the ICC from the inside then to desert its ranks in order not to betray friendships[1] [92]. And JJ was perfectly well aware of this!

After seven months of pressure, the ICC pushes JJ to request a Court of Honour

It was not until over seven months after his exclusion that, under permanent pressure from the ICC, JJ finally yielded by writing to the IBRP[2] [93], as we had vigorously advised him to do, a letter asking them to participate in a Court of Honour: “I am writing this letter to you in order to ask for the holding of a Court of Honour, in conformity with the traditions of the proletarian political milieu, precisely in order to defend my political honour in the face of the suspicions and harassment of the ICC towards me” (letter from JJ to the IBRP, 21.11.95).

The very manner in which JJ describes the reasons which motivated his call for a Court of Honour reveals all the duplicity of this person, who by a skilful use of rhetoric was trying to sow trouble in the direction of the IBRP, saying not one word about those long months of “harassment” in which he had resisted the ICC’s proposal that he call for a Court of Honour.

Contrary to his claims, it was certainly not in order to remain faithful to the tradition of the proletarian political milieu that JJ finally yielded to this persecution by the ICC. The only thing that forced him to write this letter to the IBRP was the fact that, by refusing to call for a Court of Honour to defend himself against the accusations of the ICC - which he continued to reject energetically - certain of those close to him began to doubt his loyalty and to distance themselves from him (notably his own partner, who is still a member of the ICC). In effect, it was obvious to all the members of the ICC that such behaviour was unacceptable and incomprehensible on the part of a communist militant. JJ thus had no choice: if he was to maintain his hold over certain comrades and convince them of his sincerity, he had to risk playing his cards. This very late request for a Court of Honour was the only way JJ could regain any credit and influence among those militants who, unable to throw off the weight of the circle spirit, continued to put personal friendship links above the defence of political principles. JJ’s request to the IBRP for a Court of Honour was nothing but a new manoeuvre aimed at creat­ing trouble and at carrying on, outside the ICC, his policy of destruction, by regrouping around himself a maximum of elements trapped by his sentimental manipulations.

JJ’s manoeuvres to avoid a Court of Honour

After writing this tardy letter to the IBRP, JJ did all he could to prevent the Court of Honour being held. Thus, in April 96, the IBRP sent a letter to JJ asking him, in particular, if he still wanted a Court of Honour to be held. To the extent that this organisation did not want to constitute this body on its own, it also sug­gested to JJ that he appeal to the Bordigist group Programma Comunista. 0n 23 May 96, an ICC delegation met JJ to find out if he had replied to the questions posed by the IBRP. JJ’s reply: “I have a block about writing”. It was clear that JJ was in no hurry to defend his “political honour in the face of the suspicions and harassment of the ICC”; that he was above all trying to gain time. During a meeting between the ICC and the IBRP on 26 May 96, we learned that the latter had given JJ a deadline: if he did not reply to them by the end of May 96, the IBRP would consider that he no longer maintained his request for a Court of Honour, and would consider the matter to be closed. It is obvious that if JJ had not replied to the IBRP’s letter, and if he had rejected their proposal to appeal to Programma Comunista, it would have shown clearly that his request for a Court of Honour was just a bluff. JJ therefore had no choice but to “unblock” himself. He finally sent his reply to the IBRP, after the deadline had passed (perhaps hoping that the IBRP had already closed the case), renewing his request for a Court of Honour, accompanied by a letter to Programma Comunista asking them to participate.

Following Programma’s negative response, which we heard about several months later through the IBRP[3] [94], the ICC again exhorted JJ to show more determination in his approach to the groups of the communist left. Thus, on 10 December 96, the ICC sent a letter to JJ which said: “We would like to know whether, faced with this situation, you are definitively renouncing your request for a Court of Honour or whether you intend to approach another group of the proletarian political milieu in order to compensate for the defection of Programma”.

JJ’s response to this letter was to indulge in a real conjuring trick. He totally avoided responding to our question, restricting himself to expressing his “surprise” at “learning” that the IBRP was no longer intending to meet with his request (this new contortion, a particularly dishonest one, shows the level of the duplicity of this element who had known for more than six months the conditions posed by the IBRP - not to be the only group to have to sit in on his case!)[4] [95]. In the same letter to the ICC, JJ announced his intention to write to the IBRP to ask its position about participating alone on a Court of Honour given Programma’s refusal.

Unfortunately, and contrary to what he had announced to the ICC, JJ never sent this letter to the IBRP. In order to push JJ to put into practice his “will” to call for a Court of Honour, the ICC sent him a second letter on 15 January 97, reiterating the same question and pointing out his flagrant lack of determi­nation.

JJ finally decided to respond to our question (after a month and a half of avoiding it) in a letter dated 24 January: “I confirm by this letter my will to maintain my request for a Court of Honour. Programma Comunista’s refusal to participate in such a Court of Honour unfortunately expresses the present situation of weakness of the political milieu. As political organisations, the Bordigist groups will make the same response as Programma. Among the remaining groups, such as for example the FOR or the EFICC, I don’t think that the ICC would be ready to accept their participation on the Court of Honour. In the meantime, I therefore intend to ask the IBRP whether it would be prepared to participate in a Court of Honour with independent personali­ties of the proletarian milieu.” (JJ’s letter to the ICC, 24.1.97).

This letter calls for a number of comments:

1) It first of all reveals that JJ’s “will” to call for a Court of Honour is nothing but a pious wish because, from the start, even before making the slightest approach to other groups of the communist left, he considers it impos­sible for such a body to be set up within the proletarian political milieu (owing to the lat­ter’s “weaknesses”, as revealed by Programma’s refusal);

2) JJ affirms that he intends to propose to the IBRP a Court of Honour made of “independ­ent personalities of the proletarian milieu”. Unfortunately, once again, JJ’s “intentions” were not followed up by any action: he never wrote to the IBRP to make this proposal;

3) Concerning the FOR and the EFICC, JJ says that “I don’t think that the ICC would be ready to accept their participation on the Court of honour”. Now, on 7.3.97, two months after receiving a letter from the IBRP announcing that it did not intend to follow up JJ’s request (since the latter had taken no initiative to make up for Programma’s defection), he made a proposal that he himself had considered would not be acceptable to us... the EFICC and the FOR (as well as other elements hostile to our organisation, such as Henri Simon)! Thus it is clear that JJ has done everything possible to sabotage any chance of a Court of Honour being held within the proletarian political milieu. Concerning his last proposal, it is with the IBRP (and not with his “accusers”) that he has to negotiate the participation of groups and “personalities” hostile to the ICC. Finally, it is worth pointing out that in his letter of 24.1.97, JJ himself recognised that he had lacked determination in his approach to the Court of Honour: “I would have preferred to have had the energy to act with more determination. This was not the case. And this is still not the case”. At least things are clear.

One other fact, among many others, show­ing that JJ has no interest in shedding light on his activities in front of a Court of Honour, even though he says the opposite. In the same letter he writes: “...in the concern to assume my defence as well as possible... I reiterate to you my request that you communicate to me the dossier of accusation you have compiled”.

The ICC, in a letter dated 8.2.97, proposed that he should consult this dossier in the presence of a delegation of our organisation. There was no reply to this letter. The ICC sent two more letters to JJ (the last dated 19 March) asking him whether he agreed with this pro­posal. On this point our organisation has met with total silence (perhaps he is still “blocked”?). By all the evidence, JJ doesn’t even want to prepare his defence in front of a Court of Honour because he hopes that such a body will never be set up, as demonstrated by all his evasions over the past two years.

For our part, we are still just as determined (as good Stalinists!) to make things clear by patiently insisting that JJ “unblocks” himself and decides to appeal to other groups of the communist left. We consider that only an open political confrontation in front of a body setup by the proletarian political milieu can cut short the rumours (put about, among others, by the “supporters” of JJ) which fuel the campaigns of the bourgeois state that identify communist organisations with Stalinism.

Just as Marx and his comrades made public the intrigues of Bakunin and his “Alliance” against the General Council of the First Inter­national, so the ICC remains determined to bring out into the light of day, in front of a Court of Honour, all the manipulations of the individual JJ[5] [96].

In his last letter to the ICC, dated 7.3.97, JJ said that he had not written to any other group of the political milieu asking them to take part in a Court of Honour because, being once again “blocked”, “I have not managed to keep to the deadlines that you (the ICC) want to impose on me”.

For more than two years now the ICC has been trying to push JJ to prove in practise his “will” to call for a Court of Honour in order to defend in front of the working class his “thesis” that his exclusion from the ICC is the result of a “paranoiac delirium”, symptomatic of an internal degeneration of our organisation. JJ’s repeated “blocks” about writing to the groups of the proletarian political milieu, his multiple contortions and his double language (which is not at all “unconscious”) that he uses to hypo­critically affirm his “will” to call for a Court of Honour while at the same time manoeuvring very intelligently to ensure that it will not take place, only reinforce our conviction. Not only does this element have no place in any revolu­tionary organisation, but he also constitutes a danger for the proletarian political milieu, as shown by this statement in his last letter to the ICC (7.3.97): “I have not abdicated my politi­cal will”.

We are profoundly convinced of this and would not be at all surprised to see the revolu­tionary milieu one day confronted with a new anti-ICC “theoretical” publication produced by JJ’s “allies” and inspired by him.

The ICC, May 1997.

 

 

 

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Visitors to our internet site will be aware that in the recent period the ICC has had to confront a slanderous and shameful campaign mounted by the so-called Internal Fraction of the ICC (IFICC) and the Argentine Círculo de Comunistas Internacionalistas. In fighting these attacks the ICC has drawn on the unique source of clarity and strength for any revolutionary organisation; it has placed itself squarely on the ground of the principles, history and traditions of the workers’ movement.

We can only deplore the fact that the IBRP, which is also a part of the Communist Left, has not done so but has chosen to throw in its lot with the ICC’s detractors and has embraced their sordid and cynical methods. This is a serious betrayal of all that it means to be a part of the proletarian political milieu. Moreover this is in a situation in which the other historic groups of the Communist Left stand by, indifferent to the threat from elements whose sole aim is the destruction of proletarian organisations and, with them, the hope of a classless society.

But although the other historic groups of the proletarian political milieu reveal their inability to defend the revolutionary organisation, there are nevertheless elements who are in contact with the ICC and with the Communist Left generally, who see the importance of this battle and want to take up arms themselves to defend the principles and the future of the revolutionary proletariat. They have written to the ICC to express their solidarity and support and/or they have sent us copies of the letters that they have written to the IBRP to protest at its anti-proletarian behaviour and to try and call it back from the brink.

These letters are grappling with questions that are vital for the unity of the working class and its politicised elements, for this reason we are publishing extracts from them to encourage reflection on the part of other visitors to our internet site. We make little comment on the content because the letters essentially speak for themselves.

The need to defend the proletarian political milieu

The starting point of these letters is a reflection on events that comes out of the experience of the writers, as elements in search of a framework that enables them to understand the world in which we are forced to live and to engage in a process to change it. They have found the reference point that they need in the Communist Left and they feel very keenly that the campaign mounted by the IFICC and the Argentine Circulo against the ICC is also aimed against them and against the whole working class. They are shocked and indignant at these attacks.

“Within the limits of our possibilities, we will not tolerate accusations of Stalinism against the ICC or against any proletarian group that has fought for decades against the most bloody counter-revolution in the history of Humanity.

We do not accept that such a slander is made gratuitously with no apparent proof, and even less when it comes from a shadowy group with a very dubious trajectory such as the IFICC.” (letter signed “a group of workers in the Basque country”).

Many of them want to bring their own experience to bear in defending the ICC from the false accusations made against it and defend our method in debate, as well as in dealing with organisational questions.

“The public meetings which we have visited, discussions sometimes held with you, concerning so many important questions of the international workers movement, have always been held in an atmosphere of openness and mutual respect. In particular, political divergences have always been discussed with a self-critical attitude of solidarity. New participants, who have hesitated to speak up, or those who have put forward controversial positions concerning given questions, have always been encouraged to fully participate in the discussions.

All of this reveals the accusations being raised against you at the website of the IBRP (International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party) through the Argentine … “Circle of International Communists, that you work and act in a “Stalinist” manner, to be pure denigration with the aim of discrediting a revolutionary organisation working in many countries of the world.

We have esteem for your open manner and welcome your steps to throw light in public on the orchestration of a campaign directed against you, and in the last instance against us too.” (statement adopted by participants at an ICC public meeting in Germany on the initiative of a sympathiser).

“I believe (the ICC) to be an honest organisation, that has made an inestimable contribution to clarification within the proletarian political milieu, of which it considers itself – and can be considered - to be a part.

It is a group that has always stimulated debate in a fraternal way, it has been respectful when disagreements have arisen and, a thing unknown previously, it has supplied publications of other organisations of the proletarian political milieu for reading.” (letter from AN, Spain).

“The ICC have attempted to classify a whole set of political behaviours under the definition of ‘political parasitism’. As one who has demonstrated many of these aberrant behaviours, I can testify that the ICC’s 'Theses on Parasitism' have been an irreplaceable political tool in understanding the roots and consequences of that behaviour. I can also testify that despite attacking the ICC (although to a far lesser extent than other parasites!) it has never shown the slightest hint of ‘Stalinism’ towards me. Instead, while not abdicating its right to defend itself, it did its level best to help me identify what I was doing and work towards overcoming it even if there is still a long way to go. This is not the behaviour of an organisation that ‘cannot tolerate disagreement’ or that is ‘paranoid’ or ‘delusional’.” (JB, Britain)

“The CCI has never withdrawn or censured the texts that have come into my hands. It must also be noted that, however painful it may have been, this organisation has had the courage to publicly bring to light the crisis. This means that it can be aired openly in discussion, so avoiding any temptation to resolve it behind closed doors with tricky machinations, a method that is alien to the proletariat.” (RQ, Spain)

“ When they have had internal problems they have brought them out into the open, brought them to the knowledge of all. It seems to us that this attitude does them honour as an authentic communist organisation. And if today there have been serious steps forward politically and theoretically, we owe it to these revolutionary militants who have resisted against all odds the attempts to denature the communist program from within as well as from the outside.

They have also tried to carry the debate into the international arena when there have been extremely serious conflicts, like the wars that assail the planet. But we all know (or at least those of us who have followed the situation) what has been the response of the other groups in the face of such criminal events. The ICC called for united action against imperialist war, the reply has always been one of complete scorn on the part of those who also call themselves internationalists and are certain that they are the only party.” (Basque workers)

Two of the letters draw attention to the fact that the insidious manoeuvres of the Argentine “Círculo de Comunistas Internacionalista” and the IFICC have taken the NCI into its line of fire in a specific way. Behind their concern for the comrades of the NCI lies the realisation that this is a group - albeit on another continent - that is making the same painstaking effort at clarification as they, their preoccupation is a living expression of the international, unified character of the proletariat and its struggle.

"The ICC has been attacked and not only the ICC. All of us who claim the Communist Left as a political reference point have been attacked with manoeuvres that are by no means new but which are the criminal methods that the bourgeoisie uses to destroy new militants or proletarian groups. And we are sure of this because there is evidence that the IFICC has used the same means that it used to try and destroy the ICC from the inside; manoeuvres, intrigue etc., to attempt to destroy the comrades in Argentina. That is, they have tried to generate all kinds of doubts and suspicions to create discord between these comrades and the ICC." (Basque workers)

“I express my solidarity with the comrades of the NCI in Argentina who, in spite of what has happened, have taken a position on the crisis by means of several written statements, that are completely valid, the 27/10/04 declaration and one of 7/11/04.” (RQ, Spain)

Principled action at the heart of the defence of the proletarian political milieu

“The life within communist organisations has to reflect what the future communist society will be like” (letter of AN, Spain).

The sympathisers are grappling with an issue that is of immense importance for the whole proletariat; principled action and correctness are a condition for ensuring the trust, solidarity and proletarian dignity of the working class. That is, these aspects are part of the nature of a class that has every interest in destroying the divisions imposed on it and no reason whatever to do down class brothers in order to advance personal or sectoral interests. On the contrary, it can achieve its final goal only by realising its international class unity. Moreover its political organisations can do no other than express the nature of the class that generates them.

In his letter, JB (Britain) takes up this issue within the context of the difficulties in forging a revolutionary organisation:

“The construction of the communist organisation is a project fraught with difficulty and contradiction - it can only exist as an alien body within bourgeois society and is consequently under permanent attack at every level of its existence.

To combat this continual onslaught from the ‘antibodies’ of the bourgeois order, revolutionaries must adopt the most rigorous collective understanding of how a communist organisation should function. This is why all organisations adopt rules of functioning and a precise organisational methodology to deal with the inevitable debates and disagreements that arise within organisations.

Without these structures and principles, revolutionary organisations do not exist. There is no shame in revolutionaries disagreeing with each other. Nor is there shame for militants, even groups of militants, to leave an organisation where they no longer accept its platform or positions:

But there is great shame in:

• Hijacking the internal apparatus of an organisation to further personal goals;
• Spreading lies and defamation about individual comrades in secret in an effort to destroy them;
• Refusing to follow the most basic elements of communist solidarity required of militants (i.e paying dues);
• Stealing both funds and materials from the organisation to advance the interests of a particular clique and not the organisation or workers movement as a whole;
• Making a constant stream of the vilest defamations against another organisation the centrepiece of your political existence;
• Stealing contact addresses and using them in the most irresponsible manner - comrades who give their personal details to a revolutionary organisation are placing a great deal of trust and solidarity in that organisation and the behaviour of the IFICC in this regard is a heinous betrayal of that trust;
• Making public the dates of internal meetings of a proletarian organisation, thus putting that organisation at risk of intervention by bourgeois security forces;
• Making an effort to turn the national sections of an organisation against each other through flattery and lies;
• Putting the personal safety of militants at risk by attempting to identify their individual contributions to the revolutionary press.”

The responsibility of the historic groups of the Communist Left

Just as the contacts are aware that the framework and principles of the workers' movement are the key to their own search for clarity and coherence, they are also aware of the responsibility that resides in those organisations who come from the Communist Left tradition. That is, the historic weight of those groups whose role is to safeguard and disseminate the historic programme and principles secreted by the working class. Their letters to the IBRP are highly critical of the latter's attitude in relation to the attack of the Circulo and the IFICC against the ICC.

"Over the last few months, a slander campaign has been mounted against the ICC by the IFICC and the Circulo. Unfortunately the attitude of the IBRP towards the ICC in this affair is absolutely scandalous. This attitude is incompatible with everything that the proletarian class represents.

To start with, the IBRP has put the 'declaration of the Circulo' on its Internet site without consulting the ICC.

In addition, the IBRP has deliberately lied about the theft of the address list of the ICC subscribers and it used these addresses for its own interests. How come the invitations of the IBRP were sent to ICC subscribers, who had given their addresses only to the ICC?

On the first point: we wonder how an organisation (the IBRP) whose basis is the tradition of the communist left and proletarian principles, who has known the ICC for years and considers the ICC to be a proletarian organisation, can immediately take the side of the Circulo without even contacting the ICC. From the point of view of communist principles, the IBRP should first have contacted the ICC to ask their point of view on the accusations (…).

On the second point, how can a communist organisation, which is based on principles such as confidence, honesty, solidarity, defend this theft and hide the truth from its own militants?

While the IBRP tries to shut up the ICC by saying that 'while so much is going on in the world, the ICC has nothing better to do than write 'position statements' on its disputes', it is fully engaged regrouping with the parasites. This is pure opportunism.

What the IBRP has done in relation to the two points mentioned above and in relation to the other slanders against the ICC, is solely in the interests of the bourgeoisie and against the interests of the international proletariat." (two sympathisers in Amsterdam)

“We condemn in the sharpest possible terms that you have put your website at the disposal of such campaigns of filth, and that you have, without any commentary, examination or verification, allowed that the ICC be insulted by the Argentine circle “Circulo de Comunistas Internationalistas”) as a Stalinist organisation employing nauseating methods.

We consider it to be politically perfectly right and highly responsible that the ICC excludes members from the organisation and from meetings, who are guilty of stealing subscription address lists, and who, with the most revolting bourgeois methods, without any proofs, have accused a leading member of the organisation of being a 'cop'.” (Participants at an ICC meeting in Germany)

A comrade from France reminds the IBRP that unity within the proletarian camp and fraternal debate is indispensable for revolutionaries:

“Scattered and weak as they are, the few revolutionary organisations who exist today must polemicise, discuss systematically historic questions, as well as current affairs, of course. And, it seems to me that the contributions (regular, argumented, lucid) of the ICC over the last 30 years are far from the 'methodological and political void' that you denounce. Of course, the debate for clarity must be lively, uncompromising but it must, I think, remain fraternal between organisations of the Communist Left. Because if, as you say, there is so much 'work to be done to try and understand what is happening in the world', there is also so much to be done in order to ACT together (and what strength that would bring), to distribute TOGETHER, organise COMMON meetings on essential questions, on what unites us: internationalism, the struggle against war. … Because 'the experience of the past shows that a fraternal bond must exist between the workers of different countries that encourages them to hold fast, shoulder to shoulder, (….) and that if this bond is scorned, the punishment will be the general failure of these dispersed attempts.' (Marx, Inaugural Address, p.467 Pléïade)”

A letter addressed to the IBRP by “two young sympathisers of the communist left” also takes up the need for fraternal relations between proletarian organisations. Moreover it points out that the IBRP's support for the Argentine Circulo and the IFICC against the ICC tarnishes its image as a communist organisation in the eyes of those who, like themselves, look to the tradition of the Communist Left for guidance:

“… we are open to all the revolutionary communist organisations and are very much in favour of discussion between these groups, discussion which is very important for our political clarification. This is a necessary and indispensable path for the development of consciousness and the unification of the proletarian camp on the basis of solid agreement. (…)

… we note that on your internet site, supported by the IFICC, you have published a text of the Círculo de Comunistas Internacionalistas of Argentina, which accuses the ICC of systematically refusing any discussion with groups who have opinions different from their own. We can assume that you agree with this accusation as you publish it. Such an accusation, made without appropriate argumentation and without any valid explanation, seems rather unreal to us in view of the ICC's efforts to further discussion and furnish clarification (…).

Your accusation is all the more false given that, to our knowledge, the ICC has often made reference to the proletarian political milieu (…) and has mentioned you as one of its component parts, asking you many times to intervene together with it against imperialist wars. Moreover, on your attitude, in particular at the public meeting in Berlin on 15/05/04 on the causes of imperialist war, (…) in the conclusion to the discussion, the spokesperson for the IBRP defended the position that the discussion showed that debate between the IBRP and the ICC is 'useless'. (…)

So we find that your attitude deviates appreciably from the image that we have of a revolutionary communist organisation, which must perforce disappoint us and we want to point this out to you in this letter.

Moreover, isn't solidarity between communist organisations the engine of the combat which unites us? Hoping that our criticisms will not be taken as animated by ill intentions towards the IBRP but on the contrary will help to encourage a better analysis of an important problem which certainly has not been the object of a profound reflection".

The group of workers from the Basque country also criticises the IBRP's refusal of the debate:

“There is a sentence that they have written which shows up all the weakness of the BIPR, "We are fed up with discussing with the ICC”.

In the first place our predecessors were never tired of discussing, on the contrary, it was a duty to search for the greatest possible clarity. That taste for theory has been lost and we must rediscover it. But the IBRP does not want open debate between everyone, it only wants adhesion to its positions without any discussion or questioning. An attitude typical of leftism, you like it or you lump it. A great deal must be done and discussion undertaken to form the future working class party; it will not be the ICC and the IBRP alone who will be involved in this task but many proletarian groups that will arise, at least we hope so.

By avoiding the debate, the IBRP shows clearly its theoretical weakness, as it does when, in uncontrolled anger, it tells us 'we don't have to account to the ICC or anyone else for our political actions'. Here we find the 'divine right' of the LEADER, who has the right to do whatever he likes, because the leaders are above GOOD and BAD. In brief, the reference point for morality and ethics is to be found in the complete works of the JESUITS.”

The opportunism of the IBRP

Many of the letters sent to the IBRP condemn its opportunism as unworthy of a proletarian organisation. That is, they stigmatise a policy characterised by a desertion of principles in favour of using means that are alien to the proletariat in order to 'get ahead' in what it seems to conceive as a race to win the hearts and minds of the new generation. The contacts are also aware how very self-destructive is the Bureau's political promiscuity with the IFICC and the Circulo. These gentlemen aim not only at the destruction of the ICC through sordid manoeuvres, but also at the political annihilation of the IBRP, though in its case through blandishments and siren songs.

As GW from Britain tells the IBRP: “… the creation of the IBRP from the CWO and BC was strongly marked by an anti-ICCism as well as an opportunist leap. I now believe however that recent developments show a qualitative descent in the activity of the IBRP that threatens its very existence as a revolutionary force. It is now apparent what has been implicit for some time: the IBRP sees itself, not as comrades of, but in competition with the ICC. This shopkeeper, basically bourgeois attitude, can, if not dramatically reversed, only spell the doom of the IBRP as an expression of the proletariat.” (…) This is the very opposite of working class solidarity, of confidence in the working class and recent events confirm that you understand and share very little of these fundamental and essential attributes of a revolutionary class. (…) Linking up with and publicising any anti-ICC Tom, Dick or Harry shows a shameless and fundamental betrayal of the tenets of the workers' movement on your part. You blatantly excuse theft from revolutionary organisation because it's done in the name of "leadership rights". You could say it is done in the cut and thrust of business and doing down a rival. At least that would be more honest…"

The group of workers from the Basque country also tells the IBRP in no uncertain terms that their methods are against all that the working class stands for and are not to be tolerated:

"NO GENTLEMEN OF THE IBRP, for our class not everything is acceptable. Our proletarian morality is the antithesis of bourgeois morality; everyone must account for himself. That includes you and is even more applicable in your case as you came out in defence of the IFICC and its Mafia methods, or are you perhaps trying do get us to believe the letter and the horrendous things recounted in it?

You published the letter on the Internet to give it the widest possible audience, you owe something to those who have read it. We do not accept that you justify the theft of something as important as the address list and the money of a proletarian organisation. We are appalled at such vulgar arguments as that the perpetrators were the leaders or the old guard. What do you say they want to do? Redirect the ICC towards the right path? That does not mean that they have the right to thieve.

YES GENTLEMEN OF THE IBRP, you do have to give an account and not only to the ICC but also to all of us. What is your morality, what code of conduct and behaviour do you hold to? Are you part of the working class? On this question too there are class lines."

The contacts are appalled that an organisation of the Communist Left should excuse the theft on the part of the IFICC of the ICC's list of contact addresses. They are outraged that they go onto defend it on the grounds that the elements who went on to form the IFICC were supposedly 'leaders' of our organisation (see "Reply to the stupid accusations of an organisation in the process of degenerating", on the Internet site of the IBRP). The "two young sympathisers of the CL" ask the IBRP, “do you really think that the 'leaders' of a communist organisation have more rights and power than the militants that compose it, specifically in this case the exclusive ownership of common documents?”

A very pertinent question. We hope that the Bureau will deign to answer it because, contrary to their assertion that "we don't have to account to the ICC or anyone else for our political actions", those elements who look to the Left Communist movement for political leadership have every right, nay, a duty even, to demand that revolutionary organisations account for their actions. Equally, these organisations themselves have a responsibility to motivate their political choices before the entire working class that has generated them.

The "group of Basque workers" too has something to say on this point:

"The terms used by the IBRP, such as 'the old guard, the leaders', generates a profound DISGUST in us because it reflects a conception of the party that is typically bourgeois. It is not by chance that the 'leaders' unite to manipulate at will all the honest militants who approach the communist left. The best example of this is what has happened in Argentina and it is unforgivable that such an attitude is tolerated and not denounced to the four corners of the earth. Someone who tries to destroy a proletarian group deserves our scorn, not our respect.”

A comrade in Sweden refers to the IBRP's view that the theft of the address list was not theft on the basis that these "leaders" of the ICC wanted to guide ICC militants back to the right path:

"The logic to defend theft is worse than theft itself. IBRP put forward a religious or leftist position on the leading role of the party. Militant within the ICC are not religious idolizers which can be led to the right path and they are neither foot soldiers that can be guided by a commander. My opinion is that militants within the communist left (not only within the ICC) contrary to the left of capital are able, knowledgeable and analytical, in short real revolutionaries".

As another comrade writing from America asks, “At what point does opportunism cross over the class line? Adopting bourgeois tactics is a first step in the direction of adopting bourgeois ideology, no?” (IO).

Appeal made by the contacts to the IBRP

As GW says, "recent developments show a qualitative descent in the activity of the IBRP that threatens its very existence as a revolutionary force". Aware of the dangerous waters within which the IBRP is floundering, the concern of the sympathisers is to pull it back from the abyss that it seems determined to leap into at the kind invitation of the IFICC.

The two comrades in Amsterdam say, "We condemn this opportunist attitude of the IBRP towards the ICC. We hope that in the interest of the class struggle and proletarian unity, the IBRP will make a self-criticism of its attitude in this affair."

The statement of the participants of the ICC meeting in Germany reads:

"We call on you to return to the terrain of the proletarian form and principles of confrontation, meaning:

• the immediate publication, in your press and your website, of our letter and of the communiqué of the ICC on these developments,
• the establishment, with your participation, of an independent commission of the camp of the Communist Left, to examine and clarify the accusations against the ICC.
• the rupture of any collaboration with the former ICC elements, who have grouped themselves in and around the IFICC (the so-called "internal fraction of the ICC").
• denouncing and publically combating the methods of theft of money and contact addresses, and the hate campaigns against the ICC.

You should at long last assume the collective responsibility you have towards the international proletariat. Sit down at the table with the ICC and other revolutionaries and debate publically the central questions of the workers movement, of capitalism and its overthrow."

JB, Britain declares:

"The question of parasitism is one that involves the entire communist left. I support the ICC's call for other proletarian organisations and their contacts and sympathisers to take position on the ICC's theses on the subject to:

• explain whether or not they believe the behavioural patterns of 'parasitism' identified by the ICC exist or not and to show why they believe this;
• provide alternative explanations for this behaviour if they disagree with the ICC's explanation for its existence.

In short, to develop the discussion in the widest and most rigorous possible way, as is incumbent on the workers' movement as a whole."

RQ, Spain underlines the general responsibility of the political elements of the proletarian camp:

"The proletarian political milieu must carry out its responsibilities. The evolution of the situation: the IBRP going into crisis by insisting that it maintains, and will continue to maintain, its collaboration with the FICCI; the last minute intervention of the murky Círculo de Comunistas Internacionalistas in Argentina and the silence of the other organisations, that should have taken position against the behaviour of the elements of the IFICC, because no proletarian organisation alive is safe from them. This makes me think that a sort of plot against a revolutionary organisation such as the ICC has been organised, with some who participate actively and others by default.”

The importance of solidarity

IO from America asks us: “I do have to wonder why you pay so much attention to the IFICC (…)I guess talking about them is useful perhaps as a lesson of parasitism in action, otherwise shouldn't they be ignored for the most part?”. If we have spent so much time and effort in our public struggle against the unholy alliance of parasitism and opportunism represented by the IFICC and the IBRP, this is because – however small the numbers involved – we are fighting to defend the very principles of proletarian action and organisation whereon the world wide party of the working class must one day be based. We are firmly convinced that if we do not defend these principles now, then we would both be failing in our duty, and compromising the future development of all revolutionary organisation.

The passion and conviction with which our contacts have entered into the fray in defence of proletarian principles is enough to warm the cockles of any revolutionary's heart. It shows that the ICC's insistence that principled behaviour is a political necessity isn't a voice lost in the wilderness of expediency, cynicism, and opportunism. This simple act of solidarity is all the more important as the ICC has recently received threats, for example, from the UHP-Arde[1] [104], as well as others sent anonymously.

Aware of the gravity of recent events, RQ (Spain) initially saw them as a backward step for the working class. After further reflection however, he/she says: "I don't think that the ICC and the proletariat are confronting a reflux but that, on the contrary, this is a forward step at the level of method because of what has had to be confronted. As was the case in the First International in the fight against the Bakuninists, the Marxist method, and therefore that of revolutionary organisations, lies in bringing out into the open before the militants and the whole proletariat, the problem or the crisis in all of its difficulty. It means discussing it through and going to the root without holding back.”

This, like the other letters, shows the unconquerable determination to understand and advance, however hard the battle may prove, that is the hallmark of the proletariat as a revolutionary class. The sympathisers recognise that the fight for communism is so much deeper and all-embracing than the search for a list of correct positions. The Marxist method means a questioning of every aspect of this rotten society and only it can breathe life into the reflections, the questionings, and the hunt for the unclouded truth. This is the gauntlet that the writers of these letters have taken up.

We leave the last word with the participants at the ICC Public Forum in Germany, a sentiment that encapsulates the priceless solidarity that our sympathisers have proffered:

"Don't give up, we support your struggle!"

According to Engels, the coal miner endured an unenviable excess of evils. “In the whole British Empire there is no occupation in which a man may meet his end in so many diverse ways as in this one. The coal-mine is the scene of a multitude of the most terrifying calamities, and these come directly from the selfishness of the bourgeoisie.” (The Condition of the Working Class in England, ‘The Mining Proletariat’). Gas explosions took place “in one mine or another, nearly every day”. Build-ups of “carbonic acid gas” suffocated “every one who gets into it”. Proper ventilation of the mines could have improved safety, “but for this purpose the bourgeoisie has no money to spare”. Roof collapses were common because, given the growing economy’s thirst for energy, it was in the interest of the bourgeoisie “to have the seams worked out as completely as possible, and hence the accidents of this sort”. The employment of children and young people in the mines was common, and all complained of being overtired: “Children throw themselves down on the stone hearth or the floor as soon as they reach home, fall asleep at once without being able to take a bite of food, and have to be washed and put to bed while asleep; it even happens that they lie down on the way home, and are found by their parents late at night asleep on the road.” And when the workers sought recourse to the law they were confronted by the fact that, “In nearly all mining districts the people composing the coroner's juries are, in almost all cases, dependent upon the mine owners, and where this is not the case, immemorial custom insures that the verdict shall be: ‘Accidental Death’” (Engels, ibid.)

The working class in China is paying a terrible tribute for the ‘economic miracle of Red capitalism’ in terms of unemployment, poverty, lack of education, destruction of the environment. None suffers worse than the mining proletariat. In the worst mining disaster since 1949, at least 203 miners were killed when a gas explosion occurred at the Sunjiawan mine, close to the North-eastern city of Fuxin. This was no isolated incident. According to the BBC, “more than 5,000 people died in explosions, floods and fires in China's mines in 2004… China last year produced 35% of the world's coal but reported 80% of global deaths in colliery accidents. The industry cost the lives of 15 miners a day in the first nine months of 2004” (‘Chinese mine explosion kills 203’, BBC Online, 15/2/05).

Some argue that the problem is caused by local governments selling operating licences to small ‘private’ mines that show little regard for safety. Such mines “flourish where the coal seams are too narrow to be cut by machinery, but China's insatiable demand for coal creates a market for every lump. Local governments often prefer to sell the licences and collect profit-based fees or taxes than run the mines themselves” (‘China's miners pay for growth’, BBC Online, 8/12/04). There are calls for the state to step in to take ownership of the smaller mines because safety is supposedly better in the state-run mines. However, the majority of the ‘accidents’ in the past year have occurred precisely in these state-run mines, such as the one in Fuxin. Calls for the central state to step in to increase regulation also fly in the face of the official policy of the Chinese state to de-regulate and close unprofitable concerns.

It is not just the miners who die, but their sons and daughters as well. In early March, mining dynamite stored at the home of a mine operator in the Shanxi province exploded, destroying an adjacent primary school, killing 20, including children, several teachers and the mine operator himself. (‘China blast kills schoolchildren’, BBC Online, 3/3/05). The youth suffer in the textile industry as well. According to a report from the New-York based NGO Human Rights in China, the owner of a textile company in Hebei Province illegally employed a number of young girls as labourers. In late December they were sleeping in a shared dormitory room measuring less than 10 square meters when they were overcome by charcoal fumes and were later found unconscious by the factory owner. The report goes on to say that without checking if the girls were actually dead, the factory owner put them into coffins for cremation. When the families of the dead girls were finally allowed to see their bodies, “[they] were horrified to discover that at least two of the girls… appeared to have been alive when they were placed in the coffins. Their faces were caked with vomit and tears, their noses had bled and their necks were swollen. One was found to have kicked through the cardboard lining of her coffin, and her body was twisted in apparent struggle.” (‘Cover-up of Child Labor Deaths in Hebei’, https://gb.hrichina.org [108], 2/3/05).

At the time Engels wrote his study, in 1844, capitalism was in its youthful throws, it was a mode of production in its ascendancy. The proletariat’s indignation against such inhuman working conditions took the form of combinations into trade unions and the struggle for reforms that capitalism could really allow. However, history is not repeating itself today in China, not even as farce. “A true disaster is looming in China. What's happening in China today is not the harbinger of a new phase in the development of the productive forces, but of a new plunge into economic collapse… It will not be long before the demise of the Chinese dragon shows what lies behind these miracles - the sombre reality of a bankrupt capitalist system.” (‘China: economic miracle or capitalist mirage?’, WR 278, October 2004).

Trevor 5.3.05

The current media blitz in the US about social security “reform” is the latest installment in a quarter century of austerity attacks against the American working class. American capitalism has been implementing austerity measures since President Carter first began talking about the “economic malaise” during the period of double digit inflation in the late 1970s. The continuing economic crisis has pushed the bourgeoisie towards the brink of a qualitative breakthrough in the ferocity of austerity. Up to now, one of the strengths of American state capitalism was its ability to use the relative size of the private sector economy in the US and the lack of direct state ownership to impose austerity in a diffused manner.

For example, the lack of a state-run, centralized health care system meant that cuts in medical care were not announced and implemented nationally on a centralized basis but were introduced through thousands of employer-based medical benefit programs at different companies and economic institutions at different times, in different places, in different forms and guises. Likewise, instead of announcing a generalized reduction in wages across the economy, or even across an industry, wages were attacked at the level of individual enterprises and corporations, making it more difficult for the proletariat to respond in a unified and simultaneous manner. Today the bourgeoisie is finding it impossible to continue its avoidance of a frontal assault on the social wage. It is in this context that the current social security “reform” proposed by the Bush administration must be viewed.

The current proposed fiscal budget put forth by the Bush administration calls for the abolition or scaling back of a 150 programs that the government claims “don’t work”. The cuts include programs that are near and dear to core constituencies of the Bush administration, such as the abolition of the farm subsidy program, vital to the prosperity of the agribusiness sector. However, even if they cut these programs – and there is no guarantee about this, as the last time the Bush administration proposed cutting 100 programs, only 4 wound up falling under the axe – they would have a virtually insignificant impact on the budget deficit. These programs are small potatoes compared with the rest of the “social programs.” Most of the expenses of the state are on two issues, one the so called “entitlement” programs, such as social security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the other, the military. In the face of the imperialist imperatives facing the US government in this period, it is inconceivable that military expenses are susceptible to cuts. In fact the Bush administration considers the homeland security and military expenses as “off budget” items, which are not included in the official budget proposals. This means that the bourgeoisie must move towards directly attacking the social wage head on, which is something they have carefully tried to avoid in the past.

The Economic and Social Function of Social Security in the US

While social security is part of the social wage – that part of the wages paid to the working class by the state in order to assure the social reproduction of the working class, in this instance to support the standard of living the disabled, elderly, retired workers, and the survivors of workers who have died, it would be inaccurate to assume that this is money that comes from the state; it is actually money confiscated from the workers’ own wages, collected, administered and distributed to the workers as part of state capitalism’s mechanism of centralizing economic life and tying the proletariat to the state apparatus. Historically workers always had the responsibility to support not only themselves (those on the job), but also their dependents – their children, their elders (who were too infirm to continue working) or their relatives who were disabled. They used part of their wages received from their employers to do so. However, in the Great Depression in the 1930’s unemployment in the US reached 30 percent and millions of workers were unable to support themselves or their dependents. Private charities were totally incapable of handling this social crisis, and state capitalist measures were introduced through the New Deal to stabilize the social situation and prevent potential future disasters. This was not some great reform, as the bourgeoisie likes to claim, but merely a restructuring of the way the working class had always supported its elderly and disabled in a manner that benefited the state. Social Security is actually paid for by the working class itself, not the state. Fifty percent of social security funds are raised by taxes on the wages paid in each pay period to the workers. The other 50% comes from a matching tax levied on their employers. As far as the employers are concerned, economically their tax contribution to Social Security is actually calculated as part of the wages, or labor costs, they pay for their workforce, part of their wage bill. Whereas the workers used to support their seniors by personally setting aside part of their earnings, under Social Security the state itself literally confiscates a part of the workers wages determined by law and distributes this money to the retired workers in the name of the state. While this guarantees that the senior citizens will be supported even in times of high unemployment, more importantly the state’s distribution of Social Security checks serves to tie the working class to the state – even if it is only to have access to part of their own wages that has been set aside.

The Manufactured Financial Crisis of Social Security

The money paid into the social security system has never gone into individual retirement accounts, even if the government annually sends workers nearing retirement age a financial record of the amount of money they have paid into the system over the years. The social security checks of current retirees is paid from the taxes levied on the first $90,000 of wages of current workers and exempts the bourgeoisie from having to contribute significantly to the system. Most of the taxes collected goes into the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund (commonly called the Social Security trust fund). A much smaller amount goes into the Federal Disability Insurance Trust Fund. The social security checks distributed to the retired and the disabled each year are drawn from these funds. At the end of the year any money left over is required by law to be lent to the federal government; it is not allowed to accumulate in the trust fund. According to the New York Times, “The government issues interest bearing bonds to the trust fund and immediately spends the money for other purposes” March 8, 2005. These bonds are supposed to be redeemed when and if the social security trust fund does not have enough money to pay social security checks. In other words, the social security trust fund is actually comprised of current-year social security tax funds and a bunch of IOUs from the federal government.

Until the 1980s, social security taxes were low and generally very little money was left over at the end of the year. To solve an alleged social security financial crisis during the Reagan administration, a special blue ribbon panel, headed by Alan Greenspan, who would convert his success on this panel into his nomination as head of the Federal Reserve, proposed to “save” social security by cutting benefits and raising taxes. This led to the accumulation of incredibly large surpluses in the trust fund, reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars each year, as baby boomers paid vastly more money into the program than was necessary to support their elders. These surpluses were each year turned over to the federal government and were used by the Reagan, and the first Bush administration to begin reducing budget deficits and by the Clinton administration to actually achieve a budget surplus. This money helped Reagan to fund the acceleration of the arms race in the 1980s that helped to bankrupt Russian imperialism, to fund wars and military adventures over the past two decades, and to compensate for tax cuts for the rich. Today it is estimated that there is approximately $1.7 trillion dollars in IOUs in the trust fund, and that this sum will rise to $6 trillion by 2018, when the trust fund will have to start redeeming the Treasury bills (the IOUs) to fully cover the social security checks for the baby boom retirees. In other words, while the bourgeoisie is ranting and raving about the impending bankruptcy of social security as members of the baby boom generation near retirement age, the system is actually awash with incredible surpluses – except that these surpluses are being diverted to finance imperialist war and military expenditures. The Bush administration predicts the system will become insolvent by 2042, but the less politically motivated prediction by the Congressional Budget Office is that insolvency would occur 10 years later, in 2052 – when the oldest of the baby boomers would be 106 years old, and the youngest 88, i.e. when most of them would have already died and it would be their children who be receiving their pensions. It is estimated that the shortfall in 2052 could be easily compensated for by an adjustment in federal spending of around 3 percent.

The Real Purpose of Social Security “Reform”

The debate in the bourgeois media over social security “reforms” proposed by the Bush administration focuses on the brouhaha over the diversion of a portion of workers’ tax contributions into private investment accounts, tied to the stock market. There is a lot of talk about fantastically high conversion costs to set up these accounts (estimated as ranging from $2 trillion to $6 trillion) and the supposed windfall profits to Wall Street investment brokers. But this debate obscures what is really at stake. At the heart of the Bush plan is to alter the formula used to calculate benefits for future baby boom generation retirees who are 55 or younger today, which would slash guaranteed benefits by 25% to 45% over the coming decades. The real goal of the Bush administration is to avoid paying back those $6 trillion that will have been pilfered from the trust fund by 2018. In 1983, the American ruling class used the ruse of an impending social security crisis to raise the taxes on the working class and used that money not to pay pensions to retirees or to set it aside to pay the pensions of future retirees but to fund its aggressive imperialist policies. Now it wants to complete this massive social swindle by maneuvering to avoid repaying $6 trillion dollars confiscated from the working class back into the social security trust fund.

Whether the Bush investment accounts are ever implemented, the bourgeoisie is united in its view that social security can only be fixed by cutting benefits and raising taxes, as the New York Times, which is opposed to the investment accounts, has openly said in its editorial columns. Despite the bourgeoisie’s attempts to throw up a smoke screen around social security “reform” with talk of private investment accounts, the fundamental raison d’etre of the social security reform is to cut the social wage of the proletariat. This frontal attack, while necessary for the bourgeoisie, is fraught with the risk of triggering a proletarian response, which is why they have delayed this type of attack for so long. When added to the accumulation of serious inroads on the proletarian standard of living, the potential for a proletarian response increases exponentially. Clearly there is unity within the bourgeoisie on the need to “reform social security, but the danger of provoking a working class explosion is one reason why there is so much hesitation within the ruling class on exactly how and how quickly to proceed. But there is also a concern that any clumsily orchestrated reneging on repaying the Treasury bonds to the social security trust fund, which are supposed to be backed by the “full faith and credit of the United States,” might jeopardize the confidence in and value of other Treasury bonds, much of which are held by foreign investors, like the Japanese and Chinese, who might transfer their funds to investments in Euros. This would create an economic calamity for the US. Even within the Republican party there is a hesitation to rush headlong into the investment accounts proposals, including Greenspan’s call for a go slow approach that would phase in the private accounts over a protracted period of time. However it is an open question for the ruling class as to whether they actually have the option to delay for too long.

J Grevin, 1/4/05.

A century ago on June 27, 1905, in a crowded hall in Chicago, Illinois, Big Bill Haywood, leader of the militant Western Miners Federation, called to order “the Continental Congress of the Working Class,” a gathering convened to create a new working class revolutionary organization in the United States: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), often referred to as the Wobblies. Haywood solemnly declared to the 203 delegates in attendance, “We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism…The aims and objects of this organization should be to put the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.…this organization will be formed, based and founded on the class struggle, having in view no compromise and no surrender, and but one object and one purpose and that is to bring the workers of this country into the possession of the full value of the product of their toil.”

The IWW, however, never lived up to its lofty goals. Its critique of capitalism never transcended a visceral hatred of the system’s exploitation and oppression, and never attempted to examine the nuances and intricacies of capitalist development and understand the significance of the consequent changing conditions under which the working class waged its struggles.

Historical Context for the Foundation of the IWW

The rise of the IWW in the U.S. was in part a response to the same general tendencies that triggered the rise of revolutionary syndicalism in Western Europe: “opportunism, reformism, and parliamentary cretinism.”[1] [111] The crystalization of this general international tendency in the US was conditioned by certain American specificities, including the existence of the frontier; the accompanying large scale immigration of workers from Europe to the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s; and the vitriolic clash between craft unionism and industrial unionism.

The Frontier and Immigration. The existence of the frontier and tremendous influx of immigrant workers were strongly intertwined and had significant consequences for the development of the workers movement in the US. The frontier acted as a safety valve for burgeoning discontent in the populous industrial states of the northeast and midwest. Significant numbers of workers, both native-born and immigrant, alienated by their exploitation in the factories and industrial trades, fled the industrial centers and migrated westward to the frontier in search of self sufficiency and a “better” life. This safety valve phenomenon disrupted the normal and routine evolution of an experienced proletarian movement.

The differences between native-born, English-speaking workers (even if the latter were only second generation immigrants themselves) and newly arrived immigrant workers who spoke and read little or no English were used to divide the workers against themselves. These divisions were a serious handicap for the working class in the US because it cut off the Native Americans from the vast experience gained by workers in Europe and made it difficult for class conscious American workers to be current with the international theoretical developments within the workers movement. This retarded the theoretical development of the workers movement in America, and hampered its ability to resist effectively against opportunist and reformist currents, and understand its political tasks.

Another consequence of the frontier tradition was the tendency towards violence in American society. The American bourgeoisie displayed no reluctance to utilize repressive force in its confrontations with the proletariat, whether it was the army, state militias, private militias (i.e., the infamous Pinkertons), or hired thugs that were deployed to suppress numerous workers struggles, even massacring strikers and their families. Such circumstances readily exposed the viciousness and hypocrisy of the class dictatorship of bourgeois democracy and the futility of trying to achieve fundamental change at the ballot box. This in turn triggered widespread skepticism among the most class conscious workers about the efficacy of political action, which was generally perceived as synonymous with participation in electoralism.

Craft Unionism vs. Industrial Unionism. The clash between craft and industrial unionism was a dominant controversy within the workers movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In essence this was a dispute about which type of unitary class organization best corresponded to proletarian class interests in the period of capitalist ascendance, when capitalism was still historically progressive in the sense that had not yet reached its historic limits and continued to foster the further development of the productive forces. Since it was possible for the proletariat to wrest structural reforms and improvements in wages, and living and working conditions from the bourgeoisie in ascendant capitalism, this dispute over whether unions organized along narrow craft lines, confined primarily to the most highly skilled workers, or unions organized along industrial lines, uniting skilled and unskilled workers in the same industry in the same organization, was a substantive issue for the advancement of working class interests.

Craft unions regrouped in the American Federation of Labor, which accepted the inevitability of capitalism and the wage system, and sought to make the best deal possible for the skilled workers it represented. Under Samuel Gompers’ leadership the AFL presented itself as a staunch defender of the American system, and a responsible alternative to labor radicalism. In so doing, the AFL abandoned any responsibility for the well being of millions of unskilled and semi-skilled American workers who were ruthlessly exploited in the emerging mass employment manufacturing and extractive industries.

Perhaps the most important current in the evolution of the industrial unionist perspective, particularly in terms of its direct impact on the founding of the IWW, was the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Embittered by their experiences in what literally amounted to open class warfare with the mining companies and the state authorities (both sides were often armed), the WFM became increasingly radicalized. In 1898, the WFM sponsored the formation of the Western Labor Union, as a “dual union.” A regional alternative to the AFL, it never really had any independent existence beyond the influence of its sponsor. While their immediate demands often echoed the same “pork chop unionism” wage demands of the AFL, by 1902 the long range goal of the WFM was socialism. The 1904 WFM convention directed its executive board to seek the creation of a new organization to unite the entire working class, which initiated the process that led to the founding convention of the IWW.

IWW’s Revolutionary Syndicalism vs. Anarcho-syndicalism

Despite the incipient syndicalist viewpoint that permeated the views of the founders of the IWW, particularly the idea that the socialist society would be organized along the lines of industrial unions, there were sharp differences between the IWW and anarcho-syndicalism as it existed in Europe. The men who gathered in Chicago in 1905 considered themselves adherents of a Marxist perspective. Except for Lucy Parsons, widow of the Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons who attended as an honored guest, no anarchists or syndicalists played any significant role in the founding congress.

Coming out of the founding convention, “every IWW official was a Socialist Party member.”[2] [112] In addition, the IWW’s general organizer from 1908-1915, Vincent St. John, made it clear that he opposed tying the IWW to a political party, and “struggled to save the IWW from Daniel Deleon on the one hand and from the ‘anarchist freaks’ on the other.” [3] [113] IWW leaders regarded syndicalism as an alien, European doctrine. “In January, 1913, for instance, a Wobbly partisan called syndicalism ‘the name that is most widely used by [the IWW’s] enemies.’ The Wobblies themselves had few kind words for the European syndicalist leaders. To them, Ferdinand Pelloutier was ‘the anarchist,’ Georges Sorel, ‘the monarchist apologist for violence,’ Herbert Lagardelle was an ‘anti-democrat,’ and the Italian Arturo Labriola, ‘the conservative in politics and revolutionist in labor unionism.’”[4] [114]

In contrast to the decentralized vision of anarcho-syndicalism whose federal principles favored a confederation of independent and autonomous unions, the IWW operated in accordance with a centralist orientation. While the IWW’s 1905 constitution conferred “industrial autonomy” on its industrial unions, it clearly established the principle that these industrial unions were under the control of the General Executive Board (GEB), the central organ of the IWW: “The subdivision International and National Industrial Unions shall have complete industrial autonomy in their respective internal affairs, provided the General Executive Board shall have power to control these Industrial Unions in matters concerning the interest of the general welfare.” This position was accepted without controversy. The GEB alone could authorize an IWW strike.

The Anti-Political Perspective

The preamble to the IWW constitution adopted at the founding convention was clear in its commitment to the revolutionary destruction of capitalism. “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life…Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the wage system…It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.” The organization was not clear, however, on the nature of this revolution or how it would be made. It wasn’t even clear if the revolution was a political or an economic act.

Despite their Marxist sympathies, the dominant view amongst the IWW’s founders held that for the workers the political struggle was subordinate to the economic, and that the organization should not be directly involved in politics, much to the chagrin of Socialist and Socialist Labor Party militants who sought to get the IWW to affiliate with their respective organizations. In the interests of unity, the convention formulated a convolutedly worded concession to socialists from both parties, by agreeing to the insertion of a political paragraph in the preamble to the IWW constitution, which read as follows: “Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as the industrial field, and take hold of that which they produce by their labor, through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party.” For most delegates this concessionary reference to politics was incomprehensible.[5] [115]

The opposition to politics derived from a theoretical misunderstanding of the nature of the class struggle and the proletarian revolution and the political tasks of the proletariat. For the IWW, “political” meant participation in bourgeois elections, which offered only propagandistic value in demonstrating the futility of electoralism.

This narrow definition of politics failed to understand the political nature of the proletarian revolution. What could be more political than the destruction of the capitalist state, taking control of the means of production, and the imposition of the proletarian revolutionary perspective over the whole of society? The proletarian revolution is the most audacious and thoroughgoing political act in all of human history – a revolution in which the exploited and oppressed masses rise up, destroy the state of the exploiting class, and impose their own revolutionary class dictatorship over society in order to achieve the transition to communism.

The political compromise embodied in the arcane wording of the political paragraph in the 1905 preamble was not sufficient to maintain the unity of the organization. By the 1908 convention, the anti-political perspective triumphed. The political clause was deleted from the preamble, Deleon was barred from attending the convention on a credentials technicality, and his followers split with him to form their own IWW based in Detroit that was subordinate to the SLP. Eugene Debs, along with many other Socialist Party members, permitted his membership to lapse and withdrew from IWW activities. Haywood remained in the organization and in 1911 served simultaneously as a leading member of the IWW and a board member of the Socialist Party, until he was removed from the latter after membership in the IWW was deemed incompatible by the Socialists because of the IWW’s stance on sabotage and opposition to political action.

Confusing the Revolutionary Organization and the Unitary Organization

For the IWW the industrial union was an all-in-one organizational form. The union would not simply be a unitary organization what would serve as a mechanism for working class self defense and the form for proletarian rule after the revolution but it would also be an organization of revolutionary militants and agitators. According to its 1908 constitution, the IWW believed that “the army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” As we have pointed out in International Review 118, such a syndicalist vision that sees the possibility to form “the structure of new society within the shell of the old …springs from a profound incomprehension of the degree of antagonism between capitalism, the last exploiting society, and the classless society which must replace it. This serious error leads to underestimating the depth of social transformation necessary to carry out the transition between these two social forms, and it also underestimated the resistance of the ruling class to the seizure of power by the working-class.” [6] [116]

With this vision revolutionary syndicalism also confounded the two types of organization that have historically been secreted by the working class: revolutionary organizations and unitary organizations. They failed to appreciate the difference between the revolutionary organization that regroups militants on the basis of a shared agreement on, and commitment to, revolutionary principles and program, and a unitary organization of the class that unites all workers as workers on a sociological basis. This failure condemned the IWW to an unstable existence. The open door to membership that the organization maintained was literally a revolving door, through which perhaps as many as a million workers entered and just as quickly exited between 1905 and 1917.

Furthermore, the battle waged by the industrial unionists against craft and business unionism was increasingly anachronistic. The historic period changed in the early 20th century with the completion and saturation of the world market, which accentuated the effects of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, and ushered in the onset of capitalist decadence and the evaporation of the possibility of durable reforms. Under these changed conditions, the trade union form of organization itself, whether industrial or craft, became irrelevant to the class struggle and was absorbed into the capitalist state apparatus as a mechanism for working class control. The experience of the mass strike in Russia in 1905 and the discovery of soviets, or workers councils, by the proletariat in that country was an historical watershed for the world proletariat. The lessons of these developments and their impact on class struggle were the focus of theoretical work by Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Anton Pannekoek, and others in the leftwing of the Second International. In the real struggle of the proletariat, workers councils displaced the trade unions as the unitary organization of the working class. This new type of organization united workers from all industries in a given territorial area in the revolutionary confrontation with the ruling class and constituted the historically discovered form that the dictatorship of the proletariat would take. Unfortunately, all this theoretical work seemed completely lost on the IWW, which never understood the significance of the changed period or of the workers councils, and continued to laud “industrial unionism [as] the road to freedom.”[7] [117]

Centrist Hesitancy in Response to World War I

Moments of war and revolution are historically determinant for organizations that claim to defend proletarian class interests, a litmus test revealing their true class nature. In this sense, the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 revealed the betrayal of the major parties of the Social Democracy in Europe who rallied to the side of their respective bourgeoisies, turned their backs on the principles of proletarian internationalism and opposition to imperialist war, participated in the mobilization of the proletariat for the slaughter, and thereby crossed the class line to the camp of the bourgeoisie.

When war broke out in Europe, the Wobblies formally espoused principles of proletarian internationalism, and opposed the war. In 1914, the IWW convention adopted a resolution that stated, “…the industrial movement will wipe out all boundaries and establish an international relationship between all races engaged in industry…We, as members of the industrial army, will refuse to fight for any purpose except for the realization of industrial freedom.” In 1916, another resolution committed the organization to a program advocating “anti-militarist propaganda in time of peace, thus promoting Class Solidarity among the workers of the entire world, and, in time of war, the General Strike in all industries.”[8] [118]

However, when US imperialism entered the war in April 1917, the IWW lapsed into a centrist hesitancy and failed miserably to put its internationalism and anti-militarism into practice. Unlike the AFL, the IWW never endorsed the war or participated in mobilizing the proletariat for war. But neither did it maintain an active opposition to the war. Instead, antiwar pamphlets like The Deadly Parallel were withdrawn from circulation. IWW soapbox speakers stopped agitating against war. The majority of the General Executive Board, led by Haywood, regarded the war as a distraction from the class struggle and the more important work of building the union and feared that active opposition to the war would open the IWW to repression.[9] [119]

Individual militants who faced the problem of resisting conscription into the imperialist war were told that it was an individual decision, and received no organizational support. Many IWW leaders were correctly opposed to interclassist anti-war demonstrations and organizations and accurately argued that the IWW did not have sufficent influence within the proletariat to organize a successful antiwar general strike. However, they appeared equally unwilling to seek ways in which they could find a way to oppose the imperialist war on the working class terrain. In a letter to Frank Little, a leader of the antiwar faction on the General Executive Board, Haywood counseled, “Keep a cool head; do not talk. A good many feel as you do but the world war is of small importance compared to the great class war…I am at a loss as to definite steps to be taken against the war.”[10] [120]

When an IWW activist wrote to headquarters and urged that an emergency IWW convention be convened to decide how the organization would respond to US entry into the war, Haywood deflected the request: “Of course, it is impossible for this office…to take action on our individual initiative. However, I place your communication on the file for future reference.”

In an irony of history, it was the IWW that consciously chose not to actively fight against the war once the US had entered the conflict, and not the socialist parties that opposed the war, that was targeted for repression. Only the IWW, as an organization, faced indictment for a conspiracy to sabotage the war effort. In this sense the war provided a pretext for the bourgeoisie to crackdown on the IWW for its past activities and wild rhetoric. One hundred and sixty-five IWW leaders were indicted September 28, 1917 on charges of obstructing the war effort and conscription, and conspiring to sabotage and interfere with the normal contractual economic functioning in society. At the Great Trial of Wobbly leaders, the defendants pointed out that of the 521 wartime labor strikes, only three were organized by the IWW, the rest by the AFL and disowned the views of Frank Little. After their conviction, the bulk of the IWW’s leading centralizers were sent off to Leavenworth in chains and the organization fell under the control of decentralizing anarcho-syndicalists and went into decline.

The Failure of the IWW

There persists even today a romanticized image of the Wobbly organizer as a rugged, itinerant revolutionary, who hops freight trains and hoboes from town to town, propagandizing and agitating for the One Big Union – a proletarian knight in shining armor. This petty bourgeois model of the revolutionary as exemplary individual figure, so appealing to the anarchist temperament, is of no interest to the proletariat, whose struggle is not waged by isolated, heroic individuals, but by the collective effort of the working class, a class that is both an exploited and revolutionary class.

The Russian Revolution won many of the non-anarchists in the IWW to communism, including Big Bill Haywood, who fled to exile in Russia in 1922. While Haywood became disillusioned with the Russian Revolution, in part because he was disappointed that the revolution did not take a syndicalist form, he made a comment to Max Eastman that succinctly summed up the failure of the IWW’s revolutionary syndicalism: “The IWW reached out and grabbed an armful. It tired to grab the whole world and a part of the world has jumped ahead of it.”[11] [121]

The revolutionary syndicalists of the IWW were dedicated to their class, but their response to opportunism, reformism and parliamentary cretinism was completely off the mark. Their industrial unionism and revolutionary syndicalism did not correspond to the changed historic period. The world had “jumped ahead of it” and left it far behind.

J. Grevin, 18/6/05.

We recently received an e-mail circular that encouraged us to sign a petition in support of the workers of the Zanon factory in Argentina. Here is our reply.

ICCOnline, 14/6/05.

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London,

10/6/05.

We are writing to explain briefly why, despite our solidarity with the workers of Zanon in the face of provocations and attacks by the Argentine ruling class, we do not think that your petition is the way to express this solidarity.

1) We are not in favour of petitions in general because they cannot be separated from illusions in bourgeois democracy. A petition is by definition an appeal by the individual citizens to the legal authorities. But as Marx explained, the ‘citizen’ is the atomised individual of bourgeois civil society. To appeal to the rights of the citizen, to see society as an aggregation of individuals is to deny its fundamental reality, which is based on the struggle between classes. And by the same token, the legal authorities can only be the representatives of the ruling class and its interests. Repression and mystification are the methods of the ruling class; against them, the exploited class must use its own methods to defend its interests. That means workers must fight collectively, as workers, not as individual citizens. And instead of appealing to the legal authorities – in other words, to the bourgeois state – they can only appeal to other workers to widen their struggle and build a rapport de force between them and their exploiters.

2) In the past, the trade unions were expressions of this collective struggle of the workers. But this ceased to be the case as long ago as the period 1914-21, when the trade unions first helped the bourgeoisie mobilise the workers for the imperialist war, and then helped it suppress the revolutionary wave provoked in numerous countries by the horrors of the war. Even though workers maintain many illusions in the trade unions, in practise they have been obliged in the course of their struggle to develop other forms of struggle outside and against the unions. A clear example of this were the general assemblies and strike committees produced by the mass strikes in Poland in 1980, before the movement was tamed with the aid of the trade union ‘firemen’ of Solidarnosc. Similar forms, albeit on a less extended scale, have also appeared in Argentina and many other countries. The petition puts forward the position that the trade unions can still be organs for coordinating workers’ solidarity, and we do not accept this.

3) The petition also argues that the formation of workers’ cooperatives represents a proletarian response to the bankruptcy or closure of enterprises. In our view, ‘workers’ self-management’ within the framework of a capitalist economy can only result in the same old exploitation in a different form. There have been countless demonstrations of this reality, from the anarchist collectives in Spain to LIP in France and the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in Britain. It is not possible for the working class to lay hold of the means of production without first taking political power; and when it has achieved this step – which needs to be taken on a global scale – its goal is not to run businesses more efficiently or make more profits than the capitalists but to abolish commodity production altogether.

4) We therefore think that it would be more fruitful to begin a debate on what class solidarity really means than to dissipate our energies on appealing to the bourgeois presidents and judges. We are more than willing to take part in such a debate and encourage all those who receive this message to contact us at our website or write to us at……

After the bitter defeat suffered by the SPD at the May 21 provincial elections in North-Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) – the so-called “bastion of Social Democracy” – the German Chancellor Schröder and the SPD party leader Müntefering countered with the announcement that the next general elections would take place a year ahead of schedule, in autumn 2005. After recovering from the surprise of this announcement, the German political scene reacted very positively to it. Instead of criticising, as was expected, the left wing of the party reacted to the announcement with aredent pledges of loyalty. The Christian Democratic and Liberal party opposition was unanimous in greeting Schröders decision, declaring: “every day less, in which Germany is ruled by the red-green coalition, is a good day for the country”. The employers’ federations and the trade unions expressed their “relief” that “the Germans” were now themselves going to show, in the electoral booths, whether or not they still supported the “painful, but necessary economic reforms”. At the Frankfurt stock exchange there was talk of a “new optimism” which the elections in autumn would supposedly release – independently of their political outcome.

How to explain this unanimous enthusiasm of the ruling class for new elections now? Did the red-green coalition of the SPD with the Green party, from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, govern so badly that it can no longer bear to wait another whole year to get rid of it? Will the replacement of the present government, which appears likely, lead to a change of course, for instance concerning social and economic policies, such as the opposition is presently boastfully announcing?

It is not difficult to figure out why the Chancellor wants new elections. Already, in the last issue of Weltrevolution, we wrote: “The coming elections in North-Rhine-Wesphalia are already being considered to pre-determine the outcome of the national elections in 2006. Indeed: since access to the sources of power, influence and wealth is obtainable not only at the national, but also at the municipal and provincial level, parts of the SPD could lose interest in ruling in Berlin, if the price to be paid for this is the loss of dominance over the most important province.”

The SPD has now, in NRW, had to give up power in a province which, until then, it had governed without interruption for 39 years. It was the ninth consecutive Länder election which it lost. In Düsseldorf, the last remaining provincial red-green coalition has had to leave office. In the face of such an electoral decline of Social Democracy, unparalleled in recent German history, new elections are the last resort for the Chancellor to prevent the outbreak of open power struggles within his party. Indeed, Schröder sees in early elections his only chance of staying in office. If the Christian Democrats win the next provincial elections in Rhineland-Palatinate, thus obtaining a two-thirds majority in the second chamber, the Bundesrat, they would be able to block most of the legislative initiatives of the federal government, thus condemning the latter to leave a fatal impression of idleness in its last months in government.

Moreover, since even a passionate and tricky electoral combatant like Schröder is enough of a realist to know how slight his chances of being re-elected this time are, he is of course also preoccupied with how he wants to jump ship. When, in the early 1980s, in the face of a dramatic increase in mass unemployment and growing unrest within the working class, the SPD sought its salvation by going into opposition, it was the left wing of the SPD which assumed the task of delivering the knife in the back. The way in which the Social Democratic Chancellor at the time, Helmut Schmidt, was chased out of office by his own “comrades” has gone down in history with the mark of disgrace. If he does have to go, Schröder would prefer, like his predecessor Kohl, to be democratically and “honourably” voted out.

As for the opposition, it is not difficult to see why it is happy about the prospect of early elections. The prospects for the Christian Democrats and Liberals to replace the present government appear to be particularly favourable. Above all, it is the growing unpopularity of the left government – not least among the traditional Social Democratic electorate – which gives them cause for optimism. But this optimism is also based on the realisation that, in the past months, powerful parts of the German bourgeoisie have been giving the demise of the left government a helping hand. In particular, they have been making sure that the ecological party, the Greens, and their figurehead, foreign minister Fischer, are also caught up in this demise. This has been achieved above all via the so-called “Visa Affair”, blaming the foreign office for being too “liberal” about the granting of visas, above all to Ukrainian citizens, thus opening the borders to a “flood of criminals”. Of course this affair has a foreign policy dimension, with powerful voices, echoed within the CDU/CSU and FDP opposition parties, accusing Schröder of having shown too much consideration for the interests of Russia in the Ukraine and elsewhere. These voices accuse Schröder of sticking too rigidly to the coalition constellation with France and Russia which arose at the time of the last Iraq War. They call for a more pragmatic policy of alliances, which adopts more rapidly to each change in the situation.

But today, foreign policy is not the determining factor either of the decision to advance the date of general elections, nor in determining which government the German bourgeoisie would prefer to emerge from those elections. It has now become clear that the “Visa Affair” has above all an electoral dimension. For instance, it permits the Christian Democrats to present themselves as vigilant “protectors of the country from foreign criminals” and thus to take away votes from the Neo-Nazis. But above all, it greatly contributed to sealing the fate of the present red-green coalition, thus giving Schröder the necessary hint to call for general elections.

The return of the social question

But as we said at the beginning, what is striking today is that not only the directly implicated political parties, but all the main forces of the German bourgeoisie, have warmly greeted the prospect of new elections. And although it is easy to explain the behaviour of the politicians on the basis of their power interests, this can hardly be said of the captains of industry, the trade union bosses, Church leaders or the stock exchange jobbers. After all, the power of these elites (not to mention military or secret service leaders who do not give their opinions in public) within the state does not at all depend on whether there is a red-green or a black-yellow government in Berlin. It is thus evident that new elections have become an affair of the heart of the central parts of the German bourgeoisie as a whole, and that we cannot explain this through party political calculations.

Of course the new political situation is connected to the economic situation, to the sharpening of the capitalist crisis. What is partly at stake is maintaining or capturing the confidence of investors. The German bourgeoisie wants to demonstrate to the world that the “economic reforms” (i.e. the massive attacks against the working class) are going to continue unabated, indeed in an accelerated manner. There is to be no “lost year” and no “mutual blockage” of the political forces until 2006.

But the very fact that no doubt is being left that the “reform course” will continue – independent of the electoral outcome - shows us that what is at stake is not at all a political change of course. If the red-green coalition does end up being chased out of office, this would certainly not be because the bourgeoisie is dissatisfied with its economic policies, or because the opposition would have an alternative policy to offer! What the Christian Democrats and the FDP have to offer is nothing but the continuation of what the Schröder-Fischer government has been doing over the past seven years, what every government in the world is presently doing.

So why all the fuss and the sudden hurry? The German bourgeoisie today really is reacting to a new and significant factor of social development. This new factor is not the economic crisis as such. This chronic, unceasingly developing, world-wide crisis, which is insolvable within capitalism, has been spreading and deepening for decades now. What is new is that the social question, the issue of the consequences of this crisis for the wage labourers, for the producing and exploited class within capitalism, has returned to the heart of the life of society. This highly significant social question was pushed to the sidelines through the events of 1989, when the demise of Stalinism lent credence to the lie that capitalism had gained a final victory, thus burying the class struggle forever. The delusive appearance of the 1990s – new economy, stock exchange boom, IT revolution – contributed to extending the life of this foam of illusion. But the growing sufferings of the working population, in particular the growing development of mass unemployment, have more and more cleared these illusions away. Today, not only on the periphery of the capitalist system, but in the heartlands of the system, in alleged bastions of the welfare state like Germany, France or Italy, ever broader layers of the working population feel themselves immediately threatened by unemployment and pauperisation. In Germany, even the official unemployment has surpassed the 5 million threshold. These multitudes of the unemployed are re-awakening memories of the economic crisis of 1929. In this process, layers of the population who until now had counted as well paid and highly qualified, are being touched by this unrest. When, as in recent weeks, the hospital doctors in Germany take to the streets, and the staff of Agfa discover that the company has gone bankrupt overnight, we can get an indication of the degree to which, today, the proletariat is confronted with the insecurity of its existence under the sway of wage labour, with the perils, the humiliations and the misery of dependency on capital. Before the eyes of the world, in the consciousness of the proletarians themselves, the social question is making its come back. This obliges the ruling class to react.

The significance of mass unemployment

In a country like Germany, where a particularly brutal increase of mass unemployment is just taking place, the ruling class must try to prevent even the beginnings of the impression that there is no solution for this problem within capitalism. It must do all in its power to create the contrary impression. It must pretend that there is another party available with better recipes for overcoming the problem.

New elections: this is part of the bourgeoisie’s answer to the danger that mass unemployment might enable the wage labourers to recognise, or even to begin to suspect the bankruptcy of the system. Here lies the essence of wage labour – distinguishing it radically from all the previous forms of exploitation. The exploited only have the chance to acquire the necessities of life as long as they can be profitably exploited. The wage labourers are not forced to work through the use of violence, but on the contrary are obliged to themselves go and look for someone who will exploit them, in order to survive. True enough, the bourgeoisie has learnt, in the course of the 20th century, in the face of a mass unemployment that has become more and more permanent, to set up state directed insurance systems, in order to liquidate the budding self-recognition of the situation of the wage labourers. But today, under the pressure of the crisis, the bourgeoisie is obliged to radically reduce these insurance systems precisely at a time when unemployment is becoming more massive and permanent. The crisis thus threatens to open the eyes of the exploited to the realities of class society.

However, it should not be overlooked that the exploiters through their electoral manoeuvres have won valuable time in order to attack the emerging class consciousness of the other main class of capitalist society. Should, against all expectations, the red-green coalition be re-elected, they will at least be able to claim that the majority of the population has itself “admitted” the necessity of “reforms”. Should the government be voted out of office, they can call for giving the more “consistent” reforms of the new government a fair chance. And in the meantime, Social Democracy (both the SPD and the trade unions) – more credibly than today as a government force – can come back to the recent “debate about capitalism” launched by its present party boss Franz Müntefering. Through this debate, we have seen the SPD renewing illusions in the possibility of limiting unemployment through the state limitation of what is called “globalisation” (i.e. through an autarky policy such as in the period of the preparation of World War II). And in the meantime, we can rely on the former SPD party boss Oskar Lafontaine, who has now left the SPD in order to initiate a new left wing electoral alliance with the PDS (the former GDR governing party) on an “anti-globalisation” ticket. This initiative, by the way, seems destined to further reduce the re-election hopes of Schröder.

Democracy, leading weapon of capital

But new elections mean, in addition, the full application of the weapon of democracy against the development of the consciousness, the combativity and the self-confidence of the working class. The bourgeoisie is aware of the growing dissatisfaction among the workers, employees and unemployed. It is also aware that the workers at present – lacking a clear feeling of belonging to one common class, lacking confidence in their own force, which they have not been able to use for a long time, feeling vulnerable in the face of the blackmail of unemployment – have considerable difficulties in entering into struggle.

Here, the bourgeoisie is happy to step in and offer its elections as an apparently more effective and easier means for the exploited to express their indignation and discontent. Instead of holding mass meetings, taking to the streets or going on strike, they want the proletarians to go and vote in order to “get their own back” on the government. That is how democracy works. The government, or a particular party, acts as a lightning conductor which deflects the anger of the population. In allowing it to “punish” one part of its enemy in this way, an independent workers’ struggle is prevented. Instead of worry and indignation maturing into class consciousness and solidarity, they want to convert it into a feeling of blind revenge, satisfied with having “paid back” a culprit. Instead of workers feeling their own force as a class, the bourgeoisie want to atomise the workers in the electoral cabins, where they feel and act as state citizens.

This function of “getting your own back” on the government, was recently fulfilled by the May 29 referendum in France about the EU Constitution. However, the French referendum was not called with the deliberate intention of deflecting the workers from their class terrain. The latter turned out, for the ruling class, to be a pleasant side effect of a rejection of the constitution, which was not at all what the French bourgeoisie wanted. In Germany, on the contrary, where the bourgeoisie usually operates in a politically more organised and effective manner, this effect is intentional. The ruling class wants to make us believe that it will serve workers interests to “punish” the SPD or the government. But democracy as the most powerful weapon of the bourgeoisie serves not least to ensure, via the periodic swapping of places between government and opposition, that this “punishment” does not damage the general interests of the state. Who is going to be bothered about Schröder or Fischer being voted out of office? Both can be sure of their place in history, and of their priveleges too. And the pensions and advantages of the water carriers of the SPD, the members of parliament voted out of the Bundestag or the Landtag, are also assured. This because their policy of defending the interests of a tiny minority against the interests of the working class population will be continued by their sucessors. For the working class, what is at issue can never be to “punish” this or that person or group, but to uncover and tear out the roots of its own exploitation, to liquidate the cause of the suffering and lack of perspective that weighs on the whole of humanity. What’s needed is not a fight against windmills, against single representatives or symptoms of the system, but a conscious struggle against capitalism.

31.05.2005.

This is a slightly abbreviated version of the article appearing in Weltrevolution 130, publication of the ICC in Gemany and Switzerland.

1. In 1916, in the opening chapter of the Junius pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg formulated the historical meaning of the first world war:

"Friedrich Engels once said: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism." What does "regression into barbarism" mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration - a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilization and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales".

2. Almost 90 years later, the report from the laboratory of social history confirms the clarity and precision of Luxemburg's diagnosis. Rosa argued that the conflict that began in 1914 had opened up a "period of unlimited wars" which, if permitted to go on unchecked, would lead to the destruction of civilisation. Only 20 years after the hoped-for rebellion of the proletariat had halted the war, but failed to put an end to capitalism, a second imperialist world war had far surpassed the first in the depth and extent of its barbarism, which now featured not only the industrialised extermination of men on the battlefields, but first and foremost the genocide of whole peoples, the wholesale massacre of civilians, whether in the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka or the firestorms that liquidated Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The record of the period 1914-45 alone is enough to confirm that capitalist society had irreversibly entered its epoch of decline, that it had become a fundamental barrier to the needs of humanity.

3. Contrary to the propaganda of the ruling class, the 60 years since 1945 have in no way invalidated this conclusion - as if capitalism could be in historic decline in one decade and miraculously snap out of it the next. Even before the second imperialist slaughter had ended, new military blocs began to jockey for control of the globe. The US even deliberately postponed the end of the war against Japan, not to spare the lives of its troops, but to make a spectacular display of its awesome military might by obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki - a display aimed first and foremost not at defeated Japan but at the new Russian enemy. But within a short lapse of time, both of the new blocs had equipped themselves with weapons capable not only of destroying civilisation, but of annihilating all life on the planet. For the next five decades, humanity lived under the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction. In the world's 'underdeveloped' regions, millions went hungry but the war machine of the great imperialist powers was fed with all the resources of human labour and ingenuity its insatiable maws demanded; millions more died in the 'wars of national liberation' through which the superpowers conducted their murderous rivalries in Korea, Vietnam, the Indian sub-continent, Africa and the Middle East.

4. MAD was the principal reason advanced by the bourgeoisie for the fact that the world was spared a third and probably final imperialist holocaust: thus, we should learn to love the bomb. In reality, a third world war was staved off

- in an initial period, because it was necessary for the newly formed imperialist blocs to organise themselves and to introduce new ideological themes to mobilise the populations against a new enemy. Furthermore, the economic boom linked to the reconstruction of the countries destroyed by the second world war - a reconstruction financed by the Marshall Plan - allowed for a certain calming of imperialist tensions.

- in a second period, because when the boom brought about by the process of reconstruction came to an end in the late 1960s, capitalism no longer faced a defeated proletariat as it had done in the crisis of the 1930s, but a new generation of workers fully prepared to defend their own class interests against the demands of their exploiters. In the period of decadent capitalism, world war requires a total and active mobilisation of the proletariat: the international waves of workers' struggles that began with the general strike in France in May 1968 showed that the conditions for such a mobilisation were lacking throughout the 70s and 80s.

5. The final outcome of the long rivalry between the US and Russian blocs was thus not world war but the collapse of the latter. Unable to compete economically with the far more advanced US power, incapable of reforming its rigid political institutions, militarily encircled by its rival, and - as the mass strikes in Poland in 1980 demonstrated - unable to pull the proletariat behind its war-drive, the Russian imperialist bloc imploded in 1989. This Triumph of the West was immediately hailed as the dawn of a new period of world peace and prosperity; no less immediately, global imperialist conflicts merely took on a new form as the unity of the western bloc gave way to fierce rivalries between its former components, and a reunified Germany posed its candidature as a major world power to rival the US. In this new phase of imperialist conflicts, however, world war was even lower down the agenda of history because:

- the formation of new military blocs has been retarded by the internal divisions between the powers that would be the logical members of a new bloc facing the USA, in particular, between the most important European powers, Germany, France and Britain. Britain has not abandoned its traditional policy of working to ensure that no major power asserts its domination over Europe, while France has very strong historical reasons for putting limits on any possible subordination to Germany. With the break-down of the old two-bloc discipline, the prevailing trend in international relations is therefore towards 'every man for himself';

- the overwhelming military superiority of the USA, especially compared to Germany, makes it impossible for America's rivals to square up to it directly

- the proletariat remains undefeated. Although the period that opened up with the collapse of the eastern bloc has thrown the proletariat into considerable disarray (in particular, the campaigns about the 'death of communism' and the 'end of the class struggle'), the working class of the major capitalist powers is still not ready to sacrifice itself for a new world carnage.

As a result, the principal military conflicts of the period since 1989 have largely taken the form of 'deflected' wars. The dominant characteristic of these wars is that the leading world power has tried to stem the growing challenge to its global authority by engaging in spectacular displays of force against fourth-rate powers; this was the case with the first Gulf war in 1991, the bombing of Serbia in 1999, and the 'wars against terrorism' in Afghanistan and Iraq which followed the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001. At the same time, these wars have more and more revealed a precise global strategy on the part of the USA: to achieve total domination of the Middle East and Central Asia, and thus to militarily encircle all its major rivals (Europe and Russia), depriving them of naval outlets and making it possible to shut off their energy supplies.

Alongside this grand design - sometimes subordinated to it, sometimes obstructing it - the post-1989 world has also seen an explosion of local and regional conflicts which have spread death and destruction across whole continents. These conflicts have left millions dead, crippled and homeless in a whole series of African countries like the Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, Liberia, or Sierra Leone; and they now threaten to plunge a number of countries in the Middle East and Central Asia into a kind of permanent civil war. Within this process, the growing phenomenon of terrorism, often expressing the intrigues of bourgeois factions no longer controlled by any particular state regime, adds a further element of instability and has already brought these murderous conflicts back to the heartlands of capitalism (September 11, Madrid bombings…).

6. Thus, even if world war is not the concrete threat to mankind that it was for the greater part of the 20th century, the dilemma between socialism and barbarism remains just as urgent as ever. In some ways it is more urgent because while world war demands the active mobilisation of the working class, the latter now faces the danger that it will be progressively and insidiously swamped by a kind of creeping barbarism:

- the proliferation of local and regional wars could devastate entire areas of the planet, thus rendering the proletariat of those regions incapable of making any further contribution to the class war. This applies very clearly to the extremely dangerous rivalry between the two nuclear powers on the Indian subcontinent; but is no less the case with the spiral of military adventures led by the USA. Despite their intention of creating a New World Order under the benevolent auspices of Uncle Sam, each one has added to an accumulating legacy of chaos and division, and the historic crisis of US leadership has only increased in depth and gravity. Iraq today provides clear proof of this, and yet without even making a show of rebuilding Iraq, the US is being driven towards new threats against Syria and Iran. This perspective is not invalidated by the recent attempts of US diplomacy to ‘build bridges’ with Europe over Syria, Iran or Iraq. On the contrary, the current crisis in the Lebanon is clear evidence that the USA cannot delay in its efforts to attain complete mastery in the Middle East, an ambition which can only greatly accelerate imperialist tensions overall, since none of the USA’s major rivals can afford to allow the US free rein in this strategically vital zone. This perspective is also confirmed by the USA’s increasingly brazen intervention against Russian influence in the countries of the former USSR (Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgystan), and by the serious disagreements which have arisen over the question of arms to China. At the very time that China is underlining its growing imperialist ambitions by shaking a mailed fist at Taiwan stoking up tensions with Japan, France and Germany have been at the forefront of trying to revoke the embargo on arms sales to China introduced after the massacre of Tien An Man Square ;

- the present period is marked by the philosophy of 'every man for himself' not only at the level of imperialist rivalries, but also at the very heart of society. The acceleration of social atomisation and all the ideological filth that arrives with it (gangsterisation, the flight into suicide, irrationality and despair) bears with it the threat of permanently undermining the capacity of the working class to recapture its class identity and thus its unique class perspective of a different world, based not on social disintegration but on real community and solidarity;

- to the threat of imperialist war the maintenance of the capitalist mode of production so far past its sell-by date has uncovered a new menace, one equally capable of destroying the possibility of a new and human social formation: the increasing threat to the planetary environment. As successive scientific conferences warn of the mounting danger posed in particular by global warming, the bourgeoisie shows itself utterly incapable of taking even the minimum measures required to reduce greenhouse emissions. The south east Asian Tsunami exposed the unwillingness of the bourgeoisie to lift a finger to spare the human race from the devastating power of uncontrolled nature; the predicted consequences of global warming would be vastly more destructive and extensive. Furthermore, because the worst of these consequences still appear remote, it is extremely difficult for the majority of the proletariat to see them as a motive for struggling against the capitalist system today.

7. For all these reasons, marxists are justified not only in concluding that the perspective of socialism or barbarism is as valid today as it was in 1916, but also in saying that the spreading intensity of barbarism today could undermine the future bases of socialism. They are justified in concluding not only that capitalism has long been a historically obsolete social formation, but also that the period of decline that definitively began with the first world war has entered into its final phase, the phase of decomposition. This is not the decomposition of an organism that is already dead; capitalism is rotting, turning gangrenous on its feet. It is passing through a long and painful death agony, and in its dying convulsions it threatens to drag the whole of humanity down with it.

8. The capitalist class has no future to offer humanity. It has been condemned by history. And precisely for this reason it must strain all its resources to hide and deny this judgment, to pour scorn on the marxist prediction that capitalism, like previous modes of production, was doomed to become decadent and to disappear. It has thus secreted a succession of ideological antibodies, all aimed at refuting this fundamental conclusion of the historical materialist method:

- even before the epoch of decline had definitively opened up, the revisionist wing of social democracy began to contest Marx's 'catastrophist' vision and argue that capitalism could continue indefinitely, and that as a result socialism would come about not through revolutionary violence but through a process of peaceful democratic change

- in the 1920s, the staggering rates of industrial growth in the USA led a genius like Calvin Coolidge to proclaim the triumph of capitalism on the very eve of the great crash of 29

- during the reconstruction period after world war two, bourgeois leaders like Macmillan told the workers that "you've never had it so good", sociologists theorised about the "consumer society" and the "embourgoisement" of the working class, while radicals like Marcuse looked for "new vanguards" to replace the apathetic proletarians

- since 1989, we have had a real overproduction crisis of new theories aiming to explain how different it all is today and how everything Marx thought has been invalidated: the End of History, the Death of Communism, The Demise of the Working Class, Globalisation, the Microprocessor Revolution, the Internet Economy, the rise of new economic giants in the Far East, the latest being China and India. These ideas are so pervasive that they have deeply infected a whole new generation of those who are asking questions about the future capitalism has in store for the planet, and, even more alarmingly, have been picked up and wrapped in synthetic marxist theory by elements of the communist left itself.

In short, marxism has had to wage a permanent battle against all those who seize on the slightest sign of life in the capitalist system to argue that it has a bright future in front of it. But time and time again, after maintaining a long-term and historical vision against these capitulations to immediate appearance, it has been aided in its battle by the sharp blows of the historical movement:

- the blithe 'optimism' of the revisionists was shattered by the truly catastrophic events of 1914-1918, and by the revolutionary response of the working class that they provoked

- Calvin Coolidge and Co. were rudely interrupted by the most profound economic crisis in capitalism's history, which resulted in the unmitigated disaster of the second imperialist world war

- those who declared that economic crisis was a thing of the past were refuted by the reappearance of the crisis in the late 60s; and the international resurgence of workers’ struggles in response to this crisis made it difficult to maintain the fiction that the working class had fused with the bourgeoisie

The current spate of theories about 'New Capitalism', 'Post-Industrial Society' and the rest are similarly doomed. Already a number of key elements of this ideology have been exposed by the remorseless development of the crisis: the hopes put in the Tiger and Dragon economies were crushed by the sudden slide which hit these countries in 1997; the dot.com revolution proved to be a mirage almost as soon as it had been proclaimed; the 'new industries' constructed around computing and communications have shown themselves to be no less vulnerable to recession than the 'old industries' like steel and shipbuilding. And despite being pronounced dead on numerous occasions, the working class continues to raise its head, as for example in the movements in Austria and France in 2003, or the struggles in Spain, Britain and Germany in 2004.

9. It would nevertheless be a mistake to underestimate the power of these ideologies in the present period, because, like all mystifications, they are based on a series of partial truths, for example:

- faced with the crisis of overproduction and the ruthless demands of competition, capitalism in the main centres of its system has in the last few decades created huge industrial wastelands and pushed millions of workers either into permanent unemployment or into unproductive, low paid jobs in the 'service' sectors; for the same reason it has relocated huge amounts of industrial jobs to the low-wage areas of the 'third world'. Many traditional sectors of the industrial working class have been decimated through this process, which has aggravated the difficulties of the proletariat to maintain its class identity;

- the development of new technologies has made it possible to increase both rates of exploitation and the speed of circulation of capital and commodities on a world scale

- the reflux in the class struggle over the last two decades have made it hard for a new generation to see the working class as the unique agent of social change

- the capitalist class has shown a remarkable ability to 'manage' the crisis of its system by manipulating and even deforming its own laws of operation

Other examples could be given. But none of them put into question the fundamental senility of the capitalist system.

10. The decadence of capitalism has never meant a final and sudden collapse of the system, as certain elements of the German left argued in the 1920s, or a total halt in the productive forces, as Trotsky mistakenly thought in the 1930s. As Marx observed, the bourgeoisie becomes intelligent in times of crisis and it has learned from its mistakes. The 1920s were the last moment that the bourgeoisie really believed it could go back to the laissez-faire liberalism of the 19th century; this for the simple reason that the world war, while ultimately a product of the system's economic contradictions, had broken out before these contradictions could reach their full import at a 'purely' economic level. The crisis of 1929 was thus the first global economic crisis of the decadent period. But having experienced it, the bourgeoisie recognised the need for fundamental change. Despite ideological pretensions to the contrary, no serious faction of the bourgeoisie would ever again question the necessity for the state to retain overall control over the economy; the need to abandon any notion of 'balancing the books' in favour of deficit spending and financial trickery of all kinds; the necessity to maintain a huge arms sector at the centre of all economic activity. By the same token, capitalism has gone to considerable lengths to avoid the out and out economic autarky of the 1930s. Despite growing pressures towards commercial war and the break-down of international bodies inherited from the period of the blocs, the majority of these bodies have survived as the major capitalist powers have understood the necessity to put some limits on unrestrained economic competition between national capitals.

Thus capitalism has kept itself alive through the conscious intervention of the bourgeoisie, which can no longer afford to trust the invisible hand of the market. It is true that the solutions also become part of the problem - the recourse to debt clearly piles up enormous problems for the future, the bloating of the state and the arms sector generate tremendous inflationary pressures. These problems have since the 1970s given rise to different economic policies, to alternating emphases on 'Keynsianism' or 'neo-Liberalism', but since neither policy can get to the real causes of the crisis, neither approach will ever achieve final victory. What is noteworthy is the bourgeoisie's determination to keep its economy going at all costs, its ability to hold off the inherent tendency towards collapse by maintaining a gigantic facade of economic activity fuelled by debt. Throughout the 1990s the US economy led the way in this regard; and now that even this artificial 'growth' is beginning to falter, it is the turn of the Chinese bourgeoisie to surprise the world: considering the inability of the USSR and the Stalinist states of eastern Europe to politically adapt to the necessity for economic 'reform', the Chinese bureaucracy has pulled off an amazing feat merely by surviving, let alone by presiding over the current 'boom'. Critics of the notion of capitalist decadence have even pointed to this phenomenon as proof that the system still has the capacity for real growth and development

In reality, the present Chinese ‘boom’ in no way calls into question the overall decline in the world capitalist economy. In contrast to the ascendant period of capitalism:

- China’s current industrial growth is not part of a global process of expansion; on the contrary, it has as its direct corollary the de-industrialisation and stagnation of the most advanced economies who have re-located to China in search of cheap labour costs;

- the Chinese working class does not have the perspective of a steady rise in living standards, but is predicated upon increasingly savage attacks on living and working conditions and on the continued impoverishment of huge sectors of the proletariat and peasantry outside the main areas of growth;

- China’s frenzied growth will contribute not to a global expansion of the world market but to an deepening of the world crisis of overproduction: given the restricted consumption of the Chinese masses, the bulk of China’s products are geared towards export towards the more developed capitalisms;

- The fundamental irrationality of China’s swelling economy is highlighted by the terrible levels of pollution which it has generated – a sure sign that the planetary environment can only be harmed by the pressure on each nation to exploit its natural resources to the absolute limit in order to compete on the world market;

- Like the system as a whole, the entirety of China’s growth founded on debts that can never be reabsorbed through a real expansion of the world market.

Indeed, the fragility of all such spurts of growth is recognised by the ruling class itself, which is increasingly alarmed by the Chinese bubble. This is not because it is worried about the terrifying levels of exploitation upon which it is based - far from it, these ferocious levels are precisely what makes China such an attractive proposition for investment - but because the global economy is becoming too dependent on the Chinese market and the consequences of a Chinese collapse are becoming too horrible to contemplate, not just for China, which would be plunged back into the violent anarchy of the 1930s, but for the world economy as a whole.

11. Far from refuting the reality of decadence, capitalism's economic growth today confirms it. This growth has nothing in common with the cycles of accumulation in the 19th century, based on a real expansion into outlying fields of production, on the conquest of new extra-capitalist markets. It is true that the onset of decadence occurred well before the total exhaustion of such markets, and that capitalism has continued to make the best possible use of such remaining economic areas as an outlet for its production: the growth of Russia during the 1930s and the integration of remaining peasant economies in Europe during the period of post-war reconstruction are examples of this. But the dominant trend by far in the epoch of decadence is the use of an artificial market, based on debt. It is now openly admitted that the frenzied 'consumerism' of the past two decades has been based entirely on household debt of staggering proportions: a trillion pounds in Britain, 25% of the GNP in America, while governments not only encourage such indebtedness but practice the same policy on an even vaster scale.

12. There is another sense in which capitalist economic growth today is what Marx called “growth in decay” (Grundrisse): it is the principal factor in the destruction of the global environment. The runaway levels of pollution in China, the vast contribution made by the USA to the sum total of greenhouse gases, the frenzied exploitation of the remaining rainforests...the more capitalism is committed to growth the more it must admit that it has no solution whatever to the ecological crisis, which can only be solved by placing global production on a new basis, "a plan for living for the human species" (Bordiga) in harmony with its natural environment.

13. Whether in boom or 'recession' the underlying reality is the same: capitalism can no longer spontaneously regenerate itself. There is no longer a natural cycle of accumulation. In the first phase of decadence from 1914-1968, the cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction replaced the old cycle of boom and bust; but the GCF were right in 1945 to argue that there was no automatic drive towards reconstruction after the ruin of the world war. In the final analysis, what convinced the US bourgeoisie to revive the European and Japanese economies with the Marshall Plan was the need to annex these zones to its imperialist sphere of influence and to prevent them falling into the hands of the rival bloc. Thus the greatest economic 'boom' of the 20th century was fundamentally the result of inter-imperialist competition.

14. In decadence, economic contradictions drive capitalism towards war, but war does not resolve these contradictions. On the contrary, it deepens them. In any case the cycle of crisis war and reconstruction is over and the crisis today, unable to debouch on world war, is the prime factor in accelerating the decomposition of the system. It thus continues to push the system towards its own self-destruction.

15. The argument that capitalism is a decadent system has often been criticised on the grounds that it leads to fatalism - the idea of automatic collapse and spontaneous overthrow by the working class, thus removing any need for the intervention of a revolutionary party. In fact, the bourgeoisie has shown that it will not permit its system to collapse economically. Nevertheless, left to its own dynamic, capitalism will destroy itself through wars and other disasters. In this sense, it is indeed 'fated' to disappear. But what is anything but fatal is the response of the proletariat. As Luxemburg put it in the same pages as the previously-cited passage on socialism or barbarism:

“Socialism is the first popular movement in world history that has set itself the goal of bringing human consciousness, and thereby free will, into play in the social actions of mankind. For this reason, Friedrich Engels designated the final victory of the socialist proletariat a leap of humanity from the animal world into the realm of freedom. This "leap" is also an iron law of history bound to the thousands of seeds of a prior torment-filled and all-too-slow development. But this can never be realized until the development of complex material conditions strikes the incendiary spark of conscious will in the great masses. The victory of socialism will not descend from heaven. It can only be won by a long chain of violent tests of strength between the old and the new powers. The international proletariat under the leadership of the Social Democrats will thereby learn to try to take its history into its own hands; instead of remaining a will-less football, it will take the tiller of social life and become the pilot to the goal of its own history”.

Communism is thus the first society in which mankind will have conscious mastery of its own productive powers. And since in the proletarian struggle there can be no separation between ends and means, the movement towards communism can only be “the self-conscious movement of the immense majority” (Communist Manifesto): the deepening and extension of class consciousness is the indispensable measure of progress towards the revolution and the ultimate supercession of capitalism. This process is necessarily an extremely difficult, uneven and heterogeneous one because it is the emanation of an exploited class which has no economic power in the old society and is constantly subjected to the ideological domination and manipulation of the ruling class. In no sense can it be guaranteed in advance: on the contrary, there exists the real possibility that the proletariat, faced with the unprecedented immensity of the task, will fail to live up to its historic responsibility, with all the terrible consequences for humanity that would flow from it.

16. The highest point hitherto reached by class consciousness was the October insurrection in 1917. This has been strenuously denied by bourgeois historiography and all its pale reflections in anarchism and related ideologies, for whom October was merely a putsch by the power-hungry Bolsheviks; but October represented a fundamental recognition within the proletariat that there was no way forward for mankind as a whole but to make the revolution in all countries. Nevertheless, this understanding did not grip the proletariat in sufficient depth and extent; the revolutionary wave failed because the workers of the world, and principally of Europe, were unable to develop the overall political understanding that would have enabled them to respond adequately to the tasks of the new epoch of wars and revolutions that opened in 1914. The result of this, by the end of the 1920s, was the longest and deepest retreat by the working class in its history: not so much at the level of combativity, since the 1930s and 40s were punctuated with major outbreaks of class militancy, but above all at the level of consciousness, since politically speaking the working class rallied actively to the anti-fascist programmes of the bourgeoisie, as in Spain 1936-39 or France in 1936, or to the defence of democracy and the Stalinist “fatherland” during the second world war. This profound reflux in consciousness was reflected in the near-disappearance of revolutionary political minorities by the 1950s.

17. The historic resurgence of struggles in 1968 once again posed the long-term perspective of the proletarian revolution, but this was only explicit and conscious in a small minority of the class, as reflected in the rebirth of the revolutionary movement internationally. The waves of struggle between 1968 and 1989 did see important advances at the level of consciousness, but they tended to be at the level of the immediate combat (questions of extension, organization, etc). Their weakest point was their lack of political depth, partly the reflection of the hostility to politics that was a result of the Stalinist counter-revolution. On the political level, the bourgeoisie was largely able to impose its own agendas, first by offering the prospect of change through installing the left in power (1970s) and by giving the left in opposition the task of sabotaging struggles from the inside (1980s). Although they were capable of preventing the development of a course towards war, the inability of the waves of struggle from 68 to 89 to take on a historic, political dimension determined the passage to the phase of decomposition, The historic event marking this passage – the collapse of the eastern bloc – was both the result of decomposition and a factor in its aggravation. Thus the dramatic changes at the end of the 80s were at the same time a product of the proletariat’s political difficulties; and, as they gave rise to the propaganda barrage about the end of communism and the class struggle, a key element in bringing about a serious retreat in class consciousness - to the point where the proletariat even loss sight of its basic class identity. Thus the bourgeoisie has been able to declare a final victory over the working class and the working class has so far not been able to respond with sufficient strength to refute this claim.

18. In spite of all its difficulties, the period of retreat has by no means seen the ‘end of the class struggle’. The 1990s was interspersed with a number of movements which showed that the proletariat still had untapped reserves of combativity (for example in 1992 and 1997). However, none of these movements represented a real shift at the level of consciousness. Hence the importance of the more recent movements which, though lacking the spectacular and overnight impact of a movement like that of 1968 in France, nevertheless constitute a turning point in the balance of class forces. The struggles of 2003-2005 have the following characteristics:

- they have involved significant sectors of the working class in countries at the heart of world capitalism (as in France 2003);

- they have been preoccupied with more explicitly political questions; in particular the question of pensions raised in the struggles in France and elsewhere poses the problem of the future that capitalist society holds in store for all of us;

- they have seen the re-emergence of Germany as a focal point for workers’ struggles, for the first time since the revolutionary wave;

- the question of class solidarity has been raised in wider and more explicit way than at any time since the struggles of the 80s, most notably in the recent movements in Germany

- they have been accompanied by the emergence of a new generation of elements looking for political clarity. This new generation has manifested itself both in the new influx of overtly politicized elements and in the new layers of workers entering the struggle for the first time. As evidenced in certain important demonstrations, the basis is being forged for the unity between the new generation and the ‘generation of 68’ – both the political minority which rebuild the communist movement in the 60s and 70s and the wider strata of workers who have been through the rich experience of class struggles between 68 and 89.

19. The subterranean maturation of consciousness, denied by the empiricist distortion of marxism which sees only the surface of reality and not its deepest underlying tendencies, has not been obliterated by the general reflux in consciousness since 89. It is a characteristic of this process that it becomes manifest only in a minority, but the growth of this minority is the expression of the advance and development of a wider phenomenon within the class. Already after 89 we saw a small minority of politicized element questioning the bourgeois campaigns about the ‘death of communism’. This minority has now been reinforced by a new generation preoccupied with the whole direction of bourgeois society. At the most general level this is the expression of the undefeated nature of the proletariat, of the maintenance of the historic course towards massive class confrontations which opened up in 1968. But at a more specific level the ‘turning point’ of 2003 and the emergence of a new generation of searching elements are evidence that the proletariat is at the beginning of a second attempt to launch an assault on the capitalist system, following the failure of the attempt of 68-89. Although at the day-to-day level the proletariat is faced with the apparently basic task of reaffirming its class identity, behind this problem lies the prospect of a far closer intertwining of the immediate struggle with the political struggle. The questions posed by struggles in the phase of decomposition will more and more be around seemingly ‘abstract’ but in fact more global issues like the necessity for class solidarity against the ambient atomization, the attacks on the social wage, the omnipresence of war, the threat to the planetary environment – in short, the question of what future this society holds in store, and thus, the question of a different kind of society.

20. Within this process of politicisation, two elements which up till now have tended to have an inhibiting effect on the class struggle are destined to become increasingly important as stimuli to the movements of the future: the question of mass unemployment, and the question of war.

During the struggles of the 1980s when mass unemployment was becoming an increasingly obvious fact, neither the struggle of the employed workers against impending lay-offs, nor the resistance of the unemployed in the streets, reached significant levels. There was no movement of the unemployed on anything like the scale reached during the 1930s, even though the latter was a period of profound defeat for the working class. In the recessions of the 80s, the unemployed faced a terrible atomization, especially the younger generation of proletarians who had never had any experience of collective labour and combat. Even when employed workers did launch wide-scale struggles against redundancies, as in the British mining industry, the negative outcome of these movements has been used by the ruling class to reinforce feelings of passivity and hopelessness, demonstrated recently by the response to the bankruptcy of Rover cars in Britain, where workers’ only ‘choice’ is presented as being between one or other set of new bosses to keep the company running. Nevertheless, given the narrowing of the bourgeoisie’s margin of manoeuvre and its increasing inability to offer even the minimum of benefits to the unemployed, the question of unemployment is set to develop a far more subversive side, facilitating solidarity between employed and unemployed, and pushing the class as a whole to reflect more deeply and actively on the bankruptcy of the system.

The same dynamic can be observed with the question of war. In the early 90s, the first major wars of the phase of decomposition (Gulf, Balkans) tended to reinforce the feelings of powerlessness which had been induced by the campaigns around the collapse of the eastern bloc, while the pretext of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Africa and the Balkans could still have a semblance of credibility. Since 2001 and the ‘war on terrorism’, however, the mendacity and hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie’s justification for war has become increasingly evident, even if the growth of huge pacifist movements has largely soaked up the political questioning this has provoked. Furthermore, the current wars are having a much more direct impact on the working class, even if this still mainly limited to countries directly involved in these conflicts. In the USA, this has manifested itself through the number of families affected by death and injury to proletarians in uniform, but even more significantly by the awesome economic costs of military adventures, which have risen in direct proportion to cuts in the social wage. And as it becomes apparent that capitalism’s militarist tendencies are not only an ever-growing spiral, but one over which the ruling class has less and less control, the problem of war and its connection to the crisis is also going to lead to a far deeper and wider reflection about the stakes of history.

21. In a paradoxical sense, the immensity of these questions is one of the main reasons why the present revival of struggles seems so limited and unspectacular in comparison to the movements which marked the resurgence of the proletariat the end of the 1960s. Faced with vast problems like the world economic crisis, the destruction of the global environment, or the spiral of militarism, the daily defensive struggle can seem irrelevant and impotent. And in a sense this reflects a real understanding that there is no solution to the contradictions assailing capitalism today. But while in the 1970s the bourgeoisie had before it a whole panoply of mystifications about the possible ways of ensuring a better life, the present attempts of the bourgeoisie to pretend that we are living in an epoch of unprecedented growth and prosperity more and more resemble the desperate denials of a dying man unable to admit his impending demise. The decadence of capitalism is the epoch of social revolution because the struggles of the exploited can no longer lead to any real amelioration in their condition; and however difficult it may be to move from the defensive to the offensive levels of the struggle, the class will have no choice but to make this difficult and daunting leap. And like all such qualitative leaps, it is being preceded by all kinds of small preparatory steps, from strikes around bread and butter issues to the formation of tiny discussion groups all around the globe.

22 Faced with the perspective of the politicization of the struggle, revolutionary political organisations have a unique and irreplaceable role. However, the conjunction of the growing effects of decomposition with long-standing theoretical and organizational weaknesses and opportunism in the majority of proletarian political organizations have exposed the incapacity of the majority of these groups to respond to the challenge posed by history. This is illustrated most clearly by the negative dynamic in which the IBRP has been caught up for some time: not only in its total inability to understand the significance of the new phase of decomposition, compounded by an abandonment of a key theoretical concept like that of the decadence of capitalism, but even more disastrously in its flouting of the basic norms of proletarian solidarity and behaviour, via its flirtation with parasitism and adventurism. This regression is all the more serious in that the premises are now being laid for the construction of the world communist party. At the same time, the fact that the groups of the proletarian milieu are more and more disqualifying themselves from the process which leads to the formation of the class party only highlights the crucial role which the ICC has been called upon to play within this process. It is increasingly clear that the party of the future will not be the result of the ‘democratic’ addition of the different groups of the milieu, but that the ICC already constitutes the skeleton of the future party. But for the party to become flesh, the ICC must prove itself equal to the tasks imposed by the development of the class struggle and the emergence of the new generation of searching elements.

In the midst of all the statements on the bombings in London, most of which are only notable for their varying levels of hypocrisy, we have become aware of two statements, both from the libertarian and anarchist milieu, that attempt to defend a class position.[1] [141] One is from the libcom.org website,[2] [142] the other from the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation (ZACF) of South Africa.[3] [143]

            The ZACF begin by declaring that they “stand foursquare with the working and poor people” who were the targets of the bombings, while the libcom.org statement deplores “the horrific attacks on innocent people this morning in London”. They then deal with the question of terrorism: “Terrorist actions are completely at odds with any struggle for a freer, fairer society and never help oppressed people in any part of the globe. Instead violence against civilians is a tool of states and proto-states every bit as brutal as the ones they profess to oppose” (libcom.org); “…we are unrepentant in our bitter opposition to terrorism in all forms, whether driven by state or sub-state opportunism” (ZACF). The libcom.org statement ends by declaring solidarity “with all people fighting exploitation and oppression in all its forms, from opponents to the occupation of Iraq here to those in Iraq who are opposing both the occupying forces and the ultra-reactionary Islamists that the Occupation helps strengthen”; while the ZACF conclude: ”We, the ‘great unwashed’, are the only thing that stands between terrorists - whether they lurk in the shadows or bask on TV - and the barbarism they attempt to midwife”.

            The importance of both statements is that they grasp something of the fundamental fact that terror, like imperialism, is not a function of this or that country, or a result of one foreign policy rather than another, but is a product of capitalism as a whole from which no state can stand apart. As we say in our own statement: “The truth is that Blair’s values and Bin Laden’s values are exactly the same. Both are equally prepared to cause death and destruction to innocent people in pursuit of their sordid aims. The only difference is that Blair is a big imperialist gangster and Bin Laden is a smaller one”. ('World Leaders', 'International Terrorists' – all of them massacre the workers!) [144]

The workers’ movement has always rejected terrorism as standing opposed to the interests of the working class. Suicide bombings are not ‘weapons of the oppressed’ anymore than IRA car bombings, shootings and beatings were before them, or the bombs planted in cafes by the ‘anti-imperialist’ forces in the Vietnam War before that or the actions of the terrorist gangs that helped create the state of Israel before that. This year will see the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest terrorist bombings of all time: the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[4] [145] Terror has always been a weapon of the bourgeoisie, whether it be the genocide committed against native peoples during the colonial era, the slaughter of workers after the revolution of 1919 in Germany or the Nazi concentration camps and the democratic firebombing of Dresden during the second world war. The ZACF statement is the clearer of the two on this point: “the only beneficiaries of today's global ‘strategy of tension’ (the misnamed ‘war on terror’), that thinks nothing of the lives or ordinary people are those who, like the vultures of the G8 elites roosting at Gleneagles, are left cold by the pleas of humanity”. In contrast, the libcom.org statement echoes the leftists in arguing that: “The British Government, by sending British soldiers to kill and die in Iraq and Afghanistan has made all of us a target for terrorists in their pursuit of increased profit and power at the expense of ordinary working people”. It is not that there is no truth in this statement, the actions of one power will always provoke a response from its rivals, but the error is the suggestion that this could be avoided by a change in policy, thereby implying that peace is an option under capitalism. It is because this is impossible, because all that capitalism can bring is increasing war, terror and misery, that movements such as Stop the War and the Make Poverty History reinforce the grip of the bourgeoisie.

            Both statements suffer from this lack of precision about the nature of capitalism and both reflect a certain ‘liberal’ approach in contrasting ‘the people’ to ‘the state’. For the ZACF “What matters is that humanity refuses to be led like sheep to the slaughter by their leaders” while detecting in the actions of “the G8 elites” the “stench of fascism”. The first loses sight of the fact that it is only the offensive action of the working class against capitalism that can end the slaughter, while the second implicitly sees current developments as undemocratic, whereas in reality democracy is as bloodstained as any fascism or Stalinism. Similarly, libcom.org’s solidarity with “all people fighting exploitation and oppression in all its forms” also lacks the necessary clarity about the role of the working class. There is no surprise in these weaknesses since they reflect anarchism’s roots in radical liberalism. However, it is possible for them to be overcome if the militants who produced these two statements continue their efforts to defend a class position.

The hypocrisy of the left

The strength and sincerity of the positions taken by libcom.org and the ZACF can be seen by comparing them with those of the SWP and George Galloway.

            The SWP declared that “Our thoughts are with all those killed and wounded in this morning’s terrible attacks in London” (statement on website, 7/7/05) while Galloway, on behalf of Respect, stated “We extend our condolences to the families and loved ones of those who have lost their lives today and our heartfelt sympathy to all those who have been injured by the bombs in London” (statement on website, 7/7/05). Both present the current policy of the British state as the immediate cause of the bombings: “if the British government continues on the course Tony Blair has set, these will not be the only innocent people to suffer” (SWP statement, 13/7/05); “We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring such warnings” (Galloway, ibid).

            The current state of terror is the result of bad policy decisions by governments, the US first and foremost of course, that have created a situation where the only possible opposition seems to be terror. The SWP asks “how could four ordinary young men from Yorkshire be driven to blow themselves up in London?” and then lists the wars and atrocities in Iraq and elsewhere that “produced the swamp of bitterness that Osama bin Laden tapped”. They conclude: “So, like the rest of us, they will have raged. But they will also have despaired. Then they succumbed, like other desperate young people on every continent at different times over the last 150 years, to the disastrous fantasy that they could rid the world of violence by hurling back a portion of it in some act aimed at innocent people.

“When people in the Catholic ghettoes of Northern Ireland found their cries for justice ignored and violently repressed in the 1960s, some turned to terrorism. The repression of ordinary Catholics served merely to prolong the bloodshed for 30 years until there was finally some attempt to address the political causes of the conflict.

“The repressive measures the government has introduced and is contemplating now will also bring further grievances, further bitterness that feeds a terrorist reaction.” (Statement of 13/7/05).

Galway’s argument is the same, but with an added dash of personal egoism: “A swamp of hatred towards this country has been watered by the invasion and occupation of Iraq, by the daily destruction of Palestinian homes and by the occupation of Afghanistan… I said nearly four years ago that if they handled 9/11 in the wrong way they would create 10,000 bin Ladens. Does anyone doubt that 10,000 bin Ladens at least have been created by the events of the past few years?”

For both there is a simple way out: “There has to be a dramatic reverse in policy, at home and abroad. Pulling the troops out of Iraq will begin to drain the swamp of bitterness that nurtures terrorism. It will not end the threat of terrorism overnight, but it is the necessary first step. The majority of people in the US have turned against Bush’s war — we must intensify the pressure on the British government to break from him as well” (SWP); “The only way out of this morass is to reverse the policies that have taken us into it. As the Spanish people showed us last year, the way out is to withdraw from Iraq and to break from Bush’s war on terror.

“It is to address the grievances across the region, not to add to them by support for Israel’s Ariel Sharon, and for the corrupt kings and presidents of Arabia” (Galloway).

This is not the simple open support for ‘resistance’ movements of the past but a more sophisticated and ‘sorrowful’ and hypocritical ‘understanding’, which reflects, in part, the leading roles played by Galloway and the SWP in the so-called peace movement. This more discreet approach is evident in the image of the ‘swamp of bitterness and hatred’ that both use. This swamp has supposedly been created by the actions of the US and its British sidekick and the suicide bombings in Palestine, Iraq, New York, Madrid and now London are a consequence. Those who resist are 'justified', while their methods are merely understood and excused. This was expressed more explicitly by another leftist (and now media pundit), Tariq Ali, through a historical comparison: “Throughout the Vietnam War the US denounced the Vietnamese when they planted bombs in the capital, Saigon. But the resistance had to do this to make the country ungovernable. It is not a pretty thing. But the character of the occupation determines the nature of the resistance — this is true in every single instance.” (From SWP website). The implied message is that the resistance in Iraq today also seeks to make it ungovernable and that the London bombings bring this home to one of the invaders. Today it is more effective to put this position across in the language of pacifism, just as the great powers hide their imperialist appetites under a cloak of humanitarianism. In the end, behind the lies and hypocrisy, there is no difference between Blair and Galloway, between Labour and the SWP: all champion peace through terror; all are part of capitalist barbarism, all oppose socialism. The ZACF and libcom.org, for all of their confusions, are at least trying to stand against the tide of capitalist barbarism whereas the SWP and Galloway are part of it.

North, 23/7/05.

The following article appeared as a ‘box’ in the most recent publication of the ‘Internal Fraction of the ICC’

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Article from no 31 of the Bulletin of the ‘Internal Fraction of the ICC’

 

The ICC of today: “but in contrast to the 1968-89 period, when the outcome of these class contradictions could only be world war or world revolution, the new period opens up a third alternative: the destruction of humanity..” [1] (Resolution on the international situation, International Review 113, 2003, we underline once again) 

The ICC from yesterday, back to its origins (1974) :

‘This theory of the bureaucracy…claims that the historic dilemma is not between capitalism and socialism but that a third solution has arisen with the bureaucratic class. We categorically reject any theory which tends to spread the belief that history offers another alternative to capitalism that is not socialism” (‘Defence of the proletarian character of October’, 1965, reproduced in the Bulletin d’Etude and de Discussion de Revolution Internationale, no.4 January 1974) underlined by the IFICC.

When will there be a serious response on this question which develops this revision, this third way? Recognising it as a gross error and a revisionist and opportunist deviation? Another alternative that liquidationism cannot escape, whether they try to remain silent or not. In one way or another. The material, historical facts cannot be ignored. And what could be more historic, more material for a communist organisation, than a congress resolution?

A last word on this. This text (of 1965) was written by the comrade MC, now deceased, from whom the liquidationists are trying at any price to claim the exclusive inheritance, the ‘red thread’ being assumed by that great celebrity, Peter. ‘The IFICC doesn’t walk ‘in the footsteps of MC’, it walks over all the principles which he always defended’, they dare to affirm on their website – this article which is simply announced in the June RI: they no longer venture to put these kinds of documents in their papers [2]. And for good reason: it’s not the first time that the writings of the militant MC, and not confidences whispered (according to them) in the ears of …Peter and his partner are there to denounce their current policies. Here again, there are two opposing methods.

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Our comments

So the IFICC maintains its fiction: they are the Real ICC. They are the true heirs of MC, the militant of the Italian left who played a crucial role in the foundation of the ICC. (and in doing so, they also maintain their repulsive campaign of personalised attacks on our militants). 

The ICC’s website article they mention (see the French language pages) has already shown the falsity of their claim to be walking in MC’s footsteps. The greater part of MC’s political life was spent in unremitting opposition to the opportunist course adopted by that wing of the Italian left which formed the Partito Ccomunista Internazionalista  in 1943, an opportunism continued  by both descendants of the 1952 split in the PCInt, the Bordigists and the IBRP. The IFICC of today, by contrast, has become a professional flatterer of these currents, especially of the IBRP, and this at the very time that the latter’s abandonment of proletarian principles of behaviour and of fundamental theoretical acquisitions- above all the theory of capitalist decadence – has reached unprecedented depths. 

No less did MC lead the struggle against parasitism and gangsterism in the workers’ movement, in particular, the struggle against the political thievery of the Chenier tendency of 1981, which has not had any equal… till the IFICC’s blatant robbery of ICC money and resources (justified by the IBRP as being acceptable for “leading elements” of a proletarian organisation).

In the IFICC’s latest attempt to recruit MC against the organisation to which he devoted the last two decades of his life, we are presented with proof that MC’s words contradict the alleged revisionism of the ICC concerning the theory of decomposition, which argues that following the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989 and the unchaining of a war of each against all on the imperialist front, humanity now faces the danger that it could be dragged into barbarism and even ultimate destruction not by third world war but by the acceleration of all the horrors of a decaying system – regional wars, ecological catastrophe, epidemics, etc. This is not a ‘third way’ which is neither capitalism or socialism, not some new form of social system – which is what MC was polemicisng against – but an alternative route into barbarism, even more insidious than that of a third world war. Socialism or barbarism remains the only historical alternative.

The members of the IFICC are not confused about this. They are deliberately lying. They know perfectly well that this vision of a ‘new’ route into barbarism was contained not only the congress resolution of 2003, but in all the fundamental texts on decomposition which the ICC has published since it developed this idea in the late 80s, not least the Theses on Decomposition adopted in 1990, which they voted for and defended for several years after that [3].

They also know perfectly well that the ICC militant who first put forward the theory of decomposition was none other than MC, who, following the terrorist attacks on the Paris metro in 1986, had begun to recognise that something profound was changing at the level of relations between states, and that the class struggle, for all its militancy, was not offering humanity the clear perspective of a new society. 

If there is a revision here, it is the members of the IFICC who are the revisionists. They have ‘revised’ (in fact, abandoned) the theory of decomposition, partly because it is unpopular with the groups they are trying to flatter. They have ‘revised’ (in fact, abandoned) the contribution of MC both at the level of theory and of organisational behaviour.  And in shamelessly declaring themselves to be following in his footsteps, they once again prove that they have revised their status as militants of the proletariat and joined the ranks of political parasitism.

Amos, 28/7/05. 

 

According to the bourgeoisie, China has become the new workshop of the world. The media are full of images of ‘Made in China’ shirts, trousers, shoes and other clothes arriving in Britain, Europe, or the USA. For the western bourgeoisies, it’s obviously necessary to put limits on this flood of Chinese textiles. But for the working class, the question is very different. If today Asian goods are invading western markets, it’s because the derisory cost of labour power in Asia make it possible to produce at a very low cost. But in the cause of their economic war, the bourgeoisie everywhere is obliged to exploit workers more and more viciously. In the cause of competition, capitalism is plunging workers all over the world into a spiral of misery.

Textiles: an expression of the trade war

Since the beginning of 2005, 17,000 jobs have been lost in this sector and 14 enterprises closed in the USA. This is linked to a 120% increase in imports in cotton shirts and a 300% increase in underwear. The American government reacted immediately: “By acting so quickly to impose protection measures, the American government has sent a strong message, showing that it understands that this enormous flood represents a real crisis for our workers” (C Johnson, president of the Textile Federation). In fact, the American bourgeoisie, like the bourgeoisie elsewhere, doesn’t give a damn about the workers. What worries it about the current economic war is the declining ability of its national capital to compete on the world market. It’s for the same reason that the countries of the European Union are trying, despite their divisions, to enter the war in battle order. The European Commissioner of Trade has just announced that the EU aims to put urgent limits on Chinese T-shirts and linen. It has also asked China itself to take measures to avoid using the protection clauses contained in the agreement around China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation. As for France, which is still an important textile producer, its demand is even clearer. The French bourgeoisie is demanding protectionist measures right now. It is obvious that several thousand lay-offs have already been envisaged in this sector. The French bourgeoisie would like us to believe that it is doing this to protect the working conditions of ‘its’ workers. It even goes so far as to denounce the lot of the Chinese workers, who are being sacrificed on the altar of profit. This is just a way of hiding its own attacks, its own behaviour as an exploiting class. The fact is that the bourgeoisie’s policies are everywhere the same. In a situation of profound economic crisis, maintaining profits means reducing wages on its home turf in order to export at a lower price. Contrary to what is said by the ‘alternative worldists’ or the leftists, this is not the policy of this or that neo-liberal state. The capitalist crisis obliges all nations to engage in a merciless trade war, and all of them impose the same pressures on the working class. For each country, it’s vital to grab the best possible place on the market, whatever the consequences for the workers.

This is why the Chinese bourgeoisie reacted straight away to the protectionist measures put into place by the USA and the EU. The Chinese minister Bo Xilai, cited by the Nouvells de Chine agency made it clear that “China is firmly opposed to the limitations imposed by other countries”. This same minister declared on 18 May last year; “Integration into the textile trade is a right which China has enjoyed since joining the WTO. China will not impose limits on its own exports on textile products”. The message could hardly have been clearer. With the new recession that has already started, no capitalist country can afford to hand out presents to the others.

Relocation is a direct attack on the working class

The same goes for the question of relocations – shifting whole enterprises to areas where costs are lower. A study commissioned by the Finance Commission of the French Senate, carried out by the Katalyse group, envisages “the relocation of 202,000 service employees” during 2005-2006 in France This phenomenon of relocation, which got going in the 90s, is going through a real acceleration. Here again the only concern for capital is the maximum return on investment. For France, as with the other main industrial countries of Europe, the favourite destinations are precisely China, India, and now Eastern Europe. The most recent important example of this is the transfer of the giant electronic company Philips to Lodz in Poland. The Confederation of British Industry says that over the next 10 years “there will be no jobs for unqualified people in Britain”. The Daily Telegraph comments cynically: “We must make sure that people get qualifications. If you are qualified, you have nothing to fear”. Lies! Lay-offs are falling like rain in all sectors, whether state of the art or not. Unemployment registers are full of people with too many diplomas.

Not content with attacking the wages of the working class, the bourgeoisie uses issues like Chinese textile imports and relocations to mount a huge propaganda campaign against the workers.

The bourgeoisie makes the most cynical use of the terrible living and working conditions of workers in India, China or Eastern Europe in order to argue that workers in Europe don’t have so much to moan about. This then allows them to demand new sacrifices in order to stand up to the competition from Asia or Eastern Europe. This serves the purposes of the ruling class in a number of ways.

First, it serves to make workers in the more developed countries feel guilty, so that they hesitate to fight against attacks when so many workers in the world live in even worse conditions. It also raises the threat that if workers don’t work more for less, there will be even more relocations. Any resulting unemployment won’t be the fault of bankrupt capitalism, but of the selfish workers.

Finally, by painting a picture of Asian workers who, under threat of starving to death, put up with working for practically nothing, the whole propaganda barrage creates divisions between workers. This use of scapegoats has been a constant feature in the life of capitalism. Today fingers are pointed at the workers of China, India, Poland or Hungary. Yesterday it was the workers of the Caribbean, Algeria, Morocco, or elsewhere. The proletariat should not be taken in by this nauseating message. Everywhere the working class is exploited. It is exploited all the more ferociously where it is less able to defend to itself.

As the Communist Manifesto proclaimed in 1848, “the workers have no country”. Everywhere they have the same interests; everywhere they suffer the same oppression.

Whether companies or countries are competitive is the problem of the bourgeoisie, not of the workers. Workers need to develop their unity and solidarity across enterprises and across nations, to fight capitalism’s attacks wherever they occur. And the current revival of class struggle renews the promise that this is no dream but the real future being carved out of the present.

Tino, 2/7/05.

Police Brutality against striking Honda Workers in Gurgaon, India

When several thousand striking workers of Honda Motorcycles, and workers from nearby factories expressing solidarity with them, gathered at mini secretariat in Gurgaon in the afternoon of 25th July 2005, they were immediately surrounded by police and para-military forces. These forces were assembled by the Gurgaon administration from other districts during the day.  What followed was a premeditated attack on unarmed workers captured and broadcast live by the bourgeoisie media. When the brutal attack ended by 8 PM, 800 workers have been seriously wounded, most of them sustaining head injuries. To cap this repression, at least 400 workers were put in the jail. That the intent of the administration was to teach the workers a lesson is clear from the fact that repression did not stop on 25th July itself. When workers and their families went to meet injured workers at civil hospital the next day, they have to face the wrath of the police again. 

The Parliament, which was in session in New Delhi at the time, expressed "shock" at this "atrocity". Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh expressed his "deep concern". From Stalinists to Hindu fundamentalists to Sonia Gandhi, leader of the ruling Party, politicians of all colors rushed to Gurgaon to express sham sympathy for injured workers. For the next couple of days, bourgeois media was filled with pretense of shock at this police brutality, as if something unusual for the Indian bourgeois state has happened.

In reality, this latest round of repression is very much in the traditions of violent repression of working class by the Indian state. To the older workers in Delhi region, it immediately brought to mind October 1979. At the time, to cap a rising wave of radical workers strikes, repressive forces of the state all but occupied Faridabad, industrial suburb to the south of New Delhi. Through a series of shootings in different parts of the city and through imposition of curfew at the end of October 1979, the bourgeoisie was able to suppress the workers movement.  A couple of years before that, workers of Swadeshi Cotton Mills at Kanpur were rounded up and fired upon by the repressive forces of the state, killing at least 400 workers. The chain of repression goes back uninterrupted through suppression of Railway workers strike of 1974 and many other workers struggles.

Yet is the shock of the bourgeoisie real? No, not at the police brutality.  But at finding the working class still alive and kicking, and having the temerity to raise its head after fifteen years of relentless offensive of the bourgeoisie. This clearly came through in the business press of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is seriously worried that the contagion could spread.

The Business Standard of 6th August 2005 feared "The riot that followed the labor management dispute in Gurgaon over the Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India (HMSI) could be the first major sign of things to come".  That the workers "After a decade-and-a-half of market-friendly policy changes", "seem to be sticking their necks out again".  And that militant workers being squashed by the state is not exactly news. But India has not had any serious problems on this front since the shackles of the Control Raj were unbound in the early 1990s. As per Financial Express of 6th August 2005, "The Gurgaon worker unrest has sent a chill down the spine of managements". Indian Express of 9th August 2005 feared the Gurgaon incident could have a "domino effect ".This alarm of the bourgeoisie was shared by the state both at provincial level as well as central level. The bourgeoisie was surprised to see a face of the working class that it has not seen in last few years. After initial surprise, it decided to quickly put a lid on this ?dispute?.

Just two days after police brutality of 25th July 2005, Haryana Chief Minister, Mr. Hooda called a meeting of the Honda management and union bosses on 27th July and cobbled together an ?agreement?. To atone for the police repression, Mr. Hooda ordered a ?judicial inquiry? by retired Justice G. C. Garg. The efficacy of this ?inquiry? is underlined by the fact that Mr. G. C. Garg, when he was presiding Judge of Punjab and Haryana High Court in 1999, was known more for using rough tactics and police repression than for fairness.

While making critical noises, Leftists and unions hailed all this as victory for the workers. This despite the fact that nearly one hundred workers are still in jail. Also, unions promised that workers will not ask for pay revision for one year. Management agreed to take back 67 suspended workers but insisted to remove them from all productive work.

Meaning of the Honda Strike

A part of the shock of bourgeoisie is possibly whipped up, it is crying wolf. A part was political theatre as the coalition at New Delhi, supported by Leftists, pretend to be "people friendly".  

Honda workers at Gurgaon, an industrial suburb to the west of Delhi, have been agitating since the beginning of this year. They were on strike since 27th June 2005 and have refused to sign promises of "good conduct" demanded by the management. At the same time, their movement was controlled by the leftists, partners in the ruling coalition in New Delhi, and was trapped in the political games of different fractions of the bourgeoisie at the centre and the state level.  It is not any extraordinary militancy of Honda workers struggles that has alarmed the bourgeoisie. It is the fact that despite all obstacles, workers were able to give expression to their anger and their resistance. The bourgeoisie is worried, to use words of Business Standard, as workers "seem to be sticking their necks out again" after a decade and a half.
Indian bourgeoisie has all the reasons to be satisfied with last decade and a half. For one, it has experienced unprecedented enrichment and its ambitions have soared. For another, it has been successful in carrying through relentless offensive against the working class without facing any serious resistance. Entire economy has witnessed massive destruction of permanent jobs, their conversion into contract labor at much lower wages and no social wage. In Gurgaon itself at Hero Honda, another Motorcycle Joint Venture of Honda, while production in last decade has jumped from a couple of hundred thousands to 2.6 Million motorcycles, number of permanent jobs has remained the same. On the other hand, number of temporary workers has grown by many thousands who are compelled to work at 50 euros month, which is standard wage of millions of temporary workers.  Similarly while Maruti-Suzuki car plant has grown its production, it sacked nearly 3000 permanent workers a couple of years ago without workers able to fight back. There place was taken by temporary workers. This is the story of every other company throughout India.  A depressing part of this story has been the fact that, because of its disarray, working class has been compelled to accept all these attacks with its head bowed down.
Honda Motorcycle workers were confronted by identical onslaught. Honda management wanted to sack above a thousand permanent workers and replace with temporary workers. It is a sign of changing mood of the workers, that Honda workers developed an open, even if limited, resistance. The repression has not really instilled fear among the working class.  On the contrary, it has generated a rudimentary level of self-assurance, a feeling that after years a section of the class has been able stand up to the bourgeoisie. 
This is what the bourgeoisie is scared of. This is what holds a real promise for the working class and revolutionaries. Like the working class in the rest of the world, working class in India is taking initial steps toward rediscovering the path of class struggle. This path of rediscovery is going to be long and difficult and intervention of revolutionary in this process is going to be indispensable for it fruition.

Communist Internationalist, New Delhi,  27 August 2005

What Are the Real Reasons for the War in Iraq?

The working class knows that the war is not worth the money or lives being spent on it. In addition to the 1,900 American lives lost, thousands upon thousands of Iraqis have been killed, maimed and left homeless. All the official explanations for the war in Iraq have been exposed as lies – there are no weapons of mass destruction, there was no link between the 9/11 terrorists and Iraq, Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to any other nation. The Bush administration has lost all credibility, all political authority.

There are plenty of explanations and slogans offered by anti-war activists about the causes of the war. At today’s demonstration you will hear speaker after speaker berate you with variations on the following:

It’s a war for oil. It’s the result of corporate greed. No blood for oil!

It’s a policy error. It’s a mistake.

It’s a Republican war.

It’s an irrational policy of a reactionary faction of the ruling class.

It’s the fault of the stupidity and ineptitude of George W. Bush, who can never acknowledge a mistake.

Whatever kernels of truth exist in each of these explanations, they all obscure the reality that the war in Iraq is the inevitable consequence of a globally decomposing capitalist system and the increasing difficulty of US imperialism to maintain its hegemony in an increasingly chaotic world.

In 1989, when Russian imperialism collapsed and the cold war came to an end, the politicians and the capitalist media promised us a new world order, a future of peace, prosperity, and democracy. Billions of dollars previously spent on the arms race would be transferred to social programs and the world would be a better place. Fifteen years later the new world order has become a new world chaos. There is no peace, no prosperity, and the forces of state repression and dictatorship are on the rise. The Cold War, with its disciplined blocs, led respectively by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. superpowers, where secondary and tertiary powers subordinated their interests to those of the bloc, looks increasingly like the “good old days” for the world capitalist class. The collapse of Russian imperialism was a pyrrhic victory for American imperialism, more a reflection of the decomposition of the global capitalist system than a triumph for American power. With the collapse of the blocs, the glue that kept the lesser powers in line disappeared, and every country more and more began pursuing its own imperialist interests, “every man (or nation) for itself,” producing a situation of increasing chaos on the international terrain.

In 1992, U.S. imperialism officially adopted the strategic goal of preventing the rise of any rival bloc or rival power in Europe and Asia so that it would remain the only superpower in the world and this goal has guided U.S. foreign policy ever since, whether Republicans or Democrats have occupied the White House. It is this strategy which explains U.S. imperialism’s increasing number of military excursions throughout the world – to send a warning and block any potential rival, including America’s onetime allies, to remind them that the U.S. is the only superpower in the world. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was not a greedy attempt to boost oil profits for U.S. corporations – far more has been and will be spent on the war and occupation of Iraq than will ever be compensated for by Iraqi oil production. It’s not a policy error, or the result of Republican or Bush administration stupidity, but a conscious decision supported by all factions of the ruling class, except for the extreme rightwing isolationists. The invasion of Iraq was the lynchpin in the American geopolitical strategy to keep European imperialisms from making inroads in the Middle East. Coupled with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and new American alliances with former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus, it meant growing U.S. control of one of the most strategically important areas in the world.

For the ruling class the real problem with the war in Iraq is that the greatest military machine in the history of the world is now bogged down in a quagmire, and is increasingly unable to unleash necessary military operations in other imperialist theatres. This would have happened no matter who was president, because it is a central characteristic of capitalist decomposition that every action that American imperialism takes to improve its situation only winds up exacerbating the problems even more. However, the Bush administration’s clumsiness and ineptitude both on the level of the propaganda and ideological explanation for the war (the Democrats prefer justifying military interventions on the basis of human rights) and the squandering of the considerable “patriotic” sentiment that followed the 9/11 attacks, and its tactical handling of the invasion on the ground has made things even more of a mess. The deteriorating military situation and growing unpopularity of the war raises serious problems for the ruling class because it makes it increasingly difficult for the U.S. to have available fresh, deployable troops or to drum up support for further military ventures which are a vital necessity to defend U.S. imperialist interests.

Since this war and all the wars that capitalism has in store for us in the years ahead are inexorably linked to capitalism’s drive to survive, to maintain a world of exploitation and profit, the way to end war is not to change policies, or to change presidents, but for the working class to change the world, to understand its historic responsibilities and potential, to develop the consciousness and unity necessary to destroy capitalism and consign it to the historic rubbish pile, and replace it with a society based on the fulfillment of human need and the construction of a genuine human community – a workers’ revolution..

Internationalism, September 24, 2005

In the midst of the violence and fear that is Iraq today, and after a mortar attack had killed 7 Shia pilgrims, it was easy for panic caused by suspicion of a suicide bomber to cause a stampede. On August 31, in Baghdad, nearly 1000 were killed and hundreds more injured by a stampede on a bridge over the Tigris, with the bottleneck amplified by security barriers.

Many of the victims who jumped from the bridge were pulled to safety by local people, Sunnis, who came to help. In contrast to the ideology of communal hatred and violence that is being whipped up by the bourgeoisie, poor and working people responded to the tragedy with human solidarity.

This comes at a time of heightened tension over the future of Iraq between the various factions of the Iraqi bourgeoisie, all armed and dangerous, as they squabble over the constitution. Under Saddam the minority Sunni bourgeoisie had the upper hand and were able to seize most of the wealth. Now the Kurdish and Shia parties want ‘autonomy’, and the revenues from the oil produced in their areas, leaving the Sunnis high and dry and isolated in the middle. Unable to find a compromise between Islamic and secular law, between a unified or loosely federated state, and particularly between each armed gang of the Iraqi ruling class grabbing what it can get, the deadline for the proposed constitution was delayed again and again until they gave up trying to agree and proposed the constitution for the October referendum without the support of Sunni politicians.

This constitution, even if they are able to push it through the referendum in October, will not benefit the mass of the population who will continue to be exploited, when they are fortunate enough to find jobs, and to run the gauntlet of the suicide bombs of the ‘Resistance’ and the guns, prisons and brutality of the occupying force and its client government. Meanwhile the death penalty has been reintroduced and the first executions carried out.

The developing tensions in Iraq, bringing the country to the verge of civil war, are a consequence of the imperialist conflicts between various protagonists large and small. As we said at the time of the invasion 2 years ago: “the war is already exacerbating the divisions in Iraqi society, in particular between those who have allied themselves with the USA (as in the Kurdish regions) and those who have fought against the invasion. These divisions can only serve to create disorder and instability in post-Saddam Iraq, further undermining the USA’s claim that it will be the bearer of peace and prosperity in the region” (‘Resolution on the international situation’ from the 15th Congress of the ICC, IR 113). Since then the divisions and disorder have only got worse.Alex  3.9.05

After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans the chaos for the survivors, thousands of whom were packed into the Superdome and convention centre shelters without food, water or services, showed that the world’s only superpower could treat its poor and working people as badly as any third world country. The death toll was over 1000.

Following this tragedy we are told that the US government has learned its lesson. Michael D Brown, director of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Administration) was first kicked upstairs and then resigned. The New Orleans police chief also resigned. Three weeks later, with Hurricane Rita menacing Texas, President Bush appeared on TV calling for the evacuation of Houston and Galveston. At the very least his opinion poll approval rating for handling the new storm rose to 70%.

The reality of the evacuation ahead of Hurricane Rita shows that the US administration has not improved its disaster planning. Evacuees found themselves in traffic jams for 24 hours or more, without fuel or supplies, in searing heat around 100oF, which this time proved more deadly than the storm itself: “The death toll from Hurricane Rita's assault on Texas has risen to about 100, but most of the victims died before the hurricane struck, either while preparing for the storm or fleeing from it, authorities said Thursday.

The evacuation of millions of people from coastal counties killed about 60 people, according to preliminary estimates,” (abcnews.) The Houston disaster relief centre, used by many of those evacuated from New Orleans, was closed during the evacuation ahead of Rita. It was totally unprepared for returning evacuees: some queued overnight, fainted in the heat and only managed to register just before it closed.

Clearly, the only reason that Rita caused less misery than Katrina is that it was downgraded to a category one hurricane and that its full force missed the major cities in its path. Without this, the pretence of having learned from New Orleans would have been completely exposed. In fact, FEMA has claimed to have learned the lessons before, on the eve of the Hurricane Katrina’s landfall,  “Michael D. Brown, the director of FEMA… bragged during television interviews that he had ordered the creation of an emergency contingency plan for a worst case scenario in New Orleans after the  tsunami in South Asia, and that FEMA was confident they could handle any eventuality. Reports out of New Orleans indicate that this FEMA plan included a decision to turn away trucks carrying donated bottled-water, refusing delivery of 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel transported by the Coast Guard, and the severing of emergency communication lines used by the local police authorities in suburban New Orleans” (‘Hurricane Katrina: a capitalist-made crisis’, internationalism.org).

There is more to learning the lessons of disasters than simply providing for the victims after the event. There is also the long term task of prevention. Plans to strengthen the levees protecting New Orleans called Coast 2050, costing $14 billion, were rejected in 1998, and an Army Corps proposal for $105 million for hurricane and flood protection resulted in only $42 million being approved. Contrast this with the cost of the occupation of Iraq, approximately $1 billion a week. The failure to carry out long term protection against disaster is not an aberration of this or that leader or administration, but follows the logic of capitalism throughout its decadent period. It is the logic behind the dreadful loss of life in the Asian Tsunami and the Mumbai floods just as in the USA this summer.

But not only can capitalism not spare the cash to protect its populations, it cannot stop itself eroding the natural protection afforded by the wetlands, as around New Orleans, or by mangrove swamps elsewhere. Nor can it prevent itself concreting over flood plains, which makes even more areas vulnerable.

It seems the USA is suffering from more and worse hurricanes due to the rise in sea temperatures in turn the result of global warming, yet the USA has not even pretended to learn the lesson of this. Under Democratic and Republican presidents it has rejected the science that does not suit its immediate interests and refused to sign the Kyoto agreement, while those countries that have signed it are making no progress to halt greenhouse gas emissions.

Capitalism can only lead humanity to increasing chaos, made up of wars, famines and ecological disasters. The only lesson it learned from the suffering caused by Hurricane Katrina was on the desirability of having people believe its crocodile tears.

Alex 1.10.05

The last two weeks have witnessed startling scenes on the southern border of the European Union. First there were the massed assaults by thousands of migrants on the wire frontier fences erected by the Spanish government, as they tried to break through, leaving behind a trail of tattered clothes and blood. Next came the bullets that cut down 5 desperate migrants – in all likelihood and despite the media coverup fired by the police of the very “democratic” and “pacifist” government of Señor Zapatero, who likes to present himself as a kind of inoffensive Bambi. There then followed the massive deployment of legionaries and Guardia Civil with the aim of “humanely” (sic!) repelling the migrants. On the 6th October, after behind-the-scenes negotiations between the Spanish and Moroccan governments, events took a new turn with the machine-gunning of 6 migrants on Moroccan territory. These deaths marked the beginning of a whole series of increasingly brutal acts: migrants abandoned in the desert south of Uxda on the 7th October, massive raids in Moroccan cities where the migrants were concentrated; repatriation flights to Mali and Senegal with men and women handcuffed and crammed in together and the news that huge numbers of migrants had been abandoned, in the buses of death, in the Sahara desert.

After the 6th October, the Zapatero government once again appeared in its role as the “champion of tolerance”. It “protested” loudly to the Moroccans about their “inhuman” treatment of the migrants and and made a great media presentation of its project to set up an “ultra-modern” fence (in reality three separate ones) that would stop all penetration “without causing the least injury” to the migrants. Its European Union colleagues immediately joined in the chorus of “democratic protest” against Moroccan excesses, “demanding” the “respectful treatment of the migrants”, with all their usual blather about the European Union being a “ welcoming land” and the necessity to “develop” the African countries. The Spanish Foreign Minister, an expert in beautiful smiles, bared her teeth and in all seriousness announced that “Spain would not tolerate any illegal emigration – however this is compatible with respect for the migrants” (sic!).

In this crisis the democratic states are showing themselves to be particularly two-faced. Since 6th October, the Zapatero government has skillfully subcontracted its dirty war against the migrants, to the Moroccans, allowing it to appear before the world in its usual mask of angelic promoter of “peace”, “human rights” and the “respect of the individual”. This is the face of cynicism, lies and manoeuvres, the usual disguise for the “great democracies’” revolting hypocrisy.

In the days prior to 6th October, the Zapatero government showed a different face altogether: machine gunnings, beatings by the Guardia Civil, razor-wire fences and low-flying helicopters, deportation of the migrants back to Africa. This reality has torn away the hypocritical veil with all the talk about “Rights” and “freedom” and given us a glimpse of the brutal reality: faced with the migrants from Africa, the “Socialist” Zapatero has behaved in exactly the same way as the oft-condemned Sharon with his wall in the West Bank and Gaza, or as the Stalinists Ulbrich and Honnecker when they raised the Berlin Wall to cut off East Germany off from the West.

These two faces, the democratic hypocrite and the blood-stained criminal, are in reality not opposed but complementary. They form an indispensable unity in capitalism's method of domination, a social system that sustains a minority and exploiting class, the bourgeoisie, whose very survival clashes more and more head-on with the interests and needs of the proletariat and the vast majority of the population.

With the tragic problem of immigration we see how capitalism, engulfed in an ever worsening crisis, - which takes its most extreme forms on continents such as Africa - is not even capable of ensuring the minimum of survival to the increasingly huge masses of human beings thrown into a hell of hunger, war and deadly disease.

In their flight, the migrants are beaten and robbed by the police and mafias of the countries which they cross, who can always count on the self-interested complicity of their different states and when they finally arrive at their longed-for goal they run into a new wall of shame, with fences, bullets, deportations... Faced with an increasingly severe crisis, the countries of the European Union are less and less a dazzling “refuge of peace and prosperity”. Their economies can only absorb a few tiny drops of the immense human tide, whose increasingly shameful conditions of exploitation are progressively going to resemble those in the countries from which the migrants have fled.

This situation also has to be seen in the context of the growing imperialist tensions between different states each of which is seeking ways to strike at their rival or to have the tools with which to blackmail it. This makes the migrants an appetising morsel for the manoeuvres used by the different governments. The Moroccans tried to blackmail Spain by giving all kinds of help to the mafias specialising in migrants in order to putn pressure on the Spaniards. But at the same time, through its situation as the Southern entry port into the European Union, Spain has tried to exact an even higher price for its services as bloody goal keeper.

This swindling and phony game has cost the lives of thousands of human beings condemned to a tragic odyssey. The strongest states can easily present themselves as the “most human and caring” because through their back-room deals they get their weaker colleagues to do their dirty work. Morocco appeared as the bad guy (its police and military's tradition of savage brutality perfectly fitted it for the role) whilst Spain and its “partners” in the EU, its shameless landlords,[1] [162] had the brazen gall to give it lessons about “democracy” and “human rights”.

Capitalism's growing contradictions, the deepening of its historic crisis, the decomposition of its social order, the increasing intensification of the class struggle, means that these large states, the virtuous ones of the democratic order, appear increasingly with blood on their hands. Three months ago we saw the British police, the “most democratic in the world”, cold bloodedly murder a young Brazilian,[2] [163] less than a month ago we saw the North American army and police distributing bullets rather than food and necessities to the victims of hurricane Katrina, today we see the Zapatero government assassinating migrants, deploying troops and raising a wall of shame.

Capitalism with a human face is not possible. Humanity's interests are incompatible with the necessities of this system. In order for humanity to live capitalism must die. The destruction of the capitalist state in all countries, the abolition of frontiers and of the exploitation of man by man, this is the perspective that the proletariat must give its struggle in order that humanity can, simply, begin to live.

International Communist Current 11.10.2005

Regarding the German federal elections of September 18, 2005, it is being said that it has produced no clear winner. Although it is true that the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) will be the strongest fraction in the new Bundestag, they have nonetheless suffered a serious electoral setback, with only 35 % of the votes cast. Although the Social Democrats (SPD) improved their situation strongly during the course of the electoral campaign, they nonetheless achieved their third lowest vote in the post war epoch (just over 34%). Although the Liberals (FDP) were able to improve their position, regaining their status as the third strongest parliamentary fraction, they nonetheless failed to achieve their declared goal of replacing the ruling “red-green” government by a “black-yellow” (CDU - FDP) coalition. Although the Greens were able to more or less maintain their share of the vote, they declared themselves on the night of the elections to have been voted out of office. Only the “Left Party-PDS” (a combination of the east German PDS and ex-Social Democrats plus leftists from the west), running for the first time under this name, is considered to have made successful gains, since at the first go it achieved more votes than the Greens.

In fact the German economy itself has been declared as the main loser of this election. This, not only because companies at home and abroad had been expecting a CDU/CSU/FDP government to be formed, but also because there are fears that political instability might make itself felt in the Federal Republic, a country which, at least in this respect, has until now has always been known for being particularly stable. Aspects of this possible scenario include: the absence of clear government majorities, the difficulties of the task of forming a new government, the persistence of the mutual blockage of certain legislation between the federal and the provincial governments, and the possibility of renewed elections ahead of schedule. All of this, it is alleged, might slow down the pace of the “reforms” which the whole ruling class is so frenetically calling for.

Regarding all of this, it has to be affirmed first and foremost that one clear winner has emerged from these elections: the bourgeois class in its struggle against its main enemy, the working class

The elections against the working class

When Chancellor Schröder, after the bitter electoral defeat of the SPD at the May 21 provincial elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, prematurely called general elections for the autumn, this decision was greeted by the whole ruling class as a necessary response to the growing “reform fatigue” and “frustration with politics” within the population. Now, neither the “short but intensive” electoral campaign, nor the result it has produced (which has been called a “sensation” and a “political earthquake”) have been able to overcome this much complained of alienation of the population towards the ruling “elite” and its political system. But what the bourgeoisie has succeeded in doing is mobilising the working population to the electoral booths despite this frustration and alienation. Indeed, the level of electoral participation was, at almost 78 %, only one percent lower than at the last general election three years ago. Moreover, the different TV debates between the politicians were able to attract a relatively high number of viewers. Nor can it be denied that, in the past few weeks, the elections have become the main subject of discussions in pubs and public places. Other major news items, such as the way in which, after the hurricane in the southern states of the USA, the ruling class, for days on end, left the poorest of the working population to their own, often fatal fate, were pushed aside after a few days in the media. Other events, such as the solidarity strike at British Airways in London-Heathrow, the gigantic attack against the Volkswagen employees announced at Wolfsburg, or mass layoffs and plant closures at Henschel in the Ruhr  (as well as at Siemens and Infineon), almost disappeared out of sight. How did the bourgeoisie succeed, despite all the popular frustration with its politics, to mobilise so many people for the elections, thus cloaking itself with the legitimacy with which it will try to impose even more vicious attacks? How did it manage to give the working class, which every day is reminded by the brutality of the economic crisis of the realities of class society under capitalism, the impression that this society after all is composed of “sovereign citizens”, each of whom is, thanks to the right to vote, allegedly able to exercise a certain influence over the fate of the whole?

How the bourgeoisie coaxed the workers to the ballots

In order to answer this question, two notable results of the elections ought to be  considered. First of all, the strong performance of the Left Party-PDS. Since German “reunification” the PDS, as the successor of the former ruling party of the GDR, has increasingly been reduced to the backwaters as a regional protest party of the east. At the last general elections for the first time it even failed to fulfil the minimal criteria to form a parliamentary fraction of its own. Now it has emerged as a nationwide party doubling its share of votes. And although in the west it narrowly failed to achieve its goal of  5 %  - thus still remaining essentially an eastern party – it did manage to gain over 18% of the votes in one western constituency, in the Saarland, thanks to its leading candidate Oskar Lafontaine. The national average of 8.7% of  votes cast gained by the Left-PDS represent, to a large extent, voters who in the absence of a “left” alternative probably would not have voted at all. Above all the unemployed seem to have voted for the left. Lafontaine and the PDS leader Gysi have thus made an essential contribution to the mobilisation success of the bourgeoisie.

Secondly, the electoral recovery of the SPD during the course of the electoral campaign was no less significant. As we already recalled, the catastrophic performance of Social Democracy at the North Rhine-Westphalian elections was what triggered off the decision to dissolve the Bundestag. But now, only a few months later, the SPD not only gained almost as many votes as the Christian Democrats, but emerged as the party with the strongest vote in, of all places, North Rhine-Westphalia. One should not forget that this province still represents one of the most important concentrations of the working class in Germany. In fact, Social Democracy has succeeded surprisingly well in mobilising its traditional electorate, in defiance of all the pre-election predictions. This unexpected performance pleased the whole bourgeoisie, and not only from the point of view of mobilising workers. The Social Democratic Party is the jewel in the crown of the political system of the bourgeoisie in Germany, perhaps even in Europe. In particular, this party played the decisive role in the smashing of the proletarian revolution in Germany – and thus world wide – at the end of World War I. A too severe defeat for Social Democracy at this election might have led to tedious internal power struggles possibly resulting in a longer term weakening of the party.

When the electoral campaign began, initially a comfortable electoral majority was being predicted for a CDU / FDP government, whereas the SPD was being estimated below 30%. Even an absolute majority for the Christian Democrats alone was considered possible. In relation to this the result actually gained by the Union (just over 35%) is almost a fiasco.

How did this come about? After seven years during which the Schröder-Fischer government imposed increasingly brutal attacks, putting in the shadows anything undertaken by the preceding conservative government under Helmut Kohl, a mood developed within the population to want to punish the SPD for this via a kind of protest vote. This electoral attitude, far from upsetting the ruling class, was actually favoured and encouraged by it. Precisely this kind of electoral protest – despite all the anger about the attacks and against the ruling class which is behind it – actually entices part of the population to nonetheless participate in the game of the democratic state. Moreover, the bourgeoisie wanted to profit from this mood in order to have a change of government. This, not so much because of any particular dissatisfaction with the existing one, but in order – in the face of the increasingly visible incapacity to deal with mass unemployment within capitalism – to give the impression that the government and not the system is to blame. In view of electoral predictions very much in her favour, the chancellor candidate of the CDU, Angela Merkel, decided on a risky strategy. She wanted to counter the growing distrust towards bourgeois politics by playing the card of “honesty” – by announcing at least part of the attacks in advance (for instance an increase in value added tax). The result: the existing protest mood, which until then had directed itself against Schröder, now turned against the Union. Since the Christian Democrats had begun, already before the elections, to behave as if they were the new government, the (for the moment) powerless anger of the population began to direct itself against the CDU.

Even though this element of the ‘protest vote’ has contributed to introducing into the German political game a hitherto unknown factor of unpredictability, it is above all proof of the power and elasticity of democracy as the most important weapon of the bourgeoisie against the working class. As a result, even when workers no longer want to have anything to do with bourgeois politics, many of them can still be led to participating according to the democratic rules of the game.

A stalemate situation which the bourgeoisie would have liked to avoid

One of the reasons the main fractions of the bourgeoisie favoured the calling of general elections at this time was, as we have noted, the feeling that after seven years in government a spell in opposition would be good for Social Democracy. But when Schröder himself called these elections, he was pursuing his own agenda, with the goal of remaining in office. In Weltrevolution 130, we already pointed this out, as well as the two main planks of his strategy. Firstly, the maintenance of unity within his own party (avoiding fraction fights during electoral campaigns is still a principle upheld by German Social Democrats). Secondly, obliging the Union to put up Merkel, the opponent against whom he reckoned he would have the best chance. This former protégé of Helmut Kohl from the eastern provinces, who has not yet been able to build up a power base of her own within her party, had in fact only been seen as a provisional party leader since none of the powerful provincial dukes of the CDU had been able to impose themselves against each other. Moreover, Schröder had reckoned with his inexperienced challenger losing her nerves and making mistakes, as she did at the time of the American invasion of Iraq when, more than any other German politician, she expressed her understanding for the position of the Bush administration. In fact, in order to win the elections, more or less all the Union had to do was to criticise the incapacity of the government regarding unemployment, and make some vague promises to improve things. But precisely because she had no power base of her own, Merkel wanted to win the elections in her own way. The provincial power brokers of the party tried, in vain, firstly to maintain their countenance, and then to prevent the worst, while they watched Merkel let their comfortable electoral position run down the drain. In the end, it was not enough to permit Schröder to maintain his majority. But it was more than enough to land the German bourgeoisie in something of a mess. At all events, during the whole of post war German history, the conditions for the formation of a stable government have probably never been as difficult as now.

From the beginning to the end of the electoral campaign, the economic crisis and mass unemployment remained the dominant themes. All the tactical cleverness of Schröder would not have been able to prevent a clear victory for the conservatives, if the Merkel fraction had not had a false estimation of the mood in the country. The economic crisis in the leading industrial country of Europe is today so profound, that the fear of pauperisation has gripped large parts of the population, including layers of the middle classes which had by and large been spared until now. Parts of the traditional voters of the CDU are themselves touched by this process. We no longer live in the days of Maggie Thatcher. Through the radicalisation of her neo liberal language in the course of the electoral campaign, Merkel scared off parts of her own voters.

The bourgeoisie begins to react to a changing situation

In any case, the German bourgeoisie has already begun to adjust its party political apparatus, in order to face up to new challenges. In the face of an increasingly unpredictable political situation, of a certain tendency towards dispersal within its ranks, but above all in response to the first signs of a subterranean maturation of consciousness within the proletariat, the party political state apparatus is being confronted with the same demands as the economic and the military sectors. It is supposed to become more flexible, efficient, versatile and “intelligent”.

The most important aspect of this rebuilding is at present the attempt to develop a five party system through the establishment of the Left Party as a  political force in Germany as a whole. Even the most powerful bourgeoisie cannot produce such new forces with a wave of its hand. Most of the new parties in western Europe in the past decades have either emerged from some kind of “social movement” (such as the Greens from the ecological and pacifist movements in Germany and elsewhere) or thanks to a charismatic leader like Le Pen in France, Bossi in Italy or Fortyn in Holland. In Austria, a similar kind of personality, Jörg Haider, transformed an already existing party to his own ends. The new Left Party in Germany includes all of these ingredients. The former GDR Stalinist party forms its nucleus. The protest marches of the unemployed last autumn were used in order to set up certain party structures in the west, with the active help of Trotskyist activists. Finally, the charismatic, demagogic former SPD leader Lafontaine has joined in order to head the new party.

One of the first successes of the Left Party at the elections was that it was able to absorb part of the electoral protest vote which might otherwise have gone with the neo Nazis. Had the NPD managed to get into the new Bundestag (something which became likely after their success at the provincial elections in Saxony), this would have been a considerable embarrassment in particular at the foreign policy level, since German imperialism is nowadays pleased to present itself as an anti-fascist power.

But this project involves more long term goals. The flexibility and stability of the post war political system of the Federal Republic was based to an important extent on a three party system, with two main parties and the little FDP in between tilting the scales. This arrangement allowed for a change of government whenever necessary, through a change of allegiance by the FDP, the party which also thus embodied the continuity of government, particularly in foreign policy questions. This equilibrium had to be sacrificed when it became necessary, through the establishment of the Greens as a fourth force, to absorb the potential of the “68-Generation” for the running of the state. If the bourgeoisie succeeds in establishing the Left Party in the long term as a fifth force, the traditional German party political balance could be re-established, although with another, more complex composition. Here, both the Liberals as a centre-right party and the Greens as a centre-left party could assume (together or in turn) the role of tipping the scales towards a right or a left government, and cementing government continuity. However, it should be kept in mind that this new political landscape is still under construction. Whether or not the bourgeoisie can already use it in order to find an easy way out of the present difficulty of forming a new government will be shown in the course of the present negotiations.

The ruling class is obliged to react to developments within the working class

But the historically most important aspect of the development of the Linkspartei-PDS is that, for the first time since 1945, the main fractions of the German bourgeoisie are seriously considering the establishment of a national political party left of the SPD. This is indeed a paramount indication of a fundamental change taking place in society at large, not only in Germany, but world wide. After 1989 it was claimed that there can definitively be no alternative to capitalism. Since then, the fact that – not only in Germany – all the main parliamentary parties were basically calling for the same thing, appeared less as a political weakness of the bourgeoisie than as the living confirmation that there can be nothing outside capitalism and democracy. But now the bourgeoisie has recognised that it is becoming dangerous to have all the main parties demanding the same sacrifices, with no force in parliament appearing to express fundamental criticisms and alternatives. This is the danger, in response to which the most talented left wing demagogues of the bourgeoisie, the former Social Democrat Lafontaine, and the former Stalinist Gysi, have made their comeback to politics. What the ruling class is afraid of is that the working class might begin recognising that there is no solution to the crisis within capitalism, and recommence its age old search for an alternative to capitalism, to exploitation and to class society.

19.09.2005.

From: Weltrevolution 132.

The riots that took place in the Lozells area of Birmingham during one weekend in October were a further reminder of the threat posed to the working class by the rotting of the capitalist system.

Fuelled by rumours that a young black immigrant had been raped by 3 Asian youths, the tensions between black and Asian 'communities' rose to the point where for several nights clashes took place between black and Asian youths. An IT worker - Isaiah Young-Sam - was on his way home from the cinema when he was stabbed to death. Another man was shot dead not far from the scene the following evening. The rape allegations have so far been unproved, and it seems likely that they were started by rival shopkeepers desperate to put each other out of business.

What led to this situation? It is important to see that the collapse into mob violence is not an isolated event. For many decades the inner city areas of Britain - as in any other country, 'developed' or 'developing' - have seen high unemployment and deprivation. The economic crisis in the 1980s hit these areas hardest and the lack of perspective offered by capitalism has led to proletarians from the younger generation taking out their frustrations in confrontations with the police that offer no way forward. The riots currently sweeping France have exactly the same origin. However, the deepening of capitalist decomposition has added more sinister elements. The remorseless rise of gangsterism and drug-related crime – combined with the strengthening of racism and religious fundamentalism - is eroding away at the basic elements of class solidarity, leading to greater levels of irrational and anti-social behaviour.

Some forces on the bourgeois political spectrum are actively stirring up these divisions. The desecration of a Muslim graveyard in Birmingham in the wake of the riots was claimed by a group calling itself ‘Black Nation’; in fact it was probably the work of fascists out to sharpen racial divisions. But the reaction of the ‘official’ and ‘democratic’ sectors of the ruling class is equally dangerous. They preach multi-culturalism, anti-racism, solidarity between ‘communities’. But real solidarity can’t be built up by the working class losing itself in a patchwork of religious, racial or national identities. Real solidarity means defending the common interests of all the exploited against the interests of the exploiters.

Spencer, 5/11/05.

Decadent world capitalist system – the real breeding ground of increasing wars and terrorism

Working masses in shopping mood on the eve of the biggest festival of the year in Delhi, the capital of the Indian bourgeoisie witnessed with horror and shock the same barbarous repetition of heinous crime. Terrorist bombs exploded almost simultaneously in two crowded market places and in a bus stop in the evening of 29th October. According to preliminary reports 60 persons including children have died so far in this heart rending, grossly abominable act of the ever rising heights of barbarism. About two hundred persons have been injured, some of them very seriously. Common masses of people have been terrorized and panic stricken.

As usual the prime minister and the political leaders of the Indian bourgeoisie are pointing the accusing finger at the terrorist groups based in neighboring Pakistan. Thus they are trying to fully utilize this inhuman criminal act to score a point over their nearest imperialist rival on the one hand and trying to mobilize the working class and the exploited people for the defense of their democracy and national integrity on the other. The bourgeoisie is also trying its best to project itself as their real protector.

Victims of this terrorist attack are not the Bushes, Blairs, Putins, Chiracs, Monmohans or Musharofs but the working class and exploited masses of people as everywhere in the world whether it is in the World Trade Center or the trains in Madrid, or the London tube or Beslan school or streets of Bangladesh, or Bali or Sharm el Sheikh or Mumbai or Delhi. They are the principal victims of cyclones, tsunami, hurricane Katrina, floods and earthquakes. These very people have died and are dying in their thousands in the imperialist world wars and the ever increasing imperialist wars of today and their latest incarnation the ‘war against terrorism’.

Political leaders of the left hand or right hand of capital (all the leftist and rightist parties without any exception) are never lacking in a colorful show of sympathy and concern for the sufferings of the affected people. Here also the prime minister and other ministers and political leaders are full to the brim with ‘love, sympathy and concern’. World leaders from Bush, Blair, Putin to Musharof have expressed their ‘profound’ grief and sympathy for the victims and their families and condemned this terrorist attack in the strongest words. The Indian prime minister has described it as ‘dastardly acts’ and ‘nefarious designs of terrorist elements’. They have denounced it as a crime against humanity. This latest terrorist act is, of course, a most barbarous crime against humanity. But these very self righteous leaders and the capitalist states and governments they lead are the most powerful, organized and inhuman terrorists and they are directly associated with the most barbarous massacre of hundreds of thousands of the masses of common innocent people in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Afganistan, Serbia, Bosnia, Chechnia, Rwanda etc., in the pursuit of sordid imperialist interest of the national capital they have pledged to defend. It is perfectly like the pot calling the kettle black. They have no other way but to resort to more barbarous killing in the present international situation of intensifying imperialist conflict. They cannot but defend their capitalist class interest through the ideological weapon of democracy, freedom, national liberation, integrity and defense. They are all very busy in focusing the attention of the masses of working class and exploited people on their humanitarian credentials. All this mystification, they believe, is indispensable for the existence of the decadent capitalist system. This political necessity is in essence at the root of their relief and rescue work which they can not but resort to because in its total absence their very survival will be at stake.

Their real concern is never the protection of the working class and exploited people. But it is in essence the protection of profit, the system of capitalist exploitation and repression and those at the helm of the capitalist state. Their sole concern is the protection of the interest of national capital or bourgeoisie. This is why they are sending hundreds of thousands of workers in uniform to massacre each other in imperialist wars and intensifying attacks on the living and working conditions of the working class and repressing the working class movements with brutal police and military attacks everywhere in the world. A few months back the struggling Honda workers in the vicinity of Delhi were most barbarously repressed. The ‘humanitarian’ leaders turn into savage barbarians whenever confronting the struggle of the working class against exploitation and repression. This barbarian reality of the ‘humanitarian leaders’ were fully exposed in the railway strike of 1974 and in the Swadeshi cotton mill strike in Kanpur in mid eighties. This was the case in the bloody suppression of the Paris commune of 1871, the Berlin insurrection of 1919, encirclement and counterrevolutionary struggle for the suppression of the proletarian revolution in Russia after October 1917. These crusaders against terrorism are always busy inventing newer and newer repressive measures to terrorize the working class people more and more. They have taken and are taking full advantage of every terrorist act to strengthen further the state repressive machinery to make it capable to crush any attempt of the working class and exploited masses of people to liberate themselves for ever from the stranglehold of any exploitation and repression.

All capitalist states themselves are terrorist no. 1 and each of them utilizes to the fullest possible extent the services of terrorist groups and organizations everywhere in the world. But each of them blame others for terrorist attacks within its national border. The US bourgeoisie, the pioneer in the war against terrorism discovered, trained and equipped Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda, the most dreadful terrorist organization of these days. Bin Laden was a hero and freedom fighter when he served the imperialist interest of the US bourgeoisie against that of the Russian. The CIA has resorted to innumerable terrorist attacks to assassinate other world political leaders who refused to toe the US line. The intelligence agencies of each and every capitalist country do the same heinous barbarous acts. The Indian bourgeoisie is not and can never be an exception. What is its RAW ( research and analysis wing) doing? Is it practicing Gandhi’s non violence? No, no state in a class divided society can be non violent. RAW has been specially created for counter intelligence and subversive activities using the services of crime syndicates in enemy territories. There is every possibility of its involvement in the terrorist explosions in various parts of Pakistan and Bangladesh in the same way as the ISI may be involved in the terrorist attacks in various parts of India. In these days of increasing crisis and imperialist conflict for survival, the bourgeois ruling cliques of each and every country without any exception, can not but resort to all possible sorts of terrorist means including war whenever possible, against its rival. The Indian bourgeoisie in the same way as the Pakistani bourgeoisie can not escape this material compulsion whatever noble and humanitarian appearance they may try to project.

The material conditions of decadent capitalism, the ceaseless intensification of social contradictions and conflicts, the increasing unemployment, poverty, misery and spread of inhuman living conditions, slums, ghettoes and desperation of the petit bourgeois masses, provide the very fertile breeding ground of terrorism and capitalist factions and states cannot but utilize fully the services of the terrorist groups.

Thus we are moving towards the future of increasing uncertainty of life and livelihood everywhere in the world in this phase of decomposition of decadent world capitalism. We have no respite from this so long as this decadent world capitalist system is intact. Our passivity and confusions will accelerate further the uncertainty of our life and livelihood. On the contrary our class combativeness, struggle against the increasing attacks of capital on our livelihood, living and working conditions, revolutionary class consciousness and organization are the only weapons with which we can put an end to the decadent capitalist system, the root of all evils endangering more and more the very existence of the whole human species. So we have to intensify our class struggle refusing disdainfully to be mystified further by the bourgeois ruling cliques in any part of the world and rallied behind any one of them to defend their sordid capitalist imperialist interests. This is the only way to get rid of exploitation and repression , war and terrorism, increasing uncertainty of life and livelihood.

Communist Internationalist, ICC section in India

7th November, 2005

In April 1998, following the Good Friday Agreement, the IRA were insistent: “Let us make it clear that there will be no decommissioning by the IRA”. Yet the process of putting weapons ‘beyond use’ started in October 2001. In July this year, the IRA ordered “an end to the armed campaign. … All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms. All Volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means. Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.” Finally, in September, General de Chastelain from the body responsible for checking off weapons against estimates of the IRA’s armoury, declared that “We are satisfied that the arms decommissioning represents the totality of the IRA’s arsenal.” Yet, while Tony Blair spoke of “an important step in the transition from conflict to peace in Northern Ireland”, there has been widespread suspicion, not limited to the ranks of loyalism, that there has not been any real change in the situation.

Has the IRA changed?

In the pages of WR we have always insisted that you could only understand the role of the IRA if you looked beyond Northern Ireland to British imperialism and its relations with other major powers. In particular US imperialism has a long history of manipulating Sinn Féin and the IRA, particularly since the early 1990s and the end of the ‘special relationship’ between the US and Britain. The forms of republican activity involved violence just as much as pressure in the democratic framework for the full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. Whether bombing in London or Manchester, standing in parliamentary elections or sitting in Stormont, the IRA/Sinn Féin has acted as an arm of US imperialism, to which Britain has responded with conventional means as well as through the unionist parties and loyalist paramilitaries.

As with any other capitalist force, both ‘peaceful’ and violent means can be used in the same cause. The British government rules with a combination of repression and democratic ideology. Similarly Sinn Féin/ the IRA have used brute force as well as nationalist rhetoric to maintain their position. They continue to put forward the demand for a United Ireland even though it’s never going to be brought about by the limited forces of Irish republicanism, and would require the deployment of the forces of a major imperialism such as the US or Germany to achieve it. The only alternative route was shown in World War Two when Churchill offered the prospect of a United Ireland if the Irish state abandoned its neutrality.

However, while not being distracted by the means used by Irish republicanism, the question remains: has the IRA changed, or, rather, do the criticisms made by leading US figures over the murder of Robert McCartney and last year’s Northern Bank robbery indicate that American use of Sinn Féin and the IRA has changed? In WR 283 we said that “If US rebukes to Sinn Féin prove to be more than passing … it will be because US imperialism is using other means to pursue its interests.”

As things stand there has been no further significant evidence pointing toward US dissatisfaction with Sinn Fein. In the same way that British governments have often criticised the terrorist activity of loyalist paramilitaries, while at the same time encouraging them and controlling them through its agents, a little criticism of the IRA from time to time is to be expected from the US. The IRA’s ‘total decommissioning’ is designed to make the republicans look responsible and put on further pressure for the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. Predictably, Paisley’s DUP has criticised the whole process as being very dubious, with no photographic evidence, suspicious witnesses, no indication of how weapons were destroyed and not even a hint of an inventory. It’s also clear that any re-armament could be undertaken rapidly. So both the US and Britain still seem to be using their various forces as they have done previously. 

Riots, assassinations and organised crime

Northern Ireland therefore remains a focus for the imperialist clashes between Britain and the US. It would be wrong to think, just because most paramilitary groups are on cease-fire, and that there haven’t recently been the spectacular shootings and bombings like those that hit the headlines in the 1970s and 80s, that life in Northern Ireland is the same as anywhere else in the UK.

For a start the paramilitaries on either side have not disappeared. There has recently been the campaign of the UVF (still officially recognised and either allowed or encouraged in its actions) trying to wipe out the LVF with a series of killings. There was the IRA’s offer to kill those responsible for the McCartney murder. Punishment beatings continue. September’s riots can’t just be dismissed as loyalist protests as they did show the frustration existing in parts of the population. The population of Northern Ireland didn’t need May’s report by the Independent Monitoring Commission to tell them about paramilitary involvement in drug dealing, car hijacks, armed robberies, kidnapping, extortion, money laundering, tobacco and fuel smuggling, security and taxi businesses, all alongside the continuation of paramilitary policing. A new investigation has been initiated into the activities of an estimated 200 gangs engaged in ‘organised crime’ in Northern Ireland. And still the paramilitary groups, mostly ‘on ceasefire’, continue recruiting and training …

None of these things are related to whether or not there’s a normal political process underway in Northern Ireland but to the period of decomposition that engulfs capitalist society. The ruling class can’t offer any future perspective for peace or security in Ireland or anywhere else. The electoral drift from the SDLP and the ‘moderate’ unionists to Sinn Féin and the DUP shows the gradual discrediting of the centre ground and the shift towards parties of open conflict. But while the bourgeoisie is not able to offer the resolution of any problems within capitalist society, the perspective offered by the development of workers’ struggles is recognised by very few. In Ireland the labels of Catholic and Protestant, Unionist and Republican are still taken on by workers, with only rare evidence of any sense of the need to unite in the defence of their class interests. As long as it remains divided, the working class of Northern Ireland will continue to live under the shadow of conflict between different factions of the bourgeoisie.

Car 4/11/5

Valley of death

Kashmir is known as the heaven on earth in popular parlance. The recent earthquake in the morning of eighth October-2005 has turned this heaven into a hell and valley of death. The earthquake measured 7.6 on the Richter scale and had its epicenter in a place 100 km away from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. The north western part of Pakistan has been badly affected, but both the Pakistan occupied and the Indian occupied parts of Kashmir have been worst affected. According to the defense ministry spokesman of Pakistan “this is the worst earthquake in recent times”. Thousands of people have died, more thousands have been injured and several millions have been rendered homeless. Both the governments of Pakistan and India are not in a position to put the correct figures and the figures of casualties and homeless people are being increased with every passing day, reflecting the sheer inefficiency, inability to reach the devastated areas and the victims, and the insensitivity of both ruling cliques in both the capitalist states. The latest (up to 25th October) number of those killed in the wake of the quake is eighty thousand according to a report in The Statesman of 26th October 05. The same report says that 3.3 million people have been rendered homeless. The injured far outnumber the dead. More than 1500 persons are reported to have died in the Indian occupied part of Kashmir. More than a hundred thousand people have been rendered homeless there.

Not quakes but decadent capitalism is the real killer

The decadent capitalist system killed 20 million people in the 1st World War. It killed another 60 million in the 2nd World War. The democratic US imperialist superpower killed hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not for victory in the ongoing war but to strengthen itself strategically for the inevitable imperialist conflict of the future. Millions more have been killed and are being killed in all parts of the world in the ‘peace period’ and the period of the ‘new world order’ by all the state and non state agents of the world capitalist system. This killing and massacre is still not only going on unabated but is increasing more and more with each passing day.

But the explosion of the fury of the forces of nature are not killers in that sense. The inability of the social forces to protect people is solely responsible for the social disaster, death and devastation in the wake of the explosion of nature’s fury. Today mankind has the requisite knowledge, technology, means, materials, machines to build earthquake resistant structures. But the sole question is: who will build those structures? Are the majority of people living in the earthquake prone zones able to purchase those structures? Is a handsome profit ensured in constructing those structures? Have the capitalist governments the necessary political will and resources to shoulder that social responsibility? Is it or can it be in any case the priority for any capitalist state or government in this phase of decomposition of the world capitalist system? The very emphatic answer to these very natural questions is ‘NO’.

Was the quake totally unpredictable?

The capitalist states and governments in India and Pakistan, as those anywhere in the world, leave no stone unturned to make us believe that the earthquakes are quite unpredictable; and even if predictable, there are few means to prevent or control these quakes. It may be true that quakes are impossible to control, but is it true that they are totally unpredictable? According to a report in The Statesman of 10th October, professor B.L. Dhar of the department of geology of the University of Jammu said after this most serious quake in the last 120 years, “We knew all along that Kashmir was sitting on a high seismic zone and we had been warning about it. The entire Himalayan region is a danger area”. From 6th June, 1828 up till 20th November, 2002 this particular zone has been struck by nine earthquakes, the overwhelming majority of which had measured 6 or more on the Richter scale. So the entire region has a long history of seismic activity, as it is located in the Indian tectonic plate, which is moving north at the rate of 40mm per year.

Why no precautionary measures then?

This area is not only very earthquake prone but it is also very war prone. Since August, 1947 when India and Pakistan came into being as two ‘independent’ imperialist twins, this zone has experienced many small and big imperialist war quakes. This has rendered this zone of scenic natural beauty into a permanent war zone where bloodshed and killing either by the military forces of the two imperialist neighbors or the terrorist outfits trained, aided, equipped and financed by both has been a daily affair. Both these imperialist twins have sent to death many more people than all the earthquakes and landslides in this area since their birth in 1947. Each of these imperialist neighbors has stationed a significant part of their military machinery in this strategically very significant war zone. The ruling clique in each is obsessed with the thought of scoring a point over the other in the intensifying regional and world imperialist conflict, in spite of the latest round of the ‘peace process’. Both have already spent and are spending billions of dollars for no other but strategic gain. Both boast of being nuclear powers and are seriously engaged in boosting striking capability with newer and more powerful missiles. They are busy in procuring new and more powerful means of destruction. They have modernised and are constantly modernising further their respective military machinery. According to defense analysts, the recent military operations to dislodge the Pakistani intruders from the strategic heights in Kargil cost the Indian state about 2.5 billion dollars (Sunday Mid-day , July 4, 1999, page 10). Since April, 1984 the Indian military has spent about 4 billion dollars for control of the Siachen glacier in this war prone zone (idem). It can be easily assessed what a huge amount of monetary resources have been spent and human lives destroyed in all the open or hidden wars up till now by both the imperialist states of India and Pakistan. They have no other way. They are compelled by the material conditions of decadent world capitalism to make this war preparedness and these efforts their no 1 priority. Thus it is impossible for them to set aside sufficient money and political will for social security, building of earthquake, cyclone, tsunami or flood resistant shelters for the masses of working class and exploited people.

Rescue, relief and the most cynical imperialist interests

All the most barbarous killers of humanity are now in the role and guise of saviors. The US bourgeoisie, which wields the greatest forces of death these days, has also come to the field to try to whitewash its anti-Islam image and has been loudly vocal in heralding its humanitarian concern. Other major imperialist powers and killers are not also far behind in this diplomatic, political competition, which repeats what was crudely and shamefully exposed in the relief work in the social disaster in the wake of the tsunami in last December. But the relief in reality has been much less than what is needed to save the survivors and the injured from the expanding jaws of death through increasing cold, hunger, misery and disease. According to Jan Egeland, the Chief UN relief coordinator, “the world isn’t doing enough” (Times of India, 12.10.05 , New Delhi edition). There have been reports of the agitation of the hungry people having no food, shelter and warm clothes in both the Pakistan and India occupied parts of earthquake-affected areas. People were compelled to resort to looting in the absence of timely and adequate relief and rescue.

But the imperialist political, diplomatic maneuvering has been in full swing. The Indian government proposed to its Pakistani counterpart to put in action some of its helicopters for the rescue work in the Pakistani occupied areas. The Pakistan government replied that they would accept the offer provided the helicopters are not flown by Indian pilots, which the Indian government did not agree with. The proposal died in the imperialist, diplomatic wrangling. The result would have been the same had each actor exchanged its role with that of the other. Suspicion about each other’s real motives in the relief and rescue work is the supreme and determining factor. Everybody can guess the inner reality of the high sounding ‘peace process’. Both the governments have behaved in an absolutely inhuman manner in the criminal delay in taking the political decision to open the Line Of Control between the two imperialist neighbors in this quake and war prone zone. According to the chief UN relief coordinator in Geneva “these discussions [between India and Pakistan] are now holding up a bigger operation and they shouldn’t. I would want them to work out a compromise immediately”(idem). Very quick decisions on purely humanitarian grounds and concern could have rescued and saved many people and could have provided the affected people in both sides of the LOC with indispensable relief in time. But sordid imperialist interest and concern of each for diplomatic, political, military and strategic strengthening stood in the way and overwhelmingly outweighed the humanitarian concern.

No safety in decadent capitalism

Decadent capitalism means increasing attacks on the living and working conditions of the working class in every part of the world. This means a constant increase in imperialist open wars and hidden wars through terrorism. Thus it is ceaselessly leading the working class and the exploited masses of people towards increasing uncertainty of life and livelihood. This means also the continuous increase in the inability of all the capitalist states everywhere to invest in activities indispensable for protecting the people from the free play of the fury of the forces of nature. This is inevitable in the evolving material conditions of capitalism. Moreover the activities of the forces of nature and the consequent destructive social impact are often not confined to the artificial national boundaries. Social disaster in the wake of this earthquake cared not a straw for the artificially created and forcibly maintained LOC. Such was the case with the death and devastation in the wake of the tsunami. This has brought to the fore the indispensability of internationally coordinated and centralised efforts to minimise the destruction and maximise the safety of the common people. But it is impossible for the capitalist states in the evolving international situation. Thus all aspects of the safety of the common people are bound to be more and more uncertain in the coming period.

Destruction of capitalism is the only way out

No other class but the class conscious and internationally organised and united working class can put an end to the decadent world capitalist system - the root of all evils confronting and endangering more and more the very survival of humanity. The working class will have to pierce through the humanitarian masks and see the barbarous, murderous essence of the capitalist states and leaders without any exception. It will have to disdainfully refuse to be rallied behind any fraction or political party of capital, leftist or rightist, and the calls of nationalism and democracy, the two most powerful ideological weapons of decadent capitalism. The political parties of capital, no matter whether they are leftist or rightist, extreme or moderate, blame each other for the increasing socio- economic and political problems, but carefully hide the truth: that the decadent capitalist system is the root cause of all ills and evils. They thus try their best to rally the working class behind their counterrevolutionary political projects, to keep them confined to and stuck in the capitalist political terrain. Class struggle against the increasing attacks of capital will have to be intensified and united across all sectors and national borders. This is the only way out of the hell on earth which the capitalist system is creating.

Communist Internationalist, ICC section in India, November 2005

The SPGB in its review of the British Communist Left (Socialist Standard 1213, September 2005) shows that it has understood nothing of the question of revolutionary organisation, even after 100 years of existence. Less than half of the review actually deals with the book, the rest is an attack on the ICC. The article as a whole seeks to dismiss the communist left, yesterday and today, as irrelevant.

The book is judged to be “a largely accurate account of those identified with the left-wing of Bolshevik politics in this era”. However, the notion that the communist left was simply the left of the Bolsheviks ignores the reality that it was the continuation of the tradition of the left in the workers’ movement; a tradition that included but pre-dated the Bolsheviks. This ‘mistake’ allows the SPGB to attribute all evil to the Bolsheviks. Thus the communist left “struggled towards taking up socialist positions” but “made some serious errors during its political evolution too – and continues to do so, largely because of its adherence to the vanguard politics of Leninism”. All the debates in the communist movement, including the differences with the Bolsheviks and the criticism of Lenin’s positions count for nothing. After this the British Communist Left is easily dismissed as being composed merely of “elements in the Socialist Labour Party and the British Socialist Party” and the Workers’ Socialist Federation, which was little more than “a one woman show”. There is no mention of the struggle of the working class itself, of which the communist left was a part and in whose struggles they played an active role. There is no reference to the anti-war activity of John Maclean, which recognised the link between the working class’ defence of its immediate interests and the revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism. There is nothing about the discussions on the unions, parliament and Labour Party. This should be no surprise, because in all of the writings of the SPGB there is no real attempt to understand the working class as a class with a history of its own and positions to defend. Its role is simply to imbibe socialism from the SPGB and to “muster under its banner” (SPGB Declaration of Principles).

The attack on the ICC repeats the same themes. It had “interesting beginnings” but is now “a paranoid sect” [1] [172] that is Leninist and sectarian. Above all, the SPGB is offended by the book’s criticism of its supposed “impeccable record of actively opposing both world wars” and argues that the ICC’s activity is actually the same as the SPGB’s - “i.e denounce it as a capitalist conflict not worth the shedding of a drop of blood”.

The SPGB certainly criticised the war, but Maclean and the “elements in the SLP and BSP” sought to mobilise the working class against it, not through denunciations in the abstract but through intervention into the actual struggle of the working class. This was because they understood that when the class defends its interests, even at the immediate economic level, it opposes the bourgeoisie and stands in the way of the war machine.

The SPGB’s criticism reveals an interesting vision of what it means to be a revolutionary. It is only able to see in the slogan “turn the imperialist war into a world wide civil war against capitalism” a “suicidal slogan”: “if the ICC was ever crazy enough to put its own tactic into operation it would soon cease to exist organisationally”. This is a vision of revolutionaries as something separate from the working class. The whole point of Lenin’s slogan was not for revolutionaries to hurl themselves into kamikaze raids on the capitalist state, but to take part in a growing movement of the class which would - and did - inevitably lead to a general confrontation with the bourgeoisie. As The British Communist Left shows, one of the strengths of the communist left was its criticism of the substitutionist vision which ends up replacing mass activity with the intrigues of a minority. Substitutionism, however, remains a good description of the theory and practice of the SPGB. This can be seen in its central strategy of “the conquest of the powers of government”; that is, the winning of an SPGB majority in parliament “in order that this machinery…may be converted from an instrument of oppression into an instrument of emancipation” (SPGB Declaration of Principles). This means participation in the bourgeoisie’s democratic game and the sending of representatives to parliament ‘on behalf of’ the working class with the aim of the SPGB actually taking power. In practice it is much less than that. It means the SPGB standing token candidates completely separate from the struggles of the working class.

Where the SPGB is notable for its loyalty to parliamentary democracy, the communist left in Britain has been distinguished for its opposition to the parliamentary circus of our exploiters. NA 5/11/5

More than 6,000 vehicles burned: private cars, buses, fire-trucks; dozens of buildings torched: shops, warehouses, workshops, gyms, schools, creches; more than a thousand arrests and already more than a hundred prison sentences passed; several hundred injured - rioters, but also policemen and several dozen fire-fighters; shots fired at the police. Each night since 27 October, hundreds of districts in all regions of the country have been affected. Districts and neighbourhoods which are among the poorest in the land, where, crammed into sinister tower-blocks, live millions of workers and their families, the great majority of them from North Africa and black Africa.

The violence of desperation

What is most striking about these actions, apart from the extent of the damage and violence, is their total absurdity. It’s easy to understand why the youth of the most deprived neighbourhoods, especially those from immigrant families, should want to confront the police. Day by day they have been subjected to crude and intrusive identity controls and body searches, accompanied by racist insults; it’s perfectly logical for them to see the cops as their persecutors. But here the main victims of their violence are their own families or those close to them: younger brothers and sisters who can’t go to their usual school, parents who have lost cars, for which they will get pathetic insurance pay-outs because the cars are old and cheap, and who will now have to shop away from where they live because the nearer and cheaper shops have been burned out. The young people were not smashing up the rich neighbourhoods inhabited by their exploiters, but their own grim suburbs, which will now be all the more uninhabitable than before. In the same way, the injuries inflicted on the fire-fighters, people whose job is to protect others, often at risk to their own lives, are truly shocking, as are the injuries inflicted on the passengers of a bus which was set on fire, or the death of a man of sixty struck by a young man, apparently for trying to stop him from committing some act of violence.

In this sense the depredations committed in the poor neighbourhoods night after night have nothing whatever to do with the struggle of the working class. Certainly, in its struggle against capitalism, the working class is obliged to use violence. The overthrow of capitalism is necessarily a violent act because the ruling class, with all the means of repression it has at its disposal, will defend tooth and nail its power and its privileges. History has taught us, especially since the Paris Commune of 1871 among many other examples, the extent to which the bourgeoisie is prepared to wipe its feet on its grand principles of ‘democracy’ , of ‘freedom, equality and fraternity’ when it feels threatened. In one single, bloody week 30,000 Parisian workers were massacred because they had tried to take power into their own hands. And even in the defence of its immediate interests, the working class is often faced with repression by the bourgeois state or the bosses’ private armies – repression which it has to oppose through its own class violence.

But what’s happening now in France has nothing to do with proletarian violence against the exploiting class: the main victims of the current violence are the workers themselves. Apart from those who are suffering most directly from the damage that has been done, the whole working class of the country is affected: the media barrage around the present events is covering up all the attacks which at this very moment the bourgeoisie is unleashing, while at the same time obscuring the struggles which workers have been trying to wage against these attacks.

The response of the ruling class

As for the capitalists and the leaders of the state, sitting calmly in their posh neighbourhoods, they are taking advantage of the current violence to justify the strengthening of the apparatus of repression. Thus the main measure taken by the French government to deal with the situation has been to decree, on 8 November, a state of emergency, a measure last adopted 43 years ago and which is based on a law passed over 50 years ago, during the Algerian war. The major element in this decree is a curfew, a ban on going out onto the street after a certain hour, as during the days of the German occupation between 1940 and 1944 or during the state of siege imposed in Poland in 1981. But the decree also permits other inroads into classical ‘democracy’, such as house raids by day or night, control of the media or the use of military tribunals. The politicians who decided to impose the state of emergency or who support it (like the Socialist Party) assure us that these are exceptional measures and that they won’t be abused, but it is a precedent which it is getting the population - and in particular the workers - to accept. Tomorrow, faced with the workers’ struggles which the attacks of capital are bound to engender, it will be easier to resort to similar measures and to make the weapons of bourgeois repression seem more acceptable.

The present situation can bring nothing good either to the young people burning cars, or to the working class as a whole. Only the bourgeoisie can, to a certain degree, draw profit from it for the future.

This doesn’t mean that the ruling class has deliberately provoked the current violence.

It’s true that certain of its political sectors, like the extreme right National Front, can expect to reap electoral gains from the events. It’s also true that Sarkozy, who dreams of winning votes from the extreme right during the next presidential elections, threw oil on the fire by talking about using fire-hoses to ‘clean out’ the rebellious neighbourhoods and by describing the rioters as ‘rabble’ when the violence first began. But it is also clear that the main sectors of the ruling class, beginning with the government, but including the left parties who, in general, run the most affected municipalities, are highly embarrassed by the situation. This embarrassment is motivated in part by the economic cost of the violence. Thus the boss of French bosses, Laurence Parisot, declared on Radio Europe on 7 November that “the situation is grave, even very grave” and that “the consequences for the economy are very serious”.

But above all the bourgeoisie is embarrassed and anxious on the political level. The difficulty it is having in ‘restoring order’ is undermining the credibility of the institutions of its rule. Even if the working class cannot draw any benefit from the present situation, its class enemy, the bourgeoisie, is also finding it increasingly difficult to maintain the ‘republican order’ it needs to justify its place at the head of society.

And this disquiet isn’t only being felt by the French bourgeoisie. In other countries, in Europe but also right across the world, as in China for example, the situation in France is front page news. Even in the USA, a country where in general the press has little to say about what goes on in France, images of cars and buildings in flames have hit the headlines.

For the US bourgeoisie, displaying the crisis hitting the poor neighbourhoods of French towns lets them settle a few scores: the French media and politicians made a huge noise about the failure of the American state to cope with Hurricane Katrina. Today, there is a certain jubilation in the US press or among certain of its leaders, who have taken the opportunity to mock the ‘arrogance of France’. This friendly exchange is par for the course between two countries which are in permanent opposition on the diplomatic front, especially over Iraq. This said, there is real anxiety in the tone of the European press, even if it has flicked a few barbs at the ‘French social model’, which Chirac has so often boasted about as against the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’. Thus, on 5 November, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia wrote that “no one is rubbing their hands; the autumn storms in France could be the prelude to a European winter”. And it was the same for the political leaders: “The images coming from Paris are a warning to all democracies that the efforts towards integration can never be considered as finished. On the contrary we must give them a new impetus… The situation here is not comparable, but it is clear that one of the tasks of the next government will be to accelerate integration” (Thomas Steg, a German government spokesman, 7 November). “We cannot think that we are so different from Paris here, it’s only a question of time” (Romano Prodi, leader of the centre left in Italy, and former president of the European Commiission). “Everyone is anxious about what is happening” (Tony Blair).

This anxiety reveals that the ruling class is becoming aware of its own bankruptcy. Even in countries where there has been a somewhat different approach to the problems of immigration, the bourgeoisie is still faced with difficulties it can’t overcome, because they derive from an insurmountable economic crisis which has been facing it for the last 30 years or more.

Today the ‘good guys’ of the French bourgeoisie, and even the government which up till now has resorted to the stick rather than the carrot, declares that ‘something must be done’ for the deprived neighbourhoods. They are talking about renovating the miserable suburbs inhabited by those now in revolt. They are calling for more social workers, more cultural, sports or leisure centres where young people can occupy themselves in activities other than burning cars. All the politicians agree that one of the causes of the current malaise among the young is the high level of unemployment they suffer from: it’s over 50% in these areas. The right is saying that it needs to be easier for companies to install themselves in these areas, notably through a reduction in taxes; the left calls for more teachers and better schools. But neither of these policies can resolve the problem.

The underlying causes of the revolt

Unemployment won’t go down because a factory is set up in one area rather than another. The need for education workers or social workers to deal with the hundreds of thousands of desperate young people is such that the state budget isn’t up to it. It’s the same in all countries where the state is obliged to reduce ‘social’ expenditure in order to boost the ability of the national economy to compete on a saturated world market. And even if there were lots more social workers or teachers, that wouldn’t solve the fundamental contradictions which weigh down on capitalist society and which are the true source of the alienation affecting young people.

If the young of the suburbs are rebelling by using totally absurd methods today, it’s because they are sunk in a profound despair. In April 1981, in Brixton, a poor area of London with a large immigrant population, the young people who had rebelled in a similar way daubed the walls with the slogan ‘No Future’. It’s this feeling of ‘No Future’ which hundreds of thousands of young people are feeling today in France, as in many other countries. They feel it in their guts, every day, because of unemployment, because of the discrimination and disdain with which they are treated. But they are not alone. In many parts of the world the situation is even worse and the response of young people takes on even more absurd forms: in Palestine, the dream of many children is to be ‘martyrs’ and one of the favourite games of 10 year old kids is to strap on a toy suicide bomber’s belt.

But these more extreme examples are only the tip of the iceberg. It’s not only the poorest young people who are being invaded by despair. Their despair and their absurd actions reveal a total lack of perspective not only for themselves, but for the whole of society, in all countries. A society which, more and more, is stuck in an economic crisis which can’t be solved because the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production are themselves insoluble. A society which, more and more, is ravaged by wars, famines, uncontrollable epidemics, by a dramatic deterioration of the environment, by natural catastrophes which are transformed into vast human tragedies, like last winter’s tsunami or the flooding of New Orleans at the end of the summer.

In the 1930s, world capitalism went through a crisis comparable to today’s. Capitalism’s only response was world war. It was a barbaric response but it did allow the bourgeoisie to mobilise society around this objective. Today, the only response of the ruling class to the impasse in its economy is once again war: this is why we are seeing one war after another, wars that increasingly involve the most advanced countries, countries which have been spared from the direct impact of war for a very long time (like the USA or even certain European countries, like Yugoslavia throughout the 90s). However, the bourgeoisie cannot go all the way towards a world war. In the first place because when the first effects of the crisis made themselves felt, at the end of the 60s, the world working class, especially in the most industrialised countries, reacted with such vigour (general strike in France May 68, ‘hot autumn’ in Italy 69, Poland in 70-71 etc) that it showed that this time round it was not ready to serve as cannon fodder for the imperialist ambitions of the bourgeoisie. In the second place, because with the disappearance of the two great imperialist blocs that followed the collapse of the eastern bloc in 1989, the diplomatic and military conditions for a new world war do not exist today, even if this doesn’t prevent more localised wars from continuing and multiplying.

The only perspective: the struggle of the proletariat

Capitalism has no perspective to offer humanity, except increasingly barbaric wars, ever-greater catastrophes, more and more poverty for the great majority of the world population. The only possibility for society to emerge from the barbarism of the present world is the overthrow of the capitalist system. And the only force capable of overthrowing capitalism is the world working class. It’s because, up till now, the working class has not had the strength to affirm this perspective through the development and extension of its struggles, that so many of its children are plunging into despair, expressing their revolt in absurd ways or taking refuge in the mirages of religion, which promises them a paradise after they are dead. The only real solution to the ‘crisis of the disinherited neighbourhoods’ is the development of the proletarian struggle towards the revolution. It is this struggle alone which can give a meaning and a perspective to the whole revolt of the younger generation.

ICC 8th November 2005

This article was first published in issue no. 88 of Revolucion Mundial [179], the publication of the ICC’s section in Mexico.

In the context of the lead-up to the 2006 elections, the Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion Nacional (the Zapatista National Liberation Army) has issued a communique with a tone that is apparently critical of the developing electoral circus, and for the first time it says that exploitation is at the centre of the capitalist system. This communique may appear to be critical of the electoral process and capitalism, but in reality it is an accessory of the electoral campaign.  It shores up the ideology of the ruling class that wants us to believe that our lot can be improved through making better laws or through defending the “Welfare State”. For this reason this 6th Communique (6th-C) is irrefutable confirmation of the counter-revolutionary nature of the EZNL.

The “Other Campaign” complements the election circus

The 6th-C and previous comments by Marcos appear to show a change of direction by the EZLN. In their 2nd Communiqué (June 1994), the Zapatistas openly defended democracy and elections: “Now the possibility of a peaceful transition to democracy and freedom can be put to the test: the electoral process of August 1994. The CND (Convention Nacional Democratica) must demand the carrying out of free and democratic elections...”

Now the EZLN declares that it is against the electoral process and has declared war on the PRD and Lopez Obrador (the ‘radical’ mayor of Mexico City). These changes, which the capitalist press and the apparatus of the left present as “radical”, are in reality deceitful and hollow.

The so-called denunciation of these elections and groups is not evidence of a reflection on what they represent. Commandante Marcos' apparent revulsion with the main political parties (PAN, PRI, and PRD) is due to his discovery in “April of 2001” that “politicians have no decency”.  Thus it was from 2001 they realised that the PRI, Pan and PRD were lying and they therefore tell us: “...we already have no contact with the federal powers; we understand that dialogue and negotiations with them would be a farce because of these political parties”. This is not because the EZLN considers the capitalist system uses these institutions (such as the parties) and its tools (such as the electoral process) in order to reinforce its domination. Rather these parties, and therefore the electoral process in which these participate, are seen as not carrying out their true role. That is to say, it would be enough to put other parties in their place in order to change the nature of the mechanisms of bourgeois rule.

It is their apparently radical attitude and denunciation of the electoral process and the PRD that has encouraged many sections of the working class to believe that the EZLN will now help to advance the development of the class struggle. But the EZLN’s anti-electoralism is a lie. They say they were betrayed by the PRD and deceived by the PRI and PAN when they signed the San Andres agreement; but this is only strengthens the idea that the apparatus of bourgeois domination can be used or reformed to serve the interests of the exploited.

In the same way, the role that the EZLN plays as the promoter of the “Other Campaign” reinforces the idea that, faced with capitalism, democracy is the only road to take. If the EZLN’s criticisms of the PRD and Lopez Obrador make it look like a radical group, an organisation of the “Left”, as Marcos says, it is because they are trying to present themselves as being different from the PRD.

We want to underline that while their form may be different, the nature of the EZLN has not changed. They remain alien to the proletariat and organically part of capital. They present themselves as being different, as ‘anti-globalisationists’ who maintain that ‘another world is possible’. But this ‘other world’ is merely capitalism with a human face.

We know that many workers, above all the younger generation, are taken in by the apparent radicalism of the EZLN, and that our denunciation of the 6th-C makes it appear that we being haughty or sectarian. But revolutionaries are obliged to denounce these so-called allies and friends who do nothing but swell the old structures of capital and stop the process of clarification and reflection.

The “6th Communique” in defence of Mexican capitalism

Along with the EZLN's supposedly anti-electoral talk goes its promotion of nationalism and the defence of the capitalist economy. While pretending to criticise the Free Trade Treaty (FTT), they end up defending the national economy and Mexican business. They thus conclude that the problem is not capitalism, but the interference of large foreign capital. “They make laws such as the Free Trade Treaty that leaves many Mexican in poverty, especially the peasants and the small producers, because they are swallowed up by the great agro-industrial businesses, and the workers and small businessmen, because they cannot compete with the great multinationals...”. Of course the FTT was set up to strengthen the USA and ensure its domination over the capitalist states of Latin America, but the working class cannot identify its own interests with those of capitalists large and small who have been driven to ruin by economic competition.

The same goes for the EZLN’s call to keep companies in the hands of the state, which is presented as a “great radical project” and a different form of property that workers have to defend. Without even blushing they call on workers to organise themselves to carry out “...a full and coordinated defence of national sovereignty, through intransigent opposition to the privatisation of electrical energy, oil, water and natural resources.” Faced with the EZLN’s patriotism and praise for state property, it is valuable to remember the denunciation that the Grupo de Trabajabores Marxistas[1] made of the poisoned talk and state capitalist policies of Cardenas, the 'radical' President of the Mexico in the 1930s: “...The task of the Mexican proletariat is not to sacrifice itself so that the oil industry and the railways become profitable for the imperialist and ‘national’ capitalists... the task of the proletariat  is to seize the industries, that is, wrench them from bourgeois hands through the proletarian revolution!” (Comunismo, 1938).  It’s the same today: the call for the defence of state industries means nothing more than the defence of capitalism.

In the same way, the EZLN’s critique of the “new  economic model” shows that it also yearns for the old state interventionist policies of Keynesianism used throughout the 1970's “...Neo-liberalism has changed the political class of Mexico, or rather its politics, because they act like shop employees, who have to do everything possible to sell everything cheaply.” It also continues with its tradition of defending the Constitution[2] adding “We have already seen the changes of the law that remove Article 27 from the Constitution and mean that the common land and communal land can be sold... And they also say they are going to privatise, or rather sell to foreigners, the businesses that the State once used to help the people's welfare. Not because they are not working properly... Instead of the social rights that were conquered by the 1910 revolution being improved, they are being shamefully abandoned...”

The electoral campaigns, including the “Other Campaign”, are no part of the cause of the proletariat, which needs to recognise that the real terrain for its struggles is the defence of its own living conditions. At the same time workers must be able to identify the fraudsters who present themselves as friends but who are carrying out the destructive work of the bourgeoisie.

Tatlin 14.08.05.

We are publishing here a leaflet distributed by our section in Sweden during a workers’ struggle at SL-Connex public transport (SL is a state company that has recently contracted out a number of its functions to private firms like Connex).

This strike was part of a wider movement among Swedish workers – none of them particularly powerful in themselves, but still expressions of a general revival of struggles that has been going on across the world over the past two years.

During the autumn, there have been at least three industrial actions in Sweden. One of them took place at two hospitals in two towns (Malmö and Umeå), where part of the staff has been involved in actions against the increased levels of exploitation imposed on workers in the health services (these hospitals are still operated by “public administration”).

Another, perhaps more ‘spectacular’ industrial action, took place at a petrol refinery on Sweden’s west coast, in Lysekil, where around 200 construction workers of Thai origin went out on a wildcat strike against horrible working conditions. These workers expressed a very high level of combativity and courage: they were immediately threatened by the construction enterprise that employs them to build the Preem refinery that they would be sacked within a few days, sent ‘home’ to Thailand and replaced by workers from the Philippines. The workers were fighting to get the wages they were promised by the construction enterprise (an Italian firm), which the company refused to pay. At the same time, since it’s so obvious that the conditions are so horrible, the trade union at the refinery as well as the building workers’ union (both part of the LO union federation) claimed that they stood in ‘sympathy’ with the ‘foreign’ workers, and urged Preem, the refinery enterprise, to “respect Swedish work agreements and rules”, something that the management of Preem declared that they indeed do. So both the management of Preem, and the Swedish trade unions, accused the Italian enterprise that hired the Thai workers of not respecting the “fine Swedish tradition of collective agreements”. In fact the Swedish trade unions did nothing to really support these workers. They remained isolated in their strike, which ended after around 10 days (in late September/beginning of October), after the workers were promised that they would receive their money and be able to continue work. However, that turned out to be a lie: most of them didn’t get their money, and most of them were sent ‘home’ and replaced by other workers from Asia.

Then came the strike at Connex-SL, a bit less than a week later. The board of Connex announced that they wanted to sack a rank and file union representative for being ‘disloyal’ to the enterprise. Many workers there were rightly extremely upset about the provocative way they wanted to fire him, but this action also served as a basis for a mobilisation of the unions in Sweden in a way we have not seen for many years. A three hour strike occurred, backed unofficially by the rank and file unionists and even the unions (even if they were obliged to not sanction them officially). But the class content of the strike (a response to victimisation) was derailed into a defence of “freedom of speech” and of course, into a call to “defend the union” as the decision of the management was an “attack on everything the union represents” as the chairman of SEKO (LO) would have it. After the strike took place (6th of October) there were some meetings and a demonstration, where the policy of the unions was to attack the enterprise and to denounce “privatisations”. There have also been threats from the unions (both LO and SAC, the anarcho-syndicalists) to launch a “political strike”, so the unions have really been radicalising their language in order to deal with this growing discontent from the workers.

The ICC intervened with this leaflet at a demonstration, called by SEKO, that took place in Stockholm on the 20th of October.

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Strikes at Connex-SL: To defend their class interests, workers have to confront the unions

Since the spring of 2003, there has been a re-emergence of class struggle in a number of countries in the heartlands of capitalism. During 2003 there were big demonstrations and strikes in France that involved hundreds of thousands of workers protesting against serious attacks on their pensions. There were similar movements in Austria.

In 2004 there were important strikes in the German car industry (GM-Opel/Mercedes/Chrysler) but also in other sectors, all of which put the question of solidarity at the centre of the struggle against sackings and wage cuts.

In 2005, during the peak of the summer anti-terrorist campaigns, we saw wildcat strikes at London’s Heathrow airport. Workers at British Airways went out on strike in defence of sacked catering workers

In Sweden there is growing anger against sackings, reduced wages and increasingly inhuman conditions of work. Workers have taken action at the hospitals in Malmö and Umeå; there was a wildcat strike of building workers at the Preem refinery in Lysekil, where hundreds of temporary workers went on strike against inhuman working conditions.

Now we can see this anger growing stronger with the Connex-SL workers. They tried to defend themselves when a trade union official was sacked in a provocative manner because he had “damaged and been disloyal to the enterprise” when he made critical comments to the media over security at the company.

There is no question that  working conditions at Connex-SL have deteriorated, as they have done in many other companies. Some years ago a tube driver was sacked and personally accused and convicted for an accident where a worker died, when the real cause was the lack of workplace security, for which the company is responsible.

But at that time neither SEKO nor any other union was talking about strikes or action, which shows the hypocrisy of the unions when they today talk loudly about ‘solidarity’. This only underlines the necessity of fighting against the daily attacks on our working conditions, carried out by the bosses with the help of the unions  

In order to get results, the workers must confront the unions

If you were to believe what the unions and the bourgeois media say, the situation would be resolved if the SEKO union representative was re-employed. But wasn’t it the unions, among them SEKO, that agreed to all the deteriorations and sacrifices that capital has forced upon the working class? Isn’t it these very same SEKO representatives that claim to be “Proud of SL” (the transport company) but criticise the way that Connex does its work for SL? Isn’t it the “public enterprise SL” that determines the framework for the way the “private” Connex company does its work? Aren’t the Social Democrats on the company board of SL, which has given full support to Connex? These are the same Social Democrats that in the Landstinget (the Stockholm regional council) have given the green light to “deregulation” and to the division of public transport at SL into 5 different, competing enterprises (Connex being just one of these). These are the same Social Democrats who on the boards of SEKO branches claim to defend the interests of the workers. These are the same Social Democrats that have been in government for decades and have constantly attacked the working class. In reality, aren’t the unions on the same side as the bosses and the state?

At the same time as we see a growing anger and combativity among the working class in a number of countries, which shows that the working class is beginning to defend itself against the attacks of the bourgeoisie, the media and the unions are talking about the conflict at Connex as a question of  the right to free speech, as if the working class had any rights within capitalist society.

The unions and the media, especially the leftist papers, paint a picture of the unions threatened and under attack. The chairman of KO has made declarations in the media that “The sacking of the union leader by Connex is an attack on the whole union movement”, and the workers’ struggle should be a defence of “freedom of speech” and “democratic rights”.

They try to derail the real anger of the workers against years of attacks on their working conditions into a defence of the unions and the democratic state.

They do that in order to hide that the fact that it’s the unions, together with the democratic state, that hinder the working class, either by signing agreements with the bosses and legitimising the wage diktats of capital, or through the democratic state’s legal repression against wildcat strikes.

SEKO’s talk about a ‘political strike’ at some future date, is done only to hide their sabotage of a real strike movement, that could unify all workers, starting in public transport but with the prospect of involving all workers, in both the private and public sectors, in defence of their class interests.

The bombastic rhetoric of SEKO can’t hide the fact that in reality they ensured that the struggles which occurred on 6 October were stopped with a 3-hour strike. This undermined the long standing discontent of the workers at Connex-SL, and at the same time SEKO (and LO) can present themselves as more pro-worker without taking any kind of legal responsibility for the strike.

The struggle of the working class is always political when it confronts the capitalist class, its laws and its STATE.

It’s the crisis of capitalism that forces the bourgeoisie to attack

The deterioration of working conditions, the attacks on wages, sackings or threat of sackings, all this is not something that only the workers at Connex-SL face, and these threats wouldn’t be lessened if SL was operating the services in its own name, without “entrepreneurs” like Connex, Citypendeln, or Swebus!

The leftists and the unions are trying to fool us that the situation would be much better, both for the workers at the company and for the passengers, if SL still operated the company as a so-called “public” administration.

As if the workers at a number of hospitals that still operate under “public administration” have better work conditions. Active expressions of discontent recently at hospitals in Malmö and Umeå contradict that myth.

Another myth spread by the bourgeoisie is that workers in the “private sector”, especially industrial workers, have such good conditions and are so overpaid that they don’t give a damn for the conditions of the workers in the public sector. This kind of rumour is of course spread in order to divide the workers.

In reality, the workers in the “private sector” are also being ferociously attacked. Every day we are witnessing new lay-offs: among the latest are 1500 to go at Volvo Cars, and the Electrolux factory in Mariestad is to close. Each month thousands of workers are threatened with unemployment!

All of this makes it imperative for the working class to reflect about the disastrous perspective that capitalism holds for the working class and humanity as a whole.

Between 1968 and the late 1980s, workers all around the world struggled against the crisis of capitalism. A characteristic of that struggle was that it often directly challenged the unions and their division of workers into different sectors. Workers often challenged the attempts by the unions and leftists to put workers in the public sector against workers in the “private sector”. A second characteristic of that struggle was that the working class tried to extend its struggle beyond the local branch or sector to other sectors of workers. This struggle indeed challenged the power of the bourgeoisie and its union auxiliaries.

The working class must re-appropriate these experiences! Workers must wage a unified struggle against the assaults of capital and the deterioration of their living standards. The question of solidarity is a question of life and death for us, but it can’t be left to the trade unions, and it can’t take the form of support for the unions, precisely because it’s the unions that pin our struggles down!

Internationell Revolution, section of the ICC in Sweden