As the American bourgeoisie began its lavish preparations to inaugurate President Bush’s second term in the White House there didn’t seem to be much open worry in the administration about the state of the American economy.  In fact, economic growth of 4.7 % in 2004 and a predicted 3.5 % growth rate for the coming year would appear to mean that everything is groovy in the present phase of expansion of the so-called business cycle, and therefore with the bourgeoisie’s capitalist system. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that, even considering the bourgeoisie’s own data on several key economic indicators, the U.S. is as stuck in the chronic economic crisis of capitalism as everybody else in today’s world.

The end of a decade of economic delusions

The 1990’s were years of economic delusions for the American bourgeoisie. In the wake of the euphoria about the collapse of Stalinism and the campaign about the virtues of democratic capitalism, after the recession of 1991, for the rest of the decade the American bourgeoisie never ceased to show off its supposed economic success. The things that were said then about the “health,” “vitality”, etc. of capitalism say tons about the stupidity of the talking heads of the bourgeoisie. The starting of the new millennium four years ago brought a good reality-check to American capitalism. The “longest running economic recovery in American, history” –according to bourgeois mythology – suddenly ground to a halt. The catastrophic collapse in 2001 of the “casino economy,” symbolized by sky-high stock market indicators and the once celebrated “new economy” of dot.com and high technology “virtual” companies, brought an end to the much-repeated bourgeois fairy tale of a vigorous capitalism that has just demonstrated its superiority over the busted Russian “communism.”

Thus the Bush administration during most of its first term in office presided over the worst recession of the US economy since the onset of the present open crisis of capitalism in the late 1960’s. The pompous “new economy” created by the “internet revolution” came tumbling down like a castle of sand. The paper “wealth” created by years of frantic stock market speculation suddenly went up in smoke. The great economic miracles of the 90’s became the great busts of the new millennium with many of their “hot-shot” so-called “entrepreneurs” showing what they really were: ruthless bloodsuckers, gamblers and crooks. But these spectacular events were just the tip of the iceberg. At the root of the Enron and Martha Stewart  “scandals,” among many others, what really is in play is a sick capitalism running out of options to handle its economic crisis.

According to the official version of the bourgeoisie the recession that officially started in March of 2001 supposedly ended in December of the same year. However, beneath even the enthusiasm of the official cheerleaders of capitalism, there is a certain level of consciousness that there is not much to brag about in the current ongoing “recovery.”.

An anemic “recovery” looking very much like its true self: a deepening economic crisis

The bourgeoisie can talk all it wants about the importance of present and future economic growth projections, but it cannot hide the fact that capitalism, whether in recession or recovery, can no longer bring about any improvements to the general economic and social conditions of the working class. On the contrary, every new cycle of recession-recovery, brings about a new level of deterioration in the proletariat’s living and working conditions, as the bourgeoisie tries to make workers bear the brunt of each new fall into the abyss of the chronic crisis of its system,.

The recession of 2001   put millions of workers on the street, as companies went bust or simply tried to squeeze more profits from fewer employees. Now in the phase of recovery, at the same time that the media was recently celebrating a supposed record-setting 2.2 million jobs created during last year, two remarkable facts around the issue of employment-unemployment have come to dampen the euphoria. First, the gains in job creation in the last year are not even enough to make up for all the jobs lost earlier in President Bush’s’ first term in office. In fact there has not been any growth in the total of workers with a job in the last four years –132.4 million when Bush took office in 2001 and 132.3 last December. Taking into account the population growth since 2001 –around 10 million – this means that total unemployment has surely increased, and only god knows what statistical tricks the Labor Department has had to pull to establish the rate of unemployment at 5.4%, significantly lower than the 6.3 % that existed at the height of the “recession.” Second, manufacturing companies, which shed more than two million jobs from 2000 to the end of 2003, added back only 96,000 jobs in 2004, which is said to be the weakest rebound in factory employment of any economic recovery on record in the United States. In truth, service industries have accounted for almost all the celebrated new jobs created in 2004,  which speaks volumes about the depths reached by the economic crisis. More particularly this fact reflects the tendency of the most powerful economy of world capitalism to become a service economy, with more than 4/5 of the labor force employed in services (110.2 million in services; 22.0 million in manufacturing; and 2.2 million in agriculture).

In a recent television interview the Treasury Secretary John Snow predicted a steady economic expansion and “good job numbers for the foreseeable future.” The question is: what kind of jobs? According to a recent study in the New York region, which reflects what is going on in the rest of the country, the anemic new job creation was accompanied by an even more anemic development in salaries: the jobs created in the last four year paid 43% less than those created from 1996 to 2000! Besides, these new jobs are in many cases part-time, contract work or what they now call “seasonal work,” lacking benefits like pensions, paid vacation or health care. Moreover despite the record number of new jobs being created, for the unemployed worker it is becoming more and more difficult to find a new job. As of November, about 1.8 million, or one in five, unemployed workers were jobless for more than six months, compared with 1.1 million when the recession officially ended in November 2001. By other accounts since the start of the recession in March 2001, the average length of unemployment has risen from 13 weeks to 20 weeks.

A cancerous economic growth

According to last year’s growth figures the American economy is doing much better than any of its major competitors –except China. The countries of the Euro zone grew an average of 1.6%, Japan and Great Britain 3%, compared with a 4.7% for the U.S. However rather than being the expression of a healthy economy, American economic growth is very much like the growth of a cancerous tumor in a dying body. This positive growth figure is basically based on a frantic resort to the mechanism of credit which is filled with dangerous consequences both for the U.S. and world capitalism as a whole. For the U.S., this policy is the primary cause of the new record setting deficit in its current account and, in great measure, for the astronomical growth in the government budget deficit. In other words, the American bourgeoisie has fashioned its economic “recovery” on a mountain of public and private debt that is not being paid and will not be repaid.

 There is among the dominant class a consciousness that this cheap money policy is unsustainable. It has re-ignited inflation –  3.3% last year.  Thus the Federal Reserve has reversed its policy of near zero interest rates and has begun to move them upwards.

 At the international level, the gigantic American debt is a very heavy negative weight for the world economy and a very dangerous time bomb. For one, it is world capitalism that has to cover for the deficits of the American bourgeoisie, and its aggressive policy of cheap dollar  intended to jump-start its exports. This policy in particular is affecting in the first place the countries of the euro zone –against which the dollar value is at record lows – making more difficult their own economic woes.

As the capitalism’s chronic crisis more and more affects the most powerful economies of the world, what dominates the relations between national states is a ruthless competition and a tendency of each sate to look after number one, regardless of the consequences for the world economy. —Eduardo Smith

Despite the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars on the electoral circus in 2004, the American bourgeoisie is no better off today than it was before the election and continues to face severe political problems. The goal of any electoral circus under capitalism is twofold: to exert the full power of the democratic mystification and to put in place the most appropriate ruling team for the coming period.

This year, the goal of re-establishing the credibility of the democratic mystification was particularly important, given the clearly tainted electoral shambles of 2000, from which the candidate who lost the popular vote nevertheless emerged victorious, but whose authority and legitimacy was in question for four years. At the same time, the fallout from the deteriorating military situation in Iraq, both at home and abroad, has seriously undermined American imperialism’s political authority and increased its difficulties to respond effectively to challenges to its hegemony on the international level, creating a situation which required a readjustment of the ruling team..

The election has accomplished neither goal, leaving the capitalist class with a political mess as it faces the difficulties ahead. The failure to achieve its goals were the consequences of the social decomposition of capitalism on its ability to control and manipulate the electoral process. As we discussed in Internationalism 132, these effects included the difficulty encountered by the dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie in settling on a  preferred political division favoring the election of John Kerry until very late in the campaign – perhaps too late – to facilitate its successful implementation. Another problem was its difficulty in being able to manipulate and control the electorate effectively, especially the Christian fundamentalist right, which seemed impervious to the political rhetoric of the campaign. Twenty million of the sixty million votes cast for Bush came from Christian fundamentalists who essentially ignored the central policy issues of the war in Iraq and the economy, and voted solely on the instructions of their clergy based on secondary and even tertiary issues like gay marriage and abortion. 

The Lack of Post-Election Euphoria

A central characteristic of a successful electoral circus is the emergence of a social and political euphoria, largely manufactured and manipulated by the capitalist mass media. When a new president is elected for the first time, this euphoria is generally fed by a media campaign celebrating the dawning of a “new age” and a sense of national renewal in the period following the election, running through the inauguration, and continuing through at least the first three or four months of the new regime (the so-called “honeymoon period”). The honeymoon periods that accompanied the Kennedy victory in 1960 and the first term victories of Reagan and Clinton are examples of this phenomenon. This post electoral euphoria occurs even if the election was bitterly fought and the electorate sharply divided and even if the winner did not gain a majority in the popular vote, as in the case of both Kennedy, who received only 49.7%  of the popular vote in 1960 and Clinton who got only 43% in 1992, due to the third party candidacy of H. Ross Perot that year. In the case of second term victories, the propaganda campaign generally focuses on the promise of national unity as the re-elected president, who will never have to face another election, is supposedly free to rise above political expediency and partisan politics and pursue policies that can leave his historic mark on the nation – his “legacy” as the bourgeois academics and journalists like to call it.

The most striking thing about the current period is the total absence of any political euphoria. Even in those parts of the country where Bush enjoyed heavy political support, the mood is quite subdued. For a good part of the country, the whole election seems like a bad dream, leaving people as if in a state of shock. This is true particularly in the large urban, industrialized states of the northeast, the Great Lakes region in the Midwest, and the far west where the campaign propaganda pushing for a change in the ruling team proved effective. The scenario that would have worked best in restoring the democratic mystification to full glory would have been a Kerry victory at the polls. The dominant bourgeois media campaigns had emphasized that the Bush administration had misled the nation into war, did not have a strategy to win the peace, was riddled with lying, cronyism and corruption, and an unprecedented effort was undertaken to mobilize “the people” to help rectify the wrong that had been done by a “stolen” election in 2000. From rock stars like Bruce Springsteen to everyday citizens, volunteers for Kerry were mobilized to travel to so-called swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania for door-to-door canvassing.

The opposition to Bush in the major metropolitan areas ranged as high as 75, 80, even 90 percent.  The stage was set for a tremendous celebration of this exertion of “people power” to change America for the better. Had Kerry won, there would have been dancing in the streets in the major cities of America on election night, the democratic mystification would have gotten an incredible shot in the arm and at the same time the bourgeoisie would have gotten a new president, who was committed to continuing the war in Iraq, even if he said it was mistake to be there, who would have been better able to mobilize the population for future wars, which are sure to come, and would have made it more difficult for Paris, Berlin, and Moscow to oppose the U.S. openly – at least in the near term. But instead of a much need revitalization of the democratic myth, there was demoralization and shock.

No Honeymoon for Bush

The malaise is not confined simply to those who opposed Bush in the campaign. Even within the Bush camp, instead of political euphoria the post election period is characterized by recrimination and political upheaval. A majority of the cabinet has resigned, some perhaps because they are tired, but in other cases because of policy disagreements. For example, the dispute between Secretary of State Colin Powell and the neo-conservatives at the Pentagon over Iraq policy has been well documented. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson no sooner announced his resignation than he revealed policy disagreements with the president on a number of key issues. Ashcroft is out as attorney general, as a sacrificial lamb to critics from both the left and the right who felt that the Justice Department’s strengthening of the state’s repressive apparatus was clumsy and poorly handled, especially the attempt to exempt the U.S. from the Geneva Conventions and officially legalize torture. In late December, the administration attempted to mollify these critics by revising the controversial memorandum on torture and re-committing the US to abide by the Geneva Conventions. That Ashcroft’s departure was merely a gesture at silencing critics and not a substantive retreat from repression was demonstrated by the fact that his replacement is slated to be White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, who originally developed the controversial position in the first place.

The dominant fractions of the bourgeoisie are well aware of their problems and are not entirely powerless and despite their inability to achieve the appropriate political division of labor at the polls, are seeking to rectify or minimize the damage done by the electoral outcome. Despite Bush’s inclination to circle the wagons and surround himself with close supporters as cabinet members and advisers, considerable pressure is being exerted on the administration to modify its more extreme positions, and to actually move towards the very policies advocated by Kerry in the election campaign (such as beefing up military presence in Iraq in the short term and developing a disengagement plan in the longer term).  At the same time, there are efforts to restore a certain discipline to the state capitalist apparatus, a good portion of which worked behind the scenes to defeat Bush’s re-election.

Sen. John McCain seems to most clearly represent the main faction of the bourgeoisie on this front at the current moment. On the one hand, McCain has supported the Administration’s bloodletting at the CIA, which has forced five top CIA directorate members to resign since the election in retribution for their leaking embarrassing information to the press during the final weeks of the campaign.  McCain made it clear that such disloyalty from the intelligence community is totally unacceptable. But on the other hand, McCain has aggressively criticized Rumsfeld’s handling of  defense policy and the war in Iraq, basically echoing the same charges and criticisms made by the Kerry campaign before the election. Nebraska Republican Senator Chuck Nagel, second ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, shares McCain’s lack of confidence in Rumsfeld and openly called for his resignation. Retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded US forces in the first Gulf War, and was one of the handful of former generals to openly support Bush in the campaign, also voiced his displeasure with Rumsfeld. At the same time, Brent Scowcroft, a close friend and adviser to Bush’s father and a former national security adviser, has strongly attacked the administration’s Iraq policy and predicted that the January 30th elections in Iraq “won’t be a promising transformation, and it has great potential for deepening the conflict.” Scowcroft actually proposed the possibility that the best solution is for the U.S. to get out of Iraq now. Even Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, warned that “we are now digging ourselves out of a hole in Iraq.” The New York Times reported January 10th that Republican politicians, fearful that another four years of combat and body bags, will fuel growing popular discontent with the war, are pressuring the administration for a timetable for withdrawal – precisely the position of Kerry in the campaign, who called for beginning to pull troops out of Iraq over four years. According to the Times, secret strategy sessions at the Pentagon have been exploring the option of orchestrating the Iraqi government to be elected January 30th to request the U.S. to begin a phased withdrawal. 

While Rumsfeld struggles to cling to his post and still has the support of the president, he has been forced to yield to the pressure by designating retired four star general Gary E. Luck to conduct a thorough, independent review of policy in Iraq and prepare recommendations for a policy shift. So, despite victory at the polls and the president’s insistence that his Iraq policy has received a popular ratification and that he will not announce a timetable for withdrawal, the Bush administration is experiencing strong pressure to move away from its often repeated policy of  “staying the course” and confident predictions of victory in Iraq and towards the very policies that the Bush camp ridiculed during the election.  All of these developments are unprecedented in the aftermath of a presidential re-election.

While imperialist policy is the central concern of the dominant fractions of the ruling class, Bush’s domestic agenda enjoys no honeymoon either. Despite obtaining 51 percent of the popular vote and insisting that he has a mandate for his domestic program, Bush faces tremendous opposition from the general population, from Democrats, and even from members of his own party. Public opinion polls not only show that a majority of the population thinks the war in Iraq is a mistake and not worth the cost in lives or money, but a majority also disapproves of key aspects of his domestic program, including particularly changes in social security. Even some Republican members of congress are sharply critical of his social security proposal. The administration’s plan to slash federal expenditures for Medicaid, forcing state governments to shoulder greater financial obligations, forcing them to raise taxes at the local level, has triggered a rebellion by governors, including Republicans. His plans to drastically cut appropriations for financial aid to college students at a time when tuition costs are soaring are also triggering opposition.

 What Lies Ahead for the Working Class?

Despite failure to achieve their desired political division of labor, America’s rulers are the strongest bourgeoisie in the world and are moving rapidly to adjust the policy orientation of the administration to one that will more effectively serve its interests, especially at the imperialist level. However, with the failure of  the electoral mystification to achieve any semblance of a fictional “political consensus” in society, the bourgeoisie will have increasing difficulties at the social level to control the working class. There is no significant support for the war in Iraq, especially within the working class, and even if the administration moves towards a policy of disengagement, the impatience of the workers and other strata with war-making will create tremendous difficulties for the bourgeoisie. As the need for other military incursions abroad arise, the Bush administration’s lack of credibility on war will take a heavy toll.

On the international level, there is a general trend towards a return to class confrontation, as the proletariat everywhere finds itself under increasing attack. This phenomenon will become more pronounced in the U.S. as the Bush administration accelerates its attacks on the working class’ standard of living, as a consequence of the global economic crisis and social decomposition of world capitalism which forces it to initiate more and more military interventions around the world to protect its super power status and to finance this on the backs of the proletariat. The attempt to “reform” the social security pension program poses the same risk for triggering a proletarian reaction as it has in various European countries where the bourgeoisie has been forced to cut such programs. Without the beneficial effects of the social and political euphoria that generally accompanies its electoral circus, the bourgeoisie faces the potential to confront an increasingly combative working class.  Jerry Grevin

The following article, reprinted from the ICC’s territorial publication in France, was written a week prior to the December 26 election.

After the presidential elections of 31 October the Ukraine has faced a political crisis involving Leonid Koutchma’s and Viktor Ianukovitch’s pro-Russian fraction and that of the opponent Viktor Iushchenko, a reformer and declared supporter of an “opening toward the West”.  This has taken place in the context of diplomatic tensions and threatening declarations by Russia, which the European countries and especially the US have met with harshness.  The contestation around the manipulation of the October 31 and November 21 elections has then spread in the development of massive demonstrations in the Ukrainian capital, which ended in the occupation of downtown Kiev and the blockage of the access to Parliament by the demonstrators “until democracy wins”.  The so-called ‘orange revolution’ has started, we are told by both Iushchenko’s supporters, and the media of the great democracies, which have glorified the ‘will’ of the Ukrainian people to ‘free’ themselves of the Moscow clique.  Interviews, reports, and photographs have filled the pages of the press: “The people are no longer fearful”, “we’ll be able to speak freely”, “those who thought of themselves as the ‘untouchable’ are no longer so”, etc.  In short, the hope for a better and freer life has supposedly opened up for the population and the working class of Ukraine, and, to show that democracy is advancing, a third round of the elections has been imposed for December 26, with the perspective for the electoral victory by Iushchenko!

Russia stakes its future as a world power in the Ukraine

Behind this barrage, the essential question has nothing to do with the struggle for democracy.  The real issue is the ever growing confrontation among the great powers, in particular the US’s present offensive against Russia, which aims at getting Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence.  It is important to note that Putin directed his anger essentially against the US.  In fact, it is the US which is behind the candidate Iushchenko and his ‘orange’ movement.  At the time of a conference in New Dehli on December 5, the leader of the Kremlin denounced the US for trying to “reshape the diversity of civilization through the principles of a unipolar world, the equivalent of a boot camp” and impose “a dictatorship in international affairs, made up of a pretty-sounding pseudo-democratic verbiage”.  Putin has not been afraid of throwing in the face of the US the reality of its own situation in Iraq when, on December 7 in Moscow he pointed out to the Iraqi prime minister that he could not figure out “how it’s possible to organize elections in the context of a total occupation by foreign troops”!  It is with the same logic that the Russian president opposed the declaration by the 55 OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) countries in support of the process taking place in Ukraine and confirming the organization’s role in monitoring the unfolding of the third round of the presidential elections of December 26.  The humiliation the ‘international community’ inflicted on Putin by refusing to acknowledge his own backyard is aggravated by the fact that several hundred observers from not only the US, but also from Great Britain and Germany, will be sent.

Ever since the collapse of the USSR and the catastrophic constitution of the Community of Independent States  (which was meant to salvage the crumbs of its ex-empire),  Russia’s borders have been unrelentlessly under threat, both because of the pressure from Germany and the US, and the permanent tendency toward exploding, inherent to it.  The unleashing of the first Chechen war in 1992, then the second in 1996 under the pretext of the fight against terrorism, expresses the brutality of a power in decline trying to safeguard its strategically vital position in the Caucasus at all costs.  For Moscow the war was a matter of opposing Washington’s  imperialist schemes, which aim at destabilizing Russia, and those of Berlin, which developed an undeniable imperialist aggressiveness, as we had seen in the spring of 1991, when Germany played a major role in the explosion of the Yugoslav conflict.

The Caucasus question is therefore far from a solution, because the US resolutely continues to advance its own interests in the area.  It is in this context that we can understand Shevarnadze’s eviction in 2003 by the ‘roses revolution’, which placed a pro-American clique in power.  This has allowed the US to station its troops in the country, in addition to those already deployed in Kirghizistan and in Uzbekistan, north of Afghanistan.  This strengthens the US’ military presence south of Russia and the threat to Russia of encirclement by the US.  The Ukrainian question has always been a pivotal one, whether during tsarist Russia or Soviet Russia, but today the problems is posed in an even more crucial fashion. 

At the economic level, the partnership between Ukraine and Russia is of great importance to Moscow, but it is above all at the strategic and military levels that the control of Ukraine is to it of even greater importance than the Caucasus.  This is because, to begin with, Ukraine is the third nuclear power in the world, thanks to the military atomic bases inherited from the ex-Eastern bloc.  Moscow needs them in order to show, in the context of inter-imperialist blackmails, its capacity to have control over such great nuclear power.  Secondly, if Moscow has lost all probability of gaining direct access to the Mediterranean, the loss of Ukraine would mean a weakening of the possibility to have access to the Black Sea as well.  Behind the loss of access to the Black Sea, where Russia’s nuclear bases and fleet are found in Sebastopol, there is the weakening of the means to gain a link with Asia and Turkey.   In addition, the loss of Ukraine would dramatically weaken the Russian position vis-à-vis the European powers, and particularly Germany, while at same time it would weaken its capacity to play a role in Europe’s future destiny and that of the Eastern countries, the majority of which are already pro-American.  It is certain that a Ukraine turned toward the West, and therefore controlled by it and the US in particular, highlights the Russian power’s total inadequacy, and stimulates an acceleration of the phenomenon of explosion of the CIS, along with a sequel of horrors.  It is more than probable that such a situation would only push whole regions of Russia itself to declare independence, encouraged by the great powers.

Therefore a life or death issue is posed to Russia in the near future.  It is certain that Putin will do all he can to keep the Ukraine under his influence.  At least, he will not let go of the prize without getting at least a share, even at the cost of mincing it up. This is why Russia is pushing the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine to secede, in this way contributing to chaos and the destabilization of the region.  Russia is responding to the very logic of its American rivals, whose imperialist politics worsen the deadliest barbarism by the day.

By attempting to take control of Ukraine, the US is putting pressure on Russia in order to make it back off its frontiers and allow the US to expand its own sphere of influence.  At the same time the US continues its politics of encirclement of Europe, which they initiated with the war in Afghanistan.  In particular, the US aims at blocking Germany’s expansion toward the East, which is the ‘natural’ area of expansion for this country.  We saw this at the time of the Third Reich, when the attention was turned to this area of the world, and we saw it at the time of WWI.  If the German bourgeoisie makes its own the rhetoric of its American rival, which denounces Russia and its ‘neo-colonialist’ policy toward Ukraine, it is to be better able to gain the upper hand in the future.  Therefore, it’s not a two-party game that is taking place in Ukraine, but rather a three-party one.  This does not bode a bright tomorrow for the Ukrainian population, quite the contrary.  In fact, if up to the present moment it has been lured by the Russian bourgeoisie, it is now three bandits that will sow chaos, with all the repercussions that such a situation may have at the regional and world levels.

It is for instance certain that this advance by the US will have an impact on the Ukraine, Russia, and the CIS, but also on the central Asian region.  In addition, even if it is true that it is the great powers that are the first to sow disorder, we cannot neglect the capacity that regional powers such as Turkey or Iran have to contribute to aggravate the situation.  Turkey and Iran will not stay inactive, and they will contribute to the dynamic of chaos.  The tendency toward explosion and permanent civil war which prevails in this huge area and which is greatly aggravated by the war in Iraq will therefore get a further push because of this new center of the aggravations of imperialist tensions.  Such a destabilization in turn, can only have serious consequences in a new acceleration of the tendency toward war by many countries, as new foci of tensions emerge.  The US is at the lead, with its mad race to control the planet.

The working class must not be fooled by democratic mystifications

The democratic ‘choice’ in Ukraine has reduced the population to being pawns, manipulated by this or that rival bourgeois fraction, each of which is acting on behalf of this or that imperialist power.  The ‘triumph of democracy’ will not fix the situation of misery of the Ukrainian workers.  On the contrary, it will push them to mobilize in defense of the ‘democratic’ fatherland, in the same way as the preceding generations were led to defend the ‘socialist’ fatherland, and to accept the ‘orange’ sacrifices, which the future leaders of Ukraine will no doubt impose on them.

Let us remember that the ‘democratic’ Iushchenko did not fail to impose austerity on the working class when he was prime minister and banker of the very pro-Russian government he now denounces so adamantly.  The clique that is getting ready to seize power has nothing to envy to the previous one, and its divisions promise no stability.  The democratic perspective sows illusions as to the possibility to reform the capitalist system, to gradually transform it and make it ‘better’.  It requires the working class to break its back in the face of the ‘superior’ interest of the state as opposed to the ‘inferior’ demands around food and the conditions for existence. 

The perspective to create a world of ‘citizens’ within a democracy that is working at creating a happy humanity is an illusion which aims at destroying the consciousness of the necessity to do away with capitalism, a system that engenders more and more barbarism and chaos. Mulan  12-17-04

The blind violence committed by mobs is often fueled by the economic crisis, but the ruling class knows how to use it to its own benefit.  What happened in Tlahuac was a desperate act by an interclassist mass which behaved with no perspective, pushed to react with vengeance by feelings of being manipulated and terrorized.  Even though the lynching is directed against members of the repressive arm of the state, it does not mean that this violence expresses a conscious act.  On the contrary, it is a manifestation of the irrational behaviors which capitalist decomposition causes.  We highlight the desperate actions by members of the petty bourgeoisie and the marginal strata of society, but we note that elements of the working class also become  trapped in this dynamic.

This dynamic is not the result of ignorance and backwardness alone.  It is rather a manifestation of agonizing capitalism.  This kind of irrational violence is not exclusive to the peripheral countries.  In El Ejido in Almeria, Spain, in 2000,  xenophobic fever affected the inhabitants who tried to lynch a group of immigrants.  The ‘skinheads’ and the hooligans of the industrialized countries  display similar characteristics.

The events of Tlahuac raise a deeper question than whether they were induced  by guerrillas, or drug traffickers, or government provocation.  They are an expression of desperation, immediatism, the lack of a perspective for the future.  It is the practice of a mob of people who recognize that bourgeois institutions don’t offer any kind of safety , and decide to take justice in their own hands.  They think that in this way they will find a solution to the problem, but they don’t see that the real problem is this system, which creates violence because of the insecurity resulting both from corruption and complicity, and exploitation and submission.  Which violence is greater than the one exerted by the exploitation and poverty which capitalism imposes on the workers daily?

The events in Tlahuac are not an isolated case.  It is rather a typical action, a product of capitalist decomposition.  However, it’s important to notice that this kind of action is utilized by the bourgeoisie to its own advantage.  Whether for its own incapacity or as the effect of the confrontation among its own fractions, the ruling class decided not to rescue its body-guards.  Nevertheless, they use these events to liven up the confrontation and put pressure on the Fox and Lopez Obrador governments.  This is also done to attack the consciousness of the workers, as they are invited to take sides in the dispute among fractions of the bourgeoisie.

The working class cannot be fooled.  Workers need to understand that this is not a problem of so-called ‘civil society’.  It is a problem that requires reflection and the ability to learn lessons from it.  Workers need to see that the mobs, notwithstanding their apparently ‘massive’ action, are desperate and blind.  This type of action prevents all possibility of a conscious act performed with a true sense of solidarity.  A population turned into ‘vigilantes’ because it no longer trusts the police is not, under prevailing, capitalist conditions, an alternative.  Far from being an alternative, it is a dangerous weapon, which the state repressive apparatus itself can use.  Workers need to understand clearly that it is only the proletarian revolution that can bring an end to the sense of insecurity which capitalism gives us. Vania, December 2004

(Details of the attack can be found here:

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4038173.stm [9])