The brutal slaying of 130 people in Paris on 13 November 2015 was used to justify the stepping up of British imperialism’s involvement in the living hell that is Syria. Even as the massacre was taking place the faction of the ruling class in Britain that for some years has wanted to escalate military action against Islamic State was calling for the overturning of the 2013 parliamentary vote against the extension of British involvement in this campaign from Iraq to Syria. This cold-blooded manipulation of the revulsion at the Paris slaughter was whipped up into an almost hysterical campaign which culminated in Labour’s Hilary Benn’s speech comparing the fight against the “fascists” of IS to the Second World War. The subsequent vote to bomb IS in Syria was presented as Britain once again taking up its rightful place in the world as a moral force.

In reality, British imperialism’s increased military role in Syria will only pour more oil onto the barbaric fire of militarism, sectarianism and banditry that is consuming Syria and Iraq and threatening the whole region.

This decision also does not however resolve the deep divisions within the British bourgeoisie over the best policy to pursue in order to defend the national interest. Only weeks before the vote was taken the House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee issued a report that contained the following warning: “we believe that there should be no extension of British military action into Syria unless there is a coherent international strategy that has a realistic chance of defeating ISIL and of ending the civil war in Syria. In the absence of such a strategy, taking action to meet the desire to do something is still incoherent....We consider that the focus on the extension of airstrikes against ISIL in Syria is a distraction from the much bigger and more important task of finding a resolution to the conflict in Syria and thereby removing one of the main facilitators of ISIL’s rise.”(‘The extension of offensive British operations in Syria’, 29 October 2015)

There may have been some pretence of pursuing such a strategy at meetings of world and regional leaders following the Paris killings, but the reality is that the war in Syria is a cauldron of tensions between the different imperialist powers: “The fact that there are few reliable counterparts on the ground is a reflection of the extraordinary complexity of the situation on the ground in Syria. Our witnesses described a chaotic and complicated political and military scene. After over four years of civil war, there are thousands of fighting forces in various coalitions and umbrella organisations, with unclear aspirations and shifting alliances. The complex nature of the situation makes it hard to guess the consequences of tackling just ISIL, or to predict what group would take their territory if they were defeated....The situation in Syria is complicated still further by the multiple international actors involved on the ground, to the extent that many observers now consider the civil war a proxy war as much as an internal conflict. These include Russia and Iran (on the Assad side), Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and the US (on the sides of various different parts of the opposition), creating what one witness called a ‘multi-layered conflict’. The much more substantial Russian intervention on the side of the Assad regime that started at the end of September 2015 has complicated even further any proposed action in Syria by the UK”(op cit). Clearly the committee was not going to include Britain itself  as part of this multi-layered conflict, but it was already deeply involved, whether through direct military action against IS across the non-existent border with Iraq, or through less direct support (money, weapons, military advice, etc) to rebel forces inside Syria itself. The faction that opposed direct military involvement in Syria presented itself as a force for humanitarian concern, but their actual concern was that such involvement would not serve the national interest, and would undermine the British bourgeoisie’s ability to act as a mediator and to use its diplomatic power. This was summed up by the Foreign Affairs committee’s report: “Several of our witnesses suggested that by participating in military action against ISIL in Syria, the UK would actually compromise its diplomatic capability and its capacity to put pressure on its national and international partners to create a route to a solution to the inter-related problems of ISIL and the Syrian civil war”.

Britain’s dilemma

This division within the British ruling class over such a fundamental question as the national interest is an expression of the dilemma that it has been confronted with since the end of the Cold War: how to best pursue the national interest in the absence of clearly defined blocs? There is a general agreement on the need to maintain its independence through playing its special relationship with the US against its relations with European states. The problem has been how to do this. Just how problematic is clearly expressed by the present situation in Syria.

Syria’s descent into chaos cannot be separated from the hardly less messy situation in Iraq, which has been a poisonous thorn in the side of British imperialism ever since the invasion of 2003. Britain’s involvement in the Iraq debacle was a profound blow for the British ruling class. The loyal following of US policy towards Iraq and Afghanistan failed to secure British imperialism’s international position either though its military power or its diplomatic ability to play the US and the EU at the same time. Its pretense to moral authority in bringing about a ‘democratic transformation’ of these countries was exposed as a fraud. Finally, it was reduced to scurrying away, with its tail between its legs, from the chaos it had helped to create. The Cameron government has tried to overcome the trauma of the Blair years, but as the 2013 vote showed, an important part of the ruling class was not willing to risk another ‘foreign adventure’, particularly one in the chaos of Syria. This has, as we said at the time, left British imperialism looking weak, unable to overcome its own divisions[1]. The recent vote does take steps toward overcoming this division, at least publicly, but the ruling class is still faced with the question of how its involvement will play out.

There is already cynicism about the role of the British military, which has only, to date, carried out 11 bombing raids since the vote, as well as  a real fear of mission creep as British special forces are deployed to support and train rebel forces. The so-called ‘moderate’ forces supported by Britain are in reality fundamentalist warlords and gangsters, as the above report admits.

As for  boasting about precision bombing and how concern for civilians is so important to Britain ... 6 of the missions flown have been against oil plants that are manned by workers.  Oil workers, and oil truck drivers (over 100 oil trucks were destroyed by the US in two days) are clearly not considered civilians by the British ruling class. But in any case as General Tommy Franks of the US army said early in the Iraq war, “we don’t do body counts”; and any reports of civilian deaths from within IS held areas will be brushed aside as accidents or IS propaganda.

British involvement in other wars

The problems faced by British imperialism in Syria are only part of the growing imperialist chaos in the Middle East and North Africa.

There is the  continuing sore of the collapse of Libya into a series of warring  regions, cities and even neighbourhoods, including areas controlled by IS, following the ‘liberation’ of Libya by the British and French in 2011. The sight of the British ambassador fleeing Tripoli before advancing rebel factions was hardly a good advertisement for British imperialism as potential backing for any army or clan trying to seize state control.

The involvement of British imperialism in the war waged by a coalition of Saudi Arabia, Gulf States and Pakistan in Yemen against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels is another difficulty. This proxy war between two regional powers, a war also taking place in Syria, threatens to spiral out of control as their struggle to control Yemen becomes increasingly intractable.  Saudi imperialism is particularly concerned about the agreement between Iran and the US over nuclear weapons, and also the role of Iran in Syria (where Saudi Arabia was initially one of the main backers of IS and other Islamist warlords). Britain is supplying weapons and military advisors[2] to the anti-Houthi coalition and has direct links with the military of all these countries, many of whose officer corps received training in Britain. The Saudis’ recent public execution of 47 Shia Muslims has further sharpened regional tensions. It highlighted the hollow nature of British imperialism’s claim to be fighting extremism whilst at the same time arming and making very nice profits from the Saudi state which is the main promoter of Wahabism, the ideological foundations of IS and jihadism.

The implication of British imperialism in the growing fragmentation of the Middle East has deep historical roots. It was the dividing up of the old Ottoman Empire between British and French imperialism, following World War I, that set up the artificial system of states that make up the Middle East (see the other article on the Middle East in this issue). Britain also has a history of promoting fundamentalism in order to maintain its rule and role in the region. The emergence of the Saudis as the rulers of present day Saudi Arabia, along with their fundamentalist ideology, was promoted by the British as well as the Americans. Western support for fundamentalist regimes and groups in the period of the Cold War included, to cite only two examples, the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt against Nasser, and the promotion and arming of jihadist groups in Afghanistan and beyond to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Thus today British imperialism is faced by the challenge of trying to assert itself in the growing chaos of the Middle East, a chaos it has done much to cause.  

Phil 16/1/16

“The City of London’s most vocal ‘bear’ has warned that the world is heading for a financial crisis as severe as the crash of 2008-09 that could prompt the collapse of the eurozone.

Albert Edwards, strategist at the bank Société Générale, said the west was about to be hit by a wave of deflation from emerging market economies and that central banks were unaware of the disaster about to hit them. His comments came as analysts at Royal Bank of Scotland urged investors to “sell everything” ahead of an imminent stock market crash”[1].

Of course we should take such predictions with a pinch of salt. Even though the financial crisis of 2008 was very serious indeed, there was also an element of exaggeration in the propaganda of the ruling class at the time. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, which acted as a kind of trigger for the crisis, was to some extent allowed to happen by the US government as an example to others, and the message of “we’re on the brink” certainly helped to ram home austerity measures as the “only alternative”.  We shouldn’t underestimate the capacity of the bourgeoisie, with the whole apparatus of the state and the financial system at its disposal, to use all kinds of tricks and manipulations to prevent the economic crisis running out of control – that’s an unforgettable lesson it learned from the great crash of 1929. 

But none of this means that the economic crisis is something superficial, just part of the regular business cycle with its ups and its downs. The current economic difficulties have very deep roots indeed – going back at least a hundred years, and ultimately reaching the very basis of capitalist production, the wage labour system and the contradictions that are inherent in capitalist accumulation. We may not be in a “final” economic crisis right now, but in a more long term sense we are at the final stage of capitalism’s obsolescence as a social system.

The real problems facing the system can be gauged by the fact that the current stock market jitters were to a considerable extent provoked by the slowdown of the Chinese economy, which has played such a key role as a market and a target for investment for “developed” and “developing” countries alike. For years now, western economies have been displacing production and capital to fuel the Chinese “miracle”, which could then send out a stream of cheap commodities back to the west. The result? China’s economy has been “overheating”, or to use marxist terms, it is facing the same crisis of overproduction, the same falling profit rates that have plagued the central countries throughout this century, and in particular since the end of the post-war boom in the 1960s.

All units of capital, whether individual companies or major national economies, are driven to accumulate, to expand, or risk annihilation by rival companies and national economies. But the more they produce, the more they tend to outstrip the available market, which is ultimately limited by the restricted buying power of the masses; the more they invest in new technologies to boost production, the less living labour – the only source of surplus value – is incorporated into what they produce.

The penetration into new areas of the globe, the integration of previous forms of production into the orbit of capitalism, has long provided a lifeline to capitalism, a means of postponing its in-built tendency towards breakdown.  The Chinese economy, for example, though already capitalist under Mao, had at its disposal a vast mass of peasant labour available to be transformed into wage labour, considerably reducing the costs of labour power on a global scale. This process now is reaching its limits and China’s slowdown - along with that of other BRICS like Brazil and Russia – is indeed a sign that the temporary solutions found by capitalism over the past few decades are also reaching their limits. Seen from a historical standpoint, the world capitalist economy has indeed reached an impasse.

The ecological cost of growth

The mounting panic in the stock markets at the prospect that China and other BRICS – not to mention the economy in the US and Europe – are heading for another recession, highlights another irresolvable contradiction of capitalist production. A few weeks ago, at the environmental summit in Paris, much play was made of the fact that an agreement had been reached to place a limit on carbon emissions over the next few decades. The threat of global warming running amok was thus, we were told, averted by the wise counsels that have prevailed among the world leaders. And indeed, in the extremities of the crisis, the bourgeoisie does become intelligent. In the wake of 1929 it was able to push aside the objections to state intervention coming from its more backward-looking factions, and to hold back the unfolding economic disaster through the application of state capitalist remedies. Today, in the face of mounting evidence that man-made global warming is not only real but is already becoming a major “cost of production” (as in the case of the floods in the UK, the droughts in the US and Australia, etc), the ruling class now has much less time for those die-hards (many of them financed by the big energy concerns who have most to lose through pollution controls) who insist that global warming is a hoax or has purely natural causes. The wise leaders have understood that something needs to be done.

But the bourgeoisie is caught in a cleft stick. It is seeing the ecological impact of its need to accumulate, to grow without limit. And at the same time it panics when economic growth stutters or goes into reverse. In this sense the die-hards are right: if you restrict “our” national production for the sake of the environment, other national economies will profit. So the measures it adopted at the Paris summit to reduce the impact of accumulation are extremely feeble – no more than a vague promise to curb pollution and cut emissions, without any legal sanctions. If the planet is a forest reserve, it has been entrusted to unscrupulous loggers, for whom the trees are not a source of oxygen, a “sink” for carbon dioxide, or a barrier to floodwaters in the hills, and certainly not a factor of human well-being or an inspiration for artists. They are a valuable commodity, most valuable when they are converted into timber.

Capitalism and war

On these counts alone – the management of the production of life’s necessities, and the protection of the natural environment on which all this depends – the ruling bourgeoisie has proved that it is no longer fit to rule.  But the final proof of its incapacity to provide humanity with a future lies in the omnipresence of war.

War has always been part of capitalism. In the days of its ascent, wars, however brutal, were part of its expansion across the world and its replacement of outmoded forms of society. But once the world had, to all intents and purposes, been conquered by capitalism, war increasingly became an end in itself, and even when it brought temporary triumph for the victors, the overall balance sheet for humanity has been negative: the destruction of decades of human labour, the exacerbation of hatred and division, the prospect of new and even more destructive wars. The great rash of wars now spreading from Africa to central Asia, with their focal point in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, which has engendered the desperate flight of millions of human beings to the “haven” of western Europe, is a sign – like the two world wars and the nuclear arms race which marked the 20th century – that capitalism’s drive to accumulate, when it comes up against insuperable barriers, turns into a drive towards self-destruction.

The necessity of communism

The longer capitalism continues, the more it undermines the possibility of replacing it with a human society – a society based on solidarity and cooperation. But at the same time, every aspect of its descent into barbarism adds further proof that such a society is both necessary and possible. If the capitalist economy is in crisis because it can’t sell all the commodities it produces, if it can’t generate enough profit from its production, then we need a society where people produce not for the market and not for profit, but for need. If national economies are driven to plunder nature in order to outdo their rivals, or if the same nation states can only advance their interests through war and destruction, we need to replace competing national states with a unified world community. In short, we need communism.

For us, communism and socialism are the same thing, and they are international or they are nothing. But if the word “communism” has fallen into disrepute because it has been so horribly besmirched by the nightmare of Stalinism, there are any number of politicians selling a new brand of “socialism” and claiming that they are carrying on the great traditions of the workers’ movement of the past. In Britain there’s Corbyn and the Labour left, in Greece Syriza, in Spain Podemos. But none of these “socialisms” ever put into question the need to defend the national economy, not one of them advocates the abolition of the capitalist wage relation and production for the market. All of them offer an updated version of the same state capitalism which has for decades now been the last rampart of the bourgeois mode of production.

These politicians and parties claim that the new society can come about through the existing institutions – through parliament and elections, through strengthening the trade unions and other official bodies. And what they call socialism can indeed be introduced from above, through organs which are an integral part of the present-day state. But genuine communism is, as Marx put it, “the real movement that abolishes the present state of affairs”. It can only come from below, from the unification of the exploited and the oppressed in defence of their own needs, from the bursting asunder all the state bodies which have been maintained to keep them passive and disunited. In short, if we are to have communism, we must have a revolution, the deepest, most far-reaching revolution in the history of humanity. 

Amos, 16.1.16

“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us” (Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man).

Floods, caused by a series of severe storms that battered the Northern British Isles this December, have brought the misery of repeated flooding to thousands, not just in the North of England but also in Scotland, and Ireland. They are one of a number of phenomena to hit the world this winter, including unseasonably mild weather on the East coast of North America, Western Europe and the North Pole; El Nino and flooding in South America, with the latter inundating 130,000 homes in Paraguay alone. Equally striking is the fact that the media are not passing it off as an ‘Act of God’ or a purely natural disaster, but apportioning blame to government policy on flood defences and considering the contribution of climate change. They do not, however, recognise the role of capitalism itself.

What sort of protection for areas at risk of flooding?

About 16,000 homes in England flooded; Cumbria faced in the third winter in a decade with the sort of flooding that is only supposed to happen once in 100 years; power cuts affecting a similar number of homes and businesses. There have been plenty of people willing to help each other out, including Syrian asylum seekers who volunteered to help the temporarily homeless. Help from the local or national state has been lamentable. The volunteer asylum seekers were set filling sandbags when they were no longer any use as the floods had already ruined homes. When they could have been useful many councils were unable to provide them. In Leeds and York their response was largely restricted to evacuation. Environment Agency spending on flood defences was cut by one fifth after 2010-11, although the fall in the North West of England was much steeper, to about 25% of the previous year’s total. Although the spending has risen since 2011-12 it has not yet reached the previous level. How fortunate for the ruling class that the Environment Agency chairman Sir Philip Dilley should have been on holiday in Barbados during the worst of the flooding and therefore able to become a scapegoat and resign – whatever he personally did or neglected to do, the cuts to the budgets of the very institutions responsible for flood defences and relief show that it is not a priority for the British state.

Insurance firms do not even pretend it is a priority: after all, as private businesses their responsibility is to make a profit. Many households in flood prone areas cannot get insurance against floods, and those that are insured often have to wait weeks for a claims assessor to visit, causing delay in cleaning up their homes.

It is not just a question of how much is spent on flood defences but also of what sort of defences and what sort of land use. First of all the Environment Agency is only responsible for protection against sea and river flooding, while 60% of damage to houses comes from surface or ground water (The Economist, 2.1.16). Secondly, the type of flood defence tends to treat nature as an enemy to be subdued and regulated. Walls are built, although clearly not high enough for this winter’s floods. These can be important, but are not the only approach, as was demonstrated in Pickering in North Yorkshire. There, unable to afford £20 million for a wall high enough to protect against flooding, and aware that the wall would be an eyesore and bad for tourism, they chose to work with nature building 167 leaky dams above the town, plus smaller obstructions, planted woodland and built a bund to store up to 120,000 cubic metres of floodwater. As a result they remained dry while neighbouring towns were flooded.[1] This is not a panacea to be applied everywhere, nor a guarantee against floods, but shows the possibility of a different approach based on understanding the local geography.

There is also the question of land use, and measures taken to support it that make the problems in the towns on lower ground worse. Farmers are permitted by internal drainage boards to dredge the rivers on the hills, straighten them and build up their banks, protecting their fields at the expense of those living downstream. Similarly grouse moors require land drained and heather burned, meaning that it can no longer soak up floodwater. This attracts an agricultural subsidy, as does clearing land of scrub, woodland and ponds even if no actual agriculture takes place on it (Guardian 30.12.15). All these measures increase the likelihood and severity of floods lower down.

These decisions are not down to ignorance since the dangers were already well known in the 19th Century: “When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes … they had no inkling … that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy season” (Engels, op cit). So why does the ruling class take such decisions? Why for that matter are they building 10,000 homes a year on flood plains, i.e. on land liable to flooding? Why are they not able to take account of the danger to the homes, and potentially the lives, of thousands of people? Engels went on to say “individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must be taken into account. … In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different…”

Storms as part of climate change

A far more remote effect of capitalist production than flooding downstream is global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless this is now so widely accepted that there have been articles discussing whether it is behind this winter’s storms and heavy rain. Science cannot prove climate change based on this or that meteorological event and is therefore not able to state that this or that storm is, in itself, due to such changes. But it would be equally wrong to try and dissociate any particular event from it. Thus, it has been estimated that storms such as Desmond are 40% more likely now than in the past using climate models at global, regional and local levels (see New Scientist 9.1.16); and from another report we learn that “Atmospheric thermodynamics explain that the moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere is largely influenced by temperature and pressure, and that warmer atmospheres have larger saturation vapour content. The median intensity of extreme precipitation increases with near-surface temperature at a rate of 5.9%–7.7% per degree”[2]. In very technical language this is telling us that warmer air will carry more water vapour and so cause heavier rain. However the relationship between global warming and storms does not end there, since they are actively redistributing heat and moisture across the globe. Storm Frank, before it crossed the Atlantic and received its name, started in North America where it caused flooding that drowned 13 people, and after it hit the British Isles it turned north to carry yet more heat to the Arctic (The Economist 2.1.16). So the weather systems causing these floods were also contributing to the frighteningly high temperatures at the North Pole at the end of December, more than 30oC above the usual, and above freezing point.

For capital this Arctic warming is first and foremost an opportunity bringing not just the hope of ice-free shipping lanes but also the opportunity to extract yet more oil from the area. Meanwhile the bourgeoisie’s political representatives have been at the COP21 climate change conference in Paris, wringing their hands about the danger of global warming. While we will deal with this conference in a future article, we can just note the views of James Hansen, a NASA scientist who was silenced by the US government from 1988 when he started to warn against greenhouse gasses until he retired: “It’s a fraud really, a fake… It’s just worthless words…. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”[3] We also note the actions of the British state in cutting the subsidy for solar power and in its enthusiasm for shale gas, which speak much louder than any words on the COP21 agreement.

Capitalism’s congenital inability to tackle pollution and climate change

So far we have looked at several examples of short term decisions taken regardless of consequences such as flooding on lower ground, and the hypocrisy of governments in the climate change talks. Many think the answer is to campaign against such decisions and demand that states put in place measures such as a carbon tax to create an incentive to use alternatives to fossil fuels, in other words to demand that the capitalist state effectively reform itself. We think this is impossible. It is not just a question of this or that measure, but of the nature of capitalism. Hansen is quite right to point to the fact that the cheapest fuels, fossil fuels, will continue to be burned – no business competing with others, no-one on a wage or other limited income, will be able to afford to do otherwise. He says they only “appear” to be cheapest, but for capitalism the products of nature, and the pollution of it, have no cost. If polar bears go extinct, if small islands are submerged, if pollution in Delhi and Beijing is injurious to health, this does not appear on the bottom line. Those who, like Hansen, recommend a carbon tax to give a financial incentive to reduce emissions, point to British Columbia which has had one since 2008 although the evidence is equivocal at best. Sales of petrol have fallen, although there is evidence of those who can crossing into the USA for cheaper petrol[4]. Total emissions have fallen no faster than those in the rest of Canada[5], and as a tax on goods, compensated for by cuts in other taxes it has a tendency to be regressive, hitting the poor hardest despite a tax credit system designed to compensate for this.

In capitalism the ruling class only acts on the pollution it creates when its effects are direct or at least not too remote, and that usually means something to do with the economy. The UK Clean Air Act of 1956 was not due to the fact that dirty air causes deaths, known about since the previous century, but to the fact that the great smog of 1952 not only caused 12,000 deaths but also brought London to a standstill. The populations of Beijing and Delhi can only hope for a similar incentive to clean up their cities. Right now the bourgeoisie has something much more direct and immediate on their minds, the danger of a new financial crisis caused by phenomena such as “the collapse in demand for credit in China”[6] – in other words the slowing down of its (extremely polluting) growth is a real problem for the economy, and this will carry much more weight in capitalist decision-making than the danger of greenhouse gas emissions.

Engels again: “… by long and often cruel experience and by collecting and analysing historical material, we are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our production activity, and so are afforded an opportunity to control and regulate these effects as well. This regulation, however, requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order.” (op cit). Since he wrote this, science has become much more aware of the “remote effects” of our production on the natural world and the danger this poses to many populations as well as to the world’s ecosystems, while at the same time science and technology have become much more powerful, and the most polluting industries have spread to new geographical regions. The management of economy and ecology remains in the hands of a ruling class whose vision is generally limited to a fast buck, whose states apply all the arts of deception recommended by Machiavelli, in an atmosphere that dumbs down history and theory. We simply cannot afford to leave such productive power in the hands of this ruling class.

Alex  14.1.16

Militarism and war, central manifestations of capitalism for around a century now, have become synonymous with the decay of the economic system of capitalism and the necessity to overthrow it. War in this period, and into the future, is a central question for the working class.

In the ascendant period of capitalism, wars could still be a factor in historical progress, leading to the creation of viable national units and serving to extend capitalist relations of production on a global scale: “From the formation of the citizen’s army in the French Revolution to the Italian Risorgimento, from the American War of Independence to the Civil War, the bourgeois revolution took the form of national liberation struggles against the reactionary kingdoms and classes left over from feudalism..... These struggles had the essential aim of destroying the decaying political superstructures of feudalism and sweeping away the petty parochialism and self-sufficiency, which were holding back the unifying march of capitalism: (ICC pamphlet Nation or Class). As Marx said in his pamphlet on the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France: “The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war”.

By contrast, war today and for the last one hundred years, can only play a reactionary and destructive role and is now threatening the very existence of mankind. War becomes a permanent way of life for all nation states, no matter how big or how small; and while not every state possesses the same means to pursue war, they are all subjected to the same imperialist drives. The impasse of the economic system means that a policy of state capitalism is forced on nations new or old, adopted by all on pain of death; and this dynamic can be implemented by bourgeois parties from the far right or extreme left. State capitalism is the refined defence of the nation state and a permanent attack on the working class.

In the ascendant period of capitalism, war tended to pay for itself both economically and politically by breaking down barriers to capitalist development. In the phase of its decay war is a dangerous absurdity, becoming more and more divorced from all and any economic rationale. Just looking at the last 25 years of the so-called “wars for oil” in the Middle East shows that it would take centuries for any profitable return, and that’s assuming that they stop tomorrow.

The nation is a symbol of capitalist decay

Devoting a vast percentage of national resources to war and militarism is now normal for all states, and while this has been the situation since the early 1900’s, it has only intensified today. This phenomenon is directly linked to the historic evolution of capitalism: “Imperialism is not the creation of any one or any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an increasingly international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognisable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will”[1]. The position you adopt on imperialist war determines which side of the class divide you are on; either support for the rule of capital through the defence of the nation and nationalism (compatible with both Trotskyism and the leftist wing of anarchism), or the defence of the working class and internationalism against all forms of nationalism. National “solutions”, national identities, national liberation, national “struggles”, national defence; all these serve only imperialist and thus capitalist interests. These are diametrically opposed to the interests of the working class whose class war will have to do away with imperialism, its frontiers and its nation states.

In 1900, there were 40 independent nations; in the early 1980’s, there were just fewer than 170. Today there are 195, the latest of which, South Sudan, recognised and supported by the “international community”, has immediately collapsed into war, famine, disease, corruption, warlordism and gangsterism: another concrete expression of the decomposition of capitalism and the obsolescence of the nation state. The new nation states of the 20th and 21st centuries are not expressions of youthful growth but have been born senile and sterile, immediately enmeshed in the webs of imperialism, with their own inward means of repression - interior ministries, secret services and national armies - and outward militarism, with pacts, protocols, agreements for mutual defence, the implantation of military advisors and military bases by the bigger powers.

“Today the nation state is but a cloak that covers imperialistic desires, a battle cry for imperialist rivalries, the last ideological measure with which the masses can be persuaded to play the role of cannon-fodder in imperialist wars”[2]. Since Rosa Luxemburg wrote these words there have been no bourgeois revolutions in underdeveloped countries, but only reactionary contests between bourgeois gangs and their local and global imperialist supporters. The military state and war become the mode of survival for the whole system as every nation, every proto-state, every nationalist expression, and every ethnic or religious identity become direct expressions of imperialism.

We can look a bit closer at the reactionary role of the nation state through a necessarily short overview of the important region of the Middle East over the last century.

War in the Middle East from World War One to the Gulf War

The capitalist nation has been preserved, quadrupled even, over the last 100 years. But its bourgeois democratic programme, its unifying tendencies are dead and buried; and henceforth its “peoples” can only be subjected to its repression or mobilised to defend its imperialist interests as cannon-fodder. Also “... it should be said that the new nations are born with an original sin: their territories are incoherent, made up of a chaotic mixture of ethnic, religious, economic and cultural remnants, their frontiers are usually artificial and incorporate minorities from neighbouring countries. All of this can only lead to disintegration and permanent conflict”[3]. An example of this is the anarchy of nationalisms, ethnicities, and religions that exist in the Middle East. The three major religions are here further sub-divided into a myriad of sects, many in conflict with themselves and others: Shia, Sunni, Maronite, Orthodox and Coptic Christians, Alawite and so on. There are large linguistic minorities and many millions of stateless peoples: Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians and now Syrians.

In World War One it was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and its treasures, as well as the strategic position of the Middle East (between east and west, between Europe and Africa, the Suez Canal, the Dardanelles strait) that attracted the major powers. Even before oil was discovered in the region, and well before the extent of its oil reserves were realised, Britain mobilised 1.5 million troops in the region. Having resisted the threat from Germany and Russia, and despite rivalries between themselves, most of the region was carved up by Britain and France: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, a Palestine “Protectorate”, all with borders drawn up by the victorious imperialist powers with a wary eye on each other and on their former antagonists. These absurd “nations” became permanent breeding grounds for further instability and war, not only through the rivalries of the bigger powers but also through regional conflicts between themselves. This often resulted in massive displacements of populations, justified by the need to form distinct national entities: in short they provided the soil for pogromism, exclusion, violence between religions and sects that not only live with us today but have become much more widespread and dangerous: Sunni/Shia; Jews/Muslims; Christians/Muslims and much older sects that were previously left alone but who are now pulled into the imperialist maelstrom. The region has become a violent fusion of totalitarian regimes, religion, terrorism and warlordism - a decay indicative of the fact that there is no solution to capitalist barbarity except the communist revolution. With the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Britain supported the setting-up of a Jewish homeland in Palestine which they planned to use as an ally both locally and against major rivals. It was in this militaristic framework of bloody struggles with the Arab rulers that the Zionist state was born[4]. The USA, the main beneficiary of World War One, was now beginning to supplant Great Britain as the world’s major power and this would be evidenced in the Middle East.

The Stalinist counter-revolution of the 1920s and 30s, aided and abetted by the western powers, only increased the imperialist machinations over the Middle East, up to and including World War Two. In this period the Turks, Arab factions and the Zionists wavered between the camp of Britain or Germany, with the majority eventually choosing the camp of the former. The region was important for both sides[5] but it was relatively spared from the destruction, with the major battlefields of the war being mainly in Europe and the Far East. Overall, and the war’s end was to confirm it, both Britain and Germany were fighting a losing battle here (and elsewhere) as the whole imperialist pecking order was overturned by the emergence of the American superpower. This is further emphasised by the creation of the Zionist state, which was heavily supported by the US (and also initially by Russia) to the detriment of British national interests. The establishment of the nation state of Israel signalled a new zone of conflict whose very birth saw the creation of a huge and intractable refugee problem, and which has grown up in a state of permanent military siege. The existence of Israel is probably one of the most glaring examples of how a country formed in capitalist decadence is framed by war, survives by war and lives in constant fear of war.

Another chapter of imperialism was opened when the Middle East inevitably became a factor in the Cold War between the American and Russian blocs which solidified somewhat after World War Two and led to a number of proxy “engagements” in the region between the two major powers. Thus the Israeli-Arab wars of 1967 and 1973 were at one level proxy wars between the two blocs, and Israel’s crushing victories greatly reduced the USSR’s ability to maintain the footholds it had established in the region, especially in Egypt. At the same time, already in the 70s and early 80s, we could see the germs of the chaotic, multipolar conflicts that have characterised the period since the fall of the USSR and its bloc. Thus the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979 resulted in the formation of a regime which tended to escape from the control of both blocs. Russia’s attempt to capitalise on the new balance of power in the region – its attempted occupation of Afghanistan in 1980 – embroiled it in a long war of attrition which contributed greatly to the collapse of the USSR. At the same time, by encouraging the development of the Islamist Mujahadeen, including the kernel of what became al-Qaida, to lead the opposition to the Russian occupation, the US, Britain and Pakistan were themselves constructing a monster that would soon bite the hand of its creators. Meanwhile US imperialism also had to retreat from its own defeats in Lebanon, largely at the hands of forces acting as proxies for Iran and Syria.

It is during this period that we see the beginnings of the loss of power of the US that is both an expression of and contribution to the ambient decomposition of today. After the breakdown of the Russian bloc came the disintegration of the US directed “alliance” and the centrifugal tendencies towards every nation for itself. The US responded forcefully to this situation, attempting to cohere its allies around it by launching the Gulf War of 1990/91, which resulted in an estimated half-a-million Iraqis being killed (while Saddam Hussein was left in place). But the counter-tendencies were too great and US leadership was irrevocably undermined. Post-9/11, the Evangelical Neo-Cons then acting for US imperialism started further wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that gave the appearance of a crusade against Islam and have further fanned the flames of Islamic fundamentalism.

Today, the further slide into capitalist barbarism

In the 1979 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now, the renegade US Colonel asks his CIA-appointed killer what he thought of his methods. The assassin replies: “I don’t see any method at all”. There is no method in today’s wars in the Middle East except a great free-for-all.  There is no economic rationale - trillions of dollars have gone up in smoke from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone - just a further descent into barbarism. Fictional character though he is, Colonel Kurtz is symbolic of the export of war from “the heart of darkness”, which is actually in  the main centres of capital rather than the deserts of the Middle East or the jungles of Vietnam and the Congo.

In Syria today there are around 100 groups fighting the regime and each other, all of them to a greater or lesser extent supported or directed by local and major powers. The new “nation”, the Caliphate of Isis, with its own imperialism, its cannon-fodder, its brutality and irrationality, is both an independent expression of capitalist decay and a reflection of all the major powers which, one way and another brought it into existence. Isis is currently expanding to all points of the compass, gaining new affiliates in Africa, including Boko Haram in Nigeria, and is also competing with the Taliban in Afghanistan, who are themselves threatening the Helmand region which was for so long the mini-protectorate of the British army. But if it was eliminated tomorrow it would immediately be replaced by other jihadists, such as the al-Qaida affiliated Jahbat al-Nusra. The “War on Terror” Part Two, like Part One, will only increase the terrorism that exists in the Middle East and its export back to the heartlands of capital.

One of the features of the growing number of wars in the Middle East today is the re-emergence of Russia which has taken place on the military, state capitalist level with the ideological cover of the “values” of the old Russian nation. During the Cold War, Russia was kicked out of Egypt, and the Middle East generally, as its power waned. Now, Russia has re-emerged, not in the form of a bloc leader as before – it has only a few weak ex-republics allied to it – but as a decomposition-shaped force that must assert the imperialism of its national “identity”. The weakness of Russia is clear in its desperation to hang onto its bases in Syria – its most important outside of Russia itself. Another factor that will affect much, including Russia, is the present rapprochement between the USA and Iran linked to the 2015 nuclear deal. This deal also expresses a fundamental weakness of US imperialism and is the source of considerable tension between the US and its other main regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Wherever you look, the imperialist mess in the Middle East gets increasingly impossible to untangle. There is the position of Turkey, which has not hesitated to pour oil on the fires of war; there is no end to its war with the Kurds and its actions have consequences for the US, Russia and Europe whose interests it plays one against another. Its relations with Russia in particular have hit a low point following the shooting down of a Russian fighter jet, while it has transparently used the pretext of striking back at Isis to hit Kurdish bases. There is the involvement of Saudi Arabia, which although supposedly an ally of the US and Britain has been a major backer for various Islamist gangs in the region, not only through the export of its Wahabi ideology but also with arms and money.

As far as the nation states of decadence go then Saudi Arabia must be one of the worst historical jokes you could find[6]. Undermined by falling oil prices, which Iran has done everything to facilitate (showing oil not as a factor of economic rationale but as a weapon of imperialism), and fearful at the prospect of the rival Iranian theocracy becoming the region’s policeman once again after its recent agreement with the US, the Saudi regime struck a blow against Iran with the execution of the well-known Shia cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, and further beheadings and crucifixions which have hardly been mentioned in the western media. This planned provocation towards Iran shows a certain desperation and weakness of the Saudi regime as well as more dangers of things sliding out of control. The actions of the Saudi regime here again reveal the centrifugal tendencies of each nation for themselves and the weakness of the major powers, particularly the USA, in controlling them. One thing certain from the current episode of Iranian/Saudi rivalry will be the aggravation of war, pogroms and militarism throughout the region with multiple tensions and uncertain alliances gaining ground. There were already related strains further afield in Egypt – which Saudi Arabia has bankrolled in its anti-Muslim Brotherhood fight – that will now only worsen. 

The nation state of Lebanon was already being pulled apart in the 1980s; tensions will become greater now and the consequences of the breakup of this fragile state would be disastrous not least for Israel, whose low level war with the Palestinian factions and Hezbollah rumbles on.

Finally, we should mention the increasing role of China, even if its main points of imperialist rivalry – with the US, Japan and others – are located in the Far East. Having arisen as the subordinate ally of the USSR in the late 40s and 50s, China began to follow a more independent course in the 60s (the ‘Sino-Soviet split’), which led in the short term to a new understanding with the USA. But since the 90s China has become the world’s second biggest economic power and this has vastly increased its imperialist ambitions at a more global level, most notably through its efforts to penetrate Africa. For the moment, it has tended to operate alongside Russian imperialism in the Middle East, blocking US attempts to discipline Syria and Iran, but its potential for disrupting the world balance of power - and thus accelerating the plunge into chaos - remains to a large extent untapped. This offers us further proof that the economic take-off of a former colony like China is no longer a factor of human progress, but brings with it new threats of destruction, both military and ecological.

We began by looking at the reactionary nature of the capitalist nation state, a once progressive expression that has now become not only a fetter to the advance of humanity but a threat to its very existence. The virtual breakup of the nations of Syria and Iraq, forcing millions to flee the war and avoid fighting for any side, the birth of the Caliphate of Isis, the national project of Jahbat al-Nusra, the defence of the ethnic Kurdish homeland – these are all expressions of imperialist decay that offer the populations of these areas nothing but misery and death. There is no solution to the decomposition of the Middle East within capitalism. Faced with this it is vital that the proletariat maintains and develops its own interests against those of the nation state. The situation of the working class in the main centres of capitalism is key here, given the extreme weakness of the proletariat in the war zones themselves. And although the bourgeoisie is subjecting the working class in the heartlands of capital to constant ideological attacks around the themes of the refugees and terrorism, it does not yet dare to mobilise it directly for war. Potentially, the working class remains the greatest threat of all to capitalist order, but it must begin to transform this potential into a reality if it is to avert the disaster that this system is heading towards. Understanding that its interests are international, that the nation state is finished as a viable framework for human life, will be an essential part of this transformation. 

Boxer, 13.1.16

This article was contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC.

The emergence of a concentration camp world

By proclaiming “socialism in one country”, the new Stalinist regime in Russia was preparing a race to industrialise with a view to catching up with the more advanced economies. Planning for heavy industry and the manufacture of weapons would increase the extreme exploitation of the working class. Up until the terrible depression of the 1930s, the conquering Western countries had also sought a low cost workforce to ‘divide and rule’ over. But with the economic crisis and mass unemployment, migrants and the refugees became more openly unwelcome. The flow of migrants would be quite brutally slowed down from 1929, including to the United States [1]

The latter adopted quotas to filter out the migrants, dividing and separating them from other proletarians. In this context, with whole populations displaced, the deportees and refugees were forcibly moved on and experienced terrible conditions (during and after the war): they often ended up in concentration camps that began to appear pretty much everywhere.

With the crises and the imperialist tensions escalating, a defeated working class was not able to pose any resistance. This would find expression in Spain, in 1936, with the proletariat beginning to be recruited into the war in the name of “anti-fascism”. This new total war mobilised civilians (women, the young, the old) much more brutally and massively than the first Great War. It would prove to be much more destructive and barbaric. The state, by intervening more directly on the whole of social life, opened up a kind of concentration camp era. It would spawn deportations, ethnic cleansing, famines and mass exterminations.

Deportations, massacres and forced labour

The violence of Stalinism, as brutal as it was unpredictable, was a prime example. At the time of the purges the state did not hesitate to arrest genuine communists, to execute 95% of the leaders from one region, to deport entire populations so it could control and manage its territory effectively. In the years 1931-1932, Stalin would chillingly use hunger as a weapon in attempting to break the resistance of the Ukrainians to the forced collectivisations. This terrible, deliberately caused famine led to 6 million deaths in total. In Siberia and elsewhere, millions of men and women were sentenced to hard labour. During 1935, for example, 200,000 prisoners were digging the Moscow-Volga-Don Canal and 150,000 the second Trans-Siberian route. The brutal collectivisation campaign, in which many millions of kulaks were deported to inhospitable re-settlement areas, the plans for heavy industry and the exploitation by forced-march where workers were killed at work (literally), served Stalin’s obsession of wanting “to catch up with the capitalist countries”[2].  Before its entry into the war, in 1941, the Stalinist state was carrying out a real “ethnic cleansing” on its borders, with the aim of strengthening its security. Different populations were suspected of collaboration with the German enemy and so were subjected to large collective displacements. In 1937, the deportation to Central Asia of 170,000 Koreans on simple ethnic grounds, leading to heavy human losses, was a foretaste of what was ahead. Amongst all the displaced that would follow, 60,000 Poles were dispatched to Kazakhstan in 1941. Several waves of deportations then took place after the breakdown of the German-Soviet pact, especially for people of Germanic origin, notably in the Baltic republics who openly became “the enemies of the people”: 1.2 million of them found themselves exiled overnight to Siberia and Central Asia. Between 1943 and 1944, it was the turn of the people of the North Caucasus (Chechens, Ingush ...) and the Crimea (the Tatars) to be brutally displaced. Many of these victims, hungry, criminalised and banished by the “socialist” state, would die during transportation in cattle wagons (through lack of water, food, or from diseases such as typhus). If local people generally showed great solidarity towards those unfortunate exiles, the official propaganda against these new slaves continued its climate of hatred. During transportation, they were often faced with stone-throwing along with the worst possible insults. Upon arrival, according to a report from Beria dated July 1944, “some presidents of the collective farms organised beatings, designed to justify their refusal to hire physically damaged deportees”[3].

In these extreme conditions, there were eventually “ten to fifteen million Soviet citizens” sent into “re-education camps to work”, camps that were officially created by the regime in the 1930s[4].

In Germany, when the Nazis came to power, well before the extermination of its enemies was on the agenda, the concentration camps that would multiply across the land and especially in Poland were initially labour camps. This tendency for the development of camps for prisoners or refugees, that would blossom almost everywhere, even in the democratic countries like France and the United States, had the purpose, besides controlling the population, of exploiting an almost “free” labour power. Traditionally, in selling his labour power, the proletarian allows the capitalist to extract surplus value, that is to say, profit. The terms of the contract ensure that exploitation can achieve the maximum productivity whilst guaranteeing, through the low level of pay, the simple reproduction of labour power. In the concentration camps, labour power was exploited almost absolutely. In Germany, the deportees worked more than 12 hours a day, in any weather, on the orders of “kapos”. Secret arms factories or subsidiaries of large German companies were found in the concentration camps or nearby. These war industries enjoyed almost free, abundant and easily replaceable labour. The reproduction of labour power was reduced to mere survival of the worker / prisoner, the very low productivity of this workforce being partially offset by the very low maintenance costs. The food was limited to a subsistence minimum, and the transport likewise, often reduced to the single trip to a remote and isolated place, that of the camp. In the democratic states, the camps would also be used as part of the strengthening the state’s social control of the prisoner populations and / or the exploitation of their labour power. Thus, faced with the influx of Spanish refugees (120,000 between June and October 1937, 440,000 in 1939), the French Government was responding to these “undesirables” liable to engage in “revolutionary actions”[5]. In North Africa, 30,000 of them were used as forced labour. The Spanish refugees living on French soil were herded into internment camps (the authorities themselves spoke of “concentration camps”) erected in a hurry in the south of the country (especially on the Roussillon beaches). There were, for example, as many as 87,000 refugees in Argelès, exploited as slave labour in appalling conditions, sleeping on the sand, supervised by the “kapos” of the Republican Guard or Senegalese riflemen. Between February and July 1939, about 15,000 Spanish refugees died in these camps, most of them from exhaustion or victims of dysentery.

Later, during the war, among many other examples, we could refer to the United States which also interned more than 120,000 people from March 1942 to March 1946. This was theJapanese-American population, penned in concentration camps in the north and east of California. These victims of state xenophobia were treated terribly, just like the worst criminals.[6]

The genocide of the Jews, one of the pinnacles of capitalist barbarism

We have pointed out that concentration camps in Germany began as labour camps. The largest forced population movements took place in the direction of Germany, through measures such as STO (Service de Travail Obligatoire) in France. Jews were plundered, rounded-up and subjected to mass deportations nearly everywhere in Europe. In factories, agriculture and mining, one quarter of the workforce was forced labour, notably under the Generalplan Ost. Between 15 and 20 million people in total were deported by Nazi Germany to run its war machine! Such a policy increased the number of refugees fleeing the regime and its manhunt. In the 1930s, there were about 350,000 refugees coming from Nazi Germany, 150,000 from Austria (after the Anschluss) and Sudetenland (after its annexation to Nazi Germany).

From 1942 and the plan for the “Final Solution”, the concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Maidaneck ... would be transformed into death camps. In atrocious conditions, many victims among the six million Jews were transported in convoys and massacred, most gassed and incinerated in large ovens. The worst loss and largest quota of victims was provided by Poland (3,000,000) and the USSR (1,000,000). The extermination camps like Auschwitz (1.2 million) and Treblinka (800,000) were running at full capacity. This barbarism is well known because it was extensively publicised and exploited ideologically ad nauseam after the war by the Allies, thus serving as an alibi to justify or hide their own crimes.

The infernal Nazi propaganda machine was indeed a terrible extension of the pogrom mentality that had been introduced in the 1920s, a mentality which sanctioned the bloody defeat of the proletariat and its great revolutionary figures who were equated with “Jewry”: “even though many Jewish revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg or Trotsky considered themselves to be non-Jews (...) the Israelite appears as the harbinger of subversion, as a destructive agent vis-à-vis basic values: homeland, family, property, religion. The enthusiasm of many Jews for all forms of modern art or for the new means of expression such as cinema, still justifies their reputation for a corrosive spirit”[7].  In fact, the defeat of the revolution allowed the great democracies to see Hitler as nothing more, nothing less, than an effective bulwark against “Bolshevism”. For all states at the time, the amalgam between Jews and communism was very common. Churchill himself accused the Jews of being the leaders of the Russian Revolution: “There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and the emergence of the Russian Revolution by these internationalist and mainly atheist Jews”[8]. The idea of a “Judeo-Marxist” plot was first spread by the “white troops” and cultivated on the basis of a widespread anti-Semitism: “is it necessary to point out that Hitler was not the source of this anti-Semitism (...) after the First World War, this anti-Semitism was found in most European countries”[9].  So the Jews would be systematically stigmatised, marginalised and become scapegoats without this being too much of an embarrassment to the democratic leaders, some of whom, like Roosevelt, already had openly xenophobic and anti-Semitic tendencies. Many of the Jews who were in Poland, the USSR and in ghettos, had already often been forced to flee the democratic countries because of this anti-Semitism (contrary to what one would have us believe, the anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime, for example, was not a spontaneous phenomenon, nor was it limited to his particular regime). Consequently, the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were, not surprisingly, introduced almost unnoticed. By isolating and marginalising Jewish citizens, their property would be plundered with impunity, in good conscience, since they were seen as very degenerate beings. It is in fact this whole dynamic, this nauseating breeding ground, that lay behind the hygienicist and eugenicist propaganda of the Nazis. From January 1940, the programme “Action T4” (forced euthanasia) in Germany already foreshadowed the Holocaust, methodically programming the elimination of the physically and mentally handicapped. Faced with the tragedy that was to follow, the Allies refused help to the Jews “in order to not destabilize the war effort” (Churchill). It is well established that the Allies were co-sponsors and accomplices in a genocide that was primarily a product of the capitalist system. Very early on, the democratic countries were firm in refusing to provide assistance to the Jews who were seen as outcasts and were unwelcome[10].  Faced with the Nazi repression and persecution, the Popular Front government in France, for example, would show itself intractable. Thus, behind a democratic veneer, a circular from the hand of Roger Salengro, dated August 14, 1936, noted: “we shouldn’t let (…) any German émigré into France and should start removing all foreigners; German subjects, or those arriving from Germany after the August 5 1936, will not be provided with the necessary documents ... “[11]

The barbarism comes from both imperialist camps

During the Second World War, all the actions and administrative measures to deport, expel and exterminate the populations were far more imposing and notably had more dramatic consequences than in 1914 to 1918. The number of refugees / migrants was on a much larger scale. The violence used – from the concentration camps and the gas chambers, the carpet bombing, the phosphorous gas, nuclear bombs, the use of chemical and biological weapons - had claimed millions of lives and caused lasting suffering and trauma after the war. The balance sheet is terrifying! The destruction killed in total nearly 66 million people (20 million soldiers and 46 million civilians) compared with 10 million in 1914-1918! At the end of the Second World War, 60 million people had to be relocated, ten times more than in the First World War! At the heart of Europe itself, 40 million died. In East Asia, in China, more than 12 million people died in direct military confrontations and there were nearly 95 million refugees in China. During the war, a number of sieges and military battles were among the bloodiest in history. To give some examples: at Stalingrad, almost a million men died on both sides in a hellish inferno. In a siege that lasted nearly three years, at least 1.8 million died. The battle to capture Berlin killed 300,000 German and Russian soldiers and more than 100,000 civilians.

The famous Battle of Okinawa killed 120,000 soldiers but also 160,000 civilians. Japanese troops slaughtered 300,000 Chinese in Nanking. The atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, according to historian Howard Zinn, reportedly left up to 250,000 dead. The terrible American bombing of Tokyo in March 1945 caused 85,000 deaths. In the USSR, there were 27 million victims. Ukraine would lose 20% of its population, Poland 15% (mostly Jews). Hundreds of cities in Europe were partly ruined or virtually destroyed. In Russia, 1,700 towns were affected, in Ukraine, 714, and  nearly 70,000 villages were destroyed. In Germany, incendiary phosphorous carpet bombs dropped by the Allies and Bomber Command claimed a huge number of victims, razing the cities of Dresden and Hamburg (nearly 50,000 dead). A city like Cologne was 70% destroyed. It was subsequently estimated that there were between 18 and 20 million homeless at the end of the war in Germany, 10 million in Ukraine. The number of war orphans was equally significant: two million in Germany, more than one million in Poland. Some 180,000 children were reduced to the status of vagabonds in the streets of Rome, Naples and Milan.

The appalling suffering caused by this destruction was very often accompanied by terrible vengeance and acts of barbarity against terrorised civilians and refugees. This was true of the Allies, although they were portrayed as the “great liberators”: “hubris, lightning revenge befalls the survivors; the discovery of the atrocities committed by the vanquished only fuels the good conscience of the conqueror”[12].

The accumulation of violence generated by decadent capitalism, once released, produced the most atrocious scenes, those of “ethnic purification” and acts of unimaginable cruelty. During and after the war in Croatia, nearly 600,000 Serbs, Muslims and Jews were killed by the Ustasha regime wishing to “clean up” the entire country. Greek communities were massacred by the Bulgarian army; Hungarians did the same to the Serbs in Vojvodina. During the war, defeats were always accompanied by tragic migrations. Thus, for example, five million Germans would flee before the Red Army. Many would die, often lynched by the roadside. This was one of those heroic episodes for the “liberators”, for these “knights of freedom”, who would cynically assume the role of prosecutor after the war despite their own unpunished crimes: “the terrible plight of populations in eastern Germany during the advance of the Red Army is still unforgettable (...) The Soviet soldier became the instrument of a cold will, of deliberate extermination (...) Columns of refugees were crushed under the treads of the tanks or systematically strafed from the air. The population of whole cities was massacred with refined cruelty. Naked women were crucified on the doors of barns. Children were decapitated or had their heads crushed with rifle butts or were thrown alive into pig troughs (...) The German population of Prague was massacred with a rare sadism. After being raped, women would have their Achilles tendons cut and were condemned to die bleeding in agony on the ground. Children were machine-gunned at the school gate, thrown onto pavements from the floors of the buildings or drowned in fountains; in total, more than 30,000 victims (...) the violence did not spare the young auxiliary signalmen of the Luftwaffe, thrown alive onto burning haystacks. For weeks, the river Vltava (Moldau) carried thousands of bodies; some whole families were nailed onto rafts”.[13]

It is difficult to say how many women were raped by German soldiers during the war. What is certain is that with the forces of the Allies advancing and occupying the “liberated” territory, another test awaited them. There were a million women raped in Germany by Allied troops; Berlin alone had around 100,000 cases. The estimates for Budapest lie in a range from 50,000 to 100,000 raped.

What we especially want to emphasise is that far from  intervening in “defence of freedom”, the involvement in the war  of the Allies and the great democracies was aimed at defending purely imperialist interests. The fate of populations and refugees did not concern them until they were in charge and they could be used as exploited labour. They never made mention of the fate of Jews in their propaganda during the war, even denying them help and abandoning them into the hands of the Nazis. The Allies’ motive for entering into the war had nothing to do with a desire for “liberation”. For France and Britain, it was actually about defending the “European balance of power”. For the United States, it was about countering its Japanese rival in the east and blocking the threat of the USSR, and for the latter, it was to extend its influence within Western Europe; in short, for purely strategic, imperialist and military reasons. What else can we expect? It was absolutely not to “free Germany” from the “brown plague” that they acted. This fable is nothing but a diabolic fabrication invented at the time of the liberation of the camps. It was all prepared by the Allied staff and politicians, anxious to hide their own crimes (let’s not be so naïve to think that the military and politicians in the democracies never make propaganda!). If the “liberation” was able to end the practices of the Nazi occupiers, this was primarily an indirect consequence of achieving a purely military objective and not for “humanitarian” reasons. The best proof of this is that the major democratic powers continued to defend their imperialist interests, creating new victims, colonial massacres and new divisions after the war that also produced new waves of refugees and destitute people. 

WH  18 July 2015

In the next article [16], we will continue dealing with the same question, from the Cold War until the fall of the Berlin wall and into the current period.

When Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in Britain he stepped down from being chair of the Stop the War Coalition (StWC), while continuing to support its activities. Opponents of Corbyn have used this continuing connection to attack Labour and its leader. The ensuing arguments have pursued familiar lines with Corbyn and friends accused of being ‘anti-West’ and ‘pro-jihadi’ and his detractors portrayed as ‘bombers’ and Blairites.

In reality the strand of thinking represented by the Stop the War Coalition is just one set of options on offer for British imperialism. For example, opposition to British membership of NATO is among the military options open to the British bourgeoisie. The dominant strand in the British ruling class is for continuing participation in NATO, but a minority (including StWC) favour British military independence (presumably with the possibility of temporary alliances with other powers if such are deemed to be in the interests of British capitalism).

Opposition to NATO goes along with a determination for Britain to leave the EU, which is the policy of the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of Britain (two significant parts of the StWC – Andrew Wilson of the CPB was/is chair before and after Corbyn). They might complain that they should not be lumped in with the usual right wing anti-EU little Englanders, but there’s no logical reason why not. In the Libyan war of 2011, for example, leftists were divided over whether to support the Gaddafi regime or the opposition backed by a variety of powers, in particular France and Britain. The StWC backed Gaddafi’s status quo and they were joined by the likes of Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party, who did so in the name of political stability in the region.

But the area where the Stop the War Campaign is currently most under attack is over Syria. It is not surprising that those who voted for British bombing in the area should make accusations about those who voted against. If you say that ISIS is the new Hitler then anyone who says any different is bound to be labelled an appeaser. But some of those who had previously supported StWC have said it has effectively taken sides in the conflict. In a letter from a number of activists to the Guardian (9/12/15) we read that “StWC has failed to organise or support protests against the Assad dictatorship …Nor has it shown solidarity with the … millions of innocent civilians killed, wounded and displaced by Assad’s barrel bombs and torture chambers. It portrays Isis as the main threat to Syrians, despite Assad killing at least six times more civilians. StWC has … one-sidedly failed to support demonstrations against the escalating Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah military interventions in Syria.

As well as systematically ignoring war crimes committed by the Assad regime, StWC often misrepresents the opposition to Assad as being largely composed of jihadi extremists and agents of imperialism”.

These remarks are not all at the same level. The ‘respectable’ opposition that the critics have in mind, for example, would be potential replacements for the current regime, not challengers to Syrian capitalism. But criticism of Hezbollah is not to be expected from factions that have so consistently supported it, most notably in its war with Israel. With the campaign over starvation in the besieged western Syrian town of Madaya, the United Nations reports that there are some 450,000 people trapped in around 15 siege locations across Syria, including areas controlled by the government, ISIL and other insurgent groups. Madaya is under siege by the Syrian government and Hezbollah. Inside Madaya there are anti-Assad militias, the al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda in Syria) and the pro-US Free Syrian Army. In the Morning Star, the paper that puts forward the view of the CPB, it was reported (12/1/16) that “Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV channel  … accused anti-government fighters of hoarding humanitarian assistance that had entered the town in October and selling the supplies to residents at exorbitant prices.” Whatever the truth in the specific details in Madaya, the reality for the population in Syria, in Iraq, and in other conflicts across the region and the world, is one of death from starvation, from war, or in the attempt to flee the area. The policies of StWC focus on the relations between capitalist states at the imperialist level, with recommendations for policies that British imperialism can follow, predicated on the continued existence of British capitalism.

Corbyn (in a 4/6/15 post on https://www.stopwar.org.uk/ [17]) announced, while still StWC chair, that “The 21st century is shaping up to be possibly the most warlike century ever. By comparison the last decade of the 20th century was a time of serious discussion about long-term disarmament and arms conversion, as conflicts, while not expiring completely, were certainly reduced in their intensity.” This turns reality on its head. Following the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the imperialist blocs headed by the US and Russia, there was in Europe a certain amount of military restructuring which included a reduction in the size of a number of armies and some changes in military focus. However, in the 1990s, with the end of the blocs there was a proliferation of conflicts: the Gulf War, in Rwanda, Burundi, the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, across the Caucasus, in Sierra Leone, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Wars extended and developed in their intensity and have done so further in the 21st century. Discussions among the bourgeoisie about ‘disarmament’ and ‘arms conversion’ are entirely fraudulent manoeuvres as powers great and small have been compelled to strengthen the military dimension of their intervention on the imperialist stage.

Against the lying claims of the Stop the War Campaign (and its opponents), the world is not just so many brutal military conflicts in which the population must choose between its exploiters and oppressors, it is a world in which social classes have different interests and different dynamics. The bourgeoisie’s world is one of imperialist conflict; the working class, with common interests internationally, has the potential to destroy capitalist nation states and create a society based on solidarity. 

Car 16/1/16

A century ago, on 1st of May1916, at the Potsdam Platz in Berlin, the revolutionary internationalist Karl Liebknecht pointed to the working class answer to the war that was devastating Europe and massacring a whole generation of proletarians. In front of a crowd of some 10,000 workers who had been demonstrating in silence against the privations that were a necessary consequence of the war, Liebknecht described the anguish of proletarian families facing death at the front and starvation at home, concluding his speech (which was also reproduced and distributed at the demonstration in leaflet form) by raising the slogans “down with the war!” and “down with the government!”, which provoked his immediate arrest despite the efforts of the crowd to defend him. But the trial of Liebknecht the following month was met by a strike of 55,000 workers in the arms industries, led by a new form of workplace organisation, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards. This strike was in turn defeated, with many of its leaders being sent off to the front. But this and other struggles fermenting inside both warring camps were the seeds of the revolutionary wave that was to break out first in Russia in 1917 and then crash back into Germany a year later, forcing the ruling class, terrified of the spread of the “Red” virus, to call a halt to the killing[1].

But only a temporary halt, because the revolutionary wave did not put an end to decaying capitalism and its unavoidable drive towards war.  The predatory “peace” accord imposed on Germany by the victors already set in motion a process that would – under the whip of the world economic crisis of the 1930s – plunge the world into an even more destructive holocaust in 1939-45. And even before that war was over, the battle lines for yet another world war were already being joined, as America on the one hand and the USSR on the other established rival military blocs that for the next four or five decades would jockey for position through a whole litany of local conflicts: Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, the Israeli-Arab wars…

That period – the so-called Cold War that was not so cold to all the millions who died under the banner of “national liberation” or the “defence of the free world against communism” – is history, but war itself is more widespread than ever. The disintegration of the imperialist blocs after 1989 did not, despite the promises of the politicians and their paid philosophers, bring about a “new world order” or the “end of history”, but a growing world disorder, a succession of chaotic conflicts which carries as big a threat to humanity’s survival as the shadow of a nuclear-armed Third World War which hung over the previous period.

We thus find ourselves in 2016 faced with a whole swathe of wars from Africa through the Middle East to Central Asia; with growing tensions in the far east as the Chinese giant pits itself against its Japanese and above all American rivals; with a seething fire in Ukraine as Russia seeks to regain the imperialist glory it lost with the collapse of the USSR. 

Like the war in former Yugoslavia, one of the first major conflicts of the ‘post bloc’ period, the war in Ukraine is taking place at the very gates of Europe, close to the classical heartlands of world capitalism, and thus to the most important fractions of the international working class. The streams of refugees seeking to escape from the war zones in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, or Afghanistan provide further proof that Europe is no island cut off from the military nightmare engulfing a large part of humanity. On the contrary, the ruling classes of the central capitalist countries, of the “great democracies”, have been an active element in the proliferation of war in this period, through a whole series of military adventures in the peripheries of the system, from the first Gulf war in 1991 to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq at the start of the 21st century to the more recent bombing campaigns in Libya, Iraq and Syria. And these adventures have in turn stirred up the hornet’s nest of Islamic terrorism, which has again and again taken bloody revenge in the capitalist centres, from the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 to the Paris killings of 2015.

The working class as a barrier to war

But if the refugee crisis and the terrorist attacks are a constant reminder that war is no “foreign” reality,  Europe and the USA still appear as ‘havens’ compared to much of the world. This is shown by the very fact that the victims of wars in Africa and the Middle East – or of the grinding poverty and drug wars of Mexico and Central America – are prepared to risk their lives to get to the shores of Europe or across the US border. And certainly, for all the attacks on working class living standards we have seen over the past few decades, despite the growth of poverty and homelessness in the big cities of Europe and the US, the living conditions of the average proletarian in these regions still seems like an unattainable dream for those who have been directly subjected to the horrors of war. Above all, since 1945 there have been no military conflicts between the major powers of Europe – a striking contrast with the period 1914-45.

Is this because the rulers have learned the lessons of 1914-18 or 1939-45, and have formed powerful international organisations that make war between the major powers unthinkable?

There have indeed been important changes in the balance of forces between the major powers since 1945. The USA emerged as the real winner of the Second World War and was able to impose its terms on the prostrated powers of Europe: no more wars between western European powers, but economic and military cohesion as part of a US-led imperialist bloc to counter the threat from the USSR. And even though the western bloc lost this crucial reason for its existence after the downfall of the USSR and its bloc, the alliance between the former bitter rivals at the heart of Europe – France and Germany – has held relatively firm.

All these and other elements enter into the equation and can be read about in the work of academic historians and political analysts. But there is one key element that bourgeois commentators never talk about. This is the truth contained in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto: that history is the history of class struggle, and that any ruling class worthy of its name cannot afford to ignore the potential threat coming from the vast mass of humanity that it exploits and oppresses. This is particularly relevant when it comes to waging war, because capitalist war more than anything else demands the subjugation and sacrifice of the proletariat.

In the period before and after 1914, the ruling classes of Europe were always concerned that a major war would provoke a revolutionary response from the working class. They only felt confident enough to take the fateful last steps towards war when they were assured that the organisations the working class had built up over decades, the trade unions and the Socialist parties, would no longer adhere to their official internationalist declarations and would in fact help them march the workers off to the battle fronts. And as we have already pointed out, the same ruling class (even if it had in some cases to assume a new shape, as in Germany where the “Socialists” replaced the Kaiser) was obliged to end the war in order to block the danger of world revolution.

In the 1930s, a new war was prepared by a far more brutal and systematic defeat of the working class – not only through the corruption of the former revolutionary organisations that had opposed the betrayal of the Socialists, not only through the ideological mobilisation of the working class around the “defence of democracy” and “anti-fascism”, but also through the naked terror of fascism and Stalinism. And the imposition of this terror was also taken in hand by the democracies at the end of the war: where the possibilities of working class revolt were seen in Italy and Germany, the British in particular made sure it would never rise to the heights of a new 1917, through massive aerial bombardments of working class concentrations or by allowing the fascist executioners time to suppress the danger on the ground. 

The economic boom that followed the Second World War and the displacement of imperialist conflicts to the margins of the system meant that a direct clash between the two blocs in the period from 1945 to 1965 could be avoided, even if it came perilously close at times. In this period the working class had not yet recovered from its historic defeat and was not a major factor in blocking the war-drive.

The situation changed however after 1968. The end of the post-war boom was met by a new and undefeated generation of the working class, which engaged in a series of important struggles announced by the general strike in France in 1968 and the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969 in Italy. The return of the open economic crisis sharpened imperialist tensions and thus the danger of a direct conflict between the blocs, but on neither side of the imperialist divide could the ruling class be confident that it would be able to persuade the workers to stop fighting for their own material interests and give up everything for a new world war. This was demonstrated most forcefully by the mass strike in Poland in 1980. Although it was eventually defeated, it made it clear to the most intelligent factions of the Russian ruling class that they could never rely on the workers of eastern Europe (and probably not of the USSR itself, who had also begun to struggle against the effects of the crisis) to take part in a desperate military offensive against the west.

This inability to win the working class to its project of war was thus a central element in the break-up of the two imperialist blocs and the postponing of any prospect of a classic Third World War.

If the working class, even when it has not yet become conscious of a real historical project of its own, can have such an important weight in the world situation, surely this must also be taken into account when we consider the reasons why the tide of war  has not yet broken over the central countries of capitalism? And we must also consider the question from the other side of the coin: if there is so much barbarity and irrational destruction sweeping through Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, is this not because the working class there is weak, because it has little tradition of struggle and independent class politics, because it is dominated by nationalism, by religious fundamentalism – and also by illusions that achieving “democracy” would be a step forward?

We can understand this better by looking at the fate of the revolts which swept the Arab world (and Israel…) in 2011. In the movements which, even though involving different layers of the population, had the strongest imprint of the working class – Tunisia, Egypt and Israel – there were important gains in the struggle: tendencies toward self-organisation in street assemblies, towards breaking out of religious, ethnic and national divisions. It was these elements which were to inspire struggles in Europe and the US that same year, above all the Indignados movement in Spain. But the weight of ruling class ideology in the form of nationalism, religion, and illusions in bourgeois democracy was still very strong in all three of these revolts in the Middle East and North Africa, driving them into false solutions, as in Egypt where, following the fall of Mubarak, a repressive Islamist government was replaced by an even more repressive military one. In Libya and Syria, where the working class is much weaker and had little influence on the initial revolts, the situation rapidly degenerated into multi-sided military conflicts, fuelled by regional and global powers who sought to advance their chosen pawns (as described here [20] and here [21]). In these countries society itself has disintegrated, demonstrating very graphically what can happen if a senile capitalism’s tendencies towards self-destruction are not held back. In such a situation, all hope of a proletarian answer to war has been lost, and this is why the only solution for so many has been to try to get out, to flee the war zones at whatever risk.

The necessity for a revolutionary perspective

In period between 1968 and 1989, class struggle was a barrier to world war. But today the threat of war takes a different and more insidious form. To dragoon the working class into two great organised blocs, the ruling class would have needed  both to break all resistance at the economic level and to pull the majority of the working class behind ideological themes justifying a new world conflict. In short it would have required the physical and ideological defeat of the working class, similar to what capitalism achieved in the 1930s.  Today, however, in the absence of blocs, the spread of war can take the form of a gradual, if accelerating, slide into a myriad of local and regional conflicts which draw in more and more local, regional and, behind them, global powers, ravaging more and more parts of the planet and  which - combined with the creeping destruction of the natural environment and of the very fabric of social life – could signify an irreversible descent into barbarism, eliminating once and for all the possibility of taking human society onto a higher level.

This process, which we describe as the decomposition of capitalism, is already far advanced in places like Libya and Syria. To prevent this level of barbarism spreading to the centres of capitalism, the working class needs more than just a passive strength – and more than just economic resistance. It needs a positive political perspective. It needs to affirm the necessity for a new society for the authentic communism advocated by Marx and all the revolutionaries who followed in his wake. 

Today there seems little sign of such a perspective emerging. The working class has been through a long and difficult experience since the end of the 1980s: intensive campaigns by the bourgeoisie about the death of communism and the end of the class struggle have been directed against any idea that the working class can have its own project for the transformation of society. At the same time the remorseless advance of decomposition gnaws away at the entrails of the class, undermining confidence in the future, engendering despair, nihilism, and all kinds of desperate reactions, from drug addiction to religious fundamentalism and xenophobia. The loss of illusions in the traditional ‘workers’ parties, in the absence of any clear alternative, has intensified the flight away from politics or has given an impetus to new populist parties of left and right. Despite a certain revival of struggles between 2003 and 2013, the retreat in class struggle and class consciousness, which was palpable in the 90s, now seems to be even more entrenched.

And these are not the only difficulties facing the working class. Today the proletariat, in contrast to 1916, confronts not a situation of world war where every form of resistance is obliged to take on a political character from the start, but with a slowly deepening economic crisis managed by a very sophisticated bourgeoisie which has up till now succeeded in sparing the workers in the centres of the system from the worst effects of the crisis and above all from any large-scale involvement in military conflict. Indeed when it comes to military intervention in the peripheral regions, the ruling class in the centres has been very prudent, using only professional forces and even then preferring air strikes and drones to minimise the loss of soldiers’ lives which can lead to dissent in the army and at home. 

Another important difference between 1916 and today: in 1916, tens of thousands of workers struck in solidarity with Liebknecht. He was known to workers because the proletariat, despite the betrayal of the opportunist wing of the workers’ movement in 1914, had not lost touch with all its political traditions. Today revolutionary organisations are a miniscule minority virtually unknown within the working class. This is yet another factor inhibiting the development of a revolutionary political perspective.

With all these factors seemingly stacked against the working class, does it still make sense to think that such a development is at all possible today?

We have described the present phase of decomposition as the final phase of capitalist decadence. In 1916, the system had only just entered its epoch of decline and the war had intervened well before capitalism had exhausted all its economic possibilities. Within the working class there were still profound illusions in the idea that if only the war could be brought to an end, it would be possible to return to the era of the fight for gradual reforms within the system – illusions that were played upon by the ruling class by ending the war and installing the social democratic party in a key country like Germany.

Today the decadence of capitalism is much more advanced and the lack of any future felt by so many is a real reflection of the impasse of the system. The bourgeoisie patently has no solution to the economic crisis that has dragged on for over four decades, no alternative to the slide into military barbarism and to the destruction of the environment. In short, the stakes are even higher than they were 100 years ago. The working class faces an immense challenge – the necessity to provide its own answers to the economic crisis, to war and the refugee problem, to provide a new vision of man’s relationship with nature. The proletariat needs more than just a series of struggles at the workplace – it needs to make a total critique of all aspects of capitalist society, both theoretically and practically.

No wonder that the working class, faced with the perspective offered by capitalism and the immense difficulty of finding its own alternative, falls back into despair. And yet we have seen glimpses of a movement that begins to look for this alternative, above all in the Indignados movement of 2011 which opened the door not only to the idea of a new form of social organisation – encapsulated in the slogan “all power to the assemblies” – but also to educating itself about the system it was calling into question and needs to replace.

No doubt the new generation of proletarians which led this revolt is still extremely inexperienced, lacks political formation, and does not even clearly see itself as working class. And yet the forms and methods of struggle that emerged in such movements – such as the assemblies – were often deeply rooted in the traditions of working class struggle. And even more importantly, the movement in 2011 saw the emergence of a genuine internationalism, expressing the fact that the working class of today is more global than it was in 1916; that it is part of an immense network of production, distribution and communication which links the whole planet; and that it shares many of the same fundamental problems in all countries in spite of the divisions that the exploiting class always tries to impose and manipulate. The Indignados were very conscious that they were carrying on from where the revolts in the Middle East left off, and some of them even saw themselves as part of a “world revolution” of all those who are excluded, exploited and oppressed by this society.

This embryonic internationalism is extremely important. In 1916-17 internationalism was something very concrete and immediate. It took the form of fraternisation between the soldiers of opposing armies, of mass desertions and mutinies, of strikes and anti-war demonstrations on the home front. These actions were the practical realisations of the theoretical slogans raised by the revolutionary minorities when the war broke out: “the main enemy is at home”, and “turn the imperialist war into a civil war”

Today internationalism often begins in more negative and seemingly abstract forms: in the critique of the bourgeois framework of the nation state to solve the problem of war, terrorism and the refugees; in the recognition of the necessity to go beyond competing nation states to overcome the economic and ecological crises. But, at certain moments, it can take on more practical forms: in the international links, both digital and physical, between participants in the revolts of 2011; in spontaneous acts of solidarity towards refugees by workers in the central countries, often in defiance of the bourgeoisie’s xenophobic propaganda. In some parts of the world, of course, direct struggle against war is a necessity, and where a significant working class exists, as in Ukraine, we have seen signs of resistance to conscription and protests against shortages caused by the war, although here again the lack of a coherent proletarian opposition to militarism and nationalism has seriously weakened resistance to the war drive.

For the working class in the central countries, direct implication in war is not on the immediate agenda and the question of war can still seem remote from everyday concerns. But as the “refugee crisis” and the terrorist attacks in these countries already show, war will more and more become an everyday concern for the workers in the heartlands of capital, who are best placed, on the one hand, to deepen their understanding of the underlying causes of war and its connection to the overall, historic crisis of capitalism; and on the other hand to strike at the belly of the beast, the central headquarters of the imperialist system.

Amos  16.1.16

“And if time didn’t exist?” is the title of the book[1] by physicist Carlo Rovelli[2] posing a question which could seem first of all to be very strange, absurd even. Every day we see, experience the passage of time. Clocks, alarms, omnipresent watches count off the seconds. For example, the frustration one feels when you miss the train by arriving too late; children that grow up or the wrinkles in the corner of the eye. Everything, absolutely everything seems to justify beyond any possible doubt the implacable existence of time and its effects.

Really? For those who travel little the earth doesn’t seem flat, decorated with swellings and depressions as it is. The idea of a round earth with an “underneath” where people walk “upside-down” without “falling off”, isn’t that also contrary to intuition? And to say that this earth goes around the Sun whereas we see each and every day the Sun “rise” in the east and “set” in the west?

The history of science has confirmed what the Greek philosophers had already understood more than 2,500 years ago: our senses can be mistaken; it is necessary to go beyond the immediate impressionable sensations to get to the truth. So perhaps the hypothesis of Carlo Rovelli is worth some serious consideration. For what reasons does this scientist affirm that time is fundamentally an illusion?

The illusion of the passage of time

Since Einstein humanity has known that there is a snag in the ticking of our clocks: time is relative. It doesn’t pass at the same rate everywhere. The more the speed of movement is greater or gravity stronger, the more the passage of time slows down. Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s very successful 2014 film, correctly put this scientific discovery at the centre of its story: the protagonists age differently depending if they are on Earth, or if they travel through space, or if they stay on this or that planet provided with a different gravity. The hero, a cosmonaut sent into space at the beginning of the film, returns at the end of the adventure to find his daughter who remained on earth a very old woman, while he had only aged a few months. If this example is a case of science fiction, it is nevertheless accurate, and the relative nature of time has been experimentally verified. For example, if two atomic clocks (the most precise at the present time) are started simultaneously with one remaining on the ground and the other on a flight 10km above the earth and its gravity, then the readings show two different results: the one at a distance would have “lived” less long by some nanoseconds than the one on the ground.

Time is thus not a regular ticking, fixed and implacable. But Carlo Rovelli goes further by advancing the hypothesis that time doesn’t really exist: “...we never measure time itself. We always measure the variable physics A, B, C ... (oscillations, pulsations, and many other things), and we always compare one variable with another. But it is useful to imagine that there exists a variable t, the real time that we can never measure, but which is found behind everything (...) Rather than any resort to an abstract and absolute ‘time’, which was a thing invented by Newton, one can describe each variable in relation to the state of other variables (...) Just like space, time becomes a relational idea. It only expresses a relation to the different states of things”. And thus: “Space and usual time quite simply disappear from the framework of basic physics, in the same way that the notion of the ‘centre of the universe’ disappears with the scientific image of the world” (pp.100 to 103). Time does not fundamentally exist but comes from an illusion due to our knowledge or to our limited perception of the Universe: “... time is an effect of our ignorance of the details of the world. If we understood perfectly all the details of the world, we would not have the sensation of the passage of time” (pp. 104-105).

In other words, the universe is made up of constant, permanent interactions of an infinite complexity of cause and effect. A modifies B which modifies C in its turn but also perhaps A itself, etc. Thus the universe is in movement, ceaselessly modifying itself, and these are the changes and interactions that we perceive. Alone, our existence unfolds with few fundamental variables, always on Earth or near to it and at extremely modest speeds compared to the speed of light, with all these interactions appearing to us as dictated by a physical component of the universe that man calls “time”. At our level the swing of the pendulum is imperturbable; we never see the difference of some nanoseconds which could happen here or there on Earth according to the speed of our movement or our altitude. Newton himself integrated this notion of “time” as a fundamental component of his physics. Only what Carlo Rovelli says is that when we observe the swing of a pendulum we have the illusion of the passing of “seconds” whereas we are only measuring a concatenation of interactions within the mechanism of the clock. And that is why modern physics can do without the notion of “time” within its equations: “... instead of predicting the position of a falling object ‘at the end of five seconds’, we can predict its fall after ‘five oscillations of the clock’. The difference is weak in practice, but great from a conceptual point of view because this approach frees us from all constraints on possible forms of space-time” (p. 115).

It’s neither in the competence of the author of this article nor the role of a revolutionary organisation as the ICC to validate or invalidate a hypothesis during the course of a debate in the scientific world. On the other hand, beyond the necessary interest for the advancement of thought in general, the method and the scientific approach which underpins these advances are also a foundation that needs to be assimilated in order to try to understand the world and society. Does time exist? We can’t settle that, but the approach of Carlo Rovelli is a source of inspiration for reflection. Because there appears a treasure much greater than the result of his research and that is the road that it’s necessary to take: thought in movement.

A dynamic vision of science

From the conception of a universe in constant evolution, constituted by a series of interactions of an infinite complexity, follows a dynamic vision of science and the truth. If the universe is in movement then to understand it thought must also be in movement: “With science, I have discovered a mode of thought which first of all establishes rules to understand the world, and then became capable of modifying these same rules. This liberty in the pursuit of knowledge fascinated me. Pushed by my curiosity, and perhaps by what Frederico Cesi, a friend of Galileo and a visionary of modern science, called ‘the natural desire to know’, I find myself, almost without realizing it, immersed in problems of theoretical physics” (p. 5). Carlo Rovelli disputes the validity of a fixed vision of a science which is supposed to lay down absolute and eternal truths.  On the contrary, for him, “Scientific thought is the very consciousness of our ignorance. I would even say that scientific thought is the very consciousness of our great ignorance and thus of the dynamic nature of knowledge. It is doubt and not certainty that pushes us forwards. There of course lies the profound heritage of Descartes. We must have confidence in science not because it offers certainties but because it has none” (pp. 70-71).

Carlo Rovelli thus shows us that the evolution of scientific thought is absolutely opposed to the scientific approach of the 19th century. It was believed during this period that science was in continuous evolution towards the complete knowledge of the laws of the universe. Thus in the second half of the 19th century, the majority of scientists thought that all the fundamental laws of nature had essentially been discovered. It only remained to determine some universal constants in order to make the definitive turn of the physical sciences. Hardly five years after the turn of the century two fundamental theories swept away this almost perfect edifice: the special theory of relativity (completed by that of general relativity) of Einstein, and quantum mechanics which was still more profound in terms of calling into question our understanding of the world. Carlo Rovelli shows us that the scientific method always begins by taking into account and calling into question the bases of the old theories in order to elaborate new, wider, more profound and more general ones. Advances made by the new theories allow progress. This progress leads us into a new context which itself becomes contradictory in its development. Thus quantum mechanics and general relativity have opened the possibility of better understanding the dynamics of the universe, an understanding that was inaccessible through classical physics, since the latter was only able to describe a stable and definite state. But these two great theories have not brought us to a final point in physics or to a total and definitive answer to the mysteries of the universe. Quite the contrary. New contradictions have appeared: “Quantum mechanics, which describes very well the microscopic level, has profoundly overturned what we know about matter. General relativity, which explains the force of gravity very well, has radically transformed what we know about Time and Space (...) But these two theories lead to two very different ways of describing the world, which appear incompatible. Each one of them seems to be written as if the other didn’t exist. We are in a schizophrenic situation with partial and intrinsically inconsistent explanations. To the point where we no longer know what is Space, Time and Matter (...) one way or the other it is necessary to reconcile the two theories. This mission is the central problem of quantum gravity (pp. 10 to 13). And if the theory of quantum gravitation one day attains its historic mission, thus offering humanity the possibility of understanding “the end of the life of a black hole or the first moments of the life of the Universe” (p. 11), then new questions emerge for human consciousness. And it’s really the very existence of these infinite contradictions which has led Carlo Rovelli in his passion for science, this immense and perpetual enigma: “I think that it is precisely in the discovery of the limits of the scientific representations of the world that the force of scientific thought is revealed. It’s not through experiments, neither ‘mathematics’, nor in a ‘method’. It is in scientific thought’s own capacity to always question. Doubt its own affirmations. Don’t be afraid to deny its own beliefs, even the most certain of them. The heart of science is change” (pp. 56-57).

But this relative approach of truth and science doesn’t at all mean that Carlo Rovelli falls into relativism. On the contrary: he shows what aberrations relativism leads to by taking the example of the United States where Creationism has done enormous damage. In particularly in terms of education: “These deformed visions of science consequently lead to a diminishing of its aura and irrational thought gains ground... In the United States for example (from ‘rural’ Kansas to much civilised California) teachers are not allowed to talk about evolution in schools. The laws forbidding the teaching of the results of Darwin are justified by cultural relativism: they know that science can be mistaken, and thus a scientific knowledge is no more defendable than a biblical knowledge. A candidate for the presidency of the United States, recently asked about the subject, declared that he didn’t know if human beings and the apes really had ‘common ancestors’. Does he even know if the Earth goes around the Sun or the Sun around the Earth?” (pp. 53-54).

More generally: “The scientific obsession with calling all truth into question doesn’t lead to scepticism nor nihilism, or to a radical relativism. Science is the practice of overturning absolutes, which doesn’t mean a fall into total relativism or nihilism. It is the intellectual acceptance of the fact that knowledge evolves. The fact that the truth can always be questioned doesn’t imply that one can’t be in agreement; in fact science is the very process from which one can arrive at agreement” (p. 71).

The necessary confrontation of hypotheses

In order to “agree with each other”, in order for our knowledge to have a “dynamic nature”, it is imperative that hypotheses are confronted one against another, that a debate of ideas with the sole aim of advancing the truth animates all of the sciences. That’s why throughout his book, Rovelli berates the scientists who sabotage the debate, preferring to defend their own interests by not sharing their work and hypotheses, conceiving research as some sort of race towards individual fame, by being animated by the spirit of competition with all the baseness, bad faith and other dishonest procedures that that implies:  “The world of science as I discovered with sadness, including at my own expense, is not at all like a fairy tale. Cases of the stolen ideas of others are permanent. Many researchers are extremely concerned to be the first to formulate ideas, leave others trailing behind them who did not manage to publish or to re-write history attributing to themselves the most important stages. That generates a climate of distrust and suspicion which makes life bitter and seriously hinders the progress of research. I know very many who refused to talk about this or that idea on which they are about to work before publishing them” (p. 44).

The approach of Carlo Rovelli is quite different. When he was a student in Italy in the 1970’s he was involved in the revolt against the injustices of this society before thinking, like a large part of his generation, that the revolution wasn’t yet on the agenda, he choose not to abdicate, not to renounce his dreams, but to invest his aspirations in the changes in science: “During my university studies at Bologna, my confusion and my conflict with the adult world joined with a common route of a great part of my generation (...) It was a time where one lived one’s dreams (...) With two of my friends, we wrote a book which talked of the Italian student rebellion at the end of the 70’s. But the dreams of revolution were rapidly smothered and order retaken from above. The world can’t be changed so easily. Mid-way through my university studies I found myself more lost than before with the bitter feeling that these dreams shared by half the planet were already evaporating (...) Join the rat race, make a career, get some money and grab some crumbs of power, all that seemed much too sad to me (...) Scientific research then came to my rescue – I saw within it a space for unlimited liberty, as well as an adventure as ancient as it was extraordinary (...) Also, at the moment when my dream of building a new world came up against hard reality, I fell in love with science (...) Science has been a compromise allowing me not to renounce my desire for change and adventure, to maintain my freedom of thought and to be who I am, while minimising the conflicts with the world around me that this implied. On the contrary, I was doing something that the world would appreciate” (pp. 2-6). According to Carlo Rovelli, the subversive spirit, the desire for change and science are thus constantly intermingled: “While I was writing my book with my friends on the student revolution (a book that the police did not like and got me the third degree in the police headquarters of Verona – ‘Tell us the names of your communist friends!’), I immersed myself more and more in the study of space and time” (p. 30): “Each step forward in my scientific understanding of the world is also a subversion. Scientific thought always has something subversive and revolutionary about it” (p. 138).

What particularly attracted Carlo Rovelli was the international and cosmopolitan dimension of the scientific “community”, sometimes showing the dream of a world association, disinterested and enriching itself through the discussion of differences.  At the Imperial College, London, “I met for the first time the multi-coloured and international world of researchers of theoretical physics: youths in suit and ties mixing in the most natural way possible with researchers in bare feet and with long hair tied back with coloured bands; all the languages and physiognomies intersecting, and one could glean a type of joy of differences, in the sharing of the same respect for intelligence”  (p. 34).

However, islands of paradise cannot exist in barbaric capitalism. If it reveals a profound aspiration for a really human world, united and solid, this vision is idealist, as Carlo Rovelli himself recognises in his book.

And thus to take knowledge and the truth further, he advocates open and frank debate and the healthy and disinterested confrontation of hypotheses:

• “I talk freely of my ideas which I want to spread without hiding anything, and I try to convince my students to do the same” (p. 45).
• “If there is limited scientific accuracy, polemic, even harsh polemic, it is an ingredient for the fertilisation and advancement of knowledge”  (p. 128).
• “The basic rules of scientific research are simple: everyone has the right to speak. Einstein was an obscure patent office clerk when he produced his ideas which changed our vision of reality. Disagreements are welcome; they are the source of the dynamism of thought. But they are never settled by force, aggression, money, power or tradition. The sole way of prevailing is to argue, defend one’s idea in a dialogue and convince the others. Of course here I am not going to depict the concrete reality of scientific research in its human and social-economic complexity, but the ideal rules to which the practice must relate. These rules are ancient, we find them written with passion in the famous Seventh Letter of Plato, where the latter explains how to search for the truth: ‘But, after many efforts, when one by one you rub these factors against each other: names and definitions, visions and sensations, and when they are put to the test of benevolent controls and discussions which do not involve envy, the light of wisdom and intelligence immediately shines on everything, with all the intensity that human strength can bear’” (pp. 136-137)[3]

The scientific method and capitalist society

“Galileo and Newton, Faraday and Maxwell, Heisenberg, Dirac and Einstein, to name only some of the most important examples, were nourished by philosophy and would never have accomplished the immense conceptual leaps that they made if they hadn’t also had a philosophical education.” Indeed! And Carlo Rovelli himself has an approach to science that is strongly “nourished with philosophy”. That’s why he doesn’t adopt a static vision in order to understand the world as it is (as in a snapshot) but, on the contrary, he adopts a vision in movement to understand the world in its becoming. The first approach sees things existing independently from each other, for themselves and forever; here lies one of the sources of mysticism. The second sees things in terms of contradictory relations and thus in their dynamic, their becoming, which opens the way to the dialectic.

Carlo Rovelli attempts to use this same method in order to also understand human society. In talking of his youth at the beginning of the book, his revolt against the injustices of this society, and calling himself “revolutionary”, he demonstrates that he doesn’t believe in an eternal capitalism: “My adolescence was more and more a period of revolt. I didn’t recognise myself in the values expressed around me (...) The world that I saw around me was very different from that which seemed to me just and good (...) We wanted to change the world, to make it better” (pp. 2 and 3). We do not share the concrete political positions that Carlo Rovelli then advances in his book. Moreover, on this level and as he himself affirms, he tends to go down the road, not of a rigorous scientific approach, but according to his “dreams” and “fantasies” (p. 146)[4]. But that alters nothing of the importance of his research and contributions. To use the scientific method in order to understand humanity and its social organisation is certainly a lot more difficult: all reflection on science, its history and method is thus for this reason also an extremely precious treasure. Here’s what astronomer, astrophysicist and militant of the Dutch Communist Left, Anton Pannekoek (1973-1960) had to say on the subject: “Natural science is correctly considered as the field in which human thought, through a continual series of triumphs, most powerfully develops its forms of logical conceptions... On the other hand, at the other extreme, a vast field of human actions and relationships are found in which the use of tools doesn’t play an immediate part and which acts at a far distance, like profoundly unknown and invisible phenomena. Here thought and action are determined by passion and impulses, by arbitrariness and improvisation, by tradition and belief; here no logical methodology leads to the certainty of knowledge (...) the contrast which appears here, between on the one side perfection and on the other side imperfection, signifies that man controls the forces of nature or will increasingly do so, but doesn’t yet control the forces of will and passion that exist within him. When he stops advancing, perhaps even regresses, it is at the level of an evident lack of control over his own ‘nature’ (Tilney). It is clear that this is the reason that society is still so far behind science. Potentially man has mastery over nature. But he still doesn’t possess a mastery over his own nature”[5]. And this is not the only reason for the difficulty in understanding the human soul and society; what must be added is the permanent ideological pressure exerted in order to justify the status quo of the world such as it is. Capitalism has need of science for the development of its economy and thus to encourage it in a certain measure (in a “certain measure” only because scientific research doesn’t escape the spirit born out of competition and particular interests). But the advance of thought regarding man and his social life immediately and frontally comes into conflict with the interests of this system of exploitation, particularly since this system has become decadent and obsolete with the interests of humanity demanding its disappearance. Thus the science of man is always held in check by the dominant ideology which tends to impose its own blinkers on it. This is also why humanity has need of researchers and scientists like Carlo Rovelli because they furnish us with the arms of criticism and their works constitute part of the flames of the promethean fire. This work (as his previous one) takes its part in the development of an indispensable knowledge of the history of science and philosophy and thus allows us not only to spend some worthwhile “time” but also nourishes our revolutionary reflection and critique.

Ginette (July 2015)

The following article is a contribution on the question of refugees as it is posed today in Germany. Certain aspects are not easily transferable to other countries of Europe. For example the demographic problem treated in the article doesn’t exist in countries such as France, Spain or Italy, given that a high youth unemployment rate exists in these countries despite a low birth rate. However, because of the economic and political weight of Germany in the EU and in the world this article has an importance that goes beyond its national borders.

When, surprisingly and suddenly last September, Chancellor Merkel opened the doors wide to the Promised Land of Germany (and has more or less kept them open since) to thousands of refugees camping in shameful conditions in the Central Station of Budapest and its environs, when she defended with speeches full of emotion (unusual for her) the opening of the frontiers to Syrian refugees, facing considerable criticism from her own camp, and then declared that despite the more and more open protests from municipal authorities that couldn’t cope with the influx, that there was to be no upper limit to the welcome of political refugees, the entire world asked itself why Merkel, who is reputed “to reflect on consequences”, to weigh up everything before acting, could engage in such an “adventure”. Because in fact this is an equation with a good number of unknowns which is facing Germany’s Grand Coalition. The question is also posed of how to stop the wave of refugees. A little while ago it was a matter of 800,000 refugees arriving in Germany this year; predictions are even saying that it will be at least a million-and-a-half. Merkel equally seemed, which is also unusual, to have badly calculated the effect of the policy of the helping hand on the local population; for the first time in a long while, she has, according to the opinion polls, gone backwards in the eyes of the electorate and has even been overtaken by a Social-Democrat (Minister of Foreign Affairs Steinmeier). She has not done well here in keeping the populism of the extreme-right at bay; endless waves of refugees, the majority of them Muslims, are grist to the mill of the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD)[i] which has been rising in the polls as least in Thuringia as a third force catching up with the SPD.

Why has the Coalition government under the leadership of Merkel and minister of the Economy Gabriel engaged in such a perilous game? Could it be a product of the Merkel-bashing that came out of the Greek crisis, an attempt to brighten her image, or is it some form of sentimentalism? Perhaps the pity of Merkel at her “town-hall meeting” regarding the fate of a young Palestinian girl threatened with expulsion, or the outward emotion of Gabriel regarding the no less cruel fate of a Syrian family in a refugee camp that he visited in Jordan, are really sincere? Even bourgeois politicians have an emotional life…

In our opinion the open door policy has far more material causes. It has motives which are not as altruistic and disinterested as the numerous acts of kindness we’ve seen from the German population, without which the chaos which reigns in the receiving centres for asylum-seekers would be much greater. The objectives of the policy have an importance which largely go beyond the risks and effects involved in such a policy. Let’s examine in some detail the secret objectives pursued by “the policy of opening up the frontiers”.

Economic advantages

For some years now the theme of the “demographic problem” has haunted the media. According to the Federal Institute of Statistics, the Federal Republic is threatened with the ageing and lowering of the national population which decreased by 7 million inhabitants to fall to around 75 million around 2050. Already, since the reunification of 1989, the population of the whole of Germany had fallen by 3 million, in particular with the dramatic fall in the birth rate in East Germany. As much literature referring to this issue these last years has shown, it is clear to  the German bourgeoisie that if this process isn’t checked and continues, it will in the long-term turn into a considerable loss of influence and prestige of German capitalism on the military, economic and political levels.

Already today, the lack of well-trained workers constitutes a brake on the necessity for Germany to remain a strong economy. In about a sixth of all professional branches there is a lack of qualified personnel which is so serious that according to some managers it badly affects the competiveness of a good number of enterprises. According to a study of Prognos AG (Arbeitslandschaft 2030) “.. in 2015 a good million higher diplomas were lacking -180,000 more than the number expected by economists for this same year before the arrival of the refugees. Concerning professionally qualified workers the gap is still estimated at 1.3 million. And there is even a lack of some 550,000 unqualified workers in 2015”( Handelsblatt, October 9 2015 ). In eastern Germany the lack of qualified personnel is already creating the following vicious circle: the flight of young workers towards western Germany at rates constantly above those of arrivals leading to the closure of small to medium-sized firms, which in their turn accelerate the process of departure.

In this situation the flux of numerous war refugees is manna from heaven for the German economy. The latter has recognised this: Telekom offered its help with lodgings and provisions for the refugees as well as personalised support towards some cases. Audi has spent a million euros in initiatives favouring refugees. Daimler and Porsche aim to create places for apprenticeships among the young refugees; Bayer supports the initiative of its employees in favour of the refugees. It goes without saying that the “personal responsibility” on which these firms pride themselves serves their real interests. It is quite simply a question of drawing a profit from the potential for exploitation that the refugees hold.

The Syrian refugees in particular represent an interesting source of human capital, for which many enterprises now have a pressing need. Firstly, the great majority are young; they can thus contribute to rejuvenating the age of workers in firms and – in general – lower the average age of society. Secondly, the Syrian refugees are clearly better educated than other refugees, as the enquiries from the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge – the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees - show. More than a quarter of them had higher levels of education and represent a particularly lucrative source of labour power, including engineers, technicians, doctors, care workers among others  - all categories which are most eagerly looked for. German businesses even profit from the refugees from a double angle: first of all, it allows them to fill in the gaps in the workforce; then, German capital draws advantage from the effect (called the “brain drain” in the 70’s) of siphoning off highly-qualified workers from the Third World, allowing the saving of a considerable part of its costs of reproduction (that’s to say the cost of education, school, university, etc.).

On to the third advantage offered by refugees of a Syrian origin which is attractive to the German economy. It is the extraordinary motivation of these human beings which fascinates the bosses of the economy such as the President of Daimler, Dieter Zetsche. The mentality of these people has been forged by the experience of being rendered powerless by Assad’s incendiary bombs and the horrors of Islamic State, of losing everything they had and going through the terrible experience of the flight to Europe. And it’s precisely this which makes them recognisable prey for the system of capitalist exploitation. Escaping from Hell, they are ready to work hard for little wages, thinking that for themselves things will only get better. It’s exactly the same mentality that the Trummerfrauen (“the women of the ruins”) had after World War Two: rather than submit to fate and do nothing, they swept and cleaned up the ruins of the devastated German towns with their bare hands, thus taking a decisive role in the reconstruction and the German “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) after the war, something the bourgeois economists deliberately forget.

This energy and this remarkable spirit of initiative seen among the refugees offers the German bourgeoisie a source of promising human capital full of profits. In addition, just as with the immigrants from the 1960’s and 70’s, in the short-term they can be used to serve capital’s efforts to maintain or even increase the pressure on wages.

Imperialist returns

But the refugees also form an area of manoeuvre for German imperialism, as it turned out in the past days and weeks in the context of the aggravation of the war in Syria; and for more than one reason. The Federal government used the refugee question not only on the moral level, but also on the political level by pillorying other countries, which as it happens include the country of immigration par excellence, the United States, for their hesitations about welcoming the refugees. Just lately, we have been able to see clear indications showing Germany giving a new orientation to its policy towards Syria. Knowingly linking the refugee drama to a so-called solution to the Syrian crisis, the main representatives of German foreign policy (Steinmeier, Genscher, among others) have underlined the necessity to integrate Russia, Iran and even, temporarily, the butcher Assad into the Syrian peace process. Moreover, Berlin and the Kremlin are acting together in putting the war in Ukraine to one side so all of their forces are concentrated on the question of the situation in Syria.  Not even the move by Putin to deploy additional military forces in the Syrian town of Latakia has caused any particular irritation to the Federal government. The Minister of the Economy, Gabriel, even called for the end of economic sanctions against Russia, affirming that:”...sanctions couldn’t be maintained in the long term on the one hand, and on the other hand, what is needed is (...) collaboration”.

With this political reorientation Germany is again moving, for the first time since the war in Iraq, towards an open confrontation with the United States. The latter, via the State Department, has lately upped the tone against Assad and have shown themselves far from amused by the latest diplomatic offensive of Putin at the last UN General Assembly. On the other hand the US has a very ambivalent attitude towards IS to say the least; its role towards the Islamic State has been extremely dubious, and the half-hearted way in which the US has attacked it poses a whole series of other questions as to the real intentions of American imperialism towards this terrorist organisation.

The change of course in German foreign policy seems to be partly the result of interventions and pressure from German industry. Within the latter criticisms towards the sanctions against Russia are growing as it becomes clear that it is the German economy that is bearing the brunt, while the big American enterprises such as Bell and Boeing continue to do major business with Russia despite the sanctions. Whereas the volume of German economic trade with Russia has fallen by 30%, in the same period trade between the US and Russia has increased by 6%. And further to these economic reasons political arguments also come into play for German capitalism in its opposition to the maintenance of the economic embargo against Russia. Not having a military potential to threaten and dissuade comparable to that of the United States, German imperialism has to have recourse to other means in order to validate its influence on a global scale. One of these is the economic and industrial power that German policy can use to force and constrain the development of commercial relations. One aspect that shows the mixture of politics and business as well as the political use of economic projects are official state visits to countries like China, Brazil, India or Russia, where the Chancellor is systematically accompanied by a whole suite of influential German business leaders and even representatives of small and medium businesses for the construction of machine-tools. In this sense, the policy of sanctions deprives the German bourgeoisie of more than a contract and thus goes against its general imperialist interests.

The mass of Syrian refugees welcomed by Germany must also be considered as another means of compensation for military weakness – and here, the circle is complete. In this context we shouldn’t underestimate the way that the profound human need for recognition and gratitude can be manipulated in the relations between countries. The evident sympathy for the refugees, expressed by the attempts at assistance by the greater part of the local population, is a point that the German bourgeoisie can profitably use. This debt of thanks towards Germany by a good number of those stranded there can in the longer-term become an opening for its imperialist interests in relation to the Middle East; it can bring about the rise of pro-German factions who through their lobbying could act for the profit of German interests in their country of origin.

Ideological exploitation

What immediately strikes us is the change of appearance in German nationalism. Up until just recently the Greek crisis saw Germany described abroad as the “IVth Reich” and its representatives caricatured, decked-out in Nazi paraphernalia, heartless and merciless. But this is being repaired by its newly-acquired glory as the saviour of the wretched of the earth. Globally the Germans are the “good guys”. Never since its foundation has the reputation of the German Federal Republic been so good as it is today. And as well as this external effect, it also spreads inwards, in the form of democratism. At this moment the German state has provided itself with the bearing of a paragon, tolerant, close to its citizenry, open to the world, thus animating a process that is actually deadly for the working class – the dissolution of social classes into a national unity. Chancellor Merkel, the cold scientist, clearly finds a growing pleasure in her new role as the Holy Mother, the saint of the asylum-seekers. How did she put it? “If we now have to begin to excuse ourselves for showing a friendly face in a situation of urgency, then that is not my country”.

You couldn’t put it better. In fact it’s simply a question of showing a sympathetic front; and behind this friendly face they continue to hunt down and divide. Thus, in parallel to this “culture of welcome” a cynical division is put in place between refugees from war and the “false asylum-seekers”, a merciless selection of “economic refugees”, mostly young people from the Balkans with no perspective but pauperisation. Very quickly the federal state and the Lander have agreed to deliberately declare Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro as safe countries, thus preventing any asylum for people coming from those regions. However even the “real” asylum seekers are themselves not spared from the venomous attacks of the political world or the media, as was shown by the Federal Ministry of the Interior De Maiziere against recalcitrant refugees.

Moreover, some parts of the media, despite the diehard rhetoric from the Chancellor (“we ourselves are going to succeed, we will get there”) are tireless in stirring up worry and panic within the national population. They talk about entire peoples coming towards Europe, denouncing the threat of terrorist attacks by Islamic “moles” coming with the army of refugees and asking when the atmosphere is going to “change”. But above all, the chorus of those hysterically warning about Germany being “overwhelmed” by masses of refugees and shouting that the place is full up are getter louder.

It’s not very difficult to foresee how the two routes, the opening or closing of frontiers, will end up. To be sure the policy of “open frontiers” has only been an exceptional intermission, unique in time: the near future will be marked by a new locking-up of the frontiers, as much on the national level as by EU as a whole. In the future its plans propose that the selection of asylum-seekers “useful” to Germany must directly take place at source in the country of origin. The campaign against smugglers is particularly perfidious: it is not solely aimed at the mafia gangs but also those who professionally help the refugees in flight without profiting from it. “The European Union, which says it is a place of liberty, security and rights, as well as its member states, have created a system making it almost impossible for people being pursued, tortured and oppressed, who have need of urgent help, to find protection in Europe without having recourse to professional smugglers. To bring these people in front of courts and put them in prison is hypocritical, contradictory and profoundly inhuman” wrote the Republikanische Anwaltinnen-und Anwaltevein (RAV) in its Information Letter “Praise to the smugglers”.

It’s incontestable that the world sees in the present wave of refugees a drama of a dimension that they have never known before. In 2013 there were 51.2 displaced persons, by the end of 2014 their numbers reached 59.5 million – being the most important increase in the space of a year and recorded by the UNCHR: these are unprecedented figures. After Syria, Libya threatens to slide into a civil war – with all the consequences identical to Syria. In the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey where the great majority of refugee from the Syrian war have found asylum, the threat is shaping up of a new mass immigration towards Europe following drastic reductions in aid from the UN, with hunger now adding to the desperate absence of perspective.

However, the media is deliberately over-dramatising the already dramatic conditions and adding another layer to them. Thus for some time now the spectre of immigration of entire peoples haunts the greater public, television broadcasts the frightening scenario of millions of Africans, waiting with bags packed, for the least chance to set out and try their luck in Europe. Such assertions serve only to sow worry and fear in the population and – to say the least – do not correspond to the facts. If one examines the movement of refugees closely one can see that the greater number of them in the world look for shelter close to their countries of origin; it’s only when all hope of a return has disappeared that those refugees who have the financial means to move can make the long and perilous trek towards Europe, North America or Australia. The rumours of a mass exodus coming from Africa has no basis at all up to now; migrations from the continent are largely less chaotic than the scare stories in the media would have us suppose. Often entire village communities sell their goods and belongings and club together to finance the voyage to Europe for a single young man chosen by the whole of the community and who is given the responsibility to then support the village – this is the model for the search for work tested over decades.

However, startled by the growing number of refugees, the Federal government has been compelled to act on the profound causes of the refugee drama, as it said. But the mountain gives birth to the molehill. Everything coming from the minds of Merkel & Co in relation to solving this basic global problem is only fine words and hundreds of millions of euros out of the coffers to finance the refugee camps of Turkey and Lebanon. Not a word of responsibility of the major industrial nations in the destruction of the foundations of human existence in the Third World. Let’s look once again at the words of Republikanische Anwaltinnen-und Anwalteverein (RAV) who come close to the real causes of the misery in the so-called developing countries, even if they inevitably lack precision (what do they mean by “the Europeans”, who is “us”?): “For many reasons, Europe has created the causes and continues to still make them today. The political relations that the European colonial powers left behind after their retreat, including the tracing of arbitrary frontiers, are only part of it. From the 16th to the 18th centuries the Europeans invaded South America, wading up to their thighs in blood, robbing gold and silver by the boatload which served as start-up capital for an economy about to flourish. The Europeans turned about 20 million Africans into slaves and sold them throughout the entire world. Through the vampirisation of their raw materials, overfishing to death of their waters, the exploitation of their workers for the least costs of production and the export of highly subsidised provisions which wiped out local agriculture, it turns out today that the population of the majority of the countries of emigration are still on the hook”.

Populism and pogromism

The formation of nation states in the industrial countries of the 19th century rested on two fundamentals. The first of them – economic centralisation – was very rational; on the other hand the other was by its nature completely irrational. The constitution into nations of the 18th and 19th centuries took place on the basis of founding myths containing all sorts of narratives but one fundamental idea, one common fictitious myth united them – the fable of a great national community, of a family even, defining itself by a common origin (“the blood line”), culture and language. It was characteristic of the bourgeois nation to turn inwards and close in on itself in relation to the outside on one hand, while on the other hand the outward tendency of each capitalist power aspired to the conquest of the planet, forming one of the contradictory principles inextricably gripping capitalism.

The present refugee crisis shows to what point it is difficult to reconcile these two principles. If one solely takes the economic point of view, the flow of refugees of good working age should, if possible, never cease. A million people arriving every year pose no problem. However what makes sense at the economic level can have fatal consequences politically because within capitalism refugees are not just poverty-stricken but at the same time competitors for lodgings, social benefits, jobs. What isn’t a problem for the capitalists is one for the authorities, wages are lowered and the locals uprooted.

It is of course not the first time that a wave of refugees has broken over Germany. In the five years after the war (1945-1950) more than 12 million were expelled from the eastern provinces of Bohemia-Moravia, making their way towards a ruined Germany whose population suffered from deprivations. It’s evident that at this time there could be no question of “a culture of welcome”; on the contrary these refugees came up against resentment, hatred and massive rejection from the local population.  Finally, the social integration of all the deported was achieved with much less difficulty than it was feared. This was down to two conditions: firstly the fact that the deported came from the same linguistic and cultural space, secondly, it took place in the context of the reconstruction, which was starting up in West Germany with the creation of the monetary union. The need for available workers was such that it was the bosses who were in competition for the dwindling numbers. Today, on the other hand, the masses of refugees almost without exception come from a foreign cultural and linguistic zone, and come up against a society which for a long time has suffered a constantly worsening economic crisis where competition for work, lodgings, education has taken on an unexpected scale, while catapulting important layers of the population into pauperisation.

When a general economic crisis is added to a lack of perspective and the absence of a social project to counter capitalist misery, then political populism is on the rise, nourishing a phenomenon that Marx called “The religion of daily life”. It’s the “little person’s” mentality which refuses to recognise that capitalism, contrary to past social forms, is a depersonalised, objectified system in which the particular capitalist isn’t a sovereign actor on the move but on the contrary is moved by the latter. As Engels said, the capitalist is dominated by his own product, and the representative of the political class is animated by “necessities” and not his own predilections. Populism is the philistine outrage of the petty-bourgeoisie which confronts the dominant class and blames “its” representatives, but ends up throwing itself into the arms of those it still calls  “traitors to the people” in the hope of finding protection against “foreigners”. It is a completely reactionary mentality celebrating conformism as a supreme ideal, and is quite capable of leading pogroms against those that think otherwise, those who have another colour, against everyone who is different.

The Pegida movement[ii], principally established in the east of Germany is a striking, as well as abject, example of this spirit of the extreme right. Intolerant and hypocritical, its war-cry is “We are the people” completely ignoring the working class: the people (to use its jargon), have never, in Germany nor elsewhere – and today still less – been the homogenous collective which this movement fantasises about. Its boycott of the “lying press” as well as its shrill fury against the established parties (going towards death threats against politicians) only illustrates its disappointments over the “betrayal” by politicians and the media, as if the aim of these profoundly bourgeois institutions was to restore or represent the “will of the people”. In reality their unbridled hatred doesn’t confront the ruling class but the weakest layers of society as shown day after day by their rallies in front of the lodgings of refugees, as well as their cowardly attacks against them and foreigners. What is completely typical of pogromism is that it is the parts of the population that are least able to defend themselves which serve as the scapegoats and are made to pay the added costs of their already perilous existence.

The problem of populism and pogromism is that it forces the established parties, particularly the governing parties, to play with fire.  In their actions they resemble the famous sorcerer’s apprentice who lets the (bad) genie of panic and hatred of strangers escape from the bottle, thus risking a loss of control. Up until now, contrary to the majority of other European states, the German bourgeoisie has prevented the emergence of a populist party, of the left or right, the reason being that its deadly past is a particularly important preoccupation. It will depend on the way the refugee crisis is treated if things remain thus. Everything seems to indicate that it’s particularly the populist milieu of the right which has profited from the policies of Merkel. The AfD, as we mentioned earlier in the introduction, is presently moving up in the opinion polls, the Pegida movement, quoted above, seems to have the wind in its sails. The “Monday demonstration” at Dresden was again accompanied by crowds of more than 10,000 people, whose potential aggression was sharpened by the speeches into real acts of violence.

How has the German bourgeoisie dealt with this problem? Firstly we should note that a part of the political class is not fundamentally opposed to the attacks of the extreme right. This is shown by the way the seriousness of these attacks has been minimised up till very recently. Now however those who carry out the attacks are being labelled as “terrorists”. That’s important inasmuch as the term “terrorism” provokes certain reflexes and associations of ideas linked to the Second World War where large numbers of so-called saboteurs were immediately executed; or else it evokes the memory of the “German autumn” of 1977 where the terrorists of the RAF were raised to the rank of Public Enemy Number 1. Moreover, by using the accusation of terrorism, the state can call on a number of instruments to prevent the torments and harassments getting too far out of hand. At the same time the AfD is divided. Finally one can see how desperate the politicians and media are by the way they place the Pegida movement close to neo-Nazism, which has always constituted a tested means to socially isolate movements of protest, whatever their colour.

On the other hand the established parties are working to give the impression that they understand the preoccupations and worries of the population. Thus the Federal government tries with financial inducements and moral pressure to relieve Germany of the burden of a part of the Syrian refugees onto other countries of the EU, so far without success. The Great Coalition has quickly concocted a law for a fast-track return to the borders and has begun to strongly enforce it even before it becomes law, solely with the aim of being able to preach to the electorate that it will protect them against Überfremdung or “foreign super-colonisation”[iii]. Within the government there is already a question of returning 50% of the refugees arriving in Germany back across the borders. This essentially comes from the President of the CDU Seehofer and General Secretary Soder who, as part of a division of labour, assume the role of the “bad guys” by vehemently asking for the closure of the frontiers as well as the limitation of the right to asylum written in the Constitution.

The consequences of the situation for the working class

In a certain sense these different conceptions within the Coalition reflect the diffused state of spirit in the population, that’s to say among the wage-earners and unemployed of this country. There’s a very loud and growing minority within the population in general and the working class in particular, composed of its least qualified part, often socialised in the context of the old  GDR and/or those living on state benefits, who form an open terrain for the anti-Muslim campaigns orchestrated in the world of politics or culture (Sarrazin, Broder, Pirincci, Buschkowsky, etc.) who appear as the spokesmen of the CSU and of certain sectors of the CDU[iv]. There is a silent majority, which up to now left it to young activists, those mainly coming from the anti-fascist milieu, to respond to the racist harassment by blocking roads and counter-demonstrations, feeling obliged to act by the images of misery coming from the Balkans. They are also strongly expressing their protest against the inaction of European states and their indignation over the exactions against foreigners at Dresden, Heidenau and Fretal, by demonstratively applauding the refugees when they arrive, or getting involved by the thousands in helping the masses of refugees, inundating the relief centres with all sorts of assistance and donations.

The spontaneous solidarity of significant parts of the population has surprised the ruling class and wrong-footed it; it wasn’t disposed to promote sympathy towards the war refugees but rather to create an atmosphere of panic and isolation. However, Merkel once again showed her infallible flair for sensing the moods and feelings within society. Just as after the serious nuclear accident at Fukushima, when the principles of maintaining atomic energy were practically got rid of from one day to the next, Merkel took the same abrupt turn regarding asylum policy, annulling a passage in the Dublin Agreement which up to then gave permission to the German bourgeoisie to rid itself any responsibility towards refugees stranded in Italy and in other parts of the EU’s ‘exterior borders’.

We have already mentioned some of the motives which have pushed Merkel to adopt her “policy of open borders”. It is however possible that another motive has played a role in this risky policy. Since the Bundestag elections of 2005, where the expected victory was lost because the then Chancellor Schroder managed to use against her the liberal turn that she had taken at the Leipzig Congress of the CDU in 2003, Merkel learnt something about the consequences that can come from not taking into account the feelings of the “rank and file”. Just imagine what the impact of images of hundreds of thousands of refugees abandoned at the Hungarian border, as well as the endless headlines, would have today on the electoral behaviour of those wishing to give a welcome to the refugees from war in Syria.

According to all appearances two groups in the population are particularly implicated in solidarity with the refugees. On one hand the young, who have been involved in other movements in other places, participating in the anti-CPE movement or that of the Indignados. On the hand, older people who, either from their own experience, or else through the experience transmitted by their parents about the mass expulsions at the end of the Second World War, know about the fate of refugees and so cannot be indifferent to the camps, the barbed wire and the new wave of deportations. Having grown up in the dark decades of the 20th century, this generation is impulsively pushed to act differently today. The important participation of retired workers reveals something else as well: the profound desire for the rejuvenation of society, expressed in the combination of children and adolescents with older people. This demand for rejuvenation can be distinguished from the need for younger workers for the German economy. The ageing of society constitutes a central problem not only for capitalism but for humanity, quite simply because the absence of youth doesn’t only mean a deprivation of a source of joy, life and a vitalisation of the old but is above all a negative setting for one of the most important functions in the evolution of humanity: the transmission of the treasures of experience to the generation of grandchildren.

Finally, the question posed is: does this wave of solidarity constitute a class movement? We don’t think that it possesses any of its characteristics. What’s immediately striking is its completely apolitical character: solidarity takes the form of charity. There is almost no discussion, no exchange of experiences between young and old, between natives and refugees (with the language difficulty in respect of the latter). Any point of departure for any self-organisation outside of the state isn’t there: instead of that, hundreds of thousands of volunteers become casual labourers for a state which, despite the gestures to the gallery by Merkel, provides very little; a state whose representatives, having led the volunteers to exhaustion by their own inaction, are now talking about the “limits of capacity”.

Once again: the wave of solidarity across Germany these last weeks is not unfolding on a class terrain. The working population, the principle subject of this solidarity, is dissolved almost to non-existence into the “people”. This was also the case with the solidarity towards the victims of the Tsunami in 2004. Then as now the solidarity was emptied of all class character and expressed itself in the framework of an inter-classist campaign. However, the difference with the Tsunami was that it happened far away in Asia whereas the misery of the refugees is happening right here under our eyes, so much so that solidarity and everything that concerns it takes on quite another dimension.

In fact this refugee crisis, which has only just begun, can become a decisive question for the working class. It is not yet determined how the working class, or rather its preponderant parts at the national as international levels, will react to the stakes: through the development of solidarity or though demarcation and exclusion. If our class aims to recover its class identity, solidarity can be an important means of unification in its struggle. If, on the contrary, it only sees in the refugees competition and a threat, if it doesn’t form an alternative to capitalist misery,  to a system which forces millions to flee under the threat of war or of hunger, then we will be under threat of a massive extension of the pogromist mentality and the proletariat at the heart of it will not be spared.

FT, 7.11.15

Water is vital to life, to humanity. Two-thirds of the planet is covered by water. However... potable water is becoming a rare, precious commodity, including in some of the most developed urban zones. To live and survive by drinking a simple glass of water is no longer an easy thing! And there is also drought linked to climate change and desertification in Africa, Asia and Australasia.

The reasons for this are not just industrial or agricultural pollution in themselves. The corruption of the ruling class is also a powerful factor.

The scandal of the polluted water of Flint, a small town in Michigan USA, is the latest example of this problem. The facts: in 2014, in order to reduce costs, the municipality of Flint, rather than continue buying water from the town of Detroit, decided to draw its supply from a local river of doubtful quality. After the discovery of bacteria, the local authorities started a chemical treatment process which ended up leaching lead from the pipework and into the distribution network supplying households. For a year-and-a-half, between April 2014 and autumn 2015, the inhabitants of this town of 100,000, the majority black and poor, used and consumed this lead-contaminated water. Many ongoing complaints were ignored and there were 87 cases of Legionnaires disease, ten of whom died; thousands of children are affected with risks of irreversible damage to their nervous systems by lead poisoning.

The scandal which followed forced Barack Obama to declare an emergency, the President himself affirming with hand on heart: “If I was responsible for a family there, I would be outraged that the health of my children could be in danger”. The political mobilisation then unleashed is almost an example of unanimity! The state governor and the Flint municipal administration are accused of negligence and having knowingly closed their eyes for months. There was a clamour for resignations, including from the film-maker Michael Moore, himself a native of Flint: “It is not only a water crisis. It is a crisis of race, a crisis of poverty”, he said, intimating that such a scandal wouldn’t have happened in a comfortable and white part of Michigan. Because Flint, an industrial centre in the shadow of Detroit, has suffered a total collapse of the automobile industry, in particular that of General Motors (founded in Flint in 1908). In fifty years, Flint has lost half its population. The unemployment rate today is close to twice the national average and 40% of its inhabitants live below the poverty level.

So there it is: all you need to know! Those that are responsible for the water crisis have been found: they are racists and profit from the misery of the poor in order to make economies on their backs! Here are the guilty, the “bad guys”!

Is it that simple? That these local and regional authorities bear a heavy responsibility is beyond dispute. And good capitalist managers that they are, all these administrators must balance their books faced with economic crisis. And they are not always in agreement on this. But the American state, like all states, wants to reinvent itself with a good account: the guilty must be punished and the situation has to return to “normal”. “Never again!” we are told (yet again). This sort of language has already been heard with each financial, health or ecological scandal for years and years and applied to this or that barbaric act of war and terrorism over the whole of the planet. From Bhopal to Fukushima, from the contaminated blood scandal in the NHS in the 1970s and 80s to the Amoco Cadiz, to the recent factory explosion at Tianjin in China and thousands of other episodes, we see the same story: the prosecution of the guilty is called for in order to pacify indignation and prevent any reflection on the underlying causes of these scandals.

In the circumstances, the American state, with Obama at its head, puts itself forward as the guarantor of public health faced with all the crooks or politicians greedy for profits. They want to look like champions of morality or knights in shining armour protecting the quality of life. Dream on... or rather, put up with the nightmare! It is the same state that reduces its working and social budgets, establishes austerity programmes, reducing the population to mass unemployment and tipping people into permanent precariousness. Never mind: sacrifice the guilty and above all keep the states and the capitalist system as a whole out of any responsibility.

In fact this logic hides what’s essential and this is the aim of the manoeuvre. Behind each scandal or catastrophe, there is usually the search for profits. But the principle of profit is not the privilege of this or that badly-intentioned or corrupt bourgeois: it is the permanent logic of a system at bay, a barbaric system, of a bourgeois class which only lives by competition for profit. These are the implacable laws inherent in capitalism.

Engels already declared in 1845: “I have never seen a class so profoundly immoral, so incurably rotten and so corroded within by egoism as the English bourgeoisie and by this I mean especially the bourgeoisie proper (...) With such avarice and greed it is impossible for a sentiment, a human idea to exist which is not soiled (...) all the conditions of life are evaluated by the criteria of what can be gained and everything that doesn’t bring forth money is idiotic, unrealisable, utopian (...)”[i]

Nothing has fundamentally changed since then. On the contrary. After a century of capitalism’s decadence, which has now reached the stage of outright decomposition, the quest for profits pushes the war of each against all to the planetary level just as it does at the local level. Capitalism is a permanent catastrophe. And to survive it must find in each spectacular and disastrous episode someone responsible, a scapegoat: a “bad political choice”, a “rotten leader”, a case of “human error”, or it blames “the climate”, “bad luck”, “madness”. The bourgeois states, with the USA at their head, thus try to smarten up their image in order to preserve their rotting society.

Let’s be clear:  we are not defending a fatalist analysis of history, or saying that everything is written in advance, or that each catastrophe is banal and ineluctable. It’s exactly the opposite! It’s the bourgeoisie itself with all its various ideologies which defends the inevitable existence of the capitalist world and demands that we resign ourselves to it. All that’s needed is a little more individual “good will” or for us to be confident in a “really democratic” state in order to attenuate the effects of these catastrophes, to make our “fate” more tolerable.

The left parties of the bourgeoisie’s political apparatus present themselves as champions of the “democratic solution”. The democrats in power and the movements on the left never stop telling us that with a state that listens to the needs of the people everything will be better and scandals will finish! The end of war! The end of exploitation! But the very reason for the state is precisely the preservation of the interests of capital, the profits of which are at the centre of all sorts of health scandals. With the idea of “democratic renewal” the capitalist left hopes to anesthetise the working class, render it docile and reinforce its impotence.

The Flint scandal, following many others, is the occasion for new political manipulations by the democratic bourgeoisie. But it’s their whole world which scandalises us and we reject its deadly logic altogether. It is this entire system which must be overthrown, from the roots, and at the global level. Despite appearances, despite the real difficulties and feelings of impotence which dominate the working class, the latter remains, as Engels said, the only social class able to take on this task. The affirmation of the collective international force of the proletariat has in fact been demonstrated by history and it is still able to overthrow the established order and launch itself against the dictatorship of capital.

Stopio, 21st February 2016

Much has changed in the nearly forty years since 1978 when this article was first published. The disappearance of the USSR dealt an all but fatal blow to many of those “bourgeois factions” around the world which in the past resorted to marxist phraseology to justify their crimes. The Good Friday Agreement signed in 1998 by the governments of Britain and Eire set up an Assembly for Northern Ireland where the one-time mortal foes Sinn Fein and the DUP share power on the backs of Northern Irish workers. The IRA and the UDA occupy themselves with more “normal” gangsterism: drug-running and protection rackets.1

One thing has not changed: nationalism in all its forms remains the working class’ mortal enemy. The positions set forward in this article thus remain essentially valid: and, one hundred years after the Dublin Easter Rising, it still stands as an answer to all those who would hijack the memory of James Connolly, an Irish revolutionary socialist shot down by the British army, for the cause of Irish nationalism.

“The Labour movement is like no other movement. Its strength lies in being like no other movement. It is never so strong as when it stands alone” (James Connolly from “What is Our Programme”, published in the Workers' Republic, 22 January 1916).

Ever since the outbreak of World War I, desperate factions of the bourgeoisie, determined to survive, have resorted to marxist phraseology and claimed a continuity with the workers' movement in order to save their own skins. In Ireland, the Republicans and their leftist followers have laid their hands on James Connolly in order to justify their dirty work. In equating “Lenin and 1917” with “Connolly and 1916”, they try to sell their nationalist garbage to the workers.

The bourgeoisie has been telling us what has been happening in Northern Ireland since 1969.2 On the one hand we have been told about the brave and disinterested attempts of the democratic British state to keep the Irish from tearing each other to pieces. On the other hand we have heard much about the struggle of the Irish nation for freedom and independence. In 1969, the leftists declared that in Ulster, the oppression of the Catholics (who in every other country in Western Europe, including Britain, are free men, unless they happen to be wage slaves) was the very basis of capitalism and imperialism in Ireland. And they declared that the workers of Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant, should support the IRA in the fight for national independence, because until such time as this all-Ireland State of Republican and Stalinist butchers has been established, the Irish working class remains too sectarian, too bigoted and ignorant to fight for its own class interests. Today, evidently, the patriots of the IRA are in retreat and disarray, hammered to the ground by the British Army. Ten years of bombings, mutilated corpses found in back alleys, a decade of massacre in which the British and Irish states, the Republican and the Protestant Extremists have all taken part, appears to be coming to an end. But we have seen that under decadent capitalism there is no peace, only the reorganization and reorientation of the slaughter. The workers of Belfast and Derry have certainly had enough of the politicians of Left and Right, of Orange and Green, who wipe the red blood of the workers from their hands in order to respectfully commemorate the dead. The conflict of factions of the bourgeoisie, their struggle for survival in a capitalist system locked in permanent crisis, leads inevitably, as it has in Ulster, to a terrorisation of the working class. We condemn all of these factions of the bourgeoisie, not simply as brutes and maniacs (of which there is of course no shortage), but as our class enemies.

When we consider the question of nationalism in relation to the workers’ movement of the last century, we do so in order to show the absolutely anti-proletarian nature of the PLO, Polisario, the IRA and all the imperialist gangs of today. Marx was analysing capitalism in its period of emergence and development, when the bourgeoisie was declaring war on reactionary modes of production. For the advanced workers' movement of his time, it was clear that nationalism – wars of unification to create nation states – was the economic and political means by which the bourgeoisie could crush feudalism and create an industrial society, an industrial proletariat. The creation of nation states meant the securing of particular areas of the globe for the development of capitalism. Communists at that time supported nationalist revolutions directed against feudalism, not out of patriotic feelings – on the contrary, the Communist Manifesto already announces that the workers have no fatherland – but because feudalism as such represented a threat to the development, indeed to the very existence not only of the bourgeoisie but of the proletariat as well. Therefore, support for national struggles is dependent upon the conviction that capitalism remains a progressively expanding system. In the last century the progressive role of capitalism remained obvious and indisputable. Today, however, only capitalism's biggest supporters can find anything progressive about it.

In the period when Connolly was developing his analysis, towards the turn of the century in Ireland and the USA, it was becoming clear to revolutionaries that capitalism could no longer develop as before, in the days of headlong economic growth. Connolly concluded that there was no longer any place for an independent, industrialised Irish capitalism in this world:

“...the thoughtful Irish patriot will throw rant aside and freely recognise that it is impossible for Ireland to do what other countries cannot do, with their greater advantages, viz. to attain prosperity by establishing a manufacturing system in a world-market already glutted with every conceivable kind of commodity. It is well also to remember that even under the most favourable circumstances, even if by some miracle, we were able to cover the green fields of Erin with huge ugly factories, with chimneys belching forth volumes of smoke and coating the island with a sooty desolation, even then we would quickly find that under the conditions born of the capitalist system our one hope of keeping our feet as a manufacturing nation would depend upon our ability to work longer and harder for a lower wage than the other nations of Europe, in order that our middle class may have the opportunity of selling their goods at a lower price than their competitors” (Erin's Hope, 1897).

Despite the confusions which Connolly held concerning nationalism, and which we shall examine in a moment, and despite the lack of clarity of the entire workers' movement at that time concerning the possibility of a transition to socialism taking place within national or continental boundaries, for Irish revolutionaries at this time the reactionary character of Irish capitalism was already obvious. The revolutionary wave of 1917–23 and its defeat proved the impossibility of a transition to socialism except on a world scale, just as the fifty years of barbarism since then have shown that no country can escape the ever narrowing circle of economic chaos and imperialist slaughter. Today, the Republican/Left, blabbering about the nationalism of Marx and Lenin are about as marxist as the West German3 Maoists who propose a national war of German unification because Marx did likewise in 1848 (when Germany consisted of over 30 petty principalities and before the capitalist system had even been created on a world scale):

In 1898, Connolly wrote in the Workers' Republic:

“Every war now is a capitalist move for new markets, and it is a move which capitalism must make or perish.”

With regard to the situation in China at that time, he added:

“...if this war cloud now gathering in the East does burst, it will be the last capitalist war, so the death of that baneful institution will be like its birth, bloody, muddy and ignominious.”

But how did it come about that this marxist who denounced his own bourgeoisie so clearly, and who denounced the entry of the Socialist Deputy Millerand into the French Cabinet as a compromise of the 2nd International with the class enemy, continued to put forward the struggle for national independence in Ireland as a struggle to be supported by the proletariat? Historically we can situate the growth of confusion on the national question within the context of the period of reformist activity leading up to the imperialist war of 1914-18. This was a period when the permanent organs of the working class were tending more and more to find a place for themselves within capitalist society. Connolly's schema of an Irish Republic as a stage along the road to socialism is absolutely typical of the epoch in which he was writing.

“Since the abandonment of the unfortunate insurrectionism of the early Socialists whose hopes were exclusively concentrated on the eventual triumph of an uprising and barricade struggle, modern Socialism, relying on the slower but surer method of the ballot box, has directed the attention of its partisans towards the peaceful conquest of the forces of government in the interests of the revolutionary ideal.”

And in the same article, written in 1897, he concludes:

“Representative bodies in Ireland would express more directly the will of the Irish people than when those bodies reside in England. An Irish Republic would then be the natural depository of popular power; the weapon of popular emancipation, the only power which would show in the full light of day all those class antagonisms and lines of economic demarcation now obscured by the mists of bourgeois patriotism.”

In other words, whereas within Ireland a majority might be found who would vote for socialism, this Irish majority for Irish Socialism would vanish if the votes were counted within the Empire as a whole. Therefore, the need for an Irish Republic. Socialism in Ireland becomes purely an Irish affair. Years of reformist struggle within national boundaries were trapping revolutionaries inside a nationalist and parliamentary framework. The theoretical work, of clarification undertaken by revolutionaries like Lenin, Trotsky, or indeed Connolly, was part of a bitter fight against the degeneration of the 2nd International. Their stand on the national question was a reaction to the brazen chauvinism and imperialist policies of the “Labour leaders”. In the case of Connolly, we find real encroachments of bourgeois ideology in his writings, which show that he never grasped the capitalist nature of the nation so clearly as Marx did. It was clear that under imperialism, nationalism would have a different significance than in the days of ascendant capitalism. Whether this new significance would be positive or negative for the proletariat remained to be seen. Lenin and Luxemburg debated this question in one of the most important attempts to come to terms with decadent capitalism.4

In Labour in Irish History, Connolly describes capitalism as being something alien to Ireland, whereas capitalism is no more “alien” in Ireland than in the USA. Connolly had always insisted upon the necessity for the proletariat to defend its class autonomy against the bourgeoisie. But the basis of organisational and 'military' independence is political autonomy – class consciousness. Because revolutionaries in Ireland were unable to break with nationalism after 1914, when capitalism's progressive role had clearly come to an end, they were unable to firmly defend the class autonomy of the proletariat.

The final collapse of the pre-war workers' movement in 1914, and the mobilisation of millions of workers for the imperialist slaughter, came as an enormous shock to revolutionaries. These events precipitated immense confusions: Liebknecht of the German Social Democratic Party failed to oppose the first war credits because he accepted party discipline; many Bolsheviks called for an end to the war through “pressure” on the governments. In Ireland, Jim Larkin, the hero of the 1913 Dublin lockout, at first spoke about the possibility of conditionally supporting the British government. One of the most magnificent proletarian responses to the war was Connolly's A Continental Revolution, published on 15th August:

“But believing as I do that any action would be justified which would put a stop to this colossal crime now being perpetrated, I feel compelled to express the hope that ere long we may read of the paralysing of the internal transport service on the continent, even should the act of paralysing necessitate the erection of socialist barricades and acts of rioting by Socialist soldiers and sailors, as happened in Russia in 1905. (...) To me therefore, the Socialist of another country is a fellow-patriot, as the capitalist of my own country is a national enemy!”

These hopes for a continental revolt were not fulfilled in Connolly's lifetime. In face of a total mobilisation of the European proletariat, and the apparent lack of any possibility of a class solution to the crisis, Connolly began to abandon any class perspective. Because Ireland was under the control of the British state, opposition to that state was indeed the first duty of any revolutionary in Ireland. But only the proletariat can stop the war, just as only the proletariat can smash the system which produces such barbarism. The path which Connolly took after 1914, which led him to the barricades in the company of the petty bourgeois nationalists, was a total abandonment of what he had previously fought for. On 8th August he pointed out the conflict of interests between the workers on the one hand, and the bourgeoisie and the farmers within Ireland on the other; and he called for armed struggle in the streets, in order to “set the torch to a European conflagration”.

Nonetheless, the increasing importance of the nationalist perspective leads him to write: “Should a German army land in Ireland tomorrow we should be perfectly justified in joining it if by so doing we could rid this country once and for all from its connection with the Brigand Empire that drags us unwillingly into this war” (“Our Duty in This Crisis”, 8th August 1914).

The position which he develops, that the British Empire alone is responsible for the war – for a "war upon the German nation" opens the way for a military alliance with other imperialist powers. This reaches an absolute zenith of confusion in the spring of 1916, where he holds up the patriots of Belgium (who were after all the cannon fodder of Belgian and British imperialism) as models to be emulated in Ireland.

The nationalist opposition to the war crystallised in Ireland around the Irish Republican Brotherhood whose petty bourgeois madness was well expressed by their leading luminary, Patrick Pearse. He announced in December 1915:

“The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth (...) the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.”

Because the workers were evidently not prepared to fight for the Irish Nation in 1916 the way they had fought for their own class interests in 1913, Connolly, in turning his back on the proletarian solution, was forced to join forces with such people as Pearse, despite his profound mistrust of them. Even while workers in Dublin were striking, Connolly and his Citizens Army of the 1913 lockout,5 were negotiating for a putsch with the nationalists, to be armed by German imperialism and which would declare the erection of precisely the kind of parliamentary-democratic state as would soon be used to crush the German workers. For the Easter Rising, the Citizens Army was dissolved into the Volunteers of the nationalists. All pretence of class autonomy had to disappear. The Easter Rising of 1916, staged in the middle of the war (“England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity”) was quickly and savagely crushed by the British Army. The promised German aid, insufficient in any case, never got through. Just as to this day the IRA lacks a serious backer.

The workers' movement in Ireland collapsed after 1916; its traditions obliterated in a half century of nationalist and sectarian counter-revolution. 1916 paved the way for the War of Independence which was the last hopeless attempt of the Irish bourgeoisie to assert a measure of independence. And when, in response to the world-wide proletarian upsurge which followed the war, the Irish workers began to struggle on their own class terrain, the bourgeoisie of Belfast and Dublin turned their weapons against them. In Belfast, the class solidarity of the workers, Catholic and Protestant, culminating in the strikes of 1919, was repeatedly sabotaged by Loyalists and Nationalists. In Limerick the patriotic unions, forced to call a general strike, kept it with the help of the IRA and the local bourgeoisie in Limerick within the bounds of an "anti-British" movement, before abruptly breaking it off, after the intercession of the local bishop. In early 1922 the Republican government in Dublin smashed the strike and occupation movements of the railway workers in Cork, and the mill and creamery workers in Mallow. The workers were turned out by the local IRA commandant on the orders of the cavalier guerrilla, Michael Collins, and by the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, the proud “followers” of Larkin and Connolly. In addition, IRA troubleshooters were moved in to prevent the outbreak of “disorder”.

Regarding these events, the Workers' Dreadnought wrote: “The Transport Workers' Federation had entered into an agreed national compromise from which the Mallow workers had dissented, we think, not only because they objected to any decrease of wages whatsoever, but because they are prepared to stand forth as rebels against the existing social order. They are fighting for a Workers' Republic and opposing the policies of the bourgeois Republicans, Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins and the others who at present hold the reins of power in Southern Ireland. The Mallow Workers' Council, whether a temporary example which they knew could not be sustained, or as an attempt to put the match to the tinder of revolt for all Ireland, deliberately raised the Red Flag of proletarian rule.”

The participation of Connolly in 1916, which would never have happened had the European proletariat risen earlier against capital, is hailed by the bourgeoisie as the “fitting climax” to Connolly's political career. Once again the dispossessed class is to be robbed of its own experience, the memory of its own class fighters, who are now presented as calculating capitalist politicians on a par with bloody functionaries like Mao or Ho.6 The October Revolution showed that the real way out of barbarism does not involve fighting for nation states which are now so many barriers to the development of the productive forces. And so it remains the historic task of the world proletariat today: the global destruction of capitalism, the abolition of nations.

RC

By starting a new heading of ‘Readers’ Contributions’ on our website, and occasionally in our paper, we hope to encourage our readers and sympathisers to write texts and articles which can go into greater depth than is possible in our discussion forum, and so stimulate a longer term reflection. These articles, while being broadly based on proletarian politics, need not fully represent the positions of the ICC, or may deal with issues on which the ICC does not have a collective view. The question of art is clearly such an issue, and we welcome Boxer’s effort to deepen our understanding of the marxist approach to humanity’s creative productions.

Part two: the Art of the Palaeolithic

In part one [31] we blew a bit of dust off the surface of the question of art by taking up some of the marxist analyses of Max Raphael in relation to a ideological domain of art, which he said included the “sovereign nature of architecture” and the “importance of folk-poetry”. We attempted to look at the relations between different expressions in the domain of art, the relations between the domain of art and other ideologies, and also to the economic base from which these ideological expressions spring. Using an intriguing quote from Marx in Grundrisse we looked into the question of the “eternal nature” of Greek art, a seeming contradiction if art is linked to an economic base that’s since disappeared. Part of the answer to this question lies in the integral nature of Greek mythology which was generally shared in an immediate and pressing way due to the historical conditions. But it is with the cave paintings, engravings (and portable art) of the twenty-five-thousand-year long expressions of the Upper Palaeolithic that we are once again confronted with an “eternal nature” of art from a people whose magic and  mythology would have been even more pressing and widely shared in their spiritual production than that of the Greeks. Raphael has bought all his artistic and marxist criticism to bear on the question of Upper Palaeolithic art, on its possible meanings and spiritual depth. We will look at this below but first a slight diversion entirely in keeping with Raphael’s marxist approach to the period.

From the long “procession” on the Lion Panel at Chauvet Cave. Discovered in 1994, the paintings are around 33,000 years old and described by its discoverers as seeing “time stand still”. The paintings confirm Raphael’s analysis that detailed compositional art would date back to the Aurignacian, a period much earlier than the caves he studied. While there is powerful realism here there are also strange and human-like lions in the pride. The bison are shown in a typical pose and many other paintings over thousands of years indicate that the bison clan would have been the one that was composed of shamans and sorcerers.

The “eternal nature” of Upper Palaeolithic art

Around thirteen thousand years ago in a cave called Roc-aux-Sorciers of the Magdalenian period in Vienne, France, there were on the wall, amongst other profound expressions of art, three life-sized depictions of women deeply etched into the rock face in a natural and harmonious pose. Despite the damage done to them over time, they appear like floating, erotic goddesses. There are obvious similarities with these once-painted figures and the Classical and Renaissance trio of Graces, “But by far the most extraordinary thing about these figures is the mastery of perspective and the three-quarters view, as they half turn like dancers in a line”[i] as if they are ready to peel off and join the dance.  In the same period, on a cave wall in Tarn, France, there are reliefs of two reclining women, which again despite the damage, have “... caused a great deal of astonishment because of the mastery of perspective and easy freedom of pose with its foreshadowing of Classical and Renaissance art” (ibid). At Osatrava Petrkovice, in the Czech Republic, there is a small figure of a woman’s torso carved in hard, shiny black haematite. The piece comes from the Gravettian period some twenty-five thousand years ago, and draws these remarks from Nancy Sandars above: “In a setting that gives a weird foretaste of the Industrial Revolution with its coal and iron, the artist has produced a figure of touching naturalism and truth. The rugged quality in the work is probably due to the material but the slim, youthful figure has the proportions and even equilibrium (the weight on the right leg) of the late Classical Venus or of the three Graces”. I agree that the ruggedness of the latter carving is due to the material but the cubist appearance of this portable work also enhances its expressive nature and has similarities to the cubist appearance of the symbolic Acheulean “hand-axes” of at least half-a-million years ago, one of the first expressions of art.  The works of art on the walls of the Franco-Cantabrian caves studied by Raphael includes Les Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume in France and Altimira and Covalanas in Spain are expressed in the context of compositions that include certain animals and abstract “signs”, but their aesthetic qualities, their similarities and links with classical art are undeniable.

However, we do have to be careful here because a classical symmetry is not the rule on the cave walls; on the contrary asymmetric expressions abound. And animals, not classical human figures, are at the centre of Upper Palaeolithic art. I make this point about aesthetics because very recently the idea was still being put forward, in much the same way, of the “savage past of humanity”, of a development to a finer art from ignorant childlike beginnings. This view that has been soundly contradicted by the analyses of Max Raphael despite the greatly limited access of his sources and it has been further contradicted by many later discoveries since his book was written in 1945. Raphael wrote seventy years ago: “... the dogma that Palaeolithic paintings belong to so-called primitive art gained favour. It has been said that Palaeolithic artists were incapable of dominating surfaces or reproducing space: that they could produce only individual animals, not groups and certainly not compositions. The exact opposite of this is true: we find not only groups, but compositions that occupy the length of the cave wall or the surface of a ceiling; we find representations of space, historical paintings and even the golden section! But we find no primitive art”[ii].

Even apparently random patterns of squiggles, doodle-like appearances (sometimes called “macaronis”) that are widespread in the Upper Palaeolithic caves of Europe have a depth and expression of their own that’s not at all related to some sort of “primitive” expression as a basic stage in a linear development of prehistoric art[iii].  This finger-fluting – sometimes the areas of the soft cave walls have also been incised by some stone or other instrument – relate to hand prints and compositions of animals, with studies showing that in some cases under the “random” patterns lie representational images[iv]. Whatever we are looking at in these caverns at any time during the period of the Upper Palaeolithic, it is not “primitive” art. As abstractions alone there is a depth and consistency to these “doodles” that suggests a spiritual relationship to the cave wall and the cosmos which was believed to lay behind it. There’s no doubt that, along with the development of society, forms of art have suffered advances and regressions with some distinct expressions during the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods clearly being overthrown and superseded, with cave paintings being deliberately defaced and megalithic stones literally overturned, making way for new expressions. This is to be expected in art forms that, amongst other things, represent social organisation, spiritual belief and conflict as well as, as I’ll suggest below, the possible mediation and resolution of conflict, paving the conditions for advance in a situation which is dynamic rather than static. The reverse is also true in that the dynamics of art can turn to the status-quo which in its turn favours regression. Artistic techniques and the more cosmopolitan use of materials have certainly seen major developments over thousands of years, but the fundamentals of art are profoundly embedded in the prehistoric period of humanity and particularly in the Upper Palaeolithic whose peoples Raphael called “history-makers par excellence”[v]. Intuition would suggest that the roots of this art lie in Africa and our understanding of the global geographic dispersion that had its source in this continent would tend to support that view; the fundamentals appear in cave paintings in Australia and Salawasi, Indonesia around the same time and similar expressions occur at different times throughout Africa and into the Americas as it was colonised by humanity. 

The cave paintings of Chauvet in the Ardeche region of France, discovered 20 years ago and dating back to 33,000 years, and the paintings discovered last year in Salawesi, Indonesia dating back 40,000 years show, at least, the paucity of those who dismiss the artistic strength of early Palaeolithic artists - already underlined by the virulence and abuse of their arguments[vi] . Against these pernicious ideas the discoveries of Chauvet, Salawesi, Cosquer, Costlllo and many others, made decades after his book, confirm and strengthen the analyses of Max Raphael and, looking at them, can’t fail to again bring up the question of Marx’s “eternal charm” in a period whose specifics were totally unknown to him.

Magic, the science of the Upper Palaeolithic

The “birdman” from the depths of the Shaft at Lascaux. The painting is on a wall in a hardly accessible place with many spent lamps on the floor. Only one person could have possibly got in here at a time. The bison is wounded and an accompanying rhinoceros and horse looks fit. Surrounded by “signs” it seems some sort of magic is at work here and, while it’s very difficult to say what’s going on, the ithyphallic figure appears elsewhere at Trois-Freres, Ariege France with similar figures appearing elsewhere in the Magdalenian period. Birds are regular but unusual in Upper Palaeolithic art, appearing much more in later, Neolithic barbarian art. Also found in this “apse” were flint blades, ivory spears with signs on them, sea-shells from the 200 km distant Atlantic Coast which have been stained with red ochre.

We are not looking for the origins of art because these lay much deeper. What we want to look at is a particular expression within the domain of art: the Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings, etchings, engravings, scrapings and doodles, collectively called parietal art (as opposed to sculptured mobile art). These expressions, while the artist is also something of a magician, are not, in the main, solitary specialised functions (though they definitely are in places), but they belong to the whole of society and were no doubt recognised by the peoples of the time as such. Max Raphael says that these paintings tell us little about the functioning of society but then, as usual, very methodically, he tells us a great deal about just that: the clear relationship of the artistic superstructure to the economic base of hunter-gatherers, the organisation in families, the material means of production, the spiritual production, the importance of magic, the differentiations and conflict within a society that was by no means an idyll: “Upper Palaeolithic art shows faith in all natural beings and their affinity and the existence of an organisational force capable of translating magic into reality. This was the magic of the Palaeolithic age and its art. In the best Palaeolithic paintings are shown charges of energy that comes from an objective supernatural character and these charges are perpetrated through the existential intensification of the object.... (The) artist as a magician had all the powers of society at his[vii] disposal, inspired by the group who believed in and took magic and resurrection seriously... the physical and ideological forces of the social group were always there to translate the magic into actual or imagined reality”.[viii] Today, these paintings look modern but there is no art that is more alien and distant from us. Just as symmetry and balance is unusual in these works, then so is the depictions of individuals. We’ve already mentioned that, like the Greeks, the integral and generalised nature of prehistoric mythology favoured the development of an art form that was timeless: “Today, mankind, amidst enormous sacrifices and suffering is, with imperfect awareness, striving for a future in the eyes of which all our history will sink to the level of ‘prehistory’. Palaeolithic man was carrying out a comparable struggle. Thus the art most distant from us becomes the nearest; the most alien to us becomes the closest”[ix]. The basis of this art and its animal compositions is an expression of the conscious break from the animal kingdom and a drive forward to new and wider conditions of existence from a much earlier stage of humanity, involving the identification of obstacles in order to overcome them and move onto a new stage.  As in many areas of anthropology, we can’t mechanically reconstruct this period from ethnology – we’ve seen this danger elsewhere in ideas about the “primitive killer savages” of the past from today’s examples of isolated tribes that have descended into pure superstition.

For example, the totemism of today’s “primitive” peoples is nothing like that of prehistory. In this case, any resemblance between the “primitive” tribes of the 20th or 21st century and the Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, struggling against their clear and present dangers as well as their own internal conflicts, has to be treated with care, even if ethnological evidence can be a useful pointer and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. See for example the work of Jerome Lewis among the ‘pygmy’ tribes in the Congo which doesn’t point in the direction of “killer savages”[x]; and there are further examples, some of which are quoted below.

Raphael’s work consists of trying to understand the importance of the group: the interpretation of the parts in relation to the whole; the drawing out of the meanings of the groups and individual animals, because in art form and content tend towards the same expression. The groups of animals relate to social organisation and this social nature is essential to Max Raphael’s analysis. In these compositions of animals the paintings acquire a greater significance. In the caves that he examines (and in many others that he knew nothing about) certain animal species dominate; there’s antagonism and conflict in various compositions. These expressions are much more than hunting magic, probably pre-date it, and the same animals appear almost everywhere, though their frequency varies with the caves and in the main they are not the ones that served as a food source. There are the carnivorous animals that were not hunted, shown in the most meticulous detail with their associated behaviours (Raphael wouldn’t have known about most of these from the caves he knew about): “The character of each animal seems to be as limited as the subject matter, everywhere the reindeer live a bright cheerful idyll, just as the bison live a stormy drama, the horses display playful sensitivity and the mammoths (painted long after they were extinct in places) unshakeable dignity and gravity”[xi]. The force of these compositions is a combination of naturalism, magic and totemism. Some animals form pairs taking up certain positions in relation to others to the point of “crossing” one another, and even the same or different animals merging into one hybrid form; these are also different from the anthropomorphic sorcerer figures.  Horses take in different breeds of horses and there is a clear relationship of horses and hinds to mammoths. Later discoveries of earlier works also show the rhinoceroses living a “stormy drama”.  There appears to be a “transference” of one animal to another (lions and horses for example) and “processions” of animals. Larger groups appear as spectators, in what Raphael says seems to be a “chorus”. There are vulvas and sexually excited animals demonstrating the magic of fertility and the sexual overtones of some of the compositions. Sometimes the struggle of groups is separated as at Les Combarelles in France where on the left wall conflict dominates and on the right the scene is peaceful and the conflict seems to evolve into a united group. These are obviously not cast-iron interpretations from Raphael but they are based on a sound methodology that has been confirmed and validated by later finds.

“Palaeolithic man knew no magic without action, nor could he imagine action without magic; to him theory and practice were one”[xii]. And this unity maintained all its force to the very last expressions of this art over a period of twenty-five thousand years. In fact, with later evidence unknown to Raphael, we can clearly see that strong elements of this art were maintained and developed into barbarian society for over a further fifteen millennia as expressed in the stone, ceramics and metal workings of this universal barbarian culture(s). Raphael saw this himself in the early Egyptian pottery that he studied. Before and outside of civilisation, and in continuity with their ancestors, these barbarians were another “history-making peoples”. In the Upper Palaeolithic, magic was the “science” of its time: it included the totality of all existing knowledge and took into account the means of production through which society was to be transformed. This knowledge certainly included a detailed study of animal behaviour and nature, and confirmed mankind’s conscious superiority over the animal which embraced a developing mythology. Mankind in this period was very much social and according to Raphael the animals symbolised the clan [xiii]. The social unity of society was represented by the groups of animals but this art also represented social tensions, conflict and confrontation: it represented an arena of struggle.  There are also clear expressions of catharsis and reconciliation. Within his marxist analysis Raphael uses his structuralist strengths to counter-pose and differentiate sides of oppositions, even evoking the Wagnerian theme of Liebestod “Love Death” as one of many[xiv].

As with many other aspects of this society we can’t know very much for certain and this applies to the question of magic as the “science” of its time. But there are many aspects to this very detailed pictorial record that point us in this direction. Raphael looked at the paintings on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira – which had compositions just like the earlier paintings at Chauvet, as well as contemporary with the caves of Niaux, Castillo, Les Combarelles, etc. It was probably the shaman, the distinctive member of society, who was in most cases the artist. Behind the apparent disorder of the bison and hinds on Altamira’s ceiling, Raphael detects the magic of the eye and magic of the hand – action at a distance. These compositions, along with “signs”, will stand a great deal of examination The scene here is a battle, one where reconciliation takes place. Raphael uses ethnological evidence to explain the unequivocal positions of propitiation and atonement that some of the animals, the bison particularly, take up. There’s clearly a power at work here and this expression of atonement has been seen in much later “primitive” societies such as the Siberian Kamchatkans and Ostiaks, as well as the Nootka Indians of British Columbia. Raphael gives some time to the study of these societies in the work of James George Fraser[xv] . As elsewhere, Raphael warns that we have no way of knowing exactly the mind of this prehistoric period, in relation to magic as to anything else. But the pictorial record, the sheer force of the art, and the analysis given to it, as well as decent and relevant ethnological evidence, suggests we are on the right track.

A developing totemism

The aurochs and horse clans represented on a pendent wall at Chauvet. There’s ambivalence over the positions of the rhinoceroses with animals “crossing” one another. The horses have expressions of undoubted feminine tenderness while the aurochs show some masculine bulk. There are also indeterminate animals and signs and this particular painting shows additions over a period of some thousands of years.

The family group is expressed in this art again through animals and not by human figures. Sometimes the male figure is at the centre of the group and sometime the female figure. Woman as Being is expressed in the female deer and horses; clans with their femininity and “combined wisdom and a warlike spirit and from which derive the Amazon, Hagia Sophia and the witch”[xvi], later finding their way into barbarian art and Greek mythology. Raphael rejects a simple form of totemism: “But whatever the social organisation may have been in each case, however tenaciously each group clung to its own as best, all these groups express and embody the consciousness of their unity in the shape of an animal. This is the fundamental expression of totemism”. Just as Jews and Muslims were forbidden to make images of their God so too did the peoples of the Upper Palaeolithic adopt a similar approach with the animal figures representing humans – taboo plays a part here and a wider part in general. Not only are human forms rarely expressed but there even seems to be a taboo on full-face representations of animals – they are mostly asymmetrical and this is also related to motion. This totemism did not remain static but developed into a “realism that transcended nature itself”. One of its developments is into monumentalism – the mammoth, you might say, is the elephant in the cave. Only the mammoth follows a general pattern and is a source of stability, reconciliation and power. The mammoth clan, if such a thing existed, must have been greatly respected. In Chauvet alone there are some 60 plus depictions of mammoths; their appearance is similar to everywhere else and this includes here the “embracing” of other animals. Magic was the means of art and it drove the synthesis between naturalism and monumentalism as expressed by the symbolism of the mammoth. The decorated ceilings of Altamira and Lascaux are works of monumental proportions. The same is true of the cave walls of Chauvet where along one panel (there are several different panels) there’s a “procession” involving felines, bison, various canids, rhinoceroses, ibex, horses and indeterminate animals in states from a powerful calm to frenzy, following each other in a staggering “occasion of state” overlooked by a half-bison, half-woman sorceress painted onto a large pendent rock. The “procession” is broken by a large inverted natural “V” shaped undulating cleft in the wall from which emerges a mammoth, a horse, a rhinoceros and a bison. Unlike the animals and “signs” in the procession, which are all painted red, these animals are all in black. Beneath these figures there is a shallow blood-red pool formed through the drips permeating the walls and stripping out the ochre. There’s no reason to think that the morphology of the cave has changed much in 33,000 years so this is probably an original feature. The sexual tension is apparent and the whole composition, like others in the cave, can only be described as theatrical.   Magic was socialised and society became a magic force. This is beyond the punctual expressions of hunting magic and has a more profound basis than assistance to the kill, i.e. it’s more than predators and prey. It was in the social observation of nature, of cause and effect of animal behaviour, in its conscious assimilation, that society advanced: “At Les Combarelles the scenes that have social significance are so solemn and include so many participants that they impress one as state occasions. At the same time, both morally and politically, Palaeolithic ideology reaches universal human dimensions, and some of the scenes have the grandeur of Aeschylian tragedies”[xvii]. From the observation of nature magic endowed this art with life without detracting from the unity of the image. And despite the many different depictions of animals, bison, hind, horse, lions, mammoth, bear, stags, aurochs and so on, none are identical, they are all different.

Totemism not only developed into monumentalism with the ubiquitous depictions of the mammoth and “state occasions”;  it also expressed itself in abstract symbolism where truncated versions of the concave and convex curves of the animal’s bodies and legs were reduced to “signs” and  “motifs”. Later research has further shown that the curves and features on some of the animals were painted or incised along or on natural fissures and features of the cave wall. Along with the hand prints pressed against the wall this indicates that the wall itself had a meaning as a way into the spiritual world. Some of the paintings at Chauvet (and elsewhere) show great use of the natural features of the cave, with animals appearing to emerge from the wall itself. There are also offerings, bone, antler, quartz, roots, etc., that have been pushed into cracks in the wall, all of which tends to reinforce its importance for access to the “other world” (for more on this see The Mind in the Cave, by David Lewis-Williams, Thames and Hudson, 2002. This was research that Raphael would have been unaware of). And it’s important to remember here - and Raphael was well aware of this - that the caves were not dwelling places, certainly not the areas where the paintings were done: they were often not on flat, accessible walls, these being deliberately ignored. These were places of festivity and spirituality where tensions and conflict could be confronted. The wealth of the art on display at Chauvet, and its age, tend to support many of the points made by Raphael: the duality and continuity of the human and animal world, the oppositions and antagonisms of the compositions, the anthropomorphic figures, the animals with human expressions; and in Chauvet, the spiritual link between the two worlds. It’s also necessary to mention here the importance of the choice of surface and the sophistication of the preparation, the range of materials and the techniques used. At Chauvet, where the different and autonomous morphology of the various cave walls are linked together by decoration of both representations and “signs”, there appears to have been few “visitors”, though there are signs of adolescents having been taken there. Bears inhabited the cave before and after humans: this is evidenced by the paintings over and under their scratch marks, with at least one claw mark incorporated into a painting.

Being, “signs” and motion

The “Hall of Bulls”, early Magdalenian at Lascaux in France. There’s a number of aurochs and deer coming from the opposite direction in some sort of confrontation and/or meeting-up. The panel is 9 metres long and scaffolding would have to have been used. Some of the depictions are very large and were possibly painted by a number of people. There are a few signs around the animals and black and red dots and dashes.

Raphael talks a lot about the “force” and “motion” of these paintings, the “Being” “that has divested itself of all mere relationships and yet includes the individual not as an accident but as an essence”. This Being doesn’t transcend the world but expresses its constancy.  The present sense of danger in the Upper Palaeolithic world could only accentuate this sense of Being, bringing forth the “self-assertion, self-revelation and self-creation of its substance... in general the Upper Palaeolithic artists achieve the same objectivity, the same freedom from purely subjective elements and even from human consciousness... The artist’s ability lies in its reproduction of the social world in materials that speak to our senses”[xviii]. Here is part of its eternal charm and timeless quality[xix]. And if the artist can rise above his time, and the evidence here is that he clearly can, and produce such works, “his will nevertheless remains the social slave of the compulsions of his time”. The anthropomorphic figures, which are everywhere, can express fertility but are more concerned with the motion of magic; there are those that appear at the beginning of a composition, there are those right in the centre and those that are actors in the whole. Movement and motion was fundamental to this society from the appearance, agglomeration and dispersion of the herds. It must have been conceived in a way we can’t imagine. These shaman-type figures are also found alone in the recesses and the deepest and most difficult places to in the cave. The spiritual journey and communication via the animal and into the cave wall are evident here. The historical record of the different clans, which include the shamans, sorceresses and the like, could include the specific artist. Raphael says that it looks like the sorcerers posed the question: ‘Who are you?’ famously answered by Odysseus, ‘Neither man nor animal: No one’. “The main task of a history of art is to show that these forms, forms and not contents! – must necessarily arise from definite economic, social, political, moral, religious, etc., roots, that these forms express them, manifest them; vice-versa, that they react on these roots and play a part in their transformation”[xx]. Given our knowledge of this period and its art we can only do this in a fragmented way, but we can attempt it. 

For the purveyors of the idea of unbroken progress, there’s a gulf between the primitive “signs” and later animal representations that further develop into the “proper” art of civilisation. For them it is inconceivable that Upper Palaeolithic artists could express a synthesis of geometric figures and animal representations, a unity in diversity.  Some “signs” came from truncated versions of animal figures, possibly expressions of magic, and others have been universally demonstrated to come from various forms of altered states of consciousness – in this respect see The Mind in the Cave by David Lewis-Williams already mentioned above. The dashes and dots, usually at the beginning of the artistic presentations of the cave, are a short-hand for something. They appear on their own, usually equidistant, sometimes over long distances, they make up animal figures entirely, link them or are superimposed over them. Sometimes they are contrasted to continuous lines. What they mean is by no means sure but hunter-gatherer existence is separated by motion through space that must have been particularly immediate and relevant to them in following the herds and in their closeness to nature. These signs are possibly representative of a motion of a distinct and energising kind. Just looking at one bison on the Altamira ceiling shows connections between continuous lines and discontinuous dashes that seem to point to a sense of movement and this is expressed many times elsewhere. The contradiction between Being and motion could possibly be addressed by the artist through a series of patterns, of dots and dashes. If we don’t know what they are saying it is still quite possible that, overall, these signs represent some sort of written language. Some of these signs and compositions make their way into general barbarian art prior to and during the Neolithic. Raphael himself points to some similarities with these signs and the some of the letters of the Latin alphabet.

From one side of the world to the other around forty thousand years ago, hand-prints were used as an artistic expression and in Chauvet and elsewhere they make up entire expressions.  Raphael doesn’t underestimate the importance of the hand, seeing it representing superiority over the animal kingdom, driving forwards man’s spiritual, physical and productive forces. There’s symbolic meaning to the hand and the fingers in some major religions: “In Upper Palaeolithic art the hand was laid on the animal both magically and artistically”, underlining a further stage in human evolution. But while humanity was “... no longer dominated by animals (it was) still subjected to its own spiritual means of domination over the animal world”. Like the great majority of animals depicted, the hand is asymmetrical and this is emphasised when it is spread. In the Upper Palaeolithic the animal was everything and it was such through the intermediary of the human hand.

Contradictions, oppositions, confrontation as the way forward

Part of a mammoth procession in a typical monumental pose in the Rouffiignac cave in the Dordogne from the Magdalenian period in France. The wider drawing shows Capricorn hinds and other animals accompanying the mammoths. There’s both gravity and lightness in the depiction. In the 8 km of underground caves there are 150 mammoths depicted, 70% of the total animals shown.

The counter-posing of different structures and compositions, what could be argued as its dialectical nature, is a major feature of prehistoric cave art and it is expressed in almost every cave that has been surveyed. As elsewhere the ceiling of Altamira shows both the stillness and concrete nature of the animal and the infinite possibilities of movement. The effect of movement/stillness here, as at Font-de-Gaume, Les Combarelles, Lascaux and Chauvet is palpable. The magic also changes the movement of sexual passion into the stillness of exhaustion. Struggle and death is represented in the animal and it’s the genius of the artist that brings out the universal meaning in a transcendence of reality.  These clear oppositions expressing the inner and outer worlds, and the tensions behind them allowed “... the artist to rise above the historically given and limited magic totemism into the sphere of timeless aesthetic object and this translation is in turn a condition for the formal development of the theme into an artistic whole”. The oppositions are between nomadic and sedentary, masculine bulk and feminine tenderness, totemism and magic, magic and political power, agglomeration and dispersion, spirituality and physical force, divergence and convergence, unity and diversity. These works of art are attempts to overcome and synthesise these tensions. The paintings of the herds and prides at Altamira and Chauvet are compositions of a whole range of elements: processions, a “chorus”, crowds and dispersion, parallel steps with the focal point at Altamira being the bison/shaman figure confronted by a very large hind with the crucial distances between the animals, along with the definitely placed signs and the expression of a definite concrete content.

Upper Palaeolithic art is as distant as it is as close and, for the most part, we are unable to read and interpret its expressions. We’ve seen the “scientists” who brand this art “... with the mask of primitiveness, the laziest excuse of humanistic science in the period of monopoly capitalism, intended to conceal the lack of ideas and their deterioration in a whole historical period”. Max Raphael puts forwards the thesis of homogeneous compositional art for a period of tens of thousands of years and raises the question of the artistic unity of other periods (and the relationship to their economic substructures); the theme of Greek art based on Euclidian frames of reference; the art of the Renaissance derived from the human anatomical structure. All of this underlying a general thesis of the human spirit and progress that humanity has made in understanding itself. The art forms, particularly the later expressions of Christianity, centred on the human or the god-like figure whereas these paintings clearly centre on animals, animals as humans, as clans, opponents, allies; and animals who override contradictions as magic: “ (This) enables us to show why a definite world of forms must necessarily correspond to definite material and religious bases. Thus the history of art can leave the Linnaean stage of cataloguing unessential characteristics and become a serious science”. I haven’t done a detailed study of them, such a study would be interesting, but even a superficial look at the many cave paintings and engravings discovered since his book show the strength of Raphael’s hypotheses with a remarkable validation.  It’s a validation of the marxist method.

Rhinoceros in an agitated state at Chauvet, They appear to be chased by a group of horses and other animals that are out of picture appearing on the right. Watching this from a rock opposite is what appears to be a contemplating baboon – the only primate shown in any cave art of this period. Unfortunately, while it looks definite, it is an optical illusion and the animal is in fact another rhinoceros. The whole episode is another “stormy drama”.

There’s one question where we would take issue with Raphael’s analysis and that is where, at the end of his book, he suggests, quite against his overall arguments, that this society was a class society based on oppression: “On the other hand Palaeolithic art is close enough to us to make us feel the unity of mankind and reduce the seeming differences between history and prehistory. The difference is justified by the fact that so-called prehistory has no written tradition, no historical documents we are able to read. Then, as today, man was oppressed by man; then, as today, art represented the wishes and interests of the ruling classes which possessed the spiritual and material tools and weapons.”

Where would exploitation come from in this society, where is its economic base and who is the ruling class? There is no class society and no basis for exploitation but Raphael points to the control of tools and weapons. Archaeological evidence, plenty of it, shows us that throughout the whole lithic period – over two million years – there was an abundance and development of tools, i.e., the means of production. From the early time of the Acheulean “axe”, vast deposits of these tools have been found, often unused. The Acheulean axe itself became one of the first works of art and symbolism. In the Upper Palaeolithic, again there’s evidence of an abundance of tools and their refinement shown in whole tool “industries” where, incidentally, Sapiens and Neanderthal worked side by side for a while. There is no economic basis for exploitation and whatever form of alienation these peoples felt – and this is another question we can’t answer here – it wasn’t from the means of production.

And who is the ruling class? Among the Australian aborigines thousands of years ago, different ‘classes’ were set up in order to avoid inter-marriage. But this is no different from the later gentes (or the earlier clans – if they existed) where inter-marriage became taboo and descent firmly fixed in the female line. If there was oppression of “man by man” where could it have come from? It can only be from the shaman/sorcerers, the warriors or the Chiefs/Judges. The paintings show clear distinctions and differentiations in this society but no expression of exploitation or oppression – on the contrary Raphael constantly emphasises the unity of these works above all other. And most of them were probably painted by the shaman/sorcerers. In fact when we move from the Upper Palaeolithic into the Neolithic farming/metal-working barbarian society prior to civilisation (and class society), which also brought the art of its ancestors into its own, we  find shaman/sorcerers, warriors, chiefs/judges but still no class society – no exploitation, no ruling class, no state. In fact what we do find are clear expressions of communistic practices: everyone has a voice, the balanced role of the sexes, no private property, etc. Class society developed along with civilisation, the state and private property and then art came to be completely at the service of the ruling class. The communistic tendencies of barbarian society were crushed but not extinguished by class society and, just like the Upper Palaeolithic, this society had its “chains”, its limits and had to fall. The abiding feature of these societies compared with the proletariat today is the sense of struggle, of a “history-making” people, but no class society nor exploitation.

We must leave on a positive note for Raphael’s work on this amazing art: the dynamic of struggle; differentiation within a unity; the dialectical  asymmetrical nature of this art in expressing myth, magic and symbolism. Marx posed an apparent conundrum in ascribing an eternal charm to the art of a long dead society. I think that in his analyses of prehistoric art Raphael has gone some way towards bridging the question. Today, despite its distance, we feel a unity with this art, a unity which in its timeless quality to some extent breaks down the difference between prehistory and history This earlier period was no idyll but one with the “comfortable chains” of primitive communism (Marx) and a period of struggle for survival shown by the written records of these paintings. And we should remember that in the main this society succeeded because it lasted for some twenty-five thousand years: “The study of Palaeolithic art should serve as a reminder to us that it is high time to put an end to the prehistory of mankind and to begin a new era in which the human race will consciously make its history. ‘What’s past is prologue’”[xxi]

Boxer. 11.3.16

Introduction

It is 40 years since the events that took place in the city of Vitoria, where, in 1976, in the context of falling wages due to the economic crisis there were important workers’ movements throughout the country, and in Vitoria there were increasingly massive General Assemblies which elected a committee of revocable delegates. It was when a General Assembly was taking place in the Church of San Francisco that police unleashed repression against the workers gathered there. The then government minister, Señor Fraga Iribarne, founder and president of the Partido Popular (the People’s Party) until his death, and honoured ‘democrat’, ordered the police to fire upon the workers, causing five deaths with many injured.

There was an overwhelming response by workers to these events, throughout the country there were solidarity demonstrations and massive assemblies. In Pamplona this ranged across the entire city. This expressed a mass struggle, united in demands and refusing to return to work until all their demands were met. The state had to partially concede.

In his first parliamentary speech on the occasion of the proposal of the investiture of Pedro Sánchez, Señor Iglesias (leader of Podemos) used this anniversary to endorse proposals for a “democratic renewal” and “social justice”. However, in 1976, workers were confronted by a post Franco government that was carrying out the democratic transition which was organised with the international help of the old democracies of the then US bloc (Germany and France), in order to contain the enormous discontent and struggles. A year later the Moncloa Pact showed the unity of the whole bourgeoisie in its attack upon the proletariat under the ideological cover of democratic reform.

If there is a relationship between Vitoria in 1976 and the massive assemblies of 15M in Spain in 2011, with the dynamic of mass struggle[1] (despite those of 2011 not having a clearly proletarian identity); there is none between these events and Iglesias’s party[2].

Before you read the article we would like to make some critical remarks about it. It was written when the ICC section in Spain had not yet been formed[3]. Inexperience and difficulties in assimilating our positions influence the article. Today, 40 years later, we think the following points are completely correct:

• The denunciation of the great manoeuvre represented by the ‘establishing of democracy’ in Spain whose consequences we are still living through;
• The unmasking of the coming together of all the political forces of the bourgeoisie, especially the self-proclaimed Left and extreme Left;
• The defence of proletarian means of struggle, in particular, the assemblies and the unification of the struggles;
• The defence of the communist perspective of the proletariat, the only alternative faced with the supposed reforms of a system dragging the great majority of humanity into poverty, war and barbarism

That said, the article has passages that reveal an overestimation of the immediate possibilities of the proletariat.

Thus, for example, it says “and, next time, the police stations, barracks, post offices and telephone exchanges”. This overestimation of the possibilities of the situation suggests an almost pre-revolutionary moment. The international situation of the proletariat did not justify such propositions since the struggle had strongly declined following the explosive events in France 1968, Italy 1969 and Poland 1970, something that is ignored when it says, on the contrary, that “Today, in all parts of the world the workers are striking against the conditions which the crisis is imposing on them and those strikes, even when suppressed, resurge with greater fighting spirit every time.” This sees things in a very formal way, the proletariat was very far from the levels of consciousness and the politicisation of its struggles necessary for the posing of such aims.

Furthermore it affirms that there was “the means to develop our unity, consciousness, and organisation through the experience of this period of struggle”. If it is true that there was an impressive unity and proliferation of assemblies, there was nevertheless much less of a clear conscious understanding of the necessity for the world proletarian revolution and the means for making this happen. But this same unity of the working class was not the same everywhere; there was a significant and powerful weight of sectoral, regional and other divisions. The assemblies had not taken on all the consequences and implications of their function in the class, and the committees of delegates were occupied and manipulated by the unions and forces of the extreme left of the bourgeoisie.

The inexperience and difficulties of the assimilation of class positions to which the young sections of the ICC clearly adhered, is seen in the article’s understanding of the October 1934 workers’ insurrection in Asturias as a “revolution”. Despite the enormous combativity displayed by the Asturian miners, the movement remained strictly within regional limits and was more the fruit of a provocation that forced the miners to insurrection than a conscious action they decided upon. At the same time, the world situation was an accumulation of physical and ideological defeats of the class, the triumphant counter-revolution, the preparation of the second imperialist slaughter which impeded the struggles taking up a revolutionary perspective. In reality, the Asturias insurrection has to be seen in the same light as the Austrian Social Democrats’ provocation of workers in that country in February 1934 which lead to a terrible defeat. Their Spanish colleagues, lead by Largo Caballero who had the nerve to present himself as the “Lenin of Spain” (when in the Primo de Rivera dictatorship he was a state councillor to the dictator), leading the workers into a trap and leaving them there by sabotaging all attempts at solidarity in Madrid and other places[4].

Rosa Luxemburg said that “self-criticism, cruel and relentless criticism that goes to the root of evil is life and breath for the proletariat”. The honest highlighting of these errors gives us clarity and conviction in the struggle.

Vitoria, the proletarian alternative

The bourgeoisie has not concealed its anxiety about the strength displayed by the working class during the first three months of this year. The language used by the press and the statements made by public personalities give us an idea of the extent of that anxiety. For the Primate Cardinal “. . . days of uncertainty for Spain are drawing near”; for Ricardo de la Cierva (a bourgeois commentator) “. . . the horizon is so black that I can’t see any more.” Informaciones (a Spanish periodical), faced with the avalanche of strikes, asks itself: “Are we facing an attempt that is basically revolutionary?”

Our strikes have shaken the country: all its regions and all its branches of production. The cities of Salamanca and Zamora, where ‘nothing ever happens’, have witnessed strikes in the construction and metal industries; even the blind went on strike and demonstrated in the streets.

Not even before the war has there been such a general movement. In January alone there have been more strikes than in all of 1975. Such a gigantic generalisation must serve to make us aware of the strength which we have, make us see that in this strength lies the road leading to the end of capitalist exploitation, which every day grows more unbearable.

That is the first lesson to draw, a lesson that has been present, more or less clearly, in the recent struggles. The building workers and others in Pamplona, Vitoria, Elda, Vigo, and Barcelona organised the strikes through assemblies, which were unified through a committee of delegates together with a general city assembly; they looked for the solidarity of all workers on the streets and backed by that accumulated strength and their autonomous organisation, they occupied the city, closing bars, offices, banks, and public departments.

To speak of communism, to speak of working class emancipation, is no longer considered utopian. We know that the day of revolution is still far off, but we know that on our way there, we have something very solid on which to lean: the experience of our brothers in Vitoria, Pamplona, Vigo, and other cities. That experience contains the means to unite us, the means to confront bourgeois power, to destroy it and to liberate ourselves. This experience forms part of the real resurgence of the proletariat throughout the entire world and takes up the revolutionary torch which set fire to Europe through the years 1917-21, and whose zenith saw the creation of the soviets in 1917 in Russia and the workers’ councils in Germany in 1918.

It’s essential to deepen these experiences, to generalise them to all places, and to ensure that such experiences should have a conscious organisation forged by the workers themselves. Clearly, the means are:

• the general strike
• the occupation of the cities, closing and paralysing offices, bars, public departments and, for the first time, police stations, jails, postal and telephone offices
• the autonomous organisation of our class in assemblies, unified in delegates’ committees and in a general congress of workers’ delegates
• the defence of our assemblies and demonstrations against the attacks of the repressive bodies of the state.

The road is long and difficult, but we are not starting from scratch; we have the experience of two centuries of workers’ struggle behind us. Today, in all parts of the world the workers are striking against the conditions which the crisis is imposing on them and those strikes, even when suppressed, resurge with greater fighting spirit every time.

Murder and democracy: two sides of the same coin

If we have the means to develop our unity, consciousness, and organisation through the experience of this period of struggle, it is also true that the bourgeoisie is powerful and has many ways of defeating us, dividing us, and stopping our advance forward.

We have to have a very clear consciousness of the methods the bourgeoisie is going to use to defeat our struggle. We can sum them up under two headings: repression and democracy. In less than two weeks, the pre-democratic government of Fraga assassinated more workers than the fascist government of Carrero Blanco did in two years!

Faced with the uncontrollable strength of the workers’ struggles in Vitoria, Elda, Vigo, Pamplona, etc., there was no other response open to the capitalists than to resort to the most savage repression - and a fascist government would have done the same as a democratic one, or a ‘workers’ or ‘revolutionary’ one. Capitalism - under all its state forms - always speaks the same language. History provides us with too many examples: in 1918 the Social Democrat, Ebert, bloodily defeated the workers of Berlin, assassinating Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; in 1921 the Bolshevik government used aerial bombardment to end the Kronstadt workers’ insurrection[5]; in 1931 the Swedish Conservative government killed nine workers in Adalen; in 1933 under the Spanish Republic, the progressive Azaña waded in blood at Casas Viejas while the fascist (today a democrat) Gil Robles drowned the workers’ revolution of the Asturias under the barbarity of the Spanish Foreign Legion. After the massacre of the Second World War, the killings continued: Italy in 1947 under the Christian Democrats; Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 under ‘Communist’ governments; Poland in 1970; twelve miners killed during a miners’ strike in South Africa in 1972; Argentina under the military regime, workers killed in Córdoba and Tucumán …

The crimes committed in Vitoria, Elda, etc are not the work of an ‘ultra’ faction of the bourgeoisie as OICE[6] says in Revolución number 7, but the conscious and necessary response that capitalism, under whatever form of government, makes and will go on making to the proletarian menace. Carillo would have done the same as Fraga!

But repression is not enough if the working class continues to advance through every struggle and learns from each defeat. The reform of the institutions of the bourgeois state is essential in order to contain the workers’ struggle, to divide it, and to imprison it within objectives which, far from destroying the system, consolidate and conserve it.

The events in Vitoria have not made the Government abandon its policy of reform.

They have not brought a crisis to the dreadful ‘bunker’[7]. The Council of Ministers made the following declaration:

“In consequence, the government (after the events in Vitoria) is disposed to act not only with the object of firmly maintaining public order, but also to create the objective conditions which permit a real social peace . . . particularly distressing are events such as those in Vitoria which are clearly intended to delay the programme of reforms which the Spanish people want and which the government is not prepared to renounce.”

It is no contradiction to combine democracy with murder. Bloodbaths are not a monopoly of the fascists. All factions of capital use the same weapons against workers’ rebellions.

But although it is a necessity for the Spanish bourgeoisie to defeat in blood and fire all independent workers’ struggles, it must at the same time create the democratic political institutions it needs (like unions, parties, universal suffrage and other ‘liberties’) to avoid frontal confrontations like those at Vitoria by forcing the workers’ struggles against exploitation into meaningless channels.

The vote, the unions, and the parties have a function: to contain the class, to erode its initiative, to confine it within the factory and the nation, diverting the horizon of its struggle towards ‘socio-political’ reforms such as the self-determination of the people, self-management, and anti-fascism. These are all weapons which the politicians of capital use to prevent us from becoming conscious that the only solution possible for our problems is to finish with exploitation once and for all.

Faced with a government incapable of controlling the situation, and whose only real language is crime, detention and provocation, the Democratic Opposition of the Right (liberals, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats) got together with the Left and extreme Left in the same endeavour - to channel the strike movement towards democratic reforms.

In an article appearing in Mundo Diario (a Stalinist-backed paper) entitled ‘The Urgent Need for a Political Pact’, Solé Tura, mouthpiece of the Catalonian Communist Party, drew the following conclusions from the struggles in Vitoria, Pamplona, and Sabadell: “You have to be blind not to see that we are on the point of losing the big opportunity for establishing and stabilising a democracy in our country.” He ended with the following proposal for immediate action: “Either we quickly reach an accord which encompasses the opposition and the consistent reformists to bring into being a democratic alternative, or we will very quickly reach a limit, and beyond that limit things are going to turn out very difficult for all, that is to say for the country.”

What could be clearer? A party which pretends to be ‘proletarian’ and ‘communist’ measures struggles in terms of the interests of the ‘Nation’, which can only mean the owners of the ‘fatherland’: the capitalists.

The small groups to the left of the CP are more cautious, since they speak in the name of the ‘working class and the people’; but their intervention is still more criminal because they present the same reforms which the CP and the bourgeoisie defend, as ‘great victories for the working people’; at least the CP has the nerve to speak openly in the name of the bourgeoisie and the nation:

ORT, MCE and PTE[8] in a joint declaration, after much snivelling about the assassinated workers and shouting about how evil and fascist Juan Carlos is, conclude the necessity for: “. . . a real unity of the democratic forces to fight in a consistent way for democracy against fascism, against the disunity and bourgeois vacillations of the Junta and the Plataforma.”

Liga Communista[9] in their paper Combate number 40, criticise Ruiz Giménez and Tierno Galván (bourgeois radical democrats) for not going to the pro-amnesty demonstration in Madrid on January 20th, adding: “. . . the thousands of demonstrators didn’t need their presence to defend the amnesty, and other democratic aspirations of the masses which they (Giménez and Galván) don’t know how to defend consistently.”

Since the bourgeoisie don’t know how to fight for the democracy which they need, LC will attend to the matter by telling workers that they should help the bourgeoisie out.

For the ‘ultra-leftist’ OICE, the balance sheet of Vitoria reads as follows: they attribute the criminal acts to a phantasmal ‘ultra’ faction of the bourgeoisie, and end up considering the workers’ self-defence of their demonstrations and assemblies as provocations and adventurism; they consider the class as ‘immature’ for the ‘democratic rupture’ as for the ‘socialist rupture’; finally they seize the chance to advertise themselves as a ‘beacon’ for the workers, attributing to themselves the ‘honour’ of having directed the struggle.

This ‘anti-capitalist’ and ‘left communist’ organisation doesn’t say a word about the importance that this fight has for the advance of the workers’ movement; nor does it draw the lessons by pointing out successes and errors so that the class can prepare itself for future struggles; nor does it see the fight within the world situation and the general struggle of the class. Not one word of all this; its total obsession is to show that the OICE is ‘responsible’, and that it didn’t fall for any ‘provocations’.

The left of capital

If we have reviewed the reactions of the groups of the Right, Left and extreme Left to the events in Vitoria, this has not been to expose then, and once having done so offer our merchandise as the best.

All comrades who want to engage in a permanent collective and organised struggle against capital must regroup themselves into a political organisation where we will forge a clear communist programme and a coherent intervention in the class struggle.

The problem we have to consider is whether those organisations of the Left and extreme Left who put themselves forward as the ‘vanguard’ of the proletariat really are useful instruments in the fight for communism.

For us the answer is no. For neither in the programme, nor in the organisation, nor in the consciousness of these groups can we find anything of use to that fight. Their programmes are never about communism and the practical means for achieving the consciousness and organisation necessary to create it. On the contrary, they call for ‘liberties’ (some call them democratic, others political), for a ‘workers’ trade union, for self-management, for workers’ control . . . in other words a minimal programme for the reform of capitalism, when we know from historical experience and from the experience of the democratic countries that this programme is not a ‘step forward’ but a dead-end which weakens us, divides us, and leads us to defeat.

Their organisations are models of bureaucracy and hierarchy, where all political discussion by militants is curtailed with a thousand excuses: the need for ‘unity’, the danger of falling into ‘ultra-leftism’, ‘dogmatism’ or ‘purism’ … But their main danger lies in the recipes they serve up about how the workers should struggle. These recipes are always based on a division between economic struggle and political struggle. In effect, the Left in general and the extreme Left in even more confusing jargon have insisted that the recent struggles are economic (in January Camacho[10] never stopped repeating this everywhere). The funny thing is that they utilise the same logic as the Right, which says “. . . economic strikes, yes; political strikes, no” (because they are managed by Moscow . . . or by the French CGT). The Left rejects the ‘accusation of politicisation’ by separating, in the face of all reality, the economic from the political with the exactitude of a medieval scholastic. The Left does this because, according to them, the only politics the workers can have are the politics of the bourgeois opposition . . . and that’s the end of the discussion!

Who can believe, they ask themselves, that the class can struggle politically in an autonomous way? And the extreme Left too dusts down the poorest texts of Lenin in order to justify the same old counterrevolutionary idea that in the end the workers can only arrive through their struggles with a ‘trade union’ consciousness.

Nobody denies that consciousness has to make its own way, and that in the majority of cases strikes begin for economic reasons. What we absolutely insist is counterrevolutionary is the haughty denial that consciousness is enriched by action; the posing of unbridgeable barriers between economic and political consciousness when all evidence shows that these moments constitute a permanent and continuous progression.

“. . . when they try to take exact account of the strikes, of the co-ordination, and other forms by which proletarians make into reality before our eyes their organisation as a class, some are invaded by a real terror, others show a lofty scorn.”

“Do not say that the social movement excludes the political movement. There has never been a political movement which was not at the same time social.” (Both quotes from Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy)

The guilty ones of Vitoria

It has been said that the dead of Vitoria have to be blamed on the role of the ‘bunker’ which led the workers to slaughter by continually provoking them. The workers only wanted the re-instatement of the twenty two sacked men of Forjas; the challenging attitude of the police and their exacerbation of violence provoked the tragedy; it was all a shady manoeuvre by the bunker to block democratisation. In fact the Government followed the events step by step and the order to fire came from the Civil Governor of Alava, who previously consulted with the Government. In Zamaraga, where the tragedy happened, a conversation by radio transmitter was intercepted between the Chief of Police and the Governor in which the latter specifically said that the former need not have any fear of shooting.

The Governor of Alava doesn’t have any fame as an ultra-rightist; he is a man who has the complete confidence of Fraga and was appointed by him. Neither did the Civil Guard - the refuge of the ultras - poke their noses into the conflict at all.

Another cause which has been pointed out has been the intransigence of the Alava business men and their obstinacy in not negotiating with the workers. Forjas Alaves as and other isolated companies came to an agreement to concede a very substantial part of the demands, with the clear aim of dividing the workers and negotiating company by company. But the workers didn’t allow this manoeuvre to succeed. They demanded that they should be given an overall settlement without dismissals or detentions. This was a political decision in which they put the unity of the class before negotiation and rewards (which they could see as pretty insecure). In the assemblies there were some very heated discussions about this and in the end the position of ‘all or none’ triumphed. In Forjas Alavesas, the board conceded everything: the factory assembly decided to go back to work but the joint assembly asked them to reconsider their decision and to continue to strike. The workers of Forjas accepted this.

This is very important. It means putting class unity before negotiation, before possible economic gains within a factory; it means understanding the political nature of the struggle for our demands (direct confrontation against capital and its state); it means recognising the power of the joint assembly of factories in struggle, the expression of the general movement of the class.

When people talk about the ‘bunker’ or of the irresponsibility of the Alava businessmen, they are inventing scapegoats. They see the savagery of the fascist wing of capital, but they draw a veil over the savagery of its democratic wing. Finally, they are hiding the fact that our class interests clash directly with the whole of capitalist order and that faced with our struggles, any bourgeois regime will employ the same criminal methods.

Vitoria is an example of a conscious and organised struggle by the proletariat against bourgeois power. It shows that in Vitoria workers grasped that our demands couldn’t be satisfied within capitalist institutions (agreements, negotiations, unions …), so it is necessary to prepare ourselves to face the inevitable confrontation with capital and its state.

The creation of scapegoats has a purpose: to make us believe that a trade unionist, economist struggle is viable and disrupted only by a reactionary and bunkerite element against whom we have to direct all our forces. At the same time those who put forward this line try to hide the revolutionary content of the struggle in Vitoria and try to prevent us from facing reality. And this reality is that if we generalise our struggle and unify it autonomously in genuine class organs, the whole of the repression will fall upon us. It is therefore imperative to pose the issue of the organised and conscious defence of our assemblies and demonstrations.

Solidarity with Vitoria

Solidarity with Vitoria cannot be reduced to protest against the government’s crimes; we have to understand how we can become united with the struggle of the Vitoria workers in support of their conscious and autonomous confrontation with bourgeois power.

In some places like in Navarre and Tarragona, there was a class response, while in others - Euzkadi, Catalonia - the dead were made use of by the Left to defend their democratic-nationalist alternative, confining the struggle to whimpering about the crimes.

It can be said that Madrid was a case apart. The exhaustion of the recent general strike weighed heavily on the workers there. There were places where symbolic stoppages of five minutes were made, while in other concerns (Torrejón, Intelsa and Kelvinator in Getafe …) workers struck and went out onto the streets in an attempt to extend the fight, but without success.

In Navarre, the atmosphere was already combative when news arrived from Vitoria. That same Wednesday, May the 3rd, the textile industry was paralysed and 300 factories were on strike for the Collective Agreements of Navarre, a measure intended to favour workers in smaller enterprises. In this action the ‘Council of Workers’[11] (controlled by representatives of the Workers’ Commissions (CCOO)) found itself overtaken by the workers who had elected an assembly of factory delegates. That very Wednesday afternoon, after news from Vitoria had arrived, 160 factory delegates had been meeting, and they decided to propose a general strike to their assemblies. On Thursday morning, they began to close factories, particularly in the area of the Landaben Polygon industrial estate. The main decision, which was taken in almost all the assemblies, was to go out into the streets, to extend the strike, to paralyse the city.

Pickets and demonstrations, called particularly by the workers of the following factories: Superser, Torfinosa, Perfil en Frio, Immanesa, were bringing other factories out into the street and closing shops and bars. As in the general strike of 1973, they again sang:

“Through the streets goes a song

Worker raise your fist,

Leave the machines, come out of the factory,

Go to the streets with a single cry: Revolution! Revolution!”

After building huge barricades and engaging in hard clashes with the cops, the workers reached the centre, where the commercial and banking employees joined them unanimously. The most repeated cries were “We are workers; join us!” “Solidarity with Vitoria!” “Brothers of Vitoria, we shall not forget you!” The workers’ districts were mobilised with everybody coming out into the streets. This happened especially in Rochapea, San Juan and Chantrea. The other Navarran towns were also united; Lesaca, where the workers of Laminaciónes, having paralysed the town, set off on the road to Irún (the border town with France), although the Civil Guard dispersed them with shots. In Estella, Tafalla and Tudela there were total strikes. The movement lasted until the end of the week. To curtail it, the management put forward new economic offers to be considered at the Collective Agreements. On the other hand, the ‘Council of Workers’ put forward their demand for the re-instatement of those sacked in the Potasas conflict of 1975, which the management - cornered by the situation - agreed to negotiate on.

These concessions shortened the struggle, in the same way as the mopping-up work of the Workers Commissions (controlled not by the CP, but by the ORT and the MCE) which stressed the need for, ‘conserving strength’ for the single day of struggle called for all Euzkadi (the Basque Country) to celebrate the 8th of March. That day there were hardly any strikes in Navarre.

In Tarragona: in the refinery plant employing 3,000 workers, workers put forward a class response. On Thursday, the atmosphere was effervescent, but nothing concrete came of it. However, on Friday, some workplaces started to come out, and drew people to them, everybody joining in less than an hour into an assembly where workers proposed making a march into the centre (around six miles away) to try to bring out all the factories in the industrial zone. There were opinions against this, but in the end two-thirds of the meeting decided to go forward. The attempt failed and very few factories joined them. There were groups of workers who asked the demonstrators to hold a meeting in the Ramblas which they could go to after coming out of work. Also many people from the Buenavista neighbourhood joined them. In the Ramblas there were intermittent clashes the whole evening and a Morrocan worker was killed by the police who used the maximum savagery possible.

The Tarragonan experience shows that things may not turn out well at the beginning, but that the only way to go forward is to begin to move. The factory with the highest level of consciousness must not concentrate its strength on struggle in that particular factory; its higher consciousness must lead it to take up the task of generalising and extending working class action. In almost all the zones there were examples of factories that were the motive force for the movement: Kelvinator in Getafe, Superser in Pamplona, Standard in Madrid, Duro-Felguera in Gijón, Caf in Beasíń.

The other solidarity

In Euzkadi, all the unions and political organisations joined in a call for a day of struggle for March 8th. It was followed by some 500,000 people. A success in numbers, but a failure from the point of view of the conscious struggle of the working class. How is it to be explained, for example, that a worker from Basauri was killed on Monday and nobody lifted a finger on the following day to protest against the crime?

One-day struggles mean a whole series of things for the workers’ movement which it is necessary to criticise and demystify.

1. In the first place, to stop for 24 hours and on the following day to return to work as if nothing had happened, serves to accustom the workers to the idea that their weapons of struggle (the strike, the demonstration) are means for pressuring the bourgeois state, not means for liberation which go on reinforcing our unity and weakening our enemy, until there is a violent confrontation.

2. In the second place, one-day struggles are demonstrations of force on the part of the parties of the Left against the state and other traditional factions of the bourgeoisie; they have the object of convincing the ruling factions that they should take note of the Left’s capacity for mobilisation and recognise that there is a role for the Left in the political game of the bourgeoisie. Although using methods different from parliamentary politics, they have the same end: to use the workers’ struggle in conflicts between one faction of capital and another.

The meaning of the one-day struggles held in the whole of Euzkadi was the same, with a propaganda which placed the emphasis on the fact that the dead were Basques, assassinated by Spanish centralism.

The Left of the whole country has made use of the dead to attempt to convince the population about the need for democracy. Thus, there were numerous funeral processions, protesting against the ‘violence of a government’, and demanding the coming of another - a ‘democratic’ one - which would ‘end all types of violence!’ 

March 1976

The arguments by both sides in the UK’s Referendum on membership of the European Unions are limited. They make outlandish claims on the benefits of Leaving or Remaining while warning of the dangers of their opponent’s policy in a perpetual pantomime of “Oh no it isn’t! Oh, yes it is!”

Yet it’s clear from the start that there can only be one winner, and that’s the British ruling capitalist class. We have been asked to examine every issue with one thought uppermost in our minds: “What is best for Britain?” To look at the effect on jobs, prices, benefits, pensions, family income, the prospects for businesses big and small, security, immigration, sovereignty, terrorism, anything you can think of is supposed to be looked at in terms of the UK’s membership of the EU. And ‘what is best for British capitalism’, as soon as it is considered in an international context, means ‘what is best for British imperialism’.

The fact that workers are exploited by the capitalist class means that their interests are not the same. Many groups and parties pretending to speak on behalf of the working class have recommendations on how to vote. The Labour Party says that Remaining provides jobs, investment and ‘social protection’. Many leftists are campaigning against EU membership on the grounds that the ‘bosses’ EU’ is against nationalisation, demands austerity, and attacks workers’ rights. In reality one of the main attacks on the working class in Britain today lies in the propaganda around the referendum and all the illusions in the democratic process and the EU that all the lying campaigners of the bourgeoisie are trying to foment.

Divisions in the British bourgeoisie

So, what is agreed by the Leave and Remain campaigns – what will benefit British business, what is good for the British capitalist state – is the shared basis of an ideological campaign which could have a disorienting effect on a working class that is already confused about where its interests lie and what capacity it has to change society. However, the differences between the In and Out campaigns are not all just theatre (although there is a lot of that) as there are, and have been for decades, real divergences in the ruling class on membership of the EU.

The dominant faction of the British bourgeoisie sees the benefits of the UK’s membership of the European Union at the economic, imperialist and social level. Big businesses from the FTSE 100, the vast majority of manufacturing industry, big banks and other financial institutions, multinational corporations, much of local government, organisations representing lawyers and scientists, all recognise the importance of access to an EU market of 500 million people, the deals that the EU is capable of doing, the fact EU trade with the rest of the world is about 20% of global exports and imports, the investment that EU countries attract, and the necessity for the UK to be part of the EU as part of its imperialist strategy. Outside of Britain the main factions of a number of major capitalist countries also see the importance of the UK’s continuing EU membership. In Europe itself, leading figures in Germany, France, Spain, Netherlands, and Sweden have expressed themselves in favour of Britain remaining.

Outside Europe it is significant that US President Obama is among those who support the UK continuing in Europe. The question of Britain’s relationship with the US is not simple. During the period of the two big imperialist blocs led by the US and the USSR Britain was an integral member of the western bloc, a loyal ally to the US. It was during this period that the EU’s predecessors, the European Coal and Steel Community, and its successor, the European Economic Community were founded, also, effectively, part of the US-led imperialist bloc. But, with the collapse of the eastern bloc, and the corresponding breakdown of the western bloc, British capitalism’s imperialist and economic interests implied different emphases in policy. At the imperialist level Britain has tried to pursue an independent orientation, while, at the same time, sustaining alliances with other powers when the situation has demanded it. At the economic level almost half of British trade is with the EU, while 20% of UK exports go to the US. In an article we published in WR 353 in 2012 (“Why British capitalism needs the EU”) we said that “examination of Britain’s international trade shows that its economic interests have their main focal points in Europe and US. This helps to explain the actions of the British ruling class in recent years […] While it would be an error to see a mechanical relationship between Britain’s economic and imperialist interests it would also be a mistake to deny any such link. Analysis of the economic dimension reveals some of the foundations of Britain’s strategy of maintaining a position between Europe and the US.” For the US, the UK is still a Trojan horse in the EU, a potential means to undermine the possibility of Germany strengthening itself as a rival to the US. For the UK, Germany is part of an important trading partnership, but also a potential imperialist antagonist.

But what about those campaigning for Britain to leave the EU? Who are they? What do they represent?  Economically we have heard the managers of hedge funds favouring Brexit, along with, typically, smaller businesses and individual entrepreneurs. If there were nothing else to consider then this would be easy to explain. The law as it stands benefits hedge funds, but they are understandably inclined to rail against any form of regulation that might obstruct their pursuit of profit. With smaller businesses, their size might just be the result of a lack of competivity, but that doesn’t stop them blaming the EU, or the UK government, or the local council, or the practices of bigger businesses. Anything could be the target of their frustration, when quite possibly what they suffer mostly from are plain ‘market forces’.

However, politically, the factions of the bourgeoisie that support Brexit are notable by their variety, and are not obviously tied to any particular social group or strata. There are the extreme right parties from UKIP to the BNP, the eurosceptics of the Conservative Party, and, from the left, an array of Stalinists and Trotskyists. Here are a strange set of bedfellows with a wide range of rhetoric and hypocrisy. That the likes of Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith, who’ve been at the heart of government since 2010, part of a party that’s been in power for more than 60 of the last 100 years, can stand behind banners saying “Let’s Take Back Control” is a fine example of Doublespeak from these longstanding functionaries of a long-established part of capitalism’s political apparatus. However, there is something else that the Leave factions have in common, and that is their attachment to the rhetoric of populism, the pose of standing against the ‘establishment’, a hankering after a mythical past, and battlers against an exterior threat . In a period of growing social decomposition, populism is an increasing phenomenon. In the US there is the Tea Party and Donald Trump, in Germany there is AfD and Pegida, in France there is the Front National, and, from the left, there is Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. Closer to home, in the 2015 UK General Election, the Scottish National Party’s populist campaign was at the root of the removal of nearly all Labour’s Scottish MPs.

The classic example of the marriage of two career populists was at an Anti-EU meeting where Nigel Farage of UKIP introduced a speech from George Galloway from the Respect party (“one of the greatest orators in the country” and “a towering figure on the left of British politics”). Galloway explained that “We are not pals. We are allies in one cause. Like Churchill and Stalin…” The comparison was telling. Galloway sees the link up of left and right as being like an imperialist alliance in a war involving death and destruction on a massive scale. He is not wrong. Farage and Galloway do represent forces for imperialist war and destruction, but then so do all other factions of the ruling class. The more immediate problem posed by the rise of populism is this: while it is evidently a phenomenon that can be used by the bourgeoisie, there is the danger that it can escape the control of the main political parties and cause problems for the usual political manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie.

Working class interests

We don’t intend to speculate on the result of the coming Referendum. It is hard to see which factions of the bourgeoisie would benefit from a Leave victory which would seem to pose difficulties for British capitalism. But the British bourgeoisie is the most experienced in the world and would seem likely to be able to ensure a Remain victory, or at least be able adapt to any other result.

What’s important for the working class is to see that the campaign around the EU Referendum is completely on the terrain of the ruling class. There is nothing to choose from the alternatives on offer as they both start and finish with the continuation of British capitalism and the demands of its imperialist drive.

For the working class the possibilities for social change do not lie in capitalism’s democratic process. For the struggle of the working class to be effective it needs to be conscious. At this stage, when workers have little sense of class identity, they need to be able to withstand the propaganda campaigns of all the different factions of the bourgeoisie. Forty years ago, in 1975, there was an earlier referendum on EU membership. Like today there was agreement between the main factions of the main parties, but also, in the No camp you could see the shared approach of right-winger Enoch Powell and left-winger Tony Benn. At that time the campaign was one aspect of the work of the Labour Party in power, trying to convince workers that they should abandon their struggles and put their faith in a party of the left. Today the working class is not struggling at all on the same scale as it was in the 1970s and 1980s, but, with a perspective for a world based on relations of solidarity rather than exploitation, it still has the potential to transform society. 

Car 9/4/16

(Second letter from the ICC to Tampa Communist League)

We welcome the publication of DP’s response to our letter to the Tampa Communist League1 and hope that this debate can continue in a fruitful (and fraternal) way. We will keep this reply fairly succinct but hope by doing so to concentrate on the main issues raised in this debate. We are responding more or less in the order the topics were covered in your letter, but for us the last two questions – the relationship between activity and period, and the principal lessons of the Russian revolution regarding party and power – are probably the most important ones for further debate.

The letter is a response from an individual comrade and we don’t know the content of the discussions about the question of the party within the group – it would be very positive if at some point an account of these discussions could also be published. But DP says that the group as such has added a new “unity point” on this question, i.e. “In order to triumph in the class struggle the proletariat must organise into a world-wide political party around a programme that expresses its exclusive class interest”.

“The proletariat must organise into a world-wide political party”

There is certainly much in this condensed formulation we can agree to: that the working class cannot triumph without a political party; that this party has to defend a distinct programme; that it must be international. But we still take issue with the formulation “the proletariat must organise into a political party”. When this formulation appeared in the 19th century workers’ movement under the impulsion of the marxist current, it was a definite expression of the necessity for the working class to engage in political struggles up to and including the seizure of power. It was thus to become a point of demarcation from those, like the anarchists, who rejected both the immediate political combat and the goal of political power. But the formulation “constitution of the proletariat into a class, and thus into a political party” (Communist Manifesto) also expressed certain ambiguities of the period, not least the fact that there was not yet a clear distinction between the unitary organisations of the class, open to all workers, irrespective of their beliefs or opinions, and the political organisation organised around a clear programme (made up of members who join because they agree to the political principles of the organisation) . The First International, for example, combined both these aspects. But as the class struggle matured this distinction became much sharper: in the Second International, between the socialist parties and the trade unions, in the Third, between the communist parties and the soviets. For us, this was one of the signs that the organisation question is posed differently to the working class in different epochs, in particular, when it enters what the Third International referred to as the “epoch of proletarian revolution”. It is in this epoch, when there is no longer any possible cohabitation between reformists and revolutionaries in the same organisation, that it becomes evident that the party is the organisation of the communist minority within the class.

What kind of revolutionary practice?

Nevertheless, the theoretical bases for what became clarified in “revolutionary practice” can already be found in the Communist Manifesto, which affirms that communists are not saviours from on high, not a self-appointed elite, but merely the most determined and theoretically advanced minority of the class, an expression of its historical struggle which is also an active factor in its development. This vision is one of a class in movement, one in which consciousness necessarily develops in an uneven way, given the enormous weight of the dominant ideology. The communist minority is indeed in the “avant-garde” when it comes to political clarity, but its aim is always to generalise this clarity as widely as possible. By the same token, the communist programme is not developed by the politicised minority in isolation from the class struggle: the latter learns from the struggle and seeks to draw out its most significant lessons and in doing so to clarify the perspectives for the future.

We don’t think there is anything elitist in this view. Nor do we think that there is any contradiction between aiming at the highest level of political clarity and the culture of debate, the confrontation of ideas, the testing of hypotheses in relation to practical experience. On the contrary: class consciousness, theoretical clarity, can only develop in this way. The search for truth for a clear perspective, is not something that is “imported” from outside or imposed onto the class from above, it is the result of a process of collective and individual reflection which can only move forward through debate and the exchange of ideas., But debates in a movement that aims to apply the scientific method are not a simple exchange of opinion – they seek to achieve a higher synthesis and this includes the intransigent critique of false conceptions2.

What are “modern Leninist groups”?

DP’s reply refers to “modern Leninist groups” without specifying which organisations or political tendencies are meant. It looks to us, however, as if it is talking about the organisations of the left of capital, such as the Trotskyists, whose ideas about organisation are bound to be hierarchical and monolithic, simply because these are natural to all bourgeois organisations. Although in the CLT’s points of unity you talk about the left of capital, it is not very specific and we are not sure whether you would include “modern Leninist groups” in this category.

The fact that bourgeois organisations function like bourgeois organisations is evident enough, but this does not mean that authentically proletarian organisations cannot be affected by manifestations of bourgeois ideology such as elitism and monolithism. Some indeed – such as the Bordigists – positively theorise such conceptions, while others are affected in a more subtle and perhaps more insidious way. But all of us - not just the revolutionary minority but the entire working class - are bound to be affected in one way or another because in a class society “the dominant ideas are the ideas of the dominant class”; and this means a permanent struggle against the infiltration of such ideas and practices. And this too is part of the theoretical combat, the fight for a higher level of clarity, specifically on the questions of organisation and of morality (we note that both DP’s reply and the points of unity both refer to the question of ethics and we welcome this – it’s a discussion we could take up at a later date).

Minimum and maximum programmes

On the question of the minimum and maximum programmes, we don’t agree that the 1880 programme of the Parti Ouvrier can be a model for us, however interesting it is as a historical document. It’s true that Marx wrote it along with Guesde, but if we are not mistaken, it was Guesde’s interpretation of the demands it contained, especially the economic ones, which led to disagreements between the two of them later and to Marx exclaiming that “moi, je ne suis pas marxiste”. For Marx, the economic demands were based on real possibilities and could be won under capitalism though the immediate struggle, whereas “discounting the possibility of obtaining these reforms from the bourgeoisie, Guesde regarded them not as a practical programme of struggle, but simply ... as bait with which to lure the workers from Radicalism.” The bourgeoisie’s inevitable rejection of these reforms would, Guesde believed, “free the proletariat of its last reformist illusions and convince it of the impossibility of avoiding a workers ’89.”3. This bears a strong resemblance to the manipulative methodology behind Trotsky’s “transitional demands” and Marx was right to reject it.

The political part of the text, on the other hand, while containing some very concise formulations about the goals of the revolution, is less than clear about the political means to achieve them: on the one hand, even though this was nearly 10 years after the Commune, the programme still holds out the hope that the working class can gain power through parliament. And at the same time it uses terms like “Commune” and “the general arming of the people” which imply that this whole programme is to be implemented once the class itself has already taken power.

Not then an example of clarity which we can import wholesale, but one to be seen in its historical context. This again raises the question of periodisation – for us the transition from the ascendant to the decadent period – which has a considerable bearing on whether the demands put forward in a political programme correspond to the possibilities of the period. For us, the measures which should be contained in the programme of a communist party in a genuinely revolutionary situation must be based on a clear understanding that the bourgeoisie is no longer fit to rule and that all its political institutions, including its most democratic, are thoroughly rotten, and need to be destroyed from top to bottom; and by the same token that capitalist social relations have reached a total impasse and are a blockage on the development of man’s productive powers. This is why there is no alternative to replacing them with communist social relations. Even if this entire social-economic transformation cannot be implemented the moment the working class takes power, the measures it takes must tend in this direction. On both counts (political and social-economic) we think we are talking about implementing the maximum programme: the communist revolution.

Does the existence and role of revolutionary organisations depend on the period?

In our previous letter we referred to the question of the communist fraction, which was not taken up in DP’s reply. But we think that it is an indispensable element in understanding the role of communists in periods when the formation of the party is not yet on the immediate agenda. Historical experience indicates that parties are born when the class struggle is in the ascendant, and that they are not the product of the incremental growth of this or that group. They tend to appear as the coming together of different groups and tendencies, but the more advanced fractions play the most decisive role in his process, and are the best means to ensure that the party will be formed around a clear programme. This is why, for us, the development of a coherent theoretical outlook - a specific task of a communist fraction or fraction-like organisation - is indeed crucial. And we do think that centralisation, as opposed to federalism or localism, is the means that proletarian organisations use to develop their theoretical unity. For us this does not mean an unthinking conformity imposed by a minority from above. Rather it implies the commitment of the whole organisation to achieving a coherent outlook on world events and the perspectives for the future. From our point of view, centralisation is a principle in the workers’ movement, since it implies the precedence of the whole over its parts, and theoretical rigour is our main weapon against the fog of bourgeois ideology. We also think that there can be no separation between this search for theoretical unity and the defence of principles, since the latter are precisely the conclusions forged by marxist theory on the basis of the historic experience of the class. It follows that principles can only be defended consistently if they are built on very firm theoretical foundations – they are not just a collection of points but are linked to each other, intertwined, bedded into a framework. But rather than continue with this train of thought now, perhaps we can refer comrades to the article based on one of the reports to the 21st ICC congress, “The role of the ICC as a ‘fraction’”, which provides a short history of the fractions in the workers’ movement4. As always, we would welcome your comments.

The party taking power?

Finally, with regard to the question of the party taking power, there is obviously a connection here to the question of whether the party is a minority or not. If you consider that the party, however “massive” its influence, will only regroup a minority of the class, then it is all the more logical to oppose such a minority taking or holding power. But even if the party organised a majority in the class or could obtain a majority in the soviets, we would still be opposed to the notion of the party taking power, whether or not shared with other parties or with the soviets themselves. First, because it undermines the historical advance made by the workers’ movement, referred to above, which made it possible to see that the unitary organisations and the political organisations have distinct though complementary tasks. A confusion about these tasks weakens both types of organisation - this is surely a key lesson from the Russian revolution And second, because the idea of the party forming a government or taking power reveals a vestige of parliamentary conceptions which go against the principle of instant revocability of delegates. Bourgeois parties form a government when they have a majority in parliament and can carry on governing for the next four or five years, until the next election. But when delegates to the ‘higher’ councils are subject to constant recall by base assemblies, today’s majority is tomorrow’s minority, and there is no basis for declaring that this or that group is “in power”. In fact, this is precisely the strength of the principle of revocability, that it allows the organisations of the class to express the real evolution of its consciousness.

As we approach the centenary of the October revolution (which will no doubt be accompanied by a flood of propaganda from right and left, aimed at distorting its real significance), we think that a discussion about the lessons of this gigantic experience of our class is as important as ever. We have tried here to outline some of the lessons we draw regarding the relationship between party and soviets; and vital though this is, it does not exhaust the question. In particular, there is a whole wealth of debate and contributions on the question of the transitional state, particularly in the work of Bilan and the Gauche Communiste de France, much of which we have published in our series on communism. However, for the moment, we want to suggest that a fruitful way of continuing this discussion would be for you to send your comments and criticism of two texts in particular: ‘On the party and its relations with the class [41]’ and ‘Party, councils and substitutionism [42]’

Obviously, in sending your comments of our own efforts, we would be greatly interested in hearing from you about what you consider to be the principal lessons of the Russian revolution regarding the relationship between party and class.

We look forward to further debate

Very fraternally, the ICC

If we are to believe the media bombardment that has been assaulting us in recent months, we are on the eve of an earthquake that will shake to the core the traditional scenario of the last thirty years, in which the People’s Party of the right (PP) and the Socialist Party (PSOE) have succeeded each other alternately in power without anyone finding anything to complain about. This political chessboard is disturbed today by the eruption of ‘emergent forces’, and in particular by the most recent: Podemos. But Podemos represents nothing new.

Its political programme and its ideology are the classics of Stalinist regimes[1] defended by the so-called Communist parties (in reality virulently anti-communist) and their leftist acolytes of all stripes (Trotskyists, base unionists, anti-globalisation movements)[2], who are the main supporters of this pantomime of ‘new politics’. The specificity of Podemos which justifies the stunt it has pulled for Spanish capitalism is that the troops of Iglesias (its leader) fulfil a special mission, very important for both the Spanish and the world bourgeoisie, which is to erase the footprints of the movement of May 15 that shook the streets four and a half years ago.

The ‘Pride of Spain’: Iglesias against the internationalism of the movement of May 15

Four years ago, huge crowds took to the streets and squares not only in Spain but also in Greece, the USA, Israel, etc. “This movement of indignation has spread internationally: to Spain, where the then Socialist government imposed one of the first and most draconian austerity plans; to Greece, the symbol of the crisis of sovereign debt; to the United States, the temple of world capitalism; to Egypt and Israel, focus of one of the worst and most entrenched imperialist conflicts, the Middle East.” There were attempts, still timid and embryonic, at international solidarity: “In Spain solidarity with the workers of Greece was expressed by slogans such as ‘Athens resists, Madrid rises up’. The Oakland strikers (USA, November, 2011) said ‘Solidarity with the occupation movement world wide’ In Egypt it was agreed in the Cairo Declaration to support the movement in the United States. In Israel they shouted ‘Netanyahu, Mubarak, El Assad are the same’ and contacts were made with Palestinian workers.[3]

This internationalism, expressed spontaneously even in an embryonic way in the strongest moments of the Indignados movement, is something very dangerous for the bourgeoisie which justifies its domination of the proletariat by the existence of a supposed community of interest between exploiters and the exploited of each country.

From its origins, Podemos has been characterised by what they call a “transversal” discourse, that is to say, addressing both the ‘disadvantaged’ and business leaders to whom the they have not ceased to send reassuring messages. But this supposed ‘transversal’ community is also the one invoked by the fraternal party of Podemos, the Greek Syriza party, to justify its compliance with the requirements of the European Union, which underpins an intensification of the attacks against the living and working conditions of the Greek workers. Instead of solidarity towards the victims, Iglesias, Errejon and the others solidarised with their executioner, Tsipras.

In this patriotic assault, the ‘podemists’ have distanced themselves from proposals to send soldiers into the areas occupied by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq on the grounds that “they might be killed”. We have seen that, in contrast to their initial call to send troops into the areas occupied by the Islamic State (in Syria and Iraq), they then claimed that “Spanish soldiers could be killed.” The ‘argument’ of the man with the ponytail[4] is a very effective weapon to inject the poison of nationalism, and attempts to trap workers in the small and narrow world of the ‘Spanish nation’.

No matter that the Syrian or Iraqi workers and peasants will be massacred? No matter that the population of Raqqa, the ‘capital’ proclaimed as the bastion of the Islamic State, is subject to the threefold terror of its ‘Islamist rulers’, the bombing of Russia, US and France and also of the Assad militias? No matter that these territories will be transformed into a black hole where it becomes simply impossible to live? None of this we should worry about, according to the ‘national philosophy’ and jingoism of Mr. Iglesias! The only thing that matters is that no ‘compatriot’, no Spanish national can go to die there!

It is for this reason that the ‘podemists’ have joined as ‘observers’ the anti-jihadist pact signed by both the parties taking part in the invasion of Iraq (the Popular Party), the invasion of Afghanistan (PSOE) and by the candidates for the invasion of any country that would be made under the banner of the Spanish flag. It is for this reason that Podemos has promised Rajoy[5] all the necessary support to deal with terrorist attacks, as it has already done for the victims of the recent attack in central Kabul[6].

If we put our dreams in the ballot boxes, it will be a nightmare!

One of the most repeated slogans of the movement of May 15 was “our dreams do not fit in your ballot box!” Indeed, the Indignados movement arose with a strong tendency to reject bourgeois politics, elections,[7] etc etc. In the movements of 2011, there began to be emphasised, with still many weaknesses and hesitations, a fact that, today, that is to say four years later, seems strange: “These people, the workers, the exploited who have been presented as failures, idlers, incapable of taking the initiative or doing anything in common, have been able to unite, to share initiatives and to break out of the crippling passivity to which the daily normality of this system condemns them (...) It was the first step towards a real politics of the majority, far from the world of intrigues, of the world, lies and dodgy manoeuvres that is characteristic of the dominant politics. A politics that addresses all the issues that affect us, not just the economy or politics, but also the environment, ethics, culture, education or health.”[8]

By contrast bourgeois politics advocates the isolation of each one of us; it argues that we must each consider ourselves as our own master faced with problems which have a social character and must search for their solution through the individual act of voting in favour of professional politicians – a procedure which, over time, only results in greater atomisation and greater resignation.

The evolution of the trajectory of Podemos is very significant. In its early years, to strengthen the illusion of continuity with the movement of May 15, they reproduced and plagiarised the appearance of the assemblies and public debates to understand the causes of our sufferings, possible alternatives to offer, etc. But today, the so-called ‘assemblies’ of Podemos have become an undisguised knife fight between the different competing tendencies on the electoral lists.

Furthermore, the debates are today reduced to an approval of the list of recipes defended as a simple electoral programme of variable geometry, depending on the electoral needs of Iglesias and those of his gang.[9]

What will the future role of Podemos be?

The organisation of Podemos’ ‘internal’ functioning is not in contradiction with its role, as the representatives of the wing most critical of this group would have us believe. It is in reality fully in line with the mission assigned to this party by the entire bourgeoisie: to convince the workers that any protest movement, any questioning of the control by the networks established by the democratic state to channel indignation about the future capitalism has in store for us, is inevitably doomed to die and finish up in their nets. Its ultimate aim is to convince us that it is useless to think we can fight against the system, because in the end the capitalist system will always recuperate this fight and entangle it in the institutions of the bourgeois state.

The movement of the Indignados in Spain, like those which arose in the following months in the United States or in Israel, or other expressions of weariness towards this capitalist system that turns human beings into vulgar commodities, failed to overcome the trap set by the bourgeois state, and particularly by those factions most able to sabotage any movement that puts capitalism into question. This does not mean that the possibility of a reflection, of a searching to learn the lessons of the causes of the weakening of these movements, does not exist - even in a latent form - in the dynamics of the current situation. The stimulants for this reflection are not missing. Capitalism is sinking every day into an abyss of growing misery for huge masses of the population, into multiplying outbreaks of war and terror, into a spreading scenario of ecological disaster. The exploiting class will always need, and will always be willing to pay handsomely, someone who proclaims at every street corner that the emperor is not naked, he only needs new clothes, like the ones Podemos, Syriza, Bernie Sanders in the USA or the ‘Corbynistas’ in Britain are willing to cut and tailor for him.

Paolo, 13 December 2015 (Acción Proletaria, organ of the ICC in Spain)

It may be that the recent terrorist attacks in France and Belgium are an expression of the difficulties facing “Islamic State” in the ground war in Iraq and Syria, but sudden murderous attacks on the population of the central countries of capitalism are fast becoming a fact of life, just as they have been for many years in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan and numerous other countries caught up in today’s expanding war zone. In sum, the terrorists have “brought the war back home”, and even if Daesh is being militarily weakened in the area of its “Caliphate”, there are plenty of signs that the influence of this or similar groups is spreading to Africa and elsewhere. This is because the conditions which give rise to modern terrorism continue to ripen. Just as al-Qaida was pushed into the background as Enemy Number One by the rise of IS, so new gangs can emerge, and not necessarily Islamist: it looks as if the two most recent atrocities in Turkey were carried out by a wing or offshoot of the “Kurdish Workers’ Party”.

We live in a civilisation, the capitalist mode of production, which has long ceased to be a factor of progress for humanity, its most exalted ideals exposed as utterly degenerate and corrupt. As early as 1871, in the wake of the Paris Commune, Marx noted the cooperation of the great national rivals France and Prussia in crushing the uprising of the exploited, and predicted that in the future the call to “national war” would become no more than a hypocritical excuse for aggression and robbery, in the advanced capitalist zones at any rate. In 1915, in her Junius Pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg insisted that from now on, in a planet dominated by huge imperialist powers, national war was everywhere a mere cover for imperialist appetites. The world wars and super-power conflicts that dominated the 20th century proved her absolutely correct.

And since the collapse of the great power blocs at the end of the 80s, war, the most overt expression of capitalist competition and crisis, has become ever-more irrational and chaotic, a situation highlighted by the carnage in Syria, which is being reduced to rubble by a host of armies and militias which are both at war with each other and which vie for the support of the many imperialist vultures flying over the region – the US, Russia, France, Britain, Iran, Saudi Arabia…

The irrational ideology of Islamic State is a clear product of this broader insanity. In the period of the blocs, opposition to the dominant imperialist powers tended to take on more classical forms of nationalism – the ideology of “national liberation” in which the aim was to develop new “independent” nation states, often with a sprinkling of “socialist” verbiage linked to the support of Russian or Chinese imperialism. In a period when not only blocs but national entities themselves are fragmenting, Islamic State’s pseudo-universalism has a wider appeal; but above all, in a period of history which constantly bears the threat of an end of history, of a collapse into barbarism under the weight of war and economic and ecological crisis, an ideology of the apocalypse, of self-sacrifice and martyrdom, becomes a real lure for the most marginalised and brutalised elements of bourgeois society. It is no accident that most of the personnel recruited for the attacks in France and Belgium come from the ranks of petty criminals who have taken the path of suicide and mass slaughter.

Terrorism and imperialist war

Terrorism has always been a weapon of despair, characteristically of layers in society who suffer the oppression of capitalist society but who have no future within it, of the “small bourgeois” ruined by the triumph of big capital. But 19th century terrorism was usually aimed at symbols of the old regime, at monarchs and other heads of state, and rarely targeted gatherings of ordinary citizens. Today’s terrorists seem to try to outdo each other in their cruelty. The Taliban faction which carried out the Easter attack on a park in Lahore claimed that it was “targeting Christians”. In reality it was targeting a children’s playground. Not just Christians but Christian children. And no matter to these gallant apostles that the majority of those killed were Muslims anyway. In Paris, people who like to listen to rock music, dance and have a drink were considered worthy of death in the IS communiqué lionising the attacks. But even these putrid “religious” justifications don’t stretch very far. Hitting a metro or an airport is aimed first and foremost in killing as many people as possible. This is because terrorism today is, overwhelmingly, no longer the expression of an oppressed, if non-revolutionary, class in its resistance against capitalism. It is an instrument of imperialist war, of a fight to the death between capitalist regimes.

It is sometimes claimed, in justification of suicide attacks by Palestinians in Israel for example, that the suicide belt is the poor man’s drone or dive bomber.  This is true  - or at least morally true - only if you recognise that the “poor man” recruited for the cause of Daesh or Hamas is not fighting for the poor but for a rival set of exploiters, whether a local proto-state or the bigger imperialist powers that arm them and cover them diplomatically or ideologically. And whether carried out by semi-independent groups like Daesh, or directly by the secret services of countries like Syria and Iran (as in the case of a number of attacks on European targets in the 1980s), terrorism has become a useful adjunct of foreign policy to any state or would-be state trying to carve out a niche on the world arena.

This doesn’t mean that acts of terrorism aren’t also used by the more respectable states: the secret services of democratic countries like the USA and Britain, not leaving out Israel of course, have a long tradition of targeted assassinations and even false flag operations in the guise of overtly terrorist factions. But returning to the comparison between the suicide belt and the sophisticated fighter-bomber, it’s true that the model for the terrorists is less the clever liquidation of this or that troublesome individual by the CIA or Mossad, and more the awesome destructive power of the cannons and aircraft of established armies, of weapons that can pulverise entire cities in a matter of days. The logic of imperialist war is the systematic massacre of entire populations – and this is something which has accelerated visibly over the last hundred years, with its progress from World War One, fought primarily between armies in the field, to the vast numbers of civilians carpet bombed or exterminated in death camps during World War Two, and on to the potential World War Three with its threat of the annihilation of the whole human race (a threat which has not at all disappeared in the new phase of chaotic militarism).

“Your armies kill our children with your planes, so we give you a taste of your own medicine, we kill your children with our suicide bombs”. This is the oft-heard justification of the terrorists on their pre- or post-atrocity videos. And again this shows how faithfully they follow the ideology of imperialism. Far from addressing their anger at the real perpetrators of war and barbarism, the small class of exploiters and their state systems, their hatred is directed at entire populations of entire regions of the world, all of whom become legitimate targets, and they thus play their part in reinforcing the false unity between exploiter and exploited which keeps the whole rotten system creaking on. And this attitude of demonising entire swathes of humanity is fully consistent with the dehumanising of particular groups who can then be subject to pogroms and terrorist bombings in the areas where you operate most commonly: Shia heretics, Christians, Yezidis, Jews, Kurds, Turks….

This ideology of revenge and hatred is echoed most clearly in the discourse of the right wing in Europe and America, who (while keeping their options open about blaming the Jews for the world’s ills) tend today to see all Muslims or Islam itself as the real threat to peace and security, and who brand every refugee from the war-torn zones as a potential terrorist mole, thus justifying the most ruthless measures of expulsion and repression against them. This kind of scapegoating is another means of papering over the real class antagonisms in this society: capitalism is in a deep, irresolvable economic crisis, but don’t investigate how capitalism functions to the benefit of the few and the misery of the many, blame it all on a part of the many, thus preventing the many from ever uniting against the few. It’s a very old trick, but the rise of populism in Europe and America reminds us never to underestimate it.

The democratic state is not our friend

But the spread of terrorism, of radical Islamism and its Islamophobic and populist mirror images should not blind us to another very important truth: in the countries of the capitalist centre, the main force safeguarding the system is the democratic state. And just as the democratic state is not averse to using terrorist methods, directly or indirectly, in its foreign policy, so it will use every terrorist attack to strengthen all its powers of social control and political repression. In Belgium, in the days after the Brussels attacks, the police powers of the state were dramatically reinforced: a new law was set in motion, increasing the possibility of raids and telephone-tapping, and introducing a closer following of “dubious” financial funding. As always, there was a very obvious presence of the police and army on the streets. Lessons were learned from the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, which initially gave rise to spontaneous gatherings expressing anger and indignation, requiring a major effort of media and politicians to make sure all this was contained in the framework of national unity. This time there were clear calls by the police for people to stay at home. In sum, trust the democratic state, the only force that can protect us from this horrible menace. The media, meanwhile, urged the population to get used to the new daily ambiance of fear. Of course there was much debate about the apparent incompetence of the Belgian security services which ignored a number of clues prior to the attacks. But the net result of the investigations into such failings will be to find ways of improving surveillance and supervision of the whole population.

Increasing the powers of the police state may help this or that ruling class in the incessant war between bourgeois factions and nations, but it will also be used against the population and the working class in particular in any future social explosions provoked by the crisis of the system, just as laws against terrorist groups who “hold democracy in contempt” can be used against authentically revolutionary political groups who put in question the whole capitalist system, including its democratic fireguards. But above all, just as the Islamist or nationalist ideology of the terrorists serves to bury the real class conflicts in every country, so the call for national unity behind the democratic state serves to prevent the exploited and the oppressed in any country from recognising that their only future lies in solidarity with their class brothers and sisters across the planet, and in the common struggle against a putrifying capitalist order.

Amos

On hearing of a strike by nurses demanding better staffing levels at Europe’s largest hospital, Charité, in Berlin last July a junior doctor in London said “They should do that here”. Now the junior doctors are striking here in England in a dispute over a contract that involves both a pay cut and problems of staffing levels. The government claim that they have offered a pay rise, but it’s one which will leave doctors thousands of pounds worse off due to a cut in out of hours pay. The claim that this is about 7 day working is equally outrageous, when the junior doctors have always covered nights and weekends, and rightly fear that increasing the weekend workload without increasing the number of staff would put patients at risk. In February secretary of state for Health, Jeremy Hunt, announced that the new contract would be imposed from August as negotiations had broken down.

The question facing junior doctors now, as with any sector of workers, is how to struggle. The BMA has escalated strike action from one day to two days in March and again on 6-8 April, and on 26-28 April will call an 18 hour strike without emergency cover – emergencies will be seen by other doctors. It is also launching a judicial review of the government decision on the contract – junior doctors have raised tens of thousands of pounds for this.

The problem here is that judicial review is clearly not an action that workers take collectively, but an appeal by citizens to the state and in the case of ongoing strike action nothing but a sideshow, a distraction to make it appear the BMA is doing something for junior doctors. Strike action, on the other hand, is the classical weapon of working class struggle and the plan to withdraw emergency cover sounds really militant – although other BMA members will be covering. Nevertheless, the strikes are protest strikes in support of union negotiation, with the BMA website at pains to explain who may and may not join the strike, insisting that participation in the strike is an individual decision, and laying out how to picket legally (a maximum of 6) with a view to public support. And the rules on who can strike are indeed byzantine. If teachers have faced a situation where those in one union are told to cross a picket line of those in another, there are some doctors in the position of being told they can strike on Wednesday 6th, when they are formally employed by the NHS, but not on Thurs 7th when part of the same job is formally for Public Health England, for instance. Here we can see the BMA is doing its best to rob the strike action of all collective solidarity and turn it into another protest by citizens.

Is this because junior doctors, however highly educated, are very inexperienced in class struggle? Last time they struck in 1975 the overwhelming majority were destined for a petty bourgeois position either as GPs running a small business or consultants with a private practice. After 40 years of pressure on NHS costs that is no longer the case, and while some will find more scope for business as NHS providers, or in the NHS bureaucracy, or both, others will be salaried workers. In this situation their union, the BMA, prides itself on representing all doctors whether employees or employers. Whatever is unusual about the BMA, it is containing this struggle just like any other union.

Calling workers out on strike for one or 2 days now and then as a demonstration to support or demand negotiation has been typical of struggles in the recent past, such as the electricians in 2011-12 or the teachers’ strike over pensions on 28 March 2012; and before that the CWU used exactly the same tactic with postal workers. It is a tactic that gives the unions great control, even at the expense of anger by the workers and in spite of the efforts they make to break out of this control. For instance when electricians and students held separate demonstrations on the same day a large group of electricians tried to get through to link up with the students instead of marching tamely off to Parliament. They were kettled and blocked. Similarly, while most unions would not emphasise that striking is an individual decision they achieve the same thing by emphasising the need to obey the law on picketing. So to struggle as part of the working class, rather than just being a bit of walk-on street theatre, means to come up against the unions. And as the electricians’ demonstration showed, if the unions cannot maintain control and keep them isolated, the police will be there to do it for them.

The electricians who tried to get through to link up with a student demonstration showed another aspect of what it means to struggle as part of the working class – solidarity with other sectors, linking up with them, because their struggle is our struggle. When workers are isolated, as electricians, as postal workers, as junior doctors, they are very weak – even the massive and very militant miners’ strike in 1984-5 was fatally weakened by being isolated in one sector. Strikes that spread across many sectors – France in 1968, Poland in 1980 – were much more powerful. The question of extending a struggle to link up with other workers is not just a useful tactic; it goes to the heart of what the working class is as the class that collectively produces in capitalism. And it is illegal. So a good citizen may withdraw his or her labour from a particular boss with whom there is a contract of employment, but may not legally try to extend that struggle to others who are equally affected by the dispute. Workers in Port Talbot are not the only ones who are affected by the decisions of Tata Steel: a much greater number of workers in the supply chain also find their jobs at risk because they are all associated in various aspects of the production of goods that goes far wider than even a huge multinational. This is the basis for the working class, when it sees itself as a class, to develop the power of solidarity, and also to develop a perspective for society as a whole which is in total contradiction with capitalism’s war of each against all.

Going back to the example of the junior doctors, their dispute has an impact on all those who rely on the health service, which is recognised but distorted in the totally false ideology of defending the NHS. So we have seen pickets with posters “hoot if you heart the NHS”, as we have in many struggles in the health service, just as the miners called for support to British coal. It is a trap that keeps workers tied to their employer, their sector, their isolation from other workers. And it is clearly not true. Striking health service workers do not love the NHS, they are on strike against it because they are being exploited by it. What they ‘love’ is not the real NHS with all the cuts and cost savings, but the idea of a health service that gives them adequate resources to look after patients well and do a job they love. There is no perspective for such a health service in capitalism.

The issue of what it means to struggle as a part of the working class is not just a question for junior doctors, but for all of us. And it does not stop at being able to recognise the traps and obstacles put in place by unions, government, media or police, it also carries the perspective of a new society: “Class identity is not … a kind of merely instinctive or semi-conscious feeling held by the workers … It is itself an integral aspect of class consciousness, part of the process whereby the proletariat recognises itself as a distinct class with a unique role and potential in capitalist society. Furthermore, it is not limited to the purely economic domain but from the beginning had a powerfully cultural and moral element: as Rosa Luxemburg put it, the workers’ movement is not limited to “bread and butter issues” but is a “great cultural movement”…”[1]  Alex, 7.4.16

The co-chairman of the Oxford University Labour club resigns after claiming “a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews."; two Labour councillors suspended for antisemitic posts on social media: one of them, Salim Mulla, the mayor of Blackburn, tweeted that Israel was behind recent Islamic State atrocities in Europe; further up in the party hierarchy,  Labour MP Naz Shah has to apologise in the House of Commons for suggesting on Facebook that the solution to the Israel-Palestine problem is to transport the entire population of Israel to the USA; and to top it all, Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, denies that Naz Shah has said anything antisemitic and refuses to apologise for claiming that “Hitler supported Zionism in 1932 before going mad and killing six million Jews”. Under pressure from the press and parts of his own party, Jeremy Corbyn announces the formation of a commission of inquiry into antisemitism in the party, headed by civil liberties campaigner Shami Chakrabarti.

So, do Labour and the left have a “Jewish problem”?

Leaving aside the way Labour’s scandals have been used to the hilt by the Tories, the right wing press, and parts of the Labour party itself, to discredit the Corbyn leadership; leaving aside the habitual refrain of the right wing Zionists that any criticism of the Israeli state is by definition antisemitic – the answer is still yes.

Personalising capital

Antisemitism is deeply embedded in capitalism, even if its historic roots go much further back. And Labour and the left are part of capitalism. Like capitalism’s right wing, its left wing also sees social reality not from the standpoint of the exploited class, but from the standpoint of the dominant world system.

Neither right or left are able to understand capital for what it is: a social relation between classes. For them capital must be personified to make it more understandable; but in doing so, they obscure its essentially impersonal nature. As Marx once put it: individual capitalists are increasingly becoming mere functionaries of capital.

The classic embodiment of antisemitism is the form developed by the right wing, by fascism and its various antecedents and offspring. Their anti-Jewish propaganda had a powerful impact in the wake of the First World War and above all in the great capitalist crisis of the 1930s. Millions were thrown into poverty and unemployment by the decline of the capitalist system, but this is a mode of production which appears to operate in a mysterious way, through the working out of economic “laws” which present themselves almost as laws of nature. And yet these are laws that are set in motion by the activity of human beings.  A contradiction which is certainly difficult to grasp! Far easier to understand the calamities brought about by the laws of commodity exchange as the malign product of identifiable human groups.

The “anti-capitalism” of the Nazis was thus able to point the finger of blame at the hooked-nosed, money-lending profiteers from “debt-slavery”, at “unpatriotic” Jewish financiers and at the equally unpatriotic “Judaeo-Bolsheviks” who had stabbed Germany in the back and caused it to lose the war in 1918. The “stab in the back” was, in reality, the proletarian revolution in Germany which had compelled the ruling class to halt the war, but which had been defeated through the combined efforts of the left of capital – the “social traitors” of the German Labour party – and the rightist precursors of the Nazi party. The purveyors of the myth of a Jewish conspiracy against the Fatherland were, in these conditions, largely successful in diverting the defeated and disoriented masses from going any further towards understanding the real origins of their impoverishment.

But the personalisation of capital is not limited to the right. The left also has its sinister caricatures: the top-hatted Fat Cat, the poshos of the Tory party, the bonus-guzzling bankers. In the discourse which dominated much of the Occupy movement in 2011, the bankers in particular were singled out as the very people who had caused the financial crash through their insatiable greed. And this anger at the bankers could easily slide into whispers about the power of the Rothschilds and the “Zionist lobby” in the US, or into the full-blown mythology of the Illuminati, which in turn reiterates the old theme of a world Jewish cabal.

This left-wing personalisation is also at the basis of the essential programme of the left: not the abolition of the capitalist social relation, which means the revolutionary suppression of wage labour and commodity production, but the statifying of that very same social relation – another motif they share with the fascists.  In this world-view, if capital is taken over by the state, it ceases to benefit the private few and can be made to work for the many.

Nationalism, Zionism and anti-Zionism

This traditional state capitalist programme of the left is, significantly, defined by them as a programme of “nationalisations”, with or without the sweetener of “workers’ control”. This is another indicator of the capitalist nature of the left, whether Labourite, Stalinist or Trotskyist. Nationalisation means “national” ownership – the attempt to unify the national capital. The starting point of the left is thus the starting point of all factions of capital – the interests of the nation, that fabulous community which transcends all class divisions.

In the days of Marx and Engels, the workers’ movement supported certain national movements because it saw them as progressive in relation to the still-surviving forms of feudal domination. They understood that they were capitalist and insisted that if workers took part in them they must at all times guard their organisational and political independence.

Those days are long gone. Capitalism everywhere is a reactionary system whose very survival threatens humanity with ruin. The nation state is a crying anachronism in an age where only a world without frontiers, a global human community, can overcome the crises confronting the entire species. Over the last hundred years or so, nationalist ideology has morphed into the most hideous forms, utterly devoid of any progressive content. Again, fascism is the most obvious sign of this, but the nationalism promoted by the Stalinist regimes has been hardly less rabid (and has certainly been made ample use of antisemitism where this proved expedient for the regime, as with the so-called “Doctors’ Plot” in Russia in 1952-53[1] and the employment of dark references to Zionists and “rootless cosmopolitans” in state propaganda).  

Modern political Zionism was born at the end of the 19th century as yet another form of nationalism. It arose as a reaction against the rise of antisemitism in Europe. Despairing of any possibility of radical social change as a cure for the scapegoating of the Jews, its mainstream version elaborated by Theodor Herzl and others came up with the solution of a Jewish state in Palestine, where Jews would not only be free from persecution but would create a kind of ideal society, flowering in the allegedly uninhabited deserts of the Holy Land. 

Like all forms of nationalism, Zionism starts off by obscuring the real class differences within the “Jewish community” and claims that all Jews have the same fundamental interests, from the worker in a small clothing factory to the Baron de Rochschild himself. For that reason alone, it is an antidote to the real danger that threatens capitalism: that the workers of the world will unite, recognising that their true interests have nothing to do with nationality or religion, but spring from a shared struggle against a shared exploitation.

But more than this: like any other “national liberation movement” in the epoch of imperialism, Zionism could only survive by attaching itself to the great powers that dominated the globe. First Britain, with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, then, with the fight against the British Mandate in Palestine in the 40s, the USA. And, having established itself as a nation state, Israel provided us with further confirmation of Rosa Luxemburg’s observation that we are living in an epoch where every state, from the most powerful to the most petty, has its own imperialist appetites. The drive to conquer surrounding territories and to expel or subjugate their populations has been reflected at the ideological level by the ascendance, within Zionism, of the most reactionary notions justifying the imperialist expansion of the Israeli state – Netanyahu’s thuggish nationalism, various brands of religious fundamentalism, and even a kind of Jewish fascism, where the slogan of “kill the Arabs” raised by the admirers of “Rabbi” Meir Kahane bears a sinister resemblance to the “Judenraus” of the Nazis.

The left has no difficulty in chronicling this story of the transformation of Zionism from Herzl’s utopia of a safe haven for Jews into an increasingly militarised outpost surrounded by an ‘Anti-terrorist” wall. But their critique of Zionism is an essentially nationalist one, since they choose to oppose it by supporting another form of nationalism, supposedly a “nationalism of the oppressed”, an “anti-imperialist” struggle for national liberation. For them, Zionism is a “nationalism of the oppressor”, similar to British jingoism or German fascism, because it allied itself with imperialism and established a new colonial system in Palestine. In reality, the Jews who were drawn towards Zionist ideology in the 1930s after the failure of the proletarian revolution and with the rise of fascist persecution were also oppressed, and it was their tragedy that the escape to Palestine brought them into conflict with the oppressed Palestinian Arabs who were already living there. But whether the followers of a nationalist ideology are oppressed or not, the actual nationalist movements they espouse are unfailingly  compelled to seek imperialist backers: early Palestinian nationalism first tried it with the British (who were utterly two faced in their policy towards Jews and Arabs in Palestine), then it sought help from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; during the Cold War it turned to Russian imperialism; when Palestinian nationalism morphed into the Islamism of Hizbollah and Hamas, they became more reliant on regional powers like Iran or Saudi Arabia. But underneath all these shifts, the reality of a dependence on imperialism remains. Palestinian nationalism is not anti-imperialist, but part of the world imperialist system.

It is well known that Corbyn has developed links with Hamas and Hizbollah, and his allies in the Trotskyist movement, after years of supporting Arafat or other factions of the PLO, have raised slogans like “we are all Hizbollah” at demonstrations against Israeli incursions into Lebanon. It is here that anti-Zionism indeed becomes indistinguishable from antisemitism. It is an irony of history that the classic motifs of European Jew-hatred - from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the Blood Libel[2]  - are now openly peddled in the Arab and Muslim world, which once had a rather different relationship with its Jewish minorities. Hamas has referred to the Protocols in its programme to prove that there is a world Zionist conspiracy. Hezbollah’s leaders have talked of “throwing the Jews into the sea”. Corbyn and the Trotskyists may disapprove of these excesses, but the essence of national liberation ideology is that you make a common front with the enemies of your enemy. In this way, the left becomes a vehicle not only of a more shamefaced antisemitism, but of its most open manifestations.

Who collaborated with Hitler?

To return to the scandal caused by Livingstone’s claim about Hitler supporting Zionism.  Clearly “Red Ken” doesn’t have much grasp of the materialist conception of history if he thinks the Holocaust is down to Hitler all of a sudden going mad.   But the core of his claim – collaboration between the Nazi regime and the Zionist organisations – is not quite so outrageous, even if this is a subject that is mired in controversy and historical sources on the subject must be treated with caution. Given that there was a convergence of interests between the Nazis, who wanted Jews out of Germany, and Zionists who also wanted them to leave, provided that they went to Palestine, it is hardly surprising to find evidence that this convergence led to actual cooperation - as in the case of the Havaara, or Transfer, agreement which Livingstone refers to, allowing German Jews to take themselves and a good part of their wealth to Palestine, or the toleration of Zionist organisations in Germany by the Nazi regime.

The story is highly complicated: the Nazis, no less than the British, were quite capable of playing a double game in Palestine, giving support both to the Zionists in so far as they came into conflict with the British, and also to the Mufti of Jerusalem who led an often violent opposition to Jewish immigration into Palestine. And there were certainly factions of Zionism who saw an ideological connection between their version of Jewish nationalism and the Nazi racial doctrines – most notably in the case of the Lehi group, better known as the Stern Gang, which preached a kind of Hebrew racial identity and which proposed a military alliance with the Nazis against the British, seen by Lehi as enemy number one.

We don’t propose to go further into this particular question here. But there is a great deal left unsaid in all the bluster about Livingstone’s remarks, both by the right and the left. Because collaboration with the Nazis before and during the war itself was not limited to the relatively small Zionist organisations of the day. Indeed, there was considerable support for fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s by the ruling classes of the main capitalist powers, still haunted by the spectre of “Bolshevism” which they continued to identify with the Stalinist regime in the USSR. They saw in fascism a rather brutal but perhaps necessary counter-weight to the threat of proletarian revolution. The Daily Mail, today among a procession of newspapers manufacturing offense about claims of cooperation between Zionism and Nazism, were themselves collaborators with fascism in the 1930s, with their infamous “hurrah for the Blackshirts”[3] headline in January 1934 and other articles expressing admiration for the Hitler regime. That great antifascist and critic of the policy of appeasement towards the Nazis, Winston Churchill, had himself, speaking in Rome on 20 January, 1927, praised Mussolini’s fascist regime: he considered that it had rendered a service to the whole world with its “triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism’[4]. Up to the very eve of war, the rulers of Britain and France were not yet decided whether they should oppose Hitler or ally with him against the USSR. 

Even when Churchill (supported by the Labour party and the left) had recognised that German imperialism was the greater threat to the interests of the British Empire and taken command of the British war effort, hatred of the working class and its struggle could still lead to de facto collaboration with the Nazis – most cynically after the Italian workers’ revolt of 1943 which led to the downfall of Mussolini. It was here that Churchill came up with the policy of “letting the Italians stew in their own juice”, which meant halting the allied advanced  through the south of Italy in order to give the German army time to subdue the workers of the northern cities.

The truth is that there is nothing unnatural about one part of the ruling class cooperating with another against a common enemy – whether an imperialist rival or the exploited class, although it is only the threat from the latter which will lead all the different bourgeois gangs to bury the hatchet and concentrate on crushing the revolution, as they did in 1918, when revolution in Germany convinced both camps that it was time to end the war. This is why there was also nothing unnatural in the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 which enabled the two “totalitarian” regimes to carve up Poland and was the signal for launching the Second World War. By that time, there was nothing Soviet or socialist about the USSR, which had become a capitalist state like all the others.

Fascism and anti-fascism, Zionism and anti-Zionism: these are all varieties of bourgeois ideology which can oppose each other violently but can also make shady deals among themselves. But the most dangerous thing about them is that they aim to convince the working class to forget about its own interests and collaborate with its class enemy.

Amos 6/5/2016

What is the real nature of the Nuit Debout movement?

Gatherings every evening of several thousand people, especially at the Place de la République in Paris: the Nuit Debout movement has been in the headlines since 31 March. These are meetings of people from different horizons – high school pupils and university students, workers and the precariously employed, unemployed and pensioners, all sharing a desire to get together, to discuss, to close ranks against the adversities of this system. The sincerity of many of the participants is undeniable; they are indignant about all kinds of injustice and at root they aspire to a different world, a more human world founded on solidarity. However, Nuit Debout is not developing their fight or their consciousness. On the contrary, this movement is leading them into a dead end and strengthening the most conformist outlooks. Worse than that, Nuit Debout is a vehicle for the most nauseating ideas, like the personalisation of the evils of society, blaming them on a few representatives like bankers and oligarchs. In this way Nuit Debout is not only misleading all those who are taking part for honest reasons, but is already a blow by the bourgeoisie against the consciousness of the whole working class.

Socialist government and unions, hand in hand against the working class

The new Labour law (known as the “El Khomri” law after the current Minister of Labour, Myriam el Khomri) in itself symbolises the bourgeois and anti-working class nature of the Socialist Party. This “reform” will further degrade living standards and increase divisions among the wage earners, putting them in competition with each other. This whole project is an attempt to generalise the idea of separate negotiations over working hours, wage levels, lay-offs…

To facilitate the acceptance of this new law, the unions have played their usual role: they have cried scandal, demanded the modification or withdrawal of certain parts of the initial draft and have pretended to “put pressure” on the Socialist government by organising numerous days of action and demonstrations. These union parades, which consist of people tramping the streets and being bombarded with slogans like “The workers are in the street, El Khomri you are screwed”, or “Strike, strike, general strike!”, without being able to discuss or build anything together , serve only to demoralise people and spread feelings of powerlessness.

In 2010 and 2011, in response to the pensions reform, these same union days of action followed each other for months, sometimes mobilising several million people, but in the end allowing the attack to go through and, worse still, creating a kind of moral exhaustion which still weighs heavily on the whole working class. There is however a notable difference with regard to the movements of 2010 and 2011: the Nuit Debout phenomenon has benefited from a media and political coverage which is much wider, and presented much more sympathetically, than is usual for something which claims to be a social movement contesting the present state of affairs.

Nuit Debout, born from a plebiscite…by the bourgeoisie

“Nuit Debout, the camp of the possible”[1], or “Nuit Debout, bringing the imaginary citizen back to life” as the journal Libération put it. It also wrote that “It’s of little importance how it turns out politically…what counts is that on the public squares and elsewhere, we are groping towards a more dignified daily politics”[2]. This support can also be seen at the international level. Numerous branches of the media around the world have given publicity to the general assemblies of Nuit Debout which, according to them, is reinventing politics and the world. Certain political figures on the left and far left, many of whom have gone along to the assemblies, have also waxed lyrical. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the co-founder of the Parti de Gauche, rejoiced over this gathering, as has the national secretary of the French Communist Party, Pierre Laurent. For Julien Bayou (EELV – the French green party), Nuit Debout  “is an exercise of radical democracy in real time”. Even Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the primaries candidate of the right, says she heard “interesting” slogans on the square, such as “we are not just electors, we are also citizens”. The president of the Republic himself, François Hollande, also gave his little salute: “I find it legitimate that the youth wants to have its say about the world as it is today, even about politics as it is today…I am not going to complain that part of the youth wants to invent the world of tomorrow”. The same ring tone at the international level: for Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, “these movements are magnificent sparks in the midst of a dark sky”.

Reformism and democratism, the two ideological pillars of Nuit Debout

What is the significance of these eulogies by major international media and politicians? The answer is in the two founding documents of the movement. The leaflet distributed by the Convergence des Luttes collective on 31 March in Paris, and which launched the first gathering at the Place de la République[3] puts it like this: “Our governments are trapped in the obsession of perpetuating a system at the end of its tether at the price of ‘reforms’ which are more and more retrograde and conform to the logic of neo-liberalism which has been at work for 30 years: all power to the stockholders and the bosses, to the privileged few who appropriate the collective wealth. This system has been imposed on us by government after government, at the cost of numerous ways of denying democracy”. The manifesto has the same tone: “humanity must be at the heart of the concerns of our leaders”[4].

The orientation is very clear: it’s a matter of organising a movement to “put pressure” on the “leaders” and the state institutions in order to promote a more democratic and humane capitalism. This is the kind of politics that has marked the whole life of Nuit Debout. It’s enough to look at the actions coming out of the assemblies and commissions: “an aperitif with Valls” (a few hundred demonstrators went to have an aperitif at the home of the prime minister on 9 April); demonstrations at the Élysée on 14 April, following a TV programme in which François Hollande took part; occupation of the banking agency BNP Paribas in Toulouse; picnic at a hypermarket in Grenoble; disturbance of the regional council meeting in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and the municipal councils of Clermont-Ferrand and Poitiers; establishment of a ZAD (Zone to be Defended)at Montpelier; occupation of a MacDonald’s in Toulouse; tags on the windows of banks; depositing rubbish in front the doors of certain Parisian town halls, etc.

The most popular proposals at the Paris general assemblies are also revealing about this political orientation of looking for a few superficial or falsely radical alterations to the capitalist system: demonstrations for an “ecological democracy”, for a life-long wage, a minimum wage, cutting high incomes, full employment, organic agriculture, better treatment of minorities, democracy through drawing lots, more commitment by the state to education, especially in the deprived suburbs, transatlantic partnership in trade and investment etc.

Regarding the trade unions, Marx wrote in 1865: “Instead of the conservative motto: ‘A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system!’ (Value, price and profit). It’s precisely this revolutionary logic that those who pull the strings behind Nuit Debout are deliberately rejecting, leading the young generations who are posing questions about this society onto a rotten terrain: reformism and the election box.

The most emblematic demand is without doubt the call for a new constitution establishing a “social republic”. Thus according to the economist Frédéric Lordon, one of the initiators of Nuit Debout: “the first act of re-appropriation is the re-writing of a constitution…what is the social republic? It’s taking seriously the democratic idea posed in 1789”[5]

It’s all there in a nutshell. The central aim of those who launched Nuit Debout is to realise a “true democracy” promised by the French revolution of 1789. But what was revolutionary two and half centuries ago, i.e. installing the political power of the bourgeoisie in France, overcoming feudalism by the development of capitalism, building a nation…all this today has become irredeemably reactionary. This system of exploitation is decadent. It’s not a question of making it better, because that has become impossible, but of going beyond it, of overthrowing it through an international proletarian revolution. But here the illusion is being sewn that the state is a neutral agent on which we have to put pressure, or even protect from the shareholders, the corrupt politicians, the greedy bankers, the oligarchs…when in reality, the state is the highest representative of the ruling class and the worst enemy of the exploited.

Above all, we should not underestimate the danger of fixating on the bankers, the shareholders, the corrupt politicians. This method of accusing this or that action or person instead of the system of exploitation as a whole has no other meaning than the preservation of capitalist social relations. It replaces the class struggle, the struggle against capitalism and for another world, by hatred directed against individuals who only have to be removed from power for all the evils of society to disappear as if by magic[6].

Nuit Debout, the anti-Indignados

Nuit Debout claims to be taking up the torch of the movements of 2006 and 2011. But in reality, it is making a travesty of their memory by completely deforming what was the strength of the movement against the CPE and the Indignados, framing all discussion in the optic of citizenship and republican values, and diverting reflection to the problem of making capitalism more human and democratic.

In 2006 in France, the students debated in real sovereign general assemblies which liberated speech. They also had the concern to widen the movement to the employed, to the retired[7], to the unemployed, in the first place by opening their general assemblies to them, by putting forward demands which went beyond the simple framework of the CPE[8], leaving to one side all specifically student demands. Five years later, in 2011, we saw with the Indignados movement in Spain and Occupy in the US and Israel expressions of the same vital need to get together and discuss the evils of this capitalist system founded on exploitation, exclusion and suffering. This time, the assemblies didn’t take place in lecture halls and theatres but in the streets and squares[9].

In the Indignados movement, although the context was different, we saw the same strings being pulled as in the Nuit Debout movement. The ‘alternative worldists’ of DRY (Real Democracy Now) hid behind the mask of ‘apoliticism’ in order to sabotage any real discussion. Then too they tried to channel energies into the ‘life of the commissions’ to the detriment of the debates in the general assemblies and into making the ‘right choice’ in elections (Podemos was the culmination of this approach). But at that time the social movement was rather more profound. Participants often had the strength to take the struggle into their own hands, and real general assemblies, animated by serious debate and reflection about society, were held in parallel with those of DRY, although this was totally blacked out by the media. This is what we wrote at the time:

“On Sunday 22nd, election day, instead of another attempt to end the assemblies, DRY proclaimed that “we’ve achieved our goals” and that the movement must be ended. The response was unanimous: “We are not here for the elections”. On Monday 23rd and Tuesday 24th, both in the number of participants and in the richness of the debates, the assemblies reached their peak. Interventions, slogans, placards proliferated demonstrating a deep reflection: “Where is the Left? It’s behind the Right”, “The polls cannot hold back our dreams”, “600 euros per month, that’s some violence”, “If you don’t let us dream, we will prevent you from sleeping!, “No work, no home, no fear”, “They deceived our grandparents, they deceived our children, they will not deceive our grandchildren”. They also show an awareness of the perspectives: “We are the future, capitalism is the past”, “All power to the assemblies”, “There is no evolution without revolution”, “The future starts now”, “Do you still believe this is a utopia?”…. However, it was the demonstration in Madrid in particular that provided a new focus coming from June 19th on perspectives for the future. It was convened by an organisation coming from the working class and its most active minorities. The theme of this gathering was “March and unite against the crisis and against capital.” It declared: “No to wage cuts and pension cuts; against unemployment: workers' struggles; no to price rises, increase our wages, increase the taxes on those who earn the most, protect our public services, no to privatisation of health and education ... Long live working class unity.”[10]

We didn’t share all the demands raised by the Indignados. Weaknesses, illusions in bourgeois democracy were also very present. But the movement was animated by a proletarian dynamic and included a deep criticism of the system, of the state, of elections. It began a fight against the organisations of the left and extreme left who were deploying all their political forces to limit reflection and drag it back into the limits of what is acceptable for capitalism.

The present weakness of our class has meant that it has not been possible for this kind of proletarian critique to emerge out of Nuit Debout or for the desire to come together and discuss, which certainly does animate a section of those taking part, to bear fruit. The bourgeoisie has drawn lessons from the previous movements, It has prepared the ground very well and is manoeuvring intelligently, taking advantage of the present weaknesses of the proletariat. Today, it’s Attac, the New Anti-Capitalist Party, the Left Front and all the adepts of reformism and of a so-called “real democracy now” who remain in control of Nuit Debout and who are taking advantage of the proletariat’s disarray, its lack of perspective, its difficulty in recognising itself as a class. These groups are occupying the social terrain and in doing so are acting as the most effective support for capitalism.

The real nature of Nuit Debout

We have to be clear: there was nothing spontaneous about Nuit Debout. It’s something which has been prepared and organised over a long period by the radical defenders of capitalism. Behind this “spontaneous” and “apolitical” movement lurk the professionals, the groups of the left and extreme left who use “apoliticism” as a means of control. The appeal of 31 March already had this professional dimension:

“In the programme: animations, relaxation, concerts, information sharing, a Permanent Citizens’ Assembly and all kinds of surprises”. Nuit Debout had its origins in a public meeting organised at the Paris Bourse du Travail on 23 February 2016. This meeting, baptised “make them afraid” was motivated by the enthusiastic reactions to the film by François Ruffin, Merci Patron!. The decision was taken to occupy the Place de la République at the end of the demonstration of 31 March.

“The ‘pilot’ collective of 15 people met: Johanna Silva from the journal Fakir, Loic Canitrot , from the company Joilie Mome, Leila Chaibi from the Black Thursday Collective and a member of the Left Party, a trade unionist from Air France also a member of the Left Party, a member of the Les Engraineurs association and a student from Sciences Po, the economist Thomas Couttrot and Nicolas Galepides of Sud-PTT….The association Droit au Logement offered legal and practical aid, the ‘alternative worldist’ Attac and the Solidaires union federation also joined the collective. It was the economist Frédéric Lordon who was approached by the initiative collective to open this first Paris night on 31 March. His idea: “for the social republic” would be echoed in the workshops formed to write a new Constitution in Paris and Lyon…”. These few lines from Wikipedia show how far the official political forces, trade unions, left associations etc contributed to setting up and taking charge of the Nuit Debout movement.

In particular, who is François Ruffin? Editor in chief of the leftist paper Fakir, he is close to the Left Front and the CGT. His aim is to “put pressure on the state and its representatives”, or, to use his own words, “make them afraid”. For a movement to succeed, according to him, you have to ensure that the “combat on the streets and the expression through the ballot box come together”, like in 1936 and “even in 1981”. This is an attempt to make us forget that 1936 prepared the mobilisation of the working class for the Second World War; as for 1981, this so-called “social movement” enabled the Socialist Party to come to power and carry out some of the most effectively anti-working class policies of the last few decades!. This is the real agenda of Nuit Debout: an enterprise aimed at getting those participating in good faith and full of hope that the real aim of a radical struggle is to head back to the ballot box, to instil the illusion that capitalist society can be made more human if you vote for the right parties, i.e. the Socialist party or the extreme left[11].

This initiative by the left of the SP and the extreme left has arrived at a highly opportune moment for the bourgeoisie: in a year of presidential elections, when the SP is very widely discredited. This is what is at stake in the short and medium term – the capacity of the bourgeoisie to create a new left that has some credibility for the working class, a “radical, alternative, democratic” left. We are seeing the same dynamic in a number of other countries, with Podemos in Spain and Sanders in the USA.

It’s not at all certain that this part of the manoeuvre, its electoral dimension, will be a success for the bourgeoisie, i.e. that it will lead to a mobilisation for the elections, because the working class is very deeply disgusted by all the political parties. At the same time, the attempts of François Ruffin to pull the participants of Nuit Debout towards the trade unions[12], in particular the CGT, has up till now been a failure, On the other hand, the ideology transmitted by this movement, the idea of citizenship, which serves to further dilute the proletariat’s class identity, and the tendency towards personalisation instead of the combat against the capitalist system, is a particularly dangerous and effective poison for the future.

Nuit Debout, even more than being the product of a new manoeuvre by the left and extreme left, is the symbol of the real difficulties of the workers to recognise themselves as a class, as a social force which bears the future for humanity as a whole. And these difficulties are not just temporary: they are part of a deep historical process going on in society. The seeds planted by movements like the struggle against the CPE or the Indignados, which were expressions of the real need of the proletariat to develop its struggle, are today dormant in a frozen soil. As for older movements, like the ones which led to the Paris Commune in 1871 or the October revolution in 1917, they are being buried and forgotten under heaps of lies.

But when the social atmosphere heats up, under the blows of the crisis and the inevitable aggravation of attacks against our living conditions, then some flowers can begin to bloom. This confidence in the future is based on an awareness that the proletariat is a historic class which carries within itself  another world, free from relations of exploitation, which is necessary and possible for humanity.

Germain, 15.5.16

The following article was written by our section in France as a response to cases of cruelty against animals exposed in French slaughter-houses. But the same horrors have also come to light in British abattoirs, for example in 2015 following the secret filming of what goes on behind closed doors at a slaughter-house in Butterton, Staffs[1]. As the article explains, cruelty to animals is inseparable from cruelty to human beings, and both are inseparable from the capitalist mode of production, where everything is subordinated to the drive for profit.

“Poor dogs, they want to treat you like human beings” - Marx on the proposed tax on dogs in France, in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

Just over a month ago some videos were put onto social media showing great cruelty going on within some French abattoirs. The association L214, Ethiques & Animaux distributed a video filmed on a hidden camera showing how animals in an abattoir close to Pau were being treated. This video was taken up on social media from March 29. The treatment inflicted on the animals, the atrocities and cruelties, committed sometimes directly by the employees, are indefensible. The employees butcher still-living animals, felling them sometimes with blows from a hook. Others push the animals by blows on the head from an electric prodder and you can even see a separated living lamb transfixed on two hooks in the absence of an operator. These are similar images to those which led to the closure of the abattoir of Ales in October 2015 and, following that, one at Vigan in February 2016.

Such a banalisation of barbaric practices doesn’t mean that they are a simple consequence of sadism or a lack of scruples among the staff. Submitting to infernal, mechanised time-keeping, pushed by profitability in a context of intense competition and staff reductions, these acts are driven by the need for speed, provoking unimaginable suffering in the animals, but also, in some ways, in the men who must kill them. The situation in fact demands the personnel to develop a very thick skin, a forced desensitisation. The bestiality of the staff is first and foremost that of the capitalist system, of its totalitarian power. The savage acts, the jokes and the laughter of the employees which sometimes accompany them, are as much defence mechanisms faced with daily tasks institutionalised and imposed by the bloody logic of capital.

Beyond the current practices of cruelty, we should understand that the trade-mark of this capitalist society is standardisation and the violent transformation of quality into quantity. What’s the aim of this? Profitability, the sacrifice of nature and man himself to this sole end. Everything which resists this quantification is eliminated, meticulously disqualified and excluded.

Competition gives rise to battery farming: removed from the outside world, animals are fattened and bloated by antibiotics[2]. The animals are systematically transformed in the meat factories into real monsters. The cattle in feed-lots (fattening areas) are not only pressed together in much reduced spaces but physically deformed to the point of showing muscular hypotrophy. Milk cows have a very reduced life-span because of their intensive treatment, even though overproduction pushes angry farmers to pour their unsold milk over the fields! The pollution from this intensive and massive form of farming is a major bane, the animals wallowing in their own waste, with all the risk of spreading diseases.

The same farming methods are used in the selection of ducks and geese for the production of foie gras. Terrible and often useless suffering is inflicted on these animals. First of all the males are selected because of their larger livers and the staff are required to throw the females into the crusher, with some dying slowly in agony. The forced-feeding itself “gives rise to lesions, inflammations (the gut, enteritus), infections (forms of thrush, bacterial infection)[3]. One could continue with similar scandalous cruelties, towards pigs for example or domestic animals. But it’s clear that the reality of this violence is in no way limited to acts upon animals. It is really the result of a totalitarian industrial uniformity through which the animals are reduced to commodities just like the producers, those who sell their labour-power.

The association mentioned above calls above all for  action via the application of article L 214 of the Rural Code which recognises animals as “sensate” beings[4] .

Even if we can understand it, the combat of this association is destined to fail or at least only obtain very ephemeral changes since it simply asks for “the application of the law”. Laws in reality are only fig leaves which aim to make us think that the indignant reactions of politicians and their media supporters could in any way modify such practices, which are fundamentally  linked to the very real logic of capitalism and profit. That’s why the L 214 association, which justly denounces numerous barbaric practices involving the killing of animals, participates in the mystification of bourgeois legality when it calls for “the elected of the nation” to “make the law apply”. It even invites “citizens” to put pressure on “political personalities”: “Politique-animaux.fr wants to be at the service of the citizens. Resources given to them could help them question their elected politicians and candidates, as well as orient their vote during the electoral process”.

When we see the way that capitalism treats human beings, workers in “production units” or migrants fleeing from the atrocities of war or the horrors of hunger, it’s hard to see why the question of animal farming should be any different. The deceitful reality of “public liberties”, of “equality between men” drawn up in the “Rights of Man” 200 years ago shows that “animal rights” can only turn out to be an empty shell.

The light thrown on these practices linked to the inhumanity of the production of commodities, the exposure of cruelty to the point of sadism in the killing of animals, while it arouses indignation, has no other end than to mystify the “citizen”, to restrict thought to the terrain of a capitalist order that is the very basis of these horrors. The system has established its hypocritical rules (the laws) which are adapted to the economic logic of productivity and the generalised commercial war. In several sites of the production of animal meat where barbaric acts have been committed on the animals, the meat produced has been given labels denoting quality (Red Label and IGP) and, in several cases, been declared clean and healthy. Which should mean, in principle, that a maximum amount of care and respect has been given. The director of an abbatoir gave a very limpid explanation for these cruelties when he described the working deadlines: “We had to kill 15,000 lambs in a fortnight for Easter. If we worked slower they wouldn’t commit these types of acts”[5]      

In fact the more that barbarism develops within this society, the more any argument will be used or rules applied in order to mask the causes of it and continue the selling of products for the most profit. For that the market has come up with new “labels” which aim to get the consumer to buy a product with a “mark” which claims a so-called “ethical” or “superior quality”. But these labels don’t give any protection from the advancing decadence of the capitalist system. As an expert consultant on food security said, we have in front of us images “revealing the standard functioning of abbatoirs in France (in which) negligence and ill-treatment occur daily.”[6]     

In fact they take no more care in slaughtering animals than they do in cutting down wood or picking out the best stones. And it’s the same thing for human beings robotised by the social relations and who are only labour power to be exploited, “things”, more exactly commodities, that one buys and one sells on the labour market.

Capital doesn’t care at all about human beings or animals. Its implacable organisation does not include the satisfaction of human needs. It responds only to the law of profit and the market. It is claimed that the mad destructiveness of capitalist growth is a price worth paying for feeding humanity. That’s false. The reality is that industry produces in a blind manner with an almost unique objective: to sell at any price. Nourishment is just a simple consequence which the system doesn’t care about.  As it happens it can be more pertinent to talk about food production as a form of poisoning (see our article on junk food on https://fr.internationalism.org [69]).  This also explains why this totalitarian logic can also allow for the fact “every five seconds a child under ten dies of hunger. On a planet full of riches... In its present state, in fact, world agriculture could feed 12 billion human beings with no problem – twice the present population. There’s no fatality in this respect. A child that dies of hunger is a child that has been murdered.”[7]    

Look at how the governments of the European countries have just been haggling with the government of Turkey over the acceptance or rejection of new migrants who are treated as cattle, herded and corralled without any thought or respect for their dignity. The capitalist state treats human beings as it treats animals and vice-versa.

Of course the bourgeoisie doesn’t directly carry out the horrible practices that it wants implemented and quite often it takes care to keep its distance. For the most part it doesn’t get its own hands dirty! It leaves that for the mass of the exploited. Little consequence is given to the humans or animals, these “sensate beings” that capital despises and grinds down. All this Rosa Luxemburg recognised and denounced a hundred years ago, affirming at the same time her great moral sense as witnessed by one of her letters from prison. She felt herself close to a suffering animal who was being violently beaten by a soldier because it couldn’t move its load. And she was able to connect this ferocity to the barbaric acts committed between human beings in times of war: “I had a vision of all the splendour of war...”[8]

Paco, 22 April, 2016

The whole range of imperialist war and conflict in the Middle East, despite various truces, talks and cease-fires, continues to deepen and spread: Syria’s Assad, backed by Russia, Hezbollah and Iran, is continuing the regime’s butchery; around a hundred “rebel” groups, fighting each other as well as the Assad regime, are backed by the USA, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey; the Saudis, with US and British backing as part of a more or less willing “Coalition”, launched “Operation Decisive Storm” a year ago in Yemen, which has turned into an all-round disaster; the “Caliphate” of Isis is still a strong force in fragmented Iraq and Syria with its affiliates strengthening their positions in Libya, other parts of north Africa, the Sinai Peninsula and Yemen, while al-Qaida also strengthens in Syria and Yemen – where it effectively has a mini-state – and both are making inroads into Afghanistan;  Turkish actions in its manoeuvres against Russia have reignited the smouldering conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, potentially spreading the conflict to the fragile Caucasus; Turkey’s war on the Kurds has intensified while it has been giving succour to Isis and moving its Turkmen forces into Syria; different Kurdish factions have fought for the Syrian regime, the Americans, the Russians and the British, while tensions increase between the Syrian Kurds and Iraqi Kurds. Both Lebanon and Israel are increasingly in danger of being drawn into this maelstrom.

Within this general centrifugal tendency, of each against all, a myriad of national, religious, ethnic, alliances are being formed between global and regional powers, and this includes obscure alliances between various rebel groups and jihadists. The “Scorched Earth” policy practised by all the forces involved has further increased the killings, the destruction, the misery of the civilian populations, further multiplying the numbers of displaced people and refugees.

In these circumstances it is useful to look into the root of these developments within the framework of the decadence of capitalism – the context of imperialist domination and its connection to the formation the nation state in the area of the Middle East; in particular, we want to concentrate on the “Islamic Republic” of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose rivalries are becoming increasingly significant within the overall pattern of conflicts. These two countries, now arch-enemies, bear the inevitable curse on all the nation states born in capitalism’s decadent period – i.e. from around the beginning of the First World War. These two religious regimes – the first preaching a Shia version of Islam, the second the Wahabi interpretation of the Sunni Muslim tradition - co-exist perfectly well with the modern developments of internal repression and within the ever-expanding spiral of militarism. They have grown in the hundred years since they formed but, as expressions of decadent capitalism, they have grown deformed, stunted by a development that has been chained by the self-destructive nature of capitalism in decline, and are thus straightaway forced to sacrifice vast portions of their national capital to the demands of militarism and war.

Iran: stunted child of British imperialism

The establishment of Iran as a nation took place in the early conditions of decadent capitalism. It was born of war and imperialism and involved one the least-known and worst atrocities of the 20th century. An estimated 8 to 11 million Persians, roughly half the population, were killed in a famine engineered by the British – see the book by the Princeton University-based author Mohammed Gholi Madj The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, 1917-19. The British, taking increasing control of the country, which had just lost vast parts of the Caucasus to the Russians, diverted the material resources of the country to its military effort elsewhere. Britain confiscated food, local transport, goods, oil etc., which it refused to pay for, and sent these away from the country in order to assist its war. Not a “genocide” in the strict legal framework of the bourgeoisie, which requires direct slaughter of populations, but just as deadly. Moreover, with malice aforethought, the British banned any import of food into the country, including from the local areas around Mesopotamia (Iraq) that had a surplus which it controlled. The approximate figures for the engineered famine above are based, in part, on contemporary information kept by the American Legation in the country, the US State Department, British and local sources and a later census. The British had already used starvation as a weapon against the Irish in the mid-1800’s, causing a million deaths, and Churchill was to use the weapon of famine again in his “Denial Policy” which caused the deaths of over 3 million in India in 1943.

Britain had a dominant role in the Middle East from the early 1900’s, pushing out the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, Germany and eventually Russia from the region. In 1907, the British and Russians divided up the region between themselves in the “Great Game” as part of the carve-up of the Middle and Near East. In 1919, Britain established the “Anglo-Persian Protectorate” with a strong occupation of the country as the forces of Russian imperialism were withdrawn in 1917, a result of the proletarian  revolution (which the British also attacked from its positions in Persia). The “Anglo-Persian Agreement” was forced on the Iranian government by Britain in 1919 as it tightened its military control on the state. In the conditions of capitalist decline, the disintegration and collapse of the Ottoman Empire could not give birth to new coherent industrial nations with a dynamic bourgeoisie, but only to fragmentation and states that were abortions; and then as now these states were not at all independent expressions but were prey to global imperialism and its machinations. Historically, capitalism needed large integral and united territories with a strong intellectual base, leading to the development of new forces of the working class, which is why Marx and Engels supported certain movements for national independence during capitalism’s rise. But there was no chance of any of this developing in the Middle East at the onset of capitalist decay, when the priority of the “old” nations was to carve up the world at the expense of their rivals and fight over what was left.

Certainly Britain was now the main power in the region but the Communist International at its 2nd Congress, at Baku in 1920, was wrong to pose national solutions and “national revolutions” against British domination, which it saw as a “greater evil”. The Comintern was already degenerating on the question of imperialism and national liberation and would soon fall into the trap of the “United Front” with the ruling class mobilising the working class for national “solutions”. In Persia any attempts at a more independent policy by local elements were swiftly and ruthlessly dealt with by the British, beginning with the latter fomenting a coup against undesirable Iranian elements in 1921. The British installed the Pahlavi clan as its chosen pawns and this clique, despite a pro-Nazi move in 1941 that was defeated by the British, remained in power from the mid-20’s to the late 1970’s. The Imperial State of Persia was established by the British and the Pahlavis in 1925, to be transformed into the Imperial State of Iran ten years later.

In the Second World War many factions of Arab nationalism flirted with the Nazis, as did certain elements of Zionism, and as did Britain’s pawn in Iran, Reza Shah of the Pahlavi clan who had crowned himself King and declared his “Divine Command”. He further declared Iran “neutral” but was getting too close to the Nazis, threatening Britain’s oil and strategic interests. Britain and a now fully-imperialist USSR invaded Iran in 1941 and replaced Reza with his son who ruled until his overthrow in 1979. A further attempt to make some sort of independent move, which could have only taken place within the confines and conditions of imperialism, was made by the Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, when he attempted to reduce Britain’s influence and tried to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by Britain and helped by the CIA in “Operation Boot”, which used all sorts of thugs and criminals as well as religious fundamentalists, the latter being around since the 1920’s, in order to save the Pahlavi regime. This period also marked the strengthening of the USA as the major world power, more and more supplanting Britain economically and militarily, particularly following the Second World War – a trend that had continued from World War One. Well before labelling it the “Great Satan”, the Iranian clergy kept a low profile, working primarily as forces of social control within the Iranian state that was becoming a lynchpin of US imperialist strategy in the region, above all as an outpost of the western bloc against Russian imperialism at its southern flank. But the 1963 “White Revolution” of the Shah, bringing in land and various other “reforms” including votes for women, was opposed by the Shia clergy and its particular figurehead Ruhollah Khomeini. The reforms were a sham, the proposed “trickle-down” wealth effect went the same way as all such attempts – upwards; and more and more resources went to the military and militarism with 50% of the Iranian population living below the poverty line by the early 1970s. With the traditional power of the clergy reduced by repression, backed by the USA’s strengthened position which included diplomatic immunity for all US forces in the country, the Shah declared war on the clerical opposition, resulting in some 15,000 Muslims killed and Khomeini’s exile to Iraq, Turkey and then Paris, which took in him and his clique for its own longer-term imperialist interests. Khomeini continued to call for “Islam to stand united against western and arrogant powers” and for an “Islamic revolution”.

Hobbled from the outset, the Iranian economy, based on a war economy and its plentiful oil reserves, never really developed, thrusting most of its population into poverty, while corruption and high-living among its rulers were rife. The overthrow of the Shah in 1979 was not a bourgeois revolution – such times were well past; nor was it a proletarian revolution – the working class was certainly involved and combative through months of struggle but it wasn’t strong enough to become an autonomous and leading force. The army and security forces remained intact, merely adapting to the new situation. When the now Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from Paris he established the Islamic Republic of Iran, ruled by a Supreme Leader. This was a theocratic state that relied not only on the clerics but on the army, the secret police and the feared Revolutionary Guards. Iran was now out of US control but, unusually, did not turn towards Russia. This was a foretaste of what was to become a feature of the new phase of capitalist decomposition where, in contrast to the certainties of the Cold War, irrationality, centrifugal forces and unpredictability would become the norm (as we saw later with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the tendencies of every man for himself in the western bloc). Today Iran has the highest per-capita execution rate in the world, and strikes and labour unrest are ruthlessly put down by the Revolutionary Guard.

Iran graduates into a regional shark

The importance of Iran as a country can be seen in its geo-strategic position: located between the Caucasus and the Indian Ocean, the country has offered its services as an alternative route for the gas and oil pipelines from the Caspian Basin without crossing Russia, with whom it has fallen out on many occasions over oil and gas issues.  The country itself has claimed to have 12% of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and also has the world’s second largest reserves of natural gas. China alone currently depends on Iran for 15% of its industrial oil and gas needs and most of Europe and Japan relies on oil that goes through the Straits of Hormuz, which are overlooked by Iran. The country has worked itself into its position of relative strength thanks to the undermining of the position of the US, not as an economic powerhouse, even with its vast natural resources, but as a militaristic regime. These resources have not been used for the modernisation of existing industries nor the setting-up of technically advanced ones, and while sanctions economic haven’t helped it, the only effective industries are those directly related to the military with the others being derelict, backward and non-competitive. Being an underdog, the country can threaten, challenge and destabilise but its formidable resources are squandered for military purposes. The clergy in particular has resorted to whipping up religious divisions and nationalism, while intensifying the dictatorship and its ruthless suppression of political dissent and social protest, such as the demonstrations of 2009.

Iran’s reliance on religious ideology is a characteristic expression of a social order which has no future, of the growth of irrationalism throughout the capitalist system But the Iranian ruling class also makes very calculated use of the Shia card in cementing imperialist alliances, for example with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in Iraq where entire parts of the country and its capital Baghdad have been purged of Sunni influences and taken over by Shia cliques. At the same time it doesn’t want to be seen as an exclusively Shia country, preferring rather to present itself as an anti-imperialist umbrella to all, a counter-weight to the USA and Israel and to the corrupt Arab regimes. In short, the export of the Islamic Revolution was nothing other than Iranian imperialism in a new situation. The regime rejected Russia while at the same time constantly challenging the US in the region, building up alliances and backing terrorist networks that were making its rivals – and the greater powers – extremely nervous. Iran made a long-standing alliance with Syria which only briefly faltered over the question of Palestine. Iran was behind the assassination of President Gemayal of Lebanon in September 82 and two months later an Israeli military HQ in Tyre was bombed. The first modern suicide bombers hit the US embassy in Beirut in 83, followed by similar attacks against US, French and Israeli forces, forcing a withdrawal by both the US and Israeli militaries. But drained by the Iran/Iraq War and screwed down by very tight US sanctions, Iran was obliged to jettison the overtly aggressive stance typified by President Ahmadinejad with his threat to wipe Israel off the map. The regime now appears to be coming in from the cold under the “moderate” and more intelligent regime of President Rouhani. The recent nuclear deal, essentially with the US, brings Iran back as a more or less approved player in the region. Even before this deal was signed, Iran and the US were working very closely at the highest military levels in Iraq, and continue to do so, particularly given their mutual interest in opposing the advance of Isis. Allowing Iran to take a greater role may well benefit the US and may partially make up for its weaknesses in the region, but it is already causing major ripples among its local rivals, not least Saudi Arabia. This disquiet has both military and economic aspects: Iran is certainly feared as a regional military power, but the lifting of sanctions could also give Iran an edge over other regional oil-producers in the sharpening competition for a dwindling world oil market.

Saudi Arabia: more thanks to the British Empire

Like Iran the origins of this Kingdom lie in imperialist rivalries and war, the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the various manoeuvres around it. In 1912 the religious Ikhwan (Brotherhood) based on Wahhabism gave its support to the al-Saud family exiled in Kuwait by the Turks. The Saud-backed forces took control of Riyadh and by 1924, the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, consolidating their power in the region then known as Hijaz. The Ikhwan turned against their rulers because of their plans for modernisation, but were defeated, resulting in the 1932 establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia led by Abd-al-Aziz, aka, Ibn Saud. Britain’s India Office had already secretly agreed to support Ibn Saud and his tribal forces while betraying other anti-Turkish forces and the idea of a unified Arabia being promoted by Lawrence of Arabia. In 1914, the Earl of Crewe, Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, summed up the approach of British imperialism: ”What we want is not a unified Arabia but a disunited Arabia split into principalities under our suzerainty”. In the following year Britain, along with France, achieved this aim by, as elsewhere, partitioning this country along meaningless boundaries and carving up territories in a classic divide and rule strategy, forming the Kingdom as an absolute monarchy under Islamic law.

The regime was a gerontocracy replete with anachronisms, and the ruling sheiks have never been part of a class of industrially-minded capitalists, but are a highly privileged clique, enriching themselves at the expense of the population as a whole, a trend which increased even more spectacularly with the discovery of oil in the 1930s. Britain had been the initial protector of the Saud regime and the US wasn’t much interested until the oil started flowing; by the early 30s the US established bilateral relations and shortly after full diplomatic relations. In common with the global squeezing out of the interests of British imperialism, the US Quincy Agreement of 1945 guaranteed Saudi security on condition that the latter provided the US with most of its oil. The Saudi regime, apart from some secondary spats over Israel during the 1970s, continued to be a stable and faithful ally of the US until relatively recently. The situation began to change with the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, when amidst the acceleration of decomposition in international relations, Saudi Arabia began to defend its own imperialist interests much more independently and voraciously.

On the basis of its gigantic oil revenues, Saudi Arabia has become ”the world’s largest oil producer and exporter, controlling the world’s second largest oil reserves and the sixth largest gas reserves... (it) has the fourth highest military expenditure in the world and in 2010-14 was the world’s second largest arms importer” (Wikipedia). Its command economy is petroleum-based: “roughly 75% of budget revenues and 90% of export earnings come from the oil industry” (Ibid). The ruling class has been unable to develop any substantial industrial base and has failed to integrate the greater part of its 28.7 million people into any meaningful productive process. There is virtually no production of commodities or heavy goods for the internal or export market. The population is fed and looked after by a work-force of 8 million relatively cheap migrant workers who are mainly employed in oil-related industry along with foreign experts and contractors. Hundreds of thousands of undocumented foreign workers, Yemenis, Ethiopians and Somalis, have been detained, deported and expelled. Thousands of highly-trained Saudi youth, often expensively tutored abroad, are mostly unemployable because their wages would be far higher than foreign workers. The Saudi ruling clique invests much of its considerable wealth in speculative foreign dealings and, of course, the arms sector. Because of a lack of broader industrial development – closely tied to the general conditions of decadence – there has been no development of a classical bourgeois sector able to act as a political or social buffer, and brutal repression with its religious police and ubiquitous secret services are the order of the day: the horrible practice of beheading, so decried in the west when carried out by Isis, is a routine means of instilling terror in Saudi, as is the amputation of hands for those accused of theft.  The appalling oppression of Saudi women has been fairly well documented. A system of clans run the country and it has been able to buy social peace at the cost of massive state subsidies. In 2011, King Abdullah announced “a series of benefits for citizens amounting to $36 billion” and a few months later “a package of $93 billion which included 500,000 new homes.... in addition to 60,000 security jobs” (Ibid). Whatever its specificities, Saudi Arabia shows the same development of militarism and repression, the same state capitalist tendencies inherent in all nation states in decadence. But the problems with the economy that appeared a couple of years ago have developed dramatically since. For the second consecutive year the country faces a deficit and cuts in state expenditure and increases in taxes are being implemented for the first time. For the country to avoid a budget deficit the price of oil would have to be $106 a barrel. At the moment it’s just about making $40.

While much of Saudi youth, who have the money to do so, study abroad in relatively liberal circumstances, at home the contrary tendency is for the increasing domination of religious indoctrination. “As of 2004 approximately half of the broadcast air-time of Saudi state television was devoted to religious issues. 90% of the books published in the Kingdom were on religious subjects and most of the doctorates awarded by its universities were in Islamic studies. In the state school system about half of the material taught is religious... assigned reading over 12 years of primary and secondary schooling devoted to covering the history, literature and culture of the non-Muslim world comes to a total of about 40 pages” (Ibid). Saudi Wahabism, which does everything it can to maintain the Sunni/Shia divide, is hostile to any reverence given to historical or religious places of significance for fear of idolatry (“shirk”) and the most significant Muslim sites in the world, Mecca and Medina, are located in the western Saudi region. While the west, which has caused the most global devastation to historical and cultural monuments, hypocritically criticises Isis for its cultural destruction, it is estimated that the Saudi regime has destroyed 95% of Mecca’s historic buildings, most of them over a thousand years old.  Fewer than 20 out of 300 sites linked to Mohammed and his family survive after being demolished by the regime in the name of religious purity. The dazzling skyscrapers and shopping malls that have become a feature of economic “growth” not only in Saudi Arabia but in the other oil-rich sheikhdoms in the region are a better indication of the true religion of these “puritans”: the worship of money and worldly wealth. On the imperialist level Saudi Arabia has exported its Wahhabi ideology throughout the world, not least through the development of well-funded terrorist factions. Though overshadowed by the Sunni/Shia split, the conflict between the Saudis and Iran is one between two imperialist sharks. During the 2011/12 protests in Bahrain the Saudi government sent shock troops in British-supplied Armoured Personnel Carriers not only to quell the social unrest but also to send a bloody warning to Iran in case the latter used the protests to rally Shia resistance to the Saudi regime. The Saudis’ execution of the dissident Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr at the beginning of 2016 was an even more explicit message aimed at Iran, which responded by staging massive demonstrations calling for the Sheikh to be avenged.

The oil-reliant economies of both Iran and Saudi are ill-suited to compete on a world market saturated with over-production. Iran may have had a certain respite with the ending of sanctions and the new deals and openings that this may bring, but its economic base remains fundamentally weak. Even more precarious is the economic reality of Saudi Arabia whose trillion-dollar attempt to move away from oil dependency, the “National Transformation Programme”, proposed by the Crown Prince Mohammed, has been called “manic optimism” by the Economist. Moreover this doomed strategy has already upset the clergy who, like Iran, still hold great power within the state. These types of tensions, in the land that gave us al-Qaida and thus Isis, can only get worse where an estimated 3 million Saudis themselves live in poverty. State subsidies will end or be severely cut back and direct taxes have been imposed for the first time. One of Saudi’s largest companies outside of the oil industry, the construction giant the Saudi Bin Laden Group, was recently unable to pay its workers, summarily sacking 77,000 of them. In short, the economic situation will impact on the social situation and imperialist rivalries.

Developments over Syria and Iran increase imperialist tensions

Ever since the fall of the Shah, the Saudis have been supporting any enemy of Iran, firstly spending $25 billion in supporting Saddam Hussein in the Iran/Iraq War of the 1980s. In March 2015 “Saudi spearheaded a coalition of Sunni Muslim states, starting a military intervention in Yemen against the Shia Houtis and forces loyal to the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh who was deposed in the 2011 social uprising”(Ibid). It has stationed over 150,000 forces on the heavily fortified Saudi/Yemeni border and launched devastating air-strikes on the poverty-stricken inhabitants of this country while taking severe losses itself. At the same time, “together with Qatar and Turkey, Saudi Arabia is openly supporting the Army of Conquest, an umbrella group of anti-government forces fighting in the Syrian Civil War that reportedly includes the al-Qaida linked al-Nusra Front and another Salafi coalition known as Ahrar ash-Sham ...” (Ibid). We should also mention the close relationship that Saudi has with Pakistan with much speculation that the Kingdom has bankrolled Pakistan’s nuclear programme and is looking to purchase atomic weapons from it in the near future.

The recent nuclear deal between the US and Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA), as well as the spectacle of these two old foes fighting alongside each other against Isis in Iraq, has dealt quite a blow to the Saudis and added a dangerous twist to imperialist developments in the region. The Saudis are very worried about losing their standing with the US and the weakening of the US overall has allowed the Iranians to make significant gains in Syria. The Saudis have been forced to look for new alliances: Turkey, Egypt and even the arch-enemy, Israel, have been courted. The economic plight of the country will hamper its imperialist reach somewhat but this doesn’t make the situation any less dangerous – on the contrary. In April the Saudis did a deal with Egypt, who it’s been subsidising to the tune of billions a year, offering it two Red Sea islands, Sanafir and Tiran, as a sweetener. The deal had to be agreed by the Israeli government, which it did. In fact Saudi support for the new Egyptian butcher el-Sisi in overthrowing Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government, which went against the wishes of the USA, was a further indication of the weakening of the latter and the strengthening of every man for himself.

The tendencies to war in the region are speeding up and spreading: in early spring the Turkish Prime Minister explicitly warned the Russians that it would make trouble for them and their Armenian clients in the enclave of the High Karabakh in Turkish-backed Azerbaijan, spreading potential war and uncertainty to the South Caucasus. Should the war currently going on at a low level between Saudi Arabia and Iran intensify – and we cannot rule out open military clashes – then this would be an important qualitative step in the further decomposition of the region, destabilising the whole of trade and traffic around the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz, including oil supplies, which in turn would have an enormous impact on the world economy.

If we have gone into detail about the historical development of Iran and Saudi, it is because they are almost a showcase of the totally decadent character of the world capitalist system. Instead of being able to draw on the natural riches of the region, the ruling classes, caught in a spiral of war and imperialist rivalries, has been forced to feed large parts of their profits into the military machine. And if the two biggest regional rivals are now clawing at each others’ throats, it is because imperialism in its advancing decay has turned the Middle East into a true nest of vipers.

Boxer. 8.6.16 (This article was contributed by a close sympathiser of the ICC)

In the first article in this series [15], we gave a brief overview of the origins and function of migration in the capitalist system and how this has changed as that same system began its remorseless historical decline in the early 20th century. In part two [75], we examined the culmination of those trends in the horror of the Holocaust. But the defeat of the Nazi terror did not mean an end to the suffering and trauma of displaced people around the globe. As Nazi terror was replaced by the terror unleashed by the Stalinist and democratic powers, millions of displaced Jews, fresh from the horror of the concentration camps, became pawns in the imperialist struggle in the Middle East around the formation of the Israeli state. As the Cold War confrontation widened, millions more around the globe fled wars and massacres, victims of murderous rivalry between the global super-powers and their equally murderous local client states.

At the end of the Second World War, the disastrous destruction caused by imperialist confrontations created a world of ruin and desolation. In May 1945, 40 million people were displaced or refugees in Europe. To this must be added the 11.3 million workers who had been conscripted by Germany during the war. In other major regions of the world, the weakening of colonial powers caused instability and conflicts, particularly in Asia and Africa, leading over time to millions of migrants. All these population movements provoked terrible suffering and many deaths.

The "Iron Curtain": terror and the militarisation of borders

On the still smoking ruins of the world conflict following the conferences at Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July 1945), the "Iron Curtain" that fell between the former allies (the Western powers behind the United States on one side and the USSR on the other) drove millions of people to flee from hatred and vengeance. With the division of the world into spheres of influence dominated by the victors and their allies, the new line of inter-imperialist confrontations was drawn. Hardly had the war ended than the confrontation between the Western and Eastern blocs began. The months that followed the end of the war were marked by the expulsion of 13 million Germans from the Eastern countries and the exile of more than a million Russians, Ukrainians, Belarussians, Poles and Balts, all fleeing the Stalinist regimes. Ultimately, “Between 9 and 13 million people perished as a result of the policy of Allied imperialism between 1945-50. There were three main foci of this monstrous genocide:

-       Firstly amongst a total of 13.3 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern parts of Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary etc., as allowed by the Potsdam agreement. This ethnic cleansing was so inhumane that only 7.3 million arrived at their destination within the post-war borders of Germany; the rest 'disappeared' in the most gruesome circumstances.

-       Secondly amongst the German prisoners of war who died as a result of the starvation and diseased conditions of the allied camps - between 1.5 and 2 million.

-       Finally amongst the population in general who were put on rations of around 1000 calories per day, guaranteeing slow starvation and sickness - 5.7 million died as a result.”[1]

A great number of Jewish survivors did not know where to go because of the resurgence of anti-Semitism, particularly in Poland (where new pogroms broke out such as at Kielce in 1946) and Central Europe. The frontiers of the Western democratic countries had been closed. Jews were often housed in camps. In 1947 some sought to reach Palestine to escape hostility in the East and rejection in the West. They did so illegally at the time and were stopped by the British to be immediately interned in Cyprus. The aim was to deter and control all these populations to maintain capitalist order. In the same period the number of prisoners in the camps of the Gulag in the USSR exploded. Between 1946 and 1950, the population doubled to more than two million prisoners. A large number of refugees and migrants, or "displaced" persons, ended up in the camps to die. This new world of the Cold War shaped by the "victors of freedom" had created new fractures, brutal divisions tragically cutting populations off from each other, causing their forced exile.

Germany was divided up by the imperialist victors. And to prevent migration and the flow of its population to the West, in 1961 the GDR had to build the "wall of shame". Other states such as Korea and Vietnam were also cut in two by the "Iron Curtain". The Korean War, between 1950 and 1953, divided a population imprisoned by the two new enemy camps. This war led to the disappearance of nearly 2 million civilians and caused a migration of 5 million refugees. Throughout this period until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many populations were forced to flee from the incessant local conflicts of the Cold War. Within each bloc, numerous displacements often directly resulted from the political games played by the American and Russian great powers. Thus, propaganda concerning the 200,000 refugees who fled to Austria and Germany after the suppression of the uprisings in East Berlin in 1953 and Budapest in 1956 by the Red Army fed the ideological discourse of the two rival camps. All the wars fuelled by these two great East-West military blocs continued to create large numbers of victims who were the systematically exploited by the propaganda of each opposing camp.

Tensions, "national liberation struggles" and migration

The brutal divisions of the Cold War continued in the 1950s with decolonisation movements that fuelled migration and further divided the proletariat. Since the beginning of the period of decolonisation, and especially in the 1980s when Cold War conflicts intensified and worsened, so-called "national liberation struggles" (in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East) were particularly murderous. Pushed to the geographical periphery of the major capitalist powers, these conflicts gave the illusion of an "era of peace" in Europe while the lasting wounds and forced displacement of large numbers of migrants appeared as so many "distant" tragedies (except of course for the old settlers coming from these regions and the nations directly affected). In Africa, since the end of the colonial era, there were many wars, some of them among the most murderous in the world. Throughout these conflicts, major powers like Great Britain or France (then acting as the Western bloc’s "gendarme of Africa" ​​ against the USSR) were widely involved militarily on the ground where the logic of the East/West blocs prevailed. For example, hardly had the Sudan gained its independence in 1956 than a terrible civil war would involve the colonial powers and thus be exploited by the blocs, leaving at least 2 million dead and more than 500,000 refugees,forced to seek asylum in neighbouring countries. Instability and war became a permanent feature. The terrible war in Biafra caused famines and epidemics, leaving ​at least 2 million dead and as many refugees. Between 1960 and 1965, the civil war in the former Belgian Congo and the presence of mercenaries led to many victims and many displaced. One could add to these examples, like that of Angola which had been ravaged by war since the first uprisings of its population in Luanda in 1961. After its independence in 1975, many years of wars followed between the forces of the ruling MPLA (Movement of Liberation of Angola, supported by Moscow) and the rebels of UNITA (supported by South Africa and the United States): not less than one million died and 4 million were displaced, including half a million refugees who ended up in camps. The many conflicts on this continent permanently destabilised entire regions such as West Africa or the strategic Great Lakes region. One could equally find examples in Central America, or in Asia, which saw many bloody guerrilla conflicts. The Russian intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 marked an acceleration of this infernal spiral, leading to the exodus of 6 million people, the largest refugee population in the world.

Nationalism and the mechanics of exclusion

The new states or nations that emerged following large displacements were the direct product of imperialist divisions and poverty. They were the fruit of nationalism, expulsions and exclusion: in short, a pure product of the climate of war and permanent crisis generated by decadent capitalism. The formation of these new states was a dead end that could only fuel destructive tensions. Thus the partition of India in 1947, then the creation of Bangladesh, forced more than 15 million people to be displaced on the Indian subcontinent. The founding of the state of Israel in 1948, a real besieged fortress, was also a significant example. This new state, growing from 750,000 to 1.9 million inhabitants in 1960, was from its birth the focus of an infernal spiral of wars that caused the growth of Palestinian refugee camps everywhere. In 1948, 800,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced and the Gaza strip gradually became a vast open-air camp. Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Damascus, Amman, were transformed gradually into suburbs of the capitals.

Similar problems of refugees and migrants were widely created across the planet. In China, millions of people were displaced, themselves victims of the ferocious Japanese oppression during the war. After the victory of the Maoist troops in 1949, some 2.2 million Chinese fled to Taiwan and 1 million to Hong Kong. China then isolated itself in relative autarky to try to make up for its economic backwardness. In the early 1960s, it then undertook a forced industrialisation and launched the policy of the "Great Leap Forward", imprisoning its population in kind of national labour camp, preventing any attempt at migration. This brutal policy of uprooting and repression practiced since the Mao era led to the growth of the concentration camps (laogai). Famine and repression caused not less than 30 million deaths in all. More recently, in the 1990s, the massive urbanisation of this country tore from the land not less than 90 million peasants. Other crises struck Asia, such as the civil war in Pakistan and the flight of Bengalis in 1971. Similarly, the taking of Saigon in 1975 (by a Stalinist-type regime) provoked the exodus of millions of refugees, the "boat people". More than 200,000 of them died.[2] There followed the terrible genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia causing 2 million deaths: refugees were the rare survivors.

Refugees have always been the exchange currency for the worst political blackmail, the justification for military interventions by intervening powers, sometimes for use as "human shields". It is difficult to calculate the number of victims who paid the price for the confrontations of the Cold War and give a precise figure, but "At a World Bank conference in 1991, Robert McNamara, former Secretary of State for Defence under Kennedy and Johnson, gave a table of losses in each theatre of operations whose total exceeds forty million.”[3] The new post-war period had therefore only opened up a new period of barbarism, increasing further the divisions among populations and the working class and sowing death and desolation. By further militarising borders, states exerted a globally greater and more violent control over the populations bled dry by the Second World War.

Migrants: a boon for exploiting labour power

In the early days of the Cold War, not all migrations were caused by military conflicts or political factors. The countries of Europe that had been largely devastated by the war needed to be rapidly reconstructed. But this reconstruction had to overcome a decline in population growth (10 to 30% of men had been killed or wounded during the war). Economic and demographic factors therefore played an important role in the phenomenon of migration. Everywhere, there was an available workforce, at low cost.

This is why East Germany was forced to build a wall to stop the leakage of its population (3.8 million had already crossed the border to the West). The former colonial powers favoured immigration, primarily from the countries of southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece ...). Initially, many of these migrants arrived legally, but also illegally with the help of organised smugglers. The need for labour meant the authorities at the time closed their eyes to these irregular migrations. In this way, between 1945 and 1974, many Portuguese and Spanish workers fled the regimes of Franco and Salazar. Until the early 1960s, Italians were recruited in France, first from northern Italy and then the south as far as Sicily. Then a little later it was the turn of the former colonies in Asia and Africa to provide their quotas for a docile and cheap workforce. In France, for example, between 1950 and 1960, the number of North African migrants rose from 50,000 to 500,000. The state then built hostels for migrant workers to keep them away from the population; this foreign labour was in effect deemed a "risk", justifying its marginalisation. But this did not stop it from hiring cheap labour for the heaviest work, knowing that it could get rid of them overnight. The high turnover of these newly arrived workers allowed a frenzied and unscrupulous exploitation, particularly in the chemical and metallurgical industries. Between 1950 and 1973, nearly 10 million people migrated to Western Europe to meet its industrial needs.[4]

This situation was inevitably exploited by the bourgeoisie to divide the workers and turn them against each other, to generate competition and distrust on both sides. With the recovery of workers' struggles in 1968 and the waves of struggles that followed, these factors would feed the many divisive manoeuvres by the unions and the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie. On the one side, racial and xenophobic prejudices were encouraged; on the other, the class struggle was diverted by anti-racism, often used as a distraction to workers' demands. In this way, poison was spread and foreigners became "undesirable", or were portrayed as profiteers" or "privileged". All this would favor the growth of populist ideologies, facilitating the expulsions which have increased wholesale since the 1980s.

WH (April 2016)

In the next and final article [76] in this series we will cover the issue of migrants from the 1980s to the current period which is marked the final stage of decomposition of the capitalist system.

Over the last few years in Britain, and especially recently, there’s been a number of  ‘independent’ inquiries, parliamentary investigations (often televised live), police, parliamentary and ‘independent’ reports into all sorts of scandals and injustices, some of which go back decades. With several major inquiries in progress or just starting up, those that have been pronounced upon or, like the report on the 2003 Iraq War just out, it appears that the state is ‘cleaning up its act’ and, at last, holding those responsible for unacceptable, immoral or criminal behaviour to account. Senior politicians and top police officers are bought to book and the media, from its right to left wing, as in the Hillsborough case for example, celebrate the ‘justice for victims’. But under capitalism there can be no justice for victims and the primary aim of all these inquiries, reports and investigations is to strengthen the ideology of democracy and its ‘rule of law’ behind which lies the strengthening of the totalitarian state. The bourgeoisie may make scapegoats out of one, two or even more individuals from within its ranks but this itself only serves to reinforce its overall democratic campaign against a presently disorientated and weakened working class. It is only at such times that the ruling class is able to unleash such campaigns because if the working class was struggling in any significant way even the bourgeoisie’s ‘rule of law’ would be lifted and, as with the miners’ strike of 84, the state would be confronting it with all the forces and methods available to it however heinous and brutal.

Let’s look at some examples of the inquiries and investigations going on within this democratic campaign.

The Chilcot Inquiry into Britain’s role in the 2003 war in Iraq. After 7 years and ten million quid, the 2.6 million word Chilcot Report has been released. There’s nothing surprising about its conclusions. Tony Blair didn’t lie it says but that’s not even the point; the whole war was based on a mendacity that’s stock-in-trade for the whole ruling class. The intelligence on the threat posed by Saddam was ‘flawed’ apparently but reading it one can see that it clearly warned that the war would increase the jihadist threat and increase regional instability in the Middle East. In this sense the family of one soldier killed in the war was going in the right direction in labelling Blair (and his clique) as “the world’s worst terrorist”.

Despite not being accused of lying, Blair does come in for particular criticism in the report, and was the only individual mentioned in the initial oral presentation of it. Everyone denounces Blair but it was the whole of the British bourgeoisie that was overwhelmingly behind supporting the war of the US NeoCons: the cabinet, the civil service, the military, the secret services, politicians of all parties, all faithfully supported by the media as it obediently danced to their lying tunes. The intelligence that was acted upon was what was required and made up by the British ruling class in order to fulfil its imperialist interests[1] covered by its democratic facade. It’s not a question of individuals but of the state apparatus. All the individuals involved in fomenting this war, from the civil service, the military, intelligence, the cabinet office, the media, have all been promoted or are doing very well in high-paid positions – including Tony Blair the “Peace Envoy” to the Middle East!

The lawyers arguing about ‘who lied’ deliberately avoid the point. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, an admirer of the BBC, hits it on the head: “The essential English leadership secret does not depend on a particular intelligence.... The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous”. “Never again”, “lessons will be learnt” are just continuations of the democratic lie. After around half-a-million Iraqis had been killed, the country fractured and the rise of an ISIS closely linked to the Iraq War and the role of US and British intelligence, British imperialism then unleashed the 2011 Libyan war with similar lies, similar ruthlessness and similar results.

Chilcot can’t teach us anything because the imperialist policies of Blair government are still the policies of the British state as expressed by the current political set-up. Most recently in the British bombing of Syria, the Cameron government had the full support of a significant number of the Labour Party and the majority of the media in the US-led ‘War on Terror’ (which parts of the Labour Party equated to the ‘war against fascism’). And these fantasy politics of British imperialism continue with forces on the ground in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan in order to defend its own ‘national’ interests, i.e., contribute to the war of each against all in the Middle East

One of the aspects of the inquiry and the general discussion, particularly in relation to the families of British servicemen and women, has been the need to beef up British militarism and its equipment so that its imperialist interests can be better managed. In this sense it’s similar to the ‘Walter Reed scandal’ in the US which exposed the atrocious living and medical conditions of Iraqi war veterans which was then linked to a campaign for a better organised military[2].

Finally, Jeremy Corbyn has apologised on behalf of the Labour Party, the same Corbyn that saluted the killers of Hamas and Hezbollah from the same ‘Stop the War Coalition’ that supported Islamic fundamentalism against US and British interests.

The Hillsborough inquiry, a response to the entirely justified anger and indignation of many to this slaughter (96 crushed to death at a football match in 1989) and its cover-up, has found many elements of the state culpable, including some named individuals. Some of these might, probably will not, go to jail but the state becomes stronger with this result that suggest that ‘victims matter’. Police forces are polished up and the constant refrain of ‘lessons will be learnt’ means absolutely nothing because the police remain a repressive arm of the capitalist state, and the  football authorities and the media, who hounded the fans and their families even in death, can now present clean hands.

The result of the Hillsborough inquiry gave rise to demands from the left for an inquiry into South Yorkshire police and its role in the attack on miners at the Orgreave coking plant in 1984. But everyone knows what happened: the police attacked the miners and the BBC and the rest of the media consciously inverted the story to make it look the other way around. There’s already been an inquiry into this and the BBC, in order to maintain any credibility, had to admit what it had done and apologise – presumably ‘learning lessons’. But this hasn’t stopped some, on the left in this case, for calling for more investigations and inquiries, a sort of enquiryitis going around in circles while everything stays the same or rather gets worse.

There have also been various parliamentary select committee inquiries, some televised live, to examine contentious issues and individuals; Philip Green and the now bankrupt BHS, Mike Ashley and Sports Direct (scandal of low wages and aggressive management) for example. These nauseating individuals and their ‘interrogators’ are all part of the game which, like ‘banker-bashing’ is going nowhere while the workers of both companies are either losing their jobs or continue to suffer the same conditions. And the daily grind of exploitation continues to deepen for the working class.

There are inquiries into the role of British intelligence in the killing of civilians during the ‘troubles’ in Ireland, investigations into the role of MI6 in the abuse of young boys at the Kincora home in the North and the role of these agencies in 50 killings related to the British army’s IRA agent ‘Stakeknife’. Another circular waste of time for the victims aimed at not uncovering the past but covering up the present and the future activities of these self-same agencies with the same aim of presenting a ‘clean’ democratic state.

There are various investigations into sexual abuse such as the 2014 Goddard inquiry which will also look at the question of the 150,000 children in Britain that were taken from their families by groups including the Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Church of England, Salvation Army and Barnado’s and sent abroad from the 1920s to the 70s, with many suffering sexual and physical abuse. Along with the state, to which they belong, these organisations were running a massive children’s ring of sex slaves and cheap labour. The result of the Jimmy Savile inquiry, where those that supported him have been promoted by the BBC while those that flagged up his ‘institutionalised ‘ abuse have been forced out, shows how meaningless are words like ‘Sorry’ and ‘lessons will be learnt’ and that will certainly apply in the Goddard attempt at ‘closure’, i.e., the whitewashing of the state. And apart from anything else these inquiries are a goldmine for the lawyers and other parasitic layers. But the real underlying motive is the strengthening of the state by presenting it as ultimately clean, moral and democratic.

While making a show, in one circus after the other, of its ‘clean hands’, the British ruling class continues its war against the working class and the war against its rivals, backing torturers and butchers while manipulating various elements of terrorism to its own ends. When they are not facilitating the expression of terrorism they are using it. In this sense the British bourgeoisie are no different from their counterparts everywhere, who also have their own ‘clean hands’ campaigns.

The bourgeoisie’s ideas about ending corruption and the recent London summit to this effect, involving all sorts of professional gangsters and their cliques, was beyond any parody. And London steeped in money from all sorts of ‘enterprises’, and with its offshore networks, stands as probably the most ‘corrupt’ of all national capitals.

None of these expressions of capitalism: corruption, ‘mistakes’, ‘bad policing’, cover-ups, greed, unemployment and fear at work, increased exploitation, sexual slavery and abuse, none of these are exceptions to capitalism which can be overturned or even altered by any number of inquiries. These are integral expressions of the whole system along with the tendency to increased militarism and war. There can be no fair capitalism just as there can be no ‘fair day’s pay’. The essence of this system is profit, exploitation and militarism and no inquiry can even begin to attenuate that. Nor can the bourgeoisie, who are increasingly gripped by the irrationality of their system, do anything but follow its devastating course and try to manage its rhythm. For this they have to continually swamp the working class ideologically with all their various campaigns and ‘investigations’. For its part, and as weak as it is at the moment, the working class is the only force that is capable of posing a new society but for this it has to fight for its own interests and if it begins to do that we won’t be seeing the bourgeoisie setting up inquiries into the excesses of the capitalist state. 

Boxer, 7/7/16

Last August 2015, in our article ‘Boycott the election: the marxist standpoint in the era of decadent capitalism’[1] we wrote:

“The failure of the Aquino Regime is not just because of BS Aquino and the Liberal Party. Long before the current ruling faction, the capitalist system in the Philippines was already a failure .

Together with the rottenness of the present administration, the opposition led by its strongest contender for the Presidency, Vice-President Jojimar Binay, stinks with corruption and self-enrichment. Proof that both the administration and opposition are rotten and corrupt.

Each of them exposes the scandals of their political rivals. In decadent capitalism there is no need for the radicals and progressives inside parliament to expose the decay of capitalism.

One negative effect of decadent capitalism in its decomposing stage is the rise of desperation and hopelessness among the poverty-stricken masses. One indication is the lumpenisation of parts of the toiling masses, increasing number of suicides, rotten culture among the young and gangsterism. All of these are manifestations of the increasing discontentment of the masses in the current system but they don’t know what to do and what to replace it with. In other words, increasing discontent but no perspective for the future. That’s why the mentality of ’everyone for himself’ and ’each against all’ strongly influences a significant portion of the working class.

But the worst effect of having no perspective due to demoralisation is hoping that one person can save the majority from poverty; hoping for a strongman and a “benevolent” dictator. This is no different from hoping for a all-powerful god to descend to earth to save those who have faith in him and punish those who do not. The class which mainly generates this mentality is the petty-bourgeoisie.”

Generally we were not mistaken of our analysis.

Different bourgeois ‘political analysts’ admitted that the votes for Rodrigo Duterte are votes against the failures of the BS Aquino administration. What they did not say and don’t want to say is that the hatred and discontent of the people is against  the whole system of bourgeois democracy that they believed replaced the dictatorship of Marcos Sr. in 1986. For the past 30 years the failures and corruption of the democratic institutions has been exposed, and seen as no different from the Marcos Sr. dictatorship. They feel that the current situation is worse than during the time of the Marcos Sr. dictatorship.

Duterte regime: a government of the left of capital?

Duterte declared that he is a “socialist” and a “leftist”. He boasted that he will be the first leftist Philippine President. Almost all the left factions in the Philippines agree with Duterte and offer their support for his regime. And the front runner in this support is the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines and its legal organisations.[2]

Whatever the “socialism” of Duterte, it is certainly not scientific socialism or marxism. For sure it is another brand of bourgeois “socialism” to deceive the masses and revive the lies of the bourgeoisie against socialism/communism. The “socialism” of Duterte is state capitalism.[3]

Based on Duterte’s statements before and during campaign, it is clear that the essence of his platform of government is for the interests of the capitalist class not of the working masses. In relation to this, he has threatened militant workers not to launch strikes under his term or else he will kill them.

Worse, Duterte uses language (as well as the deeds) of a street gangster and a bully This is an expression of the fact that he sees the government as a big mafia where he is the ‘Godfather’. His vague policy of “federalism”, which seems to be based on the boast that the income of the local governments is bigger than that of the national government, is in reality closer to the concept of the autonomy of local mafias in their own territories.

For the communist organisation and revolutionary workers, the Duterte regime is a rabid defender of national capitalism[4] but is still totally dependent on foreign capital.

Duterte regime: government of and by the capitalist class

The “bold” promise of Duterte to stop corruption, criminality and drugs within the first 3-6 months of his presidency has a very strong appeal to the voters. This has a stronger appeal among the capitalists and the ‘middle class’ who are the constant targets of crime. Capitalists want a peaceful and smooth-sailing business in order to accumulate more profits. That’s why, for the capitalists, workers’ strikes are just as much expressions of ‘chaos’ as the plague of crime.

The new government cannot solve the problems of massive unemployment, low wages and widespread casualisation. In the midst of a worsening crisis of over-production, the main problem for the capitalists is to have a competitive edge against their rivals in a saturated world market. Reducing the cost of labour power through lay-offs and precarious contracts is the only way to make their products cheaper than their rivals.[5]

Essentially the solution of the regime is to strengthen state control over the life of society and to oblige the population to strictly follow the laws and policies of the state through propaganda and repression.

Under the new regime factional struggles within the ruling class will intensify as the crisis of the system worsens. On the surface, most of the elected politicians from the other parties, especially from the ruling Liberal Party of Duterte’s predecessor, the Aquino regime, are now declaring their allegiance to the new government. But in reality every faction has its  own agenda which they want to assert under the new administration. Furthermore, within the Duterte camp there are several factions competing for favour and positions: the pro-Duterte Maoist faction, anti-CPP/NPA faction, warlords from Mindanao/Visayas, warlords from Luzon particularly the group around Cayetano, the Vice-Presidential candidate of Duterte.

Effects of capitalist decomposition on the consciousness of the Filipino masses

We also wrote in our article ‘Boycott the election….’

“If Duterte runs for president in 2016 and the ruling class in the Philippines decides that the country needs a dictator like in the era of Marcos to try to save  dying capitalism in the Philippines and drown the poverty-stricken mass in  fear and submission to the government, surely he will win. Ultimately, the capitalist class (local and foreign) is not concerned with what kind of management of the state the Philippines has. What is more important for them is to accumulate profit.”

There are certainly indications that Duterte is a psychologically disturbed individual who hankers after being a dictator. But whether he  rules as a dictator or as a bourgeois liberal depends on the general decision of the ruling class (both local and international) and the solid support from the AFP/PNP and even from the Maoist faction that supported him.

For us, what is important is to analyse and understand as communists why significant numbers of the population are ready to accept Duterte as dictator and ‘Godfather’. Analysis is crucial because in other countries, especially in Europe and the USA, ultra-rightist personalities who engage in tough-talking and bullying (the likes of Donald Trump ) are gaining popularity. Significant numbers among the youth are also attracted to the violence and fanaticism of ISIS.

In analysing the phenomenal popularity of Rodrigo Duterte and Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the late dictator, it is necessary to have a world-wide view

Globally, for more than 30 years capitalist decomposition has been infecting the consciousness of the population. The infection encompasses many areas: economy, politics, and culture/ideology. The popularity of Duterte and Marcos Jr. is an indication of helplessness, hopelessness and a loss of perspective; of a loss of confidence in class unity and the struggles of the toiling masses. Hence, the current seeking for a “saviour” instead of for class identity. The background to this is the unsolvable crisis of capitalism, expressing itself in worsening poverty, growing chaos, spreading wars, devastation of the environment, scandals and corruption in governments.

But a major contributing factor is also the near absence of a strong working class movement for more than 20 years in the Philippines. The militant struggles at the time of the Marcos Sr. dictatorship were diverted and sabotaged by leftism towards guerrillaism and electoralism. Because of the strong influence of nationalism the Philippine workers’ movement is isolated from the international struggles of the working class.

Criminality

For almost 50 years the Filipino toiling masses witnessed the bankruptcy of both the guerrilla war of the Maoists and the promises of reforms from every faction of the ruling class sitting in Malacañang Palace. In addition, the militarisation in the countryside of both the armed rebels and the state resulted in massive dislocation that creates a widening and increasing population of poor and unemployed people living in saturated slum areas in the cities. This situation is exploited by the crime syndicates. Hence, criminality from drugs, robbery and kidnapping and car-napping increases year by year. Gang killings and gang riots, rape and other forms of violence are daily events in the cities. And increasingly, both the perpetrators and the victims are the young, even children.

Since a number of police and military officials are protectors of these syndicates, the state itself has become totally unable to control crimes and violence.

Although the first to be affected by the rise of criminality, particularly robbery and kidnapping, are the rich, the poor people also carry the burden of these crimes since most of the “soldiers” or the cannon-fodder of these syndicates come from the hungry and unemployed population.

Helplessness

There is a widespread feeling of helplessness among the population. Being atomised and isolated, they’re asking who can protect them. Behind this thinking is their expectation that the state must protect them. But the state is abandoning them. Helplessness and atomisation breed a longing for a saviour, a person or group of persons that can save them from their misery, that is stronger than the sum of the atomised population. And this saviour must control the government since only the government can protect them.

This helplessness is a fertile ground for scapegoating and personalisation. Blaming somebody for their misery: the corrupt government officials and criminals.  The loss of perspectives and growing feelings of helplessness catapult the popularity of Duterte and Marcos Jr. The popularity of these figures is an effect of the rotting system, not of the rising political awareness of the masses. This rottenness was also the reason for the popularity of Hitler and Mussolini before World War II.

As this tendency towards scapegoating and personalisation grows, the number of people who support physical elimination, by whatever means, of corrupt officials and criminals is increasing. They clap their hands whenever they hear Duterte declaring “kill them all!”

Internationalism

It is more difficult for us to combat the effects of a decomposing society in the current political situation. Nevertheless, we are not fighting alone or in isolation. We are part of the international proletarian resistance that exploded since 1968. The international working class, despite its difficulties to find its own class identity and solidarity as an independent class, is still fighting against the attacks of decadent capitalism.

We can only see a bright future by rejecting all forms of nationalism. We cannot see the proletarian class struggle if we just look at the ‘national situation’. We should not forget that since 2006 our class brothers in Europe, some parts of the Middle East and USA have been fighting against decomposition through movements of solidarity (anti-CPE movement in France, Indignados in Spain, class struggle in Greece, Occupy movement in the USA). We should also remember that hundreds of thousands of our class brothers in China have launched widespread strikes.

We must persevere with theoretical clarification, organisational strengthening and militant interventions to prepare for the future struggles at the international level. We are not nationalists as the different leftist factions are. We are proletarian internationalists.

Let us be reminded by the last paragraph of the Communist Manifesto: “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” 

Internasyonalismo (ICC section in the Philippines) June 2016

“The communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The workers have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got” (Communist Manifesto, 1848)

Capitalism, the system of exploitation which rules the planet, cannot maintain itself by force and violence alone. It cannot do without the power of ideology – the endless production of ideas which turn reality on its head and persuade the exploited that their best interests lie in lining up behind their own exploiters. Exactly a hundred years ago, hundreds of thousands of workers from Britain, France, Germany and other countries, at the Battle of the Somme, paid the ultimate price for believing the basic lie of the ruling class – that the workers should ‘fight for their country’, which could only mean fighting and dying for the interests of the ruling class. The horrible massacres of World War One proved once and for all that nationalism is the deadliest ideological enemy of the working class.

Today, after decades of attacks on living standards, of the break-up of industries and communities, of financial shocks and austerity packages, and of a whole series of defeated struggles, the working class is being subjected to a new tidal wave of nationalist poison in the form of the populist campaigns of Trump in the USA, Le Pen in France, the Brexiters in Britain and many other central capitalist countries. These campaigns are openly basing themselves on the real disorientation and anger within the working class, on growing frustration about the lack of jobs, housing, healthcare, on widespread feelings of powerlessness in the face of impersonal, global forces. But the very last thing these campaigns want workers to do is to think critically about the real causes of all these misfortunes. On the contrary, the function of populism is to divert any attempt to understand the complex and apparently mysterious social system that governs our lives and to come up with a far simpler solution: look for someone to blame.

Blame the elites, they scream: the greedy bankers, the corrupt politicians, the shadowy bureaucrats who run the EU and tie us all up in red tape and regulations. And all these figures are indeed part of the ruling class and play their part in ramping up exploitation and destroying jobs and futures. But “blaming the elites” is a distortion of class consciousness, not the real thing, and the trick can be exposed by asking the question: who is peddling this new anti-elitism? And you only have to look at Donald Trump or the leaders of the Brexit campaign, or the mass media who support them, to see that this kind of anti-elitism is being sold by another part of the elite. In the 1930s, the Nazis used the same trick, scapegoating a sinister international elite of Jewish financiers for the devastating effects of the world economic crisis, and pulling workers behind a fraction of the ruling class which claimed to defend the true interests of the national economy. The Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels once said that the bigger the lie, the better the chance of its success, and the claim to stand for the little guy against the elite, mouthed by politicians like the billionaire Trump, is a lie worthy of Goebbels himself.

But above all, the target of the new nationalism is not a section of the rich but the most oppressed layers of the working class itself, the most direct victims of capitalism’s economic crisis, its savage imperialist wars, its devastation of the environment – the mass of economic migrants and war refugees driven towards the central capitalist countries in search of a respite from poverty and mass murder.  Another “simple” solution offered by the populists: if we could stop them coming in, if we could kick them out, there would obviously be more to go around, a better chance for the “native” workers to find jobs and housing. But this apparent common sense obscures the fact that unemployment and homelessness are products of the workings of the world capitalist system, of “market forces” that cannot be blocked by walls or border guards, and that the migrants and refugees are being pushed by the same capitalist drive for profit which closes down factories in the old industrial regions and displaces whole sectors of production to the other side of the world where labour is cheaper.

Faced with a system of exploitation that is by nature planetary in its reach, the exploited can only defend themselves by uniting across all national divisions, by forming themselves into an international power against the international power of capital. And in direct opposition to this need is the tactic of divide and rule, which is used by all capitalist parties and factions, but which has been pushed to an extreme by the populists.  When one group of workers sees the cause of their problems in other workers, when they see their interests being upheld by parties which call for tough measures against immigration, they give up the possibility of defending themselves, and they weaken the prospect of resistance by the working class as a whole.

False alternatives to populism

Behind the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the populists lies the very real threat of violence, of the pogrom. In countries like Greece and Hungary, the toxic hatred of ‘foreigners’, the rise of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism have engendered out and out fascist groupings that are willing to terrorise and murder migrants and refugees – the Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, and the list could easily be extended.  In Britain after the Brexit victory, there has been a real upsurge in racist attacks, threats and insults against Poles and other EU immigrants as well as against black and Asian people, as the most overtly racist currents in society feel that the time has come to emerge from their sewers.

But the example of Britain also shows that there is a false alternative to populism which ‘remains’ on the side of the capitalist system. The chaotic political situation created by the Brexit vote (which we analyse in another article in this paper), the growing threat to immigrant workers, has led many well-meaning people to vote for the Remain camp, and in the wake of the referendum, to organise large demonstrations in favour of the EU. We have even seen anarchists, in a panic about the increasingly overt expressions of racism stirred up by the campaign, forgetting their opposition to capitalist elections and voting Remain.

To vote for or demonstrate in favour of the EU is another way of falling into the hands of the ruling class. The EU is not a benevolent institution, but a capitalist alliance which imposes the most ruthless austerity on the working class, as we can see most clearly from what the EU demanded of the Greek workers in return for receiving EU funds for Greece’s bankrupt economy. And the EU is certainly not a kindly protector of migrants and refugees. In favour of the ‘free movement’ of labour power when it suits the profit motive, it is no less capable of building walls and razor wire fences when it sees migrants and refugees as surplus to requirements, and of coming to sordid deals to send refugees whose labour power it can’t use back to the camps that they are trying to escape from – as it has done in a recent agreement with Turkey. 

 The nationalist Tower of Babel and the fraud of bourgeois democracy

The division between pro- and anti-EU cuts across the traditional left-right divide in bourgeois politics. Both camps have their right and left supporters. The Remain campaign in Britain was led by a faction of the Tory party but was officially supported by the majority of Labour, and by the SNP in Scotland. The left itself was split between Remain and Leave. Corbyn was nominally for Remain but he comes from the Old Labour idea of a “socialist Britain”, in other words an island of autarkic state capitalism, and it was obvious that his heart wasn’t in the Remain campaign.  Corbyn’s supporters in the Socialist Workers’ Party and similar groups were for Left Exit, an absurd mirror image of the Brexit camp. This Tower of Babel of nationalisms, whether pro- or anti-EU, is itself another factor in the prevailing ideological fog, posing everything in terms of ‘in’ or ‘out’, of the interests of Britain, of the existing system.

And all these capitalist groups and parties were further thickening the fog by spreading the fraud of “democracy”, the idea that capitalist elections or referendums really can express the “will of the people”. A key element of the Leave campaign was the idea of “taking our country back” from the foreign bureaucrats – a country which the vast majority never had in the first place because it is owned and controlled by a small minority, which manipulates the institutions of democracy to ensure that, whoever wins the majority of votes, the working class as a class remains excluded from power. The democratic polling booth – which in some countries is rightly called an “isolator” – is not, as the capitalist left will often argue, a means for the working class to express its class consciousness, at least in a defensive manner. It is a means for atomising the working class, for dividing it up into a mass of powerless citizens. And referendums in particular have been a time honoured means of mobilising the most reactionary forces in society – something that was already apparent under the dictatorial regime of Louis Bonaparte in 19th century France. For all these reasons, despite the political convulsions the Brexit vote has produced, the EU referendum was a “success” for bourgeois democracy, presenting it as the only possible framework for the conduct of political debate.

 The working class alternative

Faced with a world system which seems intent on turning each country into a bunker where only you and yours deserve to survive, some groups have raised the slogan “No Borders”.  This is a praiseworthy aim, but to get rid of borders you have to get rid of nation states, and to get rid of the state you need to get rid of the social relations of exploitation which it protects.  And all that requires a world-wide revolution of the exploited, establishing a new form of political power which dismantles the bourgeois state and begins to replace capitalist production for profit with communist production for universal need.

This goal seems immeasurably distant today, and the advancing decomposition of capitalist society – above all, its tendency to drag the working class into its own material and moral downfall – contains the danger that this perspective will be definitively lost.  And yet it remains the only hope for a human future. And it is not a question of passively waiting for it to happen, like the Day of Judgement. The seeds of revolution lie in the revival of the class struggle, in returning to the path of resistance against attacks from right and left, in social movements against austerity, repression, and war; in the fight for solidarity with all the exploited and the excluded, in the defence of ‘foreign’ workers against gang masters and pogroms. This is the only struggle that can revive the perspective of a world community.

And what about the communists, that minority of the class which is still convinced by the perspective of a world human community? We have to recognise soberly that in the present situation we are swimming against the stream. And like previous revolutionary fractions which withstood the challenge of a tide of reaction or counter-revolution, we need to reject any compromising of principles learned from decades of class experience. We need to insist that there can be no support for any capitalist state or alliance of states, no concessions to nationalist ideology, no illusions that capitalist democracy provides a means of defending ourselves against capitalism. We refuse to participate in capitalist campaigns on one side or the other, precisely because we do aim to participate in the class struggle, and because the class struggle needs to become independent from all the forces of capitalism which seek to divert it or corral it. And faced with the enormous confusion and disarray which is currently reigning in our class, we need to engage in a serious theoretical effort to understand a world that is becoming increasingly complicated and unpredictable.  Theoretical work is not an abstention from the class struggle, but helps prepare the time when theory, in Marx’s words, becomes a material force by gripping the masses.

Amos 9.7.16

Populism is not another player in the games between the parties of left and right; it exists because of widespread discontent that can find no means of expressing itself. It’s entirely on the political terrain of the bourgeoisie, but is based on opposition to elites and ‘the Establishment’, on antagonism towards immigration, distrust of left-wing promises and right-wing austerity, all expressing a loss of confidence in the institutions of capitalist society but not for a moment recognising the revolutionary alternative of the working class.

In the ICC’s “Theses on Decomposition [84]”, published in 1990, we wrote about “the bourgeoisie’s growing difficulty in controlling the evolution of the political situation” and “the ruling class’ loss of control over its own political strategy”. Although the use of democracy has proven a very effective tool and ideology for the capitalist class, something in which their control of the political situation has been sustained, the latent tendency for difficulties to emerge for the ruling class has come more and more to the surface with the growth of populism.

The rise of populism, at a certain level, strengthens democracy with the discontented rallying to the populist parties, with others rallying to any force that will confront populism. However, the UK vote to Leave the EU is a reminder of the difficulties that populism can cause for the bourgeoisie’s political control. The ruling class uses democracy to try and give its rule some legitimacy, but populism undermines its attempts at validation. Populism poses dangers for the bourgeoisie because, as it develops, it brings unpredictable upsets in the democratic process

The British bourgeoisie faced with the problem of populism

We have often had good reason to emphasise that the British ruling class is the most experienced bourgeoisie in the world, able to manoeuvre at the diplomatic, political and electoral level in a manner that is the envy of capitalist states across the globe. However, in this case, the Brexit vote shows the limits of the abilities of the British bourgeoisie.

Although the UK has a long history of capitalism’s use of elections, it has had little use for referenda. After the EU referendum of 1975, apart from local referenda in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, there was only the 2011 referendum on a new voting system before this year’s vote on Leave/Remain. This has been a wise policy for the bourgeoisie because there is always the danger that a referendum can be used as a focus for protest on any issue, regardless of the actual subject of the vote. In practice David Cameron’s calling of a referendum was a massive miscalculation about the growth of populism. Far from being limited to a battle with UKIP and Eurosceptic Tories, there were many from all and no political backgrounds drawn into the fray. This also accounted for the weakness of the Remain campaign. While it presented facts, common sense and rational considerations (from a capitalist point of view), the Leave campaign appealed, with greater success, to irrational emotions.

The Brexiters personalised the argument by focussing on the rich Cameron and Osborne who couldn’t understand the concerns of ordinary people; they said that people were fed up with experts and should trust their gut feelings; they portrayed immigration as a problem and one worsened by EU membership; and they promised £350m per week would be available to spend on the NHS (later saying this was a ‘mistake’). Against this the Remain campaign sustained its arguments on the need to continue the benefits of EU membership, displayed the analysis of armies of economists, and quoted the testimonies of businesses that recognised the importance of the EU. When Remain did approach questions like immigration they agreed with the Leavers that it was a problem, but insisted that the EU framework was the best way of further clamping down on the movement of people looking for employment or safety.

The unpredictable consequences of Brexit

After the EU referendum there will be no return to political ‘business as usual”. Neither side had a plan for what to do in the event of a Leave victory. Whatever happens those who will suffer most will be those who were suffering already. While Osborne was quick to announce a cut in Corporation Tax to attract business to Britain, it is clear that it will be the working class that will have to make the economic sacrifices, and that workers would bear the brunt of attacks whether Remain or Leave had won.

At the economic level there has been much speculation as to what could happen, how British capitalism can best defend its interests, how the countries of the EU can defend themselves against any collateral damage in the aftermath of the referendum. The implications are international. There will be attempts to limit the impact on the EU. The dangers of a Brexit contagion spreading to other countries are very real. There are forces in many countries that resent the dominance of France and Germany in the EU. A British exit could further deepen these centrifugal forces.

One other prospect opens up with the growth of separatist tendencies. With the Scottish vote in the referendum strongly in favour of remaining in the EU, and with the 2015 General Election leaving only a handful of Scottish MPs not in the Scottish National Party, the possibility of a further loss of control and the undermining of the Union has been the subject of much speculation. It’s a different situation in Northern Ireland, but a majority there also wanted to remain, which could also cause further difficulties for the United Kingdom.

On the political level there will be realignments, but there’s no guarantee that there’ll be a return to the unambiguous certainties of Left/Right politics. Parliament has 40 years of EU legislation to examine in a short period. After its internal battles the Conservative Party is not going to settle down easily. There was a big split in the Tory Cabinet during the campaign, and, after the referendum, the battle between Gove and Johnson showed a further division in the Brexit camp. Of the two women who are candidates for the Conservative leadership, May was for the Remain side but now says that “Brexit means Brexit”, while Leadsom, in 2013, said leaving the EU “would be a disaster for our economy”, but campaigned to Leave in 2016. The 150,000 members of the Conservative Party who will decide on the next Prime Minister might not be a predictable electorate, any more than the Labour Party was when it voted for Corbyn. (Editor's note: Since this article was written, the political situation has evolved yet again, with Theresa May now installed as Prime Minister, following Leadsom's withdrawal.)

The situation in the Labour Party is a microcosm of the overall political difficulties faced by the bourgeoisie. Labour is not being called on to fulfil any important government function at present, but it does have an important oppositional role and needs to be ready for the future whenever the working class begins to stir. There is a gap between the MPs who don’t support Corbyn as leader and the membership who do. The unions are not united, but they too will contribute to the situation, not necessarily to provide stability.

The UK’s EU referendum is a disquieting example to the bourgeoisie elsewhere. If the British bourgeoisie, across the spectrum, has difficulties in coping with the growth of populism then the same will apply to every other state. While democracy is one of the main means for containing and diverting the impulses of the working class and other social strata, the force of populism shows that the democratic process has its limitations and doesn’t always follow the will of the dominant factions of the bourgeoisie.

The working class in the face of populism

One of the reasons for the growth of populism is the weakness of the working class, at the level of its struggles, its consciousness and its sense of its own identity. If the working class was widely seen to present an alternative to capitalism then it would be an inspirational factor in the perspective of a human community. But this is currently not the case.

Not only that, many workers have fallen in with populism, taken in by the idea of the ‘people’ against the elites. It is significant that in those areas of old industrial Britain that have been most run down and neglected there was a greater working class tendency to vote Leave. The Labour Party has taken support in these areas for granted, and although a majority of Labour voters voted to Remain, the minority that didn’t was significant. These are the sections of the working class who have suffered most from the ‘neo-liberal’ policies which have displaced whole industries from the old capitalist heartlands, have turned the housing market into an arena for unrestricted speculation, and which subsequently offered austerity as the medicine needed to avert the disintegration of the international financial system.   

Faced with this onslaught, often presented in the guise of a kind of capitalist ‘internationalism’, it is not surprising that whole sectors of the working class feel a very real anger against the establishment, but this does not in itself lead to the development of class consciousness. The appeal of populist demagogues, with their easy targets to blame, the EU, a metropolitan elite, immigration, foreigners, is quite concrete. Where capitalism is an abstraction, the populists can change their focus from EU regulations to Islamist terrorism to globalisation, even to the parasitic rich, without pausing for breath. Populism represents a considerable danger to the working class, because it does not have to be in any way coherent to be effective. It is a big challenge for revolutionaries to analyse the significance this whole phenomenon, and we are only just beginning this work.

The UK referendum, both campaign and result, is just one demonstration of a situation that is changing because of the growth of populism. It is a problem that can only get worse until the proletariat begins to appreciate its historic role, understands that it is not just an exploited class but that it has the capacity to overthrow capitalism and establish an international human community.

Car 9/7/16

The state has prepared the terrain for repression very well. As we said in our articles on the terrorist attacks in Paris in January and November 2015, the incredible reinforcement of police control and the state of emergency put in place created a situation, on the material as well as ideological levels, in which repression and police provocation can be used more easily, especially in exploiting the phenomenon of ‘casseurs’ (rioters/wreckers) as an important alibi for the police action.

The repressive nature of the bourgeois state

The state and its repressive forces are the product of irreconcilable class contradictions and are the instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed, exclusively at the service of the bourgeoisie. How is ‘order’ maintained? “... in order that these antagonisms, classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in sterile struggle, a power seemingly standing above society became necessary for the purpose of moderating the conflict, of keeping it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society, but placing itself above it, and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.” But “This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed people but also of material adjuncts, prisons and institutions of coercion of all kinds... A standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power.”[1] So, the reality of police violence is neither new, nor an accident of history, nor the product of an imperfect realisation of democracy; it is a clear expression of the profoundly oppressive nature of the state. The ruling class has thus always been extraordinarily brutal faced with any expression that puts its social order in question. The bourgeoisie has attempted to bury each challenge from the proletariat under a deluge of iron and fire. So today the police cosh the working class youth on the same pavements where in 1871 the armies of Versailles drowned the Paris Commune in blood.

From the start of the workers’ movement revolutionary organisations have been confronted not only with state violence but also with the question of the recourse to violence in the ranks of the proletariat. Violent actions in themselves have never been seen as an expression of the political strength of the movement, but have to be seen in a more general context. Even when directed against the forces of order, violent actions can often be no more than individual responses which contain the danger of undermining the unity of the class. This doesn’t mean that the workers’ movement is “pacifist”. It inevitably uses a certain form of violence: the violence of the class struggle against the bourgeois state. But here it is a question of a different, liberating, nature, which is accompanied by a conscious step which has nothing to do with the violence and brutality of ruling classes whose power is maintained by terror and oppression. So, the experience of a proletariat which little by little constituted itself as a distinct organised and conscious class, allowed it to gradually struggle against the immediate temptation of blind violence which was one of the characteristics of the first workers’ riots. For example in the 18th century numerous workers, nearly everywhere in Europe, rose up very violently against the introduction of weaving machines by destroying them. These violent actions, exclusively against the machines, were the product of the lack of experience and organisation in the infancy of the workers’ movement. As Marx emphasised: “It took both time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilises those instruments.”[2]

‘Rioters/wreckers’, a phenomenon encouraged by decomposition

On the other hand, there were a number of political expressions which emerged during the 20th century and which have given in to blind violence in various forms. This was particularly the case after 1968, for example those in Italy inspired by ‘operaist’ ideologies[3], or in West Germany among the many ‘autonomist’ tendencies. These currents expressed a lack of reflection and orientation about the means needed for a political confrontation with capitalism. In Berlin, for example, since the 1980s, the 1st May has become a time of ritual confrontations between police and all sorts of ‘rioters’ who above all seek confrontation with the police, destroying shops and cars, mistakenly identifying this with the idea of ‘making the revolution’.

Today these ‘autonomist’ forces, which are more and more identified with ‘terrorism’ by the state, express the impotence and the political void left at present by the great weakness of a working class which, if it has been able to emerge from decades of traumatic Stalinist counter-revolution, has not yet succeeded in recognising itself as a social class, in affirming its authentic means of struggle, and thus its communist perspective. Disorientated, totally lacking in confidence in its own strength, the proletariat has not succeeded in recognising its own identity and still less its historic power. So it leaves the field free for all the impatience of an exasperated youth, deprived of political experience, and momentarily lacking any perspective for the future.

This largely explains the relative attraction among some of the young for the methods of the ‘autonomists’ and ‘insurrectionists’, or the success of hazy theories like those of the pamphlet The Coming Insurrection[4] by a certain ‘Invisible Committee’. In it we can read “The offensive aiming to liberate territory from police occupation is already committed, and can count on inexhaustible reserves of resentment that these forces have united against themselves. The ‘social movements’ themselves are little by little won over by the riot”. This kind of discourse, more or less shared by a good number of autonomists regrouped under various changeable banners (black blocs, defenders of ‘autonomous zones’, some antifascists) has pushed them more and more to the front of the social scene. For some years more and more of the young, suffering the social violence of capitalism, of precarity and unemployment, express their anger and exasperation in revolt, sometimes violently. Fed up, subject to police provocations, they are easily led to confront the forces of order during demonstrations. Some of the young are thus exposed to the influences and actions of ‘casseurs’ or of ‘autonomist’ groups who distinguish themselves through sterile actions such as trashing property, breaking shop windows, etc, which can unfortunately fascinate the desperate.

There is no question of drawing a parallel between the violence of the state, through the good offices of the over-equipped police, and that of some demonstrators armed with a few feeble projectiles, as if the first were the ‘legitimate’ consequence of the second. The bourgeois press do this shamelessly. But the problem of this sterile violence, of these brawls with the police, is that the state can used them totally to its advantage. So, the government has wilfully pushed all these ‘casseurs’ and ‘autonomists’ into a trap seeking to ‘demonstrate the facts’ to proletarians as a whole that violence and revolt inevitably lead to chaos. The damage to the Necker Hospital in Paris is a perfect illustration. On 14 June the police charged with unusual violence a demonstration passing by a children’s hospital. Groups of rioters, probably incited by agents provocateurs[5], ended by breaking some hospital windows, under the impassive gaze of several companies of CRS riot police. That evening, the bourgeois press obviously had a field day, and we were treated to the scandalised declarations of the government which didn’t fail to use the occasion to pit the ‘radicals’ against the sick children. This is how the bourgeoisie polarises attention on the most violent elements on the margins of a whole damaged youth, victims of the bourgeois order, to justify the brutality of police repression. To better present the state and its institutions as the ultimate rampart against those who threaten ‘public order’ and democracy, the media highlight the symbolic destruction carried out by the ‘rioters’. This also has the effect of dividing the demonstrators, of generating distrust within the working class and above all of smothering the least idea of solidarity and of the revolutionary perspective. So, far from shaking the system, these phenomena allow the bourgeoisie to exploit their actions in order to discredit all forms of struggle against the state, but above all to better deform the revolutionary perspective. The manifestations of violence at present are both the reflection of a weakness of the class struggle and the product of social decomposition, of a general atmosphere which gives free rein to behaviour typical of social layers who have no future, who are incapable of opposing the barbarity of capitalism with another perspective, apart from blind and nihilistic rage. Other actions by rebellious minorities (such as the Molotov cocktail attack, on 18 May, against two police officers in their car, on the margins of a rally), which are clearly products of a spirit of revenge, are also exploited to the hilt by the state and its press in order to denounce ‘anti-police hatred’.

Throughout the existence of the workers’ movement it has been shown that the construction of a real balance of forces with its class enemy takes a completely different road and uses radically different methods. To take only a few examples: during the summer of 1980 in Poland, faced with the threat of repression, the workers immediately mobilised massively across sectors in the towns of Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot, making the government pull back. When the state threatened to intervene militarily to suppress them, the workers of Lubin, in solidarity, threatened in their turn to paralyse transport, the railways which connected the Russian barracks in the GDR to the Soviet Union. The Polish state ended by retreating. Faced with the past repression in 1970 and 1976, the workers’ response was not based on revenge, but on memory and solidarity.[6] More recently in France, in a different context, at the time of the struggle against the CPE in 2006, the proletarianised youth of the universities took control of their struggles by organising general assemblies open to all to extend their movement. The Villepin government, fearing the extension, had to retreat. In 2011, at the time of the Indignados movement in Spain, the people were regrouped in assemblies in the street to discuss, to exchange experience and so to forge a common will to struggle. The Spanish bourgeoisie attempted to break this dynamic by provoking confrontations with the police and by unleashing media campaigns on the ‘rioters’. But the strength and confidence accumulated in the open assemblies allowed the proletariat to respond with massive demonstrations, particularly in Barcelona where thousands of people were able to resist police attacks courageously, several times.

So, it is not violence in itself, the spirit of revenge, isolated and minority action, which creates the power of a movement faced with the capitalist state, but on the contrary a dynamic of conscious action with the perspective of overturning and destroying it.

The strength of our class resides precisely in its capacity to oppose police provocation massively and consciously.

The rotting of capitalism on its feet generates a tendency to the fragmentation of the social tissue and devalues all effort at coherent thought and reflection, pushing towards ‘action for its own sake’ and to simple and immediate solutions,[7] fed by an accumulation of dissatisfaction and resentment, a spirit of revenge, encouraging the upsurge of tiny groups which are the prey of choice for police provocation and manipulation. The most violent elements often come from decomposing petty bourgeois layers or from a declassed intelligentsia in revolt against the barbarity of the capitalist system. Their actions, marked by individualism, blinded by hate and impatience, are the expressions of immediate impulses, often without any real aim. So we find the same nihilist roots which push other young people to set out on jihad.

The bourgeoisie also uses the violence and destruction that accompany many demonstrations to push workers back towards the unions which, despite the distrust towards them, appear as the only force able to ‘organise and lead the struggle’. Such a situation can only further weaken consciousness by rebranding the main saboteurs of the struggle.

What is a revolutionary perspective?

An authentic working class movement has nothing to do with the false alternative between containment by the official unions and ‘riotous’ actions which can only lead those who truly want to struggle, especially the youth in the demonstrations, towards the political void and repression. By contrast, what characterises a real workers’ struggle is solidarity, the search for unity in struggle, the will to fight against capitalist exploitation as massively as possible. The essence of this combat is the unification of struggles, uniting all, unemployed, employed, young, old, retired, etc. And when the working class is able to mobilise on such a scale, it is capable of rallying all the other strata of this society that are victims of the suffering caused by this system. It is this mobilisation in large numbers, really taken control of by the workers themselves, which alone has the capacity to push back the state and the bourgeoisie. This is why the working class does not seek the badge of violence to create a balance of force against the ruling class, but bases itself first of all on its numbers and its unity. The proletarian struggle has nothing to do with the skirmishes filmed by journalists. Far from the instrumentalisation of violence that we see today, the historic and international combat of the working class rests on conscious and massive action. It consists of a vast project whose cultural and moral dimension contains in embryo the emancipation of humanity as a whole. As an exploited class the proletariat has no privileges to defend and only its chains to lose. For this reason the programme of the Spartacist League, written by Rosa Luxemburg, says in point 3 that: “the proletarian revolution requires no terror for its aims; it hates and despises killing. It does not need these weapons because it does not combat individuals but institutions...”[8] The workers’ struggle, with its spirit of association and solidarity, anticipates the real human community of the future. Its way of organising is not that of a general staff which directs from the summit to the base but takes the form of a conscious, collective resistance that gives birth to innumerable creative initiatives: “The mass strike … flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth. Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, in individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting – all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another – it is a ceaselessly moving changing sea of phenomena.”[9] This living, liberating momentum is expressed in the mass strike, then in the formation of the workers’ councils before leading to the insurrection and the world-wide taking of power by the proletariat. For the moment this perspective is not within reach for the proletariat which is much too weak. Although it is not defeated, it does not have sufficient strength to affirm itself and first of all needs to become conscious of itself, to reconnect with its own experience and history. The revolution is not immediate and inevitable. A long and difficult road, littered with pitfalls, still remains to be travelled. A veritable and profound upheaval of thought has to happen before it is possible to imagine the affirmation of a revolutionary perspective.  EG/WH, 26/6/16

“A trial of strength”! A “War of attrition”! “Rising tensions”!

These are the kind of terms the media has been using in the last few weeks to describe the apparent confrontation between the governments and the unions over the “El Khomri” labour law. The conflict has been presented in a spectacular way by the media. It even reached the point where, for a few hours, the government banned a union demo prior to allowing it after all – something that hasn’t been seen for 50 years.

There has been real discontent against this attack on the working conditions of the entire working class. It has given rise to a relatively significant level of mobilisation and militancy during certain days of action. However, contrary to what the media would have us believe, this militancy has not drawn in the majority of wage earners. Despite the images of blockades, of tyres burning on the roads, the strikes have very often been restricted to a minority and there has been little in the way of a growth of confidence, unity and consciousness in the ranks of the working class. On the contrary: “these union parades, which consist of people tramping the streets and being bombarded with slogans like ‘The workers are in the street, El Khomri you are screwed’, or ‘Strike, strike, general strike!’,without being able to discuss or build anything together , serve only to demoralise people and spread feelings of powerlessness”[1].

Many wage earners, high school and university students, and precarious or unemployed workers have asked questions about this, feeling that the omnipresence of the unions and their sterile days of action are not leading anywhere. But they have not been able to break out of the union manacles or develop an open, collective critique of union methods. And the Nuit Debout movement, which claims to offer a “space” for deeper reflection,  “is leading them into a dead end and strengthening the most conformist outlooks. Worse than that, Nuit Debout is a vehicle for the most nauseating ideas, like the personalisation of the evils of society, blaming them on a few representatives like bankers and oligarchs”. [2]

Among the youngest participants, there is the illusion that all this is an expression of the class war and that we are heading towards a new May 68, a mobilisation of the proletariat on a scale we haven’t seen for many years. But the government has shown no signs of retreating in the face of pressure from the streets, as it did in 2006 at the time of the fight against the CPE. Even if the Socialist government has not been a picture of unity and coherence, the government and the unions, led by the CGT, have managed to work together to set up this confrontation, with the aim of manipulating the working class and reinforcing its disorientation.

The focus of this strategy has been the growing “radicalisation” of the CGT[3]. Over several months the social movement has not disappeared, and in response the two main actors, government and unions, have fuelled the appearance of a major confrontation. The CGT through the blockading of oil refineries and motorways, through rolling strikes in public transport and the energy sector. The government, especially Manuel Valls, has come out with more and more provocative declarations, culminating in this momentary, but still gob-smacking decision to ban a union demonstration. All this on the basis of the heavy media publicity given to the violence of the rioting “casseurs”. If we were to believe the bourgeoisie and its press, you’d think the country was on a war footing, with everything being dramatised to an almost surreal level, until you stop watching the TV or the computer screen and go and out and look at what’s really been happening.

The conflict, we are told, reached a culminating point with the operations aimed at “blockading the economy”, in particular the ports and oil refineries. Blocking the oil refineries, as in 2010 with the struggle against the pension reforms, is presented as the ultimate weapon against the bourgeoisie, a way of hitting it where it really hurts. But not only was the real level of paralysis on the oil sector even more pathetic than in 2010, it has functioned as a powerful factor of division within the working class.

On the one hand you have some of the most militant workers trapped behind makeshift barricades, cut off from the rest of their class and at the mercy of police repression; on the other hand, you have many workers who are feeling discontented but are waiting to see what will happen, hardly involved in the social movement and sometimes exasperated by the endless transport strikes and the petrol shortages.

The CGT and all the “combative” unions have not suddenly become “revolutionary” any more than they are fighting for the basic interests of the workers. With the decadence of the capitalist system, the trade unions, whose original reason for existence (the reduction of capitalist exploitation) was already quite conservative, have become an essential cog of the state apparatus, with the task of imprisoning the working class in the logic of negotiations, of sabotaging workers’ struggles and smothering the growth of a revolutionary consciousness. Their role is to divide the workers and undermine any mass movement which could lead to questioning the capitalist order. The current radicalism of the unions is aimed at making us forget their direct complicity in the attacks that have been carried out by successive governments, and their involvement in the day-to-day management of exploitation in the factories and offices.

The essential complicity of the unions and the government doesn’t mean that there are no struggles for influence between various cliques. The government’s efforts to restore credibility to the union apparatus have involved downgrading the hegemonic status of the CGT and giving a more central role to more “tolerant” and “cooperative” unions like the CFDT. Article 2 of the new labour law aims to give accords reached at enterprise level priority over those worked out at branch level, which would mean undermining the financial organisational and strength of the CGT in favour of the more “reformist” unions, especially at the level of the small and medium enterprises which are in the majority in France. This is what to a large extent lies behind the radicalism of the CGT: keeping its place at the table of the state, maintaining its position in the apparatus of exploitation.

From the point of the view of the interests of the working class, the CGT is anything but radical. While the working class draws its strength from its capacity to unite, to extend its struggles beyond sectional and national frontiers, the CGT demands that everyone must march in their particular work clothes behind “their own” union banner, raising demands specific to each sector. If they do raise the slogan “everyone together”, this is still within the limits of each union boutique. It has nothing to do with the search for the extension of the struggle, with raising proposals that will draw all sectors into a common fight regardless of union membership, as was the case for several weeks during the struggle in 2006.   

Similarly, the general assemblies, which should be the lungs of the movement, have been replaced by simulated assemblies which only bring together a minority of wage earners and where the unions decide on practically everything in advance. This has nothing to with assemblies that are open to all, young and old, without consideration to profession, union or political membership; assemblies which elect and can recall strike committees, and where you can openly discuss the conduct of the struggle, how to spread it and establish a balance of forces in the face of the state. The anti-CPE struggle of 2006, whose lessons the state and its unions want us to forget, was exemplary at this level and resulted in a real loss of credibility by the unions.  

This division of labour on the part of the different wings of the state, government and unions, is exploiting to the maximum the current weakness of the working class, with the object of manipulating it, dividing it, demoralising it and pushing through the attacks, all the while giving the impression that only militant unions like the CGT and FO are capable of standing up to an arrogant Socialist government that is even worse than the right.

The working class needs to make the deepest and most lucid analysis possible of the present social movement, in order to identify its enemies and prepare the real struggles of the future. 

Stopio, 24.6.16

In July 2016, the ICC held an open discussion day on the topic of immigration, refugees and populism. We are publishing the following account, written by one of our close sympathisers who attended the meeting.

Held in London, July 2016, against the backdrop of the largest global ‘production’ of refugees since the end of WW2 and the accompanying rise of xenophobic political ‘populism’, the meeting attempted to understand these phenomena in both their historic dimension and in their present-day implications for the struggle of the working class. It was called by the International Communist Current which made two presentations and provided the input of comrades from three European countries. In addition the meeting was animated by representatives of the Communist Workers Organisation/International Communist Tendency; the Socialist Party of Great Britain; The Midlands Discussion Forum; an author and lecturer sympathetic to communist politics; an internationalist anarchist, former member of the Anarchist Federation; an individual concerned with the plight of refugees and several sympathisers of the ICC, some of them former members.

The atmosphere was fraternal, the discussion serious, with little evidence of sectarianism or ‘scoring points’ but saw a real attempt to clarify reality and understand different proletarian interpretations of it in order to effect change. It was a moment of face-to-face debate – real militant interaction - in an evolving discussion, producing some basic if essential affirmations but raising issues for further elaboration, some of which appear in the necessarily truncated account below.

Historic

The first (morning) presentation dealt in great length and depth with the historic aspects of economic migration and refugees from war, from the origins of humanity as an eminently migratory species (‘out of Africa’) to the evolving and dynamic specificities of the capitalist mode of production in both its formative and declining epochs:

In the ascendant epoch: above all, with and through violence - by forcing peasants off the land (enclosures, etc) and robbing them of a means of subsistence; through the kidnap and enforced migration of millions of black slaves - capitalism created the modern proletariat, a class without countries, a class with nothing but its labour power to sell: doomed to wander in search of employment, a migratory class par excellence. Emigration (eg to the ‘Americas’ or the British ‘colonies’) was encouraged by the state, an expression of capitalism’s continuing expansion.

In its epoch of decline: With quasi-permanent economic crisis and world-wide warfare, the rise of militarised borders, the restriction and even mass extermination of large parts of the labour force amid hysterical state-sponsored nationalism and pogroms and the creation of vast refugee populations fleeing increasing conflict or seeking decreasing opportunities to work. Capitalism is less able and has less need to integrate such masses into highly-automated production and emigration is largely subject to increasing restrictions and obstacles.

Some quotes from the presentation to give a flavour:

“Marx described primitive accumulation as the process of ‘divorcing the producer from the means of production. … great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and ‘unattached’ proletarians on the labour-market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process’ (Marx, Capital Volume I, Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation). This separation of the peasant from the soil, from their means of production, meant uprooting millions of people. Because capitalism needs “the abolition of all laws preventing labourers from transferring from one sphere of production another to and from one local production centre to another” (Marx, Capital Volume 3, Chapter 10.) ....

“... we need to distinguish economic migration from wars: every refugee is a migrant, but not every migrant is a refugee. A migrant is someone who leaves his residence in search of a place where he can sell his labour power. A refugee is someone whose life is at stake in an immediate way and moves elsewhere to find a safe place.” ....

“...Today, we can see that migration from Africa and the Middle East falls entirely as a consequence of the murderous wars which have raged for over 40 years. There is no attempt to truly integrate these desperate people only to see them die, be used as pawns, in a cynical political game or at the best used as the very cheapest of cheap labour.”

The morning discussion emphasised that this global and historical approach was the only method capable of fully arming and inoculating the proletariat against the prevailing pogromist, nationalist, anti-immigrant hysteria and the leftist-liberal counterpart, a vision of capitalism without such excrescences - a contradiction in terms and in reality.

On the level of humanity as a species, the migration of hunter gatherers colonised the world; an entirely natural process accompanied by and the result of a development of profound social bonds and instincts - one for all and all for one: a necessity made more or less conscious. Humanity is a species of immigrants! As for the proletariat, it is the essence of a migratory class having been formed by an enforced rupture with the land and the products of its labour, obliging it to cross counties, countries and continents in a bid to sell its labour power. These are the realities behind today’s false claims that the working class is by nature racist and to blame for the rise of right-wing ‘populism’.

The CWO comrade, who agreed with and welcomed the presentation,  pointed out that despite the historic tightening of borders, limited immigration was a ‘necessary evil’ for the bourgeoisie (pace Marx, quoted above) and that it wanted, needed, to a certain extent, ‘porous borders’. The dynamic of bourgeois attitudes depended on the state of the economy (ie the slave trade in ascendancy; the ‘import’ of labour from the ‘British colonies’ during the labour shortage after WW2). An ICC sympathiser said that ‘people smuggling’ was in itself a ‘growing business’, while an ICC member pointed out that, by its very nature as a class representing the continued revolutionising of the means of production within social relations restricted to the nation state framework, the bourgeoisie inevitably faced an ‘overproduction’ of labour power in certain sectors (in particular manual labour), while projecting chronic shortages in others: a real anarchy of production characteristic of capitalism and one only mitigated, not resolved, by the on-going development of state capitalism.

However the over-arching dynamic of capitalism remained clear: the system in its decadence and decomposition doesn’t stop creating vast waves of human misery – economic migrants and those fleeing wars - on the contrary. But its ability to integrate these masses has been more and more restricted over the past 100 years, despite periods of reconstruction such as that post WW2. Ethnic cleansing; mass exterminations and the creation of rigid borders were the hallmark of the 20th century and this dynamic only accelerates in the 21st, a process unfolding before our eyes and the root cause of today’s social and political upheavals. The economic and social crisis that the bourgeoisie of the major metropoles has for decades attempted to push to what it considers ‘the peripheral parts of the planet’ returns to the centre in the form of financial dislocations, viruses and diseases long thought banished and terror on the streets of Istanbul, Brussels, Paris, Nice and elsewhere.

At the dawn of capitalism, the dispossessed peasantry flooded into the towns which became ‘human drains’, over-crowded cities riven with squalor and disease, before a growing industrialisation – which required this ‘surplus population’ for the reproduction of capital – and the consequent geographic extension of capitalist social relations, together with the epic migration this implied, tended to ‘mop up’ this mass of humanity. This whole process took 200-300 years or so.

But in the space of the past 100 years – particularly since the end of WW1 - while wars and crises created ever-more tides of migration and refugees, increasing barriers have been raised on cross-border movements, with militarised zones, the building of walls, etc. These developments were designed to control the movement of labour (in the former Eastern bloc, to prevent its mass migration to the West) and to a certain extent, to police the population internally. At the same time, masses expelled from the unprofitable agriculture of the land tended less and less to be integrated into capitalist production with the consequent the swelling of the world’s cities, turning large parts of many of them into burgeoning slums.

Whereas in the late 19th century the bourgeoisie was taking strides to ‘clean up’ its environmental act in major European metropoles (eg the sewer systems of Victorian London), today, millions of dispossessed Chinese peasants whose labour power is surplus to the world market’s relatively saturated requirements are stranded in misery while many newly-built cities remain empty ‘ghost towns’. The hideous degradation of the environment implied in the transfer of production to areas of ‘low-cost labour’ – the ‘race to the bottom’ – is a notable reversal of tendencies in the late 19th century and makes a mockery of lying lip service about ‘mitigating climate change’.

In the lifetime of most comrades at the London meeting, the reality of a society closing in on itself was evident. In the 60s, treks to Afghanistan, the Hindu Kush and elsewhere, were possible. Though travel to and within the former Eastern imperialist bloc was difficult, the collapse of this bloc in 1989 promised a golden epoch of ‘open borders’. Today, despite the EU, whole areas are rendered impassable by war (the Balkans, Ukraine, Libya, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Mid-East, increasing swathes of Africa, etc) while ‘fortress Europe’ constructs vast camps – the ‘safety nets’ - where tens of thousands of human beings are caught (i.e. between Greece and Turkey; and on the borders of Europe with Africa). 4000 migrant souls drowned in the Mediterranean in the first 6 months of 2016 alone! All this and the land-mine militarization of walls and borders across the Mid-East:... “this is living barbarism.” The deteriorating situation in Turkey – “a worrisome, country running the risk of sinking into civil and external war” ... such a situation is “a nightmare for humanity.”

Finally, on the morning session, an essential notion for the working class: migrants are not merely ‘victims’ but ‘have agency’ and are able to defend themselves and, through their struggle, a struggle of the proletariat, are able at certain moments to contribute to an alternative, politicised, internationalist perspective for humanity. There are many examples of this - from the immediate defence of immigrant communities from racist attacks in this or that country to the struggles of the Amsterdam workers in Holland during WW2 to prevent the deportation of Jews to extermination. But... in today’s situation, such limited initiatives are no longer enough. If the basic resistance to racism and anti-immigration – like the essential defence of immediate proletarian demands – is one element, the development of communist consciousness is even more important. Today, given the gravity of the historical situation, only large-scale movements in the direction of the mass strike and the proletarian revolution offer any real alternative perspective to capitalist barbarism.

‘Populism’ - Presentation

The second half of the day’s meeting, concerning the current situation and the rise of ‘populism’, began with a presentation from an ICC comrade:

“The [UK] Brexit option was not an isolated incident but another example of the growing international problem of populism. You can see it in the support for Donald Trump in the battle for the US Presidency; in Germany with the appearance of political forces to the right of the Christian Democrats (Pegida and Alternative für Deutschland); in the recent presidential elections in Austria where the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats were eclipsed, and the contest was between the Greens and the populist right; in France there is the continuing rise of the Front National; in Italy there is the Five Star movement; and there’s also the governments of Poland and Hungary.

“Populism is not another player in the games between the parties of left and right; it exists because of widespread discontent that can find no means of expressing itself. It’s entirely on the political terrain of the bourgeoisie, but is based on opposition to elites and ‘the Establishment’, on antagonism towards immigration, distrust of left-wing promises and right-wing austerity, all expressing a loss of confidence in the institutions of capitalist society but not for a moment recognising the revolutionary alternative of the working class.” (Growing Difficulties for the bourgeoisie and for the working class [88]).

Populism is therefore not merely a weapon of the ruling class but a product of a social impasse – neither the bourgeoisie nor the working class can offer a way forward to society which meanwhile experiences growing poverty, war and social dislocation. This populist trend is an expression of demoralisation, despair, of anger; in its demonization of bankers, of elites, as well as of its scapegoats, ‘the refugees’ the migrants, the Muslims, the ‘others’. It offers a personalisation of a system that is apparently incomprehensible.

For the ruling class, this situation marks a retreat from its claim to uphold traditional, ‘liberal’, ‘enlightened’ values. It’s a reinforcement of borders, not a ‘global community of ‘free capitalism’.

The ruling class in Great Britain made a mess vis-a-vis the recent referendum on EU membership because they thought that expressions like UKIP only represented a small minority alongside the ‘Eurosceptics’ in the Conservative Party. Former Prime Minister David Cameron and his clique underestimated completely the scope of this phenomenon in this period. One result: both main UK parties suffered. Labour Party still undergoing severe convulsions; leadership challenges; legal actions, a split between Parliamentary Party and grass roots activists, etc. The Tories were thrown into disarray, with back-stabbing, but showed a capacity to make a coherent response, to find a way of creating the facade of healing the wounds with the resignation of Cameron, a new cabinet and new PM Teresa May’s policy of addressing the ‘healing of divisions’ between right and left, rich and poor, black and white.

However the point is that they have been obliged to act out something the more intelligent factions of the bourgeoisie did not want: an exit from the European Union. In the immediate aftermath, the UK economy has suffered with fluctuations in the value of sterling, a new round of ‘quantitative easing’ (ie the electronic printing of money) and this, coupled with the slowdown of the Chinese economy, and threats to the Italian banking system, etc, has further imperilled the world economy.

Also on the international level: the UK EU referendum result has given a boost to other populist demagogues: Trump in the US, Le Pen in France. The ruling class, in order to deal with the crisis over the past 30 years, has evolved organisations to control the movement of labour and capital, and the populist move tends to wreck these and reinforces national isolationism. On the imperialist level, being outside the EU makes it harder for the United Kingdom to present itself as a dominant power, makes it more difficult to influence events in Europe as it and the US wanted it to do.

For the working class, this does not create a situation beneficial to the development of consciousness. On the contrary, it’s poisoned the atmosphere, fostered racist divisions; divisions over whether to leave or to stay in Europe; anti-populism, which is strong (eg the London ‘March for Europe’) which presents the idea that the way to oppose this racist poison is to stand up for state capitalist Europe. Also: the emphasis on the generations (with many of the older generation voting to leave), between London and the regions. It got people involved in the bourgeois democratic process – it even affected parts of the anarchist milieu and this represents a capitulation to bourgeois democracy. So this poisoned, nationalist atmosphere has strengthened the difficulties already faced by the proletariat.

Balance of Class Forces

Is the ICC saying the working class is defeated? “We certainly think since 1989 it has suffered a series of blows, of impacts on its consciousness. Having thrown off the counter-revolution in the ‘60s, since 89, it has faced campaigns about the ‘death of communism’; globalisation; has seen the decimation of whole sectors of industry that were foci of militancy – cars, mines, shipbuilding, etc.” These were global phenomena and Britain exemplified the ruling class’s response: the ‘Thatcher solution.’

There have been important movements of the working class this century– in France, Spain and elsewhere - but in the last five or so years there has been a regression in combats and above all in consciousness. One of the consequences of capital’s decomposition is the refugee crisis, posing immediate problems for the proletariat, raising concretely the question of internationalism to a class that’s under the cosh and doesn’t have an immediate answer. Fundamentalism, terrorism, all pose problems, allow channels through which the prevailing trends of bourgeois barbarism seep into the working class, threatening definitively to derail its alternative project for humanity. Still, the organisation has stated that they don’t think the working class has yet reached this point, despite all the difficulties.

Revolutionaries are against the stream: only a tiny political minority held on to principles to oppose the either/or of the UK referendum. Faced with a situation that’s confusing, perplexing, revolutionaries need to develop analysis, coherence. And if that means criticising ourselves, our past positions, so be it. Defence of internationalism is key. In the face of the referendum, as in the war in Syria, we’ve seen sizeable chunks of the Anarchist milieu call for support for one side or the other (eg supporting the ‘revolution in Rojava’). The need for the defence of those who are facing repression, for the unity of the working class, is paramount. If the political minorities of the working class can’t say this, there’s no one else. Revolutionaries must talk about revolution, must insist that the problems can’t be resolved inside this system, these social relations. Well-meaning concepts and phrases like ‘No Borders’ won’t cut it.

Discussion on Populism and the Present Period

One fundamental strand of the discussion concerned the class and social origins of today’s populist movement. Various views were forwarded about the origins, from the ‘populist peasant revolts of the Middle-Ages’ to anti-elite populism in early 20th century America. Perhaps most succinctly, a comrade (S from The Midlands Discussion Forum) argued that contrary to the ICC’s presentation, populism did not arise from civil society but “comes from and serves the bourgeoisie.”

He dated the beginning of populism as a programme of national renewal to, perhaps, Mussolini in the 1920s and Peron in the 40s and 50s, both of whom used populist ideology and promoted or represented the corporatist state. These were the ideological forbearers of today’s populism which then as now, expresses divisions inside the ruling class, used against the working class.

This was clearly seen during the UK referendum in which both sides argued for bourgeois solutions. Rather than arguing that the Remain camp represented the most intelligent, far-sighted factions of the ruling class, implying that the Brexit camp was most reactionary, S believed they represented the big and petty bourgeoisie respectively. The big bourgeoisie is connected to countries that trade internationally, common standards, currencies, whereas the petty bourgeoisie is by definition local; the ‘rules’ are just an encumbrance. So these divisions reflect how the different factions of the ruling class deal with the world. 73 % of the population rallied to this Referendum. They have been enrolled into bourgeois politics, the defence of the nation state, and this is evidently of use to the ruling class. Seen in this light, Populism in its more extreme sense (Farage) could be seen as a deliberate political orientation of the bourgeoisie in order to get people involved in the myth of the nation. Populism has to provide an explanation for things that are happening to a working class angry due to the fall of living standards. Populism is a deliberately distorted explanation: a deliberate policy of the ruling class.

There was significant disagreement with central elements of this view from various sources. For many ICC comrades, populism was not just another ideology dreamed up and used by the bourgeoisie: the situation was more serious than that, presaging a prolonged agony of unfolding violence within society, one which the ruling class is unable to adequately control. It’s not just the working class that can’t see a way forward. If today’s populism was merely a tool of the ruling class, how was it that all the major sections of it in the West opposed the Brexit campaign, for example, or the rise of Trump in the US, whilst being apparently unable to prevent either? Something more profound is at work here and it’s this underlying dynamic we need to uncover.

It was necessary not to blur the period of Mussolini and Peron – products of a defeated working class – with the specificity of modern populism which has developed in the past two decades in the context of the stalemate between the classes and the collapse of the imperialist blocs.

In 1989 our rulers promised prosperity and peace. But the result has been major wars, a terrifying financial crisis, the influx in Europe of cheap labour driving up competition for jobs and the price of housing, accompanied by a sense of fear for the future and the reality of violence on the streets in the immediate. There has evolved within populations a profound distrust of and disgust with existing institutions and parties – a helplessness and hopelessness, expressions of rage, fear and anger against ‘the elite’ - not just within the proletariat but also vast swathes of the middle class. Can we reduce this reaction to a mere ploy by the ruling class?

The populists say in answer to this generalised anger and fear “the boat is full, we are going to throw refugees out.” In Germany, Pegida, they say they want to shoot refugees. In France, the party of Le Pen advances. In Poland, rising nationalism and the formation of a part-time guard is directed as much against an imagined invasion of refugees as against resurgent Russia on its borders. Trump’s attitude to Mexicans and Muslims offers the same perspective. The specificities are different in each country, but populism announces a new chain of violence: pogromism, against refugees, and within society in general.

Higher echelons of the ruling class don’t want to concede the monopoly of violence yet. It’s a cancer developing within society, not imposed from above. Hence the concerted campaign against Brexit, against Trump, by the US security forces and even from within his own party.

Revolutionaries are used to showing how state capitalism invades every aspect of life – sometimes this leads to the assumption that any social manifestation is the result of the state’s will and role. But the state also responds to what is going on in society. The unease within the heart of the bourgeoisie at the rise of Populism, the concerted if failed attempts to block Brexit and Trump, are expressions of the fact that the ruling class is losing control over its own political apparatus.

For revolutionaries, today’s situation points towards a polarisation: for the politicisation and the development of consciousness of the working class, for understanding, for analysing, for pointing towards solidarity – or towards populism, scape-goating, every man for himself, violence. The ruling class has hitherto used democracy, elections, to channel discontent but the wearing out of existing strategies implies this may not be enough to confront the populist tide. In all events, there will be no quick outcome, and an increasing social agony in the interim.

Regarding the 30s, fascism and the mobilisation of the petty-bourgeoisie, certain analogies could perhaps be drawn, but only if the specificities of today’s period are firmly acknowledged. In the 30s the working class was physically decimated and its revolutionary consciousness crushed. The petty-bourgeoisie’s anger and rage could be harnessed by the bourgeoisie for its war aims. Today, though cowed by unemployment and in part infected with the poisonous dominant ideology, the working class is not yet defeated; the bourgeoisie is not organised for a global war and large portions of the petty bourgeoisie are as disenchanted with the elite as are the working class. It’s too simple to equate Trump, the millionaire, with Hitler, the “Bohemian corporal”, as Hindenberg contemptuously called him. The petty bourgeoisie may be crushed between the two major classes but its ideology of revolt without perspective both infects the working class and is not at all helpful in the present situation to the mainstream of the bourgeoisie which can’t easily control its expressions, of which widespread support for incoherent populism is one.

The future of the nation state

A sympathiser drew attention to the break-up of the imperialist blocs - the ‘Soviet Empire’ under Russia and the ‘Western Bloc’ under US hegemony - since 1989 and the repercussions today. The erosion of organisations like the EU and NATO should be linked to a decline of US power, an expression of decomposition, with countries tending to break free of organisations that previously held the western bloc together. This centrifugal tendency encouraged certain countries – ie India, China and Turkey – to ‘go their own way’ though vis-a-vis Turkey, the results are proving disastrous. This situation is also encouraging a more bellicose response from Russia, all this giving rise to fierce clashes (ie Balkans, Syria, Crimea, Ukraine); with more refugees, fuelling the Populist pyre.

There was, indeed, an important secondary discussion about the future fate of the nation state: for the CWO, in the recent past, capitalism had outgrown this framework and organisation like the EU represented the tendency for a reformation of the imperialist blocs which transcended nations. The Brexit result, apparently in contradiction to this, would have to be further discussed, the comrade said. For the ICC, the EU was never an imperialist bloc – e.g. the imperialist interests of Germany and Poland were widely divergent – but a trading organisation precisely to enable nation states to survive increasing global turmoil. Historically, the nation state – the basic unit of capitalist organisation - has indeed outgrown its usefulness but remains intact, whatever temporary alliances and federations it enters into. No bourgeoisie willingly gives up its sovereignty, its imperialist appetites. No nation state has in reality voluntarily dissolved itself.

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For this public meeting, there were many issues that could not be immediately explored – including how best and on what level to promote a working class defence against racist propaganda and attacks: the concretisation of ‘solidarity’  - or only superficially touched upon. However the main questions raised around the origins of this present, gigantic wave of refugees from war and economic migration must be pursued, for they largely determine the immediate and medium term evolution of the world situation. Within the ICC, the discussion regarding Populism is only at the beginning. A text will appear in a forthcoming edition of the International Review. Other discussions provoked by the above-mentioned article in World Revolution appear in the Discussion Forum of this website.

KT

June and July 2016 will be remembered as bloody months which struck fear into whole populations living in the West. On 12 June, 49 people were gunned down in a gay club in Orlando, Florida. The next day, the 13th, a police officer and his partner were murdered near Paris by a man who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State (Daesh). On 14 July, a man drove a truck through crowds in Nice, killing 84 people, a number of them children, and leaving over 330 wounded. The attack was claimed by IS. On 18 July, in Germany, a young man aged 17 wounded five people, two seriously, in a regional train, attacking them with an axe and a knife. IS claimed the attack. On 22 July, shooting in a shopping centre in Munich. 10 killed. Again the gunman was very young -18. On 24 July, a new attack with a machete in Germany. A 21 year old man killed a woman in a restaurant in Reutlingen and fled, wounding others as he went. On 24 July, a Syrian refugee aged 27 blew himself up in the centre of Ansbach, near an open air music festival. On 26 July, near Rouen, a priest had his throat cut after hostages were taken in a church. Again Daesh claimed responsibility.

At the very heart of the great capitalist nations, barbarism is reaching unbearable levels. In a world in chaos, where more and more parts of the globe have been plunged into terrorism and war[1], Europe has been presented as a haven of peace since 1945. So now the fortress has to be protected by walls and barbed wire from this ‘alien’ barbarism – in reality, the effects of the murderous confrontations in which the weapons and bombs of the great democratic powers have played a particularly active role. But now, like a boomerang, the horror is returning to the historical centre of capitalism. Not only are the world conflicts penetrating the walls of Schengen, but the violence that has been accumulating and internalised in a whole part of the ‘local’ population has exploded to the surface. During this summer period, the atmosphere, especially in Germany, that symbol of stability and prosperity, has become stifling. The description by the German political writer Joachim Krause[2] is rather lucid about this:

“On Friday (during the killing in Munich) we could see how widely an ambiance of fear was prevailing. When the population learned that there had been an atrocity in a shopping centre in the north-west of Munich, scenes of panic were produced in the city centre, several kilometres from the crime. In Karlsplatz, people fled en masse in fear of a shooting that never happened. In the big Hofbrauhaus beer hall, people were jumping out of windows because there was a rumour going round that an Islamic terrorist was inside”.

This climate of panic is obviously the fruit of a deliberate policy of the Daesh leadership, with its thirst for revenge[3]. IS wants to destabilise its imperialist rivals by terrorising the population, But the list of violent actions in June and July reveals a wider and deeper problem. None of these killings were carried out by a well-trained Daesh soldier, far from it. They were the work of young men hardly out of childhood and feeling excluded from society. A violent father of a family coping very badly with his divorce. A refugee whom the state had refused to regularise. Their histories and origins are diverse: some were born in Europe, others in the Middle East. Nearly all of them were recently ‘radicalised’ and without any real direct links with IS, apart from a few videos on the internet. Some of the crimes had nothing at all to do with Jihadism: the Munich shooting was the work of a sympathiser of the extreme right, fascinated by Hitler; the machete attack in the Reutlingen restaurant was in the end described as a crime of passion. So the hateful propaganda of the Jihadists doesn’t explain everything; on the contrary, the success of their influence is itself the product of a much graver and more historic situation. What destructive, murderous force is pushing these individuals, with apparently such diverse motivations, to go into action? And why now? What does this barbarism tell us about the evolution of the whole of world society?

Capitalism is a system of terror

These young murderers are not monsters. They are human beings committing monstrous acts. They have been produced by a world society that is sick, dying. Their hatred and their murderous intoxication have first and foremost been fermented by the permanent terror of capitalist social relations, then liberated by the pressure of this same system, exploding into a series of shameful deeds.

Capitalism is a society intrinsically based on terror. Exploitation is inconceivable without violence. The two are organically inseparable. Even if violence can exist outside of relations of exploitation, the latter can only be realised through coercive violence. But for over a century capitalism has been a system in decadence. No longer able to offer a real future for humanity, it maintains its existence through an increasingly systematic recourse to violence, on the ideological and psychological level as well as the physical. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 gives us a striking image of this. Violence, combined with exploitation, takes on a new and particular quality. It’s no longer a secondary element, but becomes a constant at all levels of social life:

“It’s no longer an accidental or secondary fact: its presence has become a constant at every level of social life. It impregnates all relationships, penetrates the pores of the social organism, both on the general level and the so-called personal level. Beginning from exploitation and the need to dominate the producer class, violence imposes itself on all the relationships between different classes and strata in society: between the industrialized countries; between the different factions of the ruling class; between men and women; between parents and children; between teachers and pupils; between individuals; between the governors and the governed. It becomes specialized, structured, organized, concentrated in a distinct body: the state, with its permanent armies, its police, its laws, its functionaries and torturers; and this body tends to elevate itself above society and to dominate it.

In order to ensure the exploitation of man by man, violence becomes the most important activity of society, which devotes a bigger and bigger portion of its economic and cultural resources to it. Violence is elevated to the status of a cult, an art, a science. A science applied not only to military art, to the technique of armaments, but to every domain and on all levels, to the organization of concentration camps and the installation of gas chambers, to the art of rapid and massive extermination of entire populations, to the creation of veritable universities of psychological and scientific torture, where a plethora of qualified torturers can win diplomas and practice their skills. This is a society which not only “sweats mud and blood from every pore”, as Marx said, but can neither live nor breathe outside of an atmosphere poisoned with cadavers, death, destruction, massacres, suffering and torture. In such a society, violence has reached its apogee and changed in quality - it has become terror”.[4]

 In other words, capitalism contains terror like the cloud contains the storm[5].

Capitalism negates the value of life

All these barbaric acts carried out in recent weeks are the very negation of life – the life of others, the life of those who do the killing. But the ideology of Daesh in whose name so many of these attacks are committed, like that of the extreme right, are just a brutal caricature of the lack of value given to life by capitalism as a whole.

The wars waged by all the big states are the most flagrant proof of this. Like the contrast between the opulent wealth accumulated in a few hands and the poverty which leads to starvation and death for millions. Like the medicines which draw together the highest levels of human knowledge but which can’t be distributed because it’s not profitable. Like the expensive commodities which are displayed in glitzy stores when millions live in a state of total deprivation. In the film Modern Times with Charlie Chaplin, there is a classic scene in which Charlie is manhandled by a crazed robot programmed to wash him, dress him and feed him to get him ready as efficiently and rapidly as possible so he can go and work in the factory. This is a humorous but ferocious critique of capitalism as whole, not only in the factory; because man is treated like an object in every aspect of his life, and on a daily basis. We no longer live according to our bodily, mental and social needs. Everything is conceived and organised according to the needs of capital and dominated by its rhythms. Capitalist exploitation more and more requires humanity to negate itself in order to incorporate itself into the machine.

This robotisation of man leads to the exclusion of those who can’t adapt to the numbing rhythms of capital. The result is marginalisation, humiliation, a feeling of inferiority among those who are stigmatised as inadequate by the state, and through the repressive actions of its police forces or so-called ‘social welfare’ organs. There is no doubt that this is one of the deeper roots of the spirit of hatred and revenge.

Terrorism and individuals without hope or morality

Terror and the negation of the value of life: this is the soil which gives rise to individuals who become terrorists.

Sometimes materially crushed, with no hope in front of them, living in a totally restricted present tense, a daily mediocrity, these despairing individuals are easy prey to the bloodiest mystifications (Daesh, Ku-Klux- Klan, fascist gangs, gangsters and mercenaries of all kinds etc). In this violence, they find “the compensation of an illusory dignity. It is the heroism of the coward, the courage of the clown, the glory of sordid mediocrity. After reducing them to a most miserable condition, capitalism finds in these strata an inexhaustible source of recruitment for the heroes of its terror”.[6]

The Nice outrage on 14 July reveals clearly what lies behind all the others: hatred and the thirst to kill by pulverised individuals. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the man who used a truck to kill dozens of people in Nice, was described by those who knew him as ultra-violent, going through ‘crises’ in which he would smash everything around him. His ex-wife left him because of his extremely aggressive character. But to go further and to coldly run down men, women and children something else was needed: a real psychological disintegration. In such actions, all the fundamental taboos of human society crumble into dust. This man had internalised all the violence of capitalism, then externalised it in an explosion of destruction. Such mass murders have been around for several decades in the USA, where mass killings in schools and universities have frequently hit the headlines. Each time the killers are young people who feel themselves excluded and marginalised by the educational system, stigmatised by colleagues and teachers. The ideology of Daesh is thus by no means the primary cause of these barbaric actions. It’s because the system has first produced these broken individuals who are desperate for revenge that they become fascinated by the hateful and irrational discourse of IS and become obsessed with weapons. And it is at this stage that IS plays a considerable role: they enable these individuals to legitimise their barbarity. They make them believe that they can get revenge for their wasted life and win something through death. They release the most murderous impulses generated by this society.

This succession of barbaric acts is all the more traumatic because some of the perpetrators are themselves victims of war, refugees or former combatants (official soldiers of the democratic armies, private mercenaries, young people who have gone off to fight for Daesh, al Qaida etc), people who are marked by deep psychic scars, haunted by all kinds of nightmares. Here the spiral is an infernal one: victims can be carried away by fear and hatred, by the most irrational kind of behaviour, and thus in turn give rise to further suffering, further traumas.  

An aggravation of capitalist decomposition

The multiplication of these kinds of attacks, the fact that a country like Germany is now being hit, that the terrorists often come from Europe itself – all this says a lot about the considerable worsening of the international social situation. There are many reasons for this:

• The imperialist conflicts unleashed after September 11 2001, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have destabilised whole areas of the globe, particularly in the Middle East. These wars have intensified hatred and the spirit of revenge;[7]
• The world economic crisis of 20017/8 has led to much more than poverty: it has stirred up an immense wave of anxiety about the future, with bank failures and stock exchange crashes making the world seem increasingly incomprehensible. It ruined millions of savers who have lost all confidence in money which, under capitalism, is one of the strongest social links holding society together…In sum, this economic crisis has made the planet a more uncertain place and has greatly increased fear and distrust between people;
• The ‘Arab Spring’, which was presented as a wave of revolutions, was followed by a considerable increase in ethnic and religious divisions, by regimes founded on torture and by the horror of civil war. The impression given is that any massive social struggle can only result in even more chaos, that the future can only be worse than the present;
• Terrorist groups have prospered, born out of war and kept going by the sordid games of alliance, the support and manipulation of the big powers;[8]
• Facing this barbarism in a whole swathe of countries, from Mali to Afghanistan, passing through Somalia and up to the southern tip of Turkey, millions of human beings, month after month, have been forced to flee just to keep alive. They have become ‘refugees’ who are either stuck in camps or turned away at borders. They arrive at the same time as the economic crisis worsens and as terrorism is on the rise, all of which has greatly exacerbated xenophobia;
• And above all, as capitalism advances into its decomposition and social ties disintegrate, the working class for the moment is unable to offer humanity another perspective. Incapable of developing its consciousness and its fighting spirit, its sense of international solidarity and fraternity, it is absent as a class from the world situation.

This convergence of factors, to which we could ad others, explains the worsening of the social situation, Fear, hatred and violence are spreading like a gangrene. And each new explosion, each new terrorist outrage, adds to this suicidal dynamic. The spirit of revenge is everywhere. Racism and the scapegoating of Muslims is part of this vicious circle. This is in any case the strategy of Daesh: if the Muslim population is persecuted, the more recruits there will be for Jihad.

The danger of this putrefaction should not be underestimated: if it is allowed to follow its logic to the end, it will push the whole of humanity towards destruction.

What is the perspective?

Fundamentally, the bourgeoisie has no real solution for this dramatic historic situation. It’s true that its most intelligent factions make speeches about tolerance and the culture of welcome in order to limit the spread of hatred and prevent the situation from spiralling out of control. This is the case with the factions of the bourgeoisie led by Merkel in Germany. But the ones who are ready to manipulate fear and hatred are becoming increasingly numerous, playing the role of the sorcerer’s apprentices.

Concretely, the most widespread response is to wage a more ferocious war in the Middle East, to build higher and thicker walls around Europe and North America in order to police (sorry, ‘securitise’) the whole of society, to put the whole population under permanent surveillance and to arm the police to the teeth. In other words, more terror, more hatred, everywhere, all the time.

But even more fundamentally, the bourgeoisie has no real solution to offer because its aim is to preserve its system, capitalism, when it is this system which is totally obsolete and is at the root of the problem. Its world is divided into competing nations, into exploited and exploiting classes; human activity is determined by the interests of the profit economy and not by human need. All these obstacles are behind the accelerating decay of society. And no government in the world, democratic or dictatorial, can do anything about this. All of them defend a dying system which is dragging humanity through the most horrible suffering.

The only counter-weight to this drift towards barbarism is the massive and conscious development of proletarian struggles. This alone can offer pulverised individuals a real identity, a class identity, a real community – that of the exploited and not the ‘believers’, a real solidarity, the solidarity that grows in the struggle of all workers, of the unemployed of all races, nationalities and religions, against their common enemy, not against the Jew or the Catholic priest or the Muslim or the gypsy or the unemployed or the refugees, not even the banker, but the capitalist system itself. It’s the class struggle alone that can give rise to the one perspective that can save humanity from barbarism: the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a communist society.

Camille 3.8.16

At a time when the French government has just extended the state of emergency to 2017, when an atmosphere of suspicion and fear is pressing hard on a population still feeling the shock of a series of terrorist attacks, a new  and highly demagogic ‘debate’ is reinforcing the current anti-Islam campaign. It’s been in the national headlines and has had considerable international coverage. We’re referring to the ‘burkini ban’ on a number of beaches. This retrograde controversy has engaged the whole political class, from local mayors in coastal towns to the highest state authorities, all of them, right and left, plunging their hands into the whole ideological mess.

At the beginning of August, ‘L’Association Islamiste des Soeurs Marseillaises, Initiatrices de Loisirs et d’Entreaide’ (a whole programme!) “privately hired a swimming centre for Muslim women to come to on 10 September. The advertising called for burkinis to be worn”[1]. It was all the extreme right needed to display its customary paranoia and to denounce the “Muslim invasion of our country”. Following pressure from local councillors, who didn’t want to appear ‘lax’ in a region where populism and xenophobia are deeply implanted, the “Burkini Day” was quickly cancelled.

But on 12 August, the mayor of Cannes again blew on the embers by forbidding the wearing of the burkini on beaches, in the name of ensuring public order. Several mayors from the region, from Corsica and from Pas-de-Calais in the north, many of them products of the most right wing and demagogic of the right wing Republican party, also imposed the ban. By instrumentalising the wearing of the burkini, the French bourgeoisie is continuing its recurrent campaign on Islam[2], aimed at poisoning consciousness, dividing the population and accentuating nationalist propaganda.

The danger of pogromism

In a context where there is a growing dislocation of the social body, and in which the working class is presently not able to defend a revolutionary perspective, all sorts of irrational and sectarian tendencies are being reinforced. This dynamic is feeding fear, misunderstanding, xenophobic and racist prejudices, blind and obsessive hatred, on the part of ‘natives’ towards ‘foreigners’, and vice versa.

It was in this context that a scuffle broke out on 14 August in an inlet in Sisco, Corsica, between three families of Muslims, who according to the authorities wanted to “privatise” the beach, and part of the local population. This altercation, whose details remain rather vague, resulted the next day in an excitable demonstration of 500 people shouting slogans like “this is our home!”  This kind of event is unfortunately not new in Corsica : in 2015, in Ajaccio, there were several days of demonstrations which were openly xenophobic, with the public burning of books including the Koran, pillaging of Arab shops and other provocations.

This illustrates the danger of a pogrom mentality becoming commonplace at the very heart of capitalism. The present difficulties of the working class - even if it hasn’t entirely lost its capacity to resist, its capacity to revive its own revolutionary alternative - tend to undermine hope for a better world in the minds of many proletarians. In the absence of an understanding of the real nature of capitalist social relations and their inextricable contradictions, in the absence of any real perspective, the danger is that people look for scapegoats to blame for the miseries of this world. This reactionary approach, based on the chimerical quest to go back to the good old days when society was more harmonious, sees immigrants and those hardest hit by the crisis as troublemakers, as responsible for destroying the way things used to be.

Xenophobia is not something new in history, far from it. But what we are seeing in capitalism today is a tendency for the basest instincts to be unleashed, in words and actions. There is a real threat that looking for scapegoats can lead to the physical and mental destruction of sacrificial victims.

For the bourgeoisie, the rise of populism has shaken its electoral games and can go against its real political orientations (as with the rejection of the European Union and the single currency). At the same time it is seeking to manipulate the most disgusting retrograde ideologies in order to reaffirm its domination. This is the case with the polemic over the burkini. The state has not hesitated to fuel a false debate and stir up divisions through a hysterical media campaign. For or against the burkini ban, defenders of ‘women’s rights’ versus advocates of ‘Republican virtue’, arguments between the right and left of the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie – all this serves only to reinforce confusion in the minds of the workers. The dangerous strategy of those politicians and state agencies who seek to ride the tiger of populism can only strengthen it in the long term. But while fanning the flames of hatred, the state can at the same time present itself as the guarantor of democracy and national unity (as with the Supreme Court’s ruling that the burkini ban was illegal). The working class has nothing to gain by getting drawn onto this swampy ground, which is a nationalist trap on all sides.

Capitalist society engenders alienation

The appearance of the burkini on the beaches is a very limited phenomenon[3], but it is also a tangible sign, like the spectacular rise of halal products and the wearing of the veil over the last few years, of the growing strength of religious obscurantism, which, far from giving meaning to life, is “at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”[4].

These garments are indeed straitjackets for women, who are often consenting victims to the bonds of dress but above all of ideology. But consenting to domination is by no means restricted to veiled women; it is a direct expression of the generalised, totalitarian alienation that pervades capitalist society and humanity as a whole. It is one form of the internalisation of the ruling social relations. At a time when science and technology have developed to unprecedented levels, the social relations of production incarcerate humanity in savagery and alienation. Both the burkini and the public humiliation, at the hands of armed police, of the women wearing it, who are treated like criminals violating the laws of democracy, provide us with a caricature of the sexual discrimination which the current ‘civilisation’ is incapable of abolishing. We can also see how the so-called ‘liberation’ of women from the 60s onwards has ended up insidiously reinforcing macho domination on a daily level. Wage labour transforms human beings into commodities, into sexual objects, into images for adverts, into anorexic manikins for luxury fashions – and all this is no less scandalous than the burkini. Obtaining rights and freedoms in capitalist society is a total illusion. The real principles of this society are terror, exploitation, and barbarism.

WH-EG, 30.8.16

The internal response to the July 15/16 attempted coup was, according to Turkish President Erdogan, a “Gift from God”. He insisted that the “cleansing” would continue and the “virus would be eradicated” along with terrorists wherever they were. Sure enough, a Stalinist-like purge, with lists of names already drawn-up, was implemented with force and the war against the Kurds in south-east Turkey immediately stepped up.

Coup and counter-coup

Without any speculation as to the possible role or knowledge of outside agencies, it looks clear that the coup involved some of the senior levels of the Turkish military, called by the BBC as the coup unfolded, “the guarantors of Turkish secularism”.

This putsch to overthrow Erdogan and his AKP was in all probability wider and deeper than a “Gulenist” movement[1], although the alliances and links between the various shadowy factions and tendencies within the Turkish state are often truly Byzantine in their complexity. For example, the Gulenists have long been accused of being involved in the “deep state” conspiracy Ergenekon, which was supposedly set up around the 1990s as a guarantor of Turkey’s secular traditions, and traditionally, the main opponents of Erdogan’s “moderate” Islamist party,  AKP are not the Gulenists but the Kemalist[2] factions within the military and society at large. But this was not just a new confrontation between the Islamist AKP and the secular Kemalists – indeed, in the wake of the coup the main Kemalist party, the CHP, rallied to the government in a grand display of national solidarity. And there are also complex religious rivalries involved: between Sunni and the heterodox Alevis, and between Erdogan’s version of Sunni Islam and the one promulgated by the Gulenists. But for now Erdogan and the AKP have now tightened their totalitarian grip on the Turkish state, with a three-month State of Emergency enabling them to rule by decree in an atmosphere of fear and heightened state surveillance.

To date (CNN, 9.8.16) 22,000 people have been detained and a further 16,000 arrested on specific charges, including thousands of military personnel, involving about a third of Turkey’s General and Admiral ranks. Hundreds of journalists have been arrested, detained, investigated or sacked along with many thousands of civil servants, and foreign travel has been stopped for many. Altogether 68,000 have been fired or suspended with 2000 institutions shut down. The State of Emergency has led to torture, beatings, and starvation of those detained

Some involved in Erdogan’s inner circle have been arrested and the Presidential Guard has been disbanded. Around 250 soldiers and civilians were killed in the coup on the government side as well as an unknown number of those, wittingly or unwittingly, on the side of the putsch. Dozens of fighter-bombers, dozens of helicopters, thousands of armoured vehicles and 3 ships were used in the coup attempt. From some reports Erdogan narrowly escaped with his life after warnings from Russian interceptions.

The internal destabilisation of Turkey

For some years Turkey has been held up as a stable, economically thriving island, and an example of moderate, democratic Islam, amid a sea of troubles in the Middle East. And indeed, as a state,  Turkey does have a more solid historical implantation than many of its war-torn neighbours like Syria and Iraq. But it remains the case that Turkey has a lot in common with Syria and Iraq in terms of ethnic and sectarian divisions.

The strength of Erdogan’s AKP has been in its delivery on the economic level where the standard of living has risen for most of the countryside and the urban poor. Jobs have been created by borrowing huge sums for state investments and state projects. At the same time Erdogan has profited from the rise of Islam and has pursued a moderate form of fundamentalism in order to enhance the image of a “New Turkey”, demonstrating its power as a potential leader of the Sunni world. Behind the conflict between the Islamist AKP and the secular Kemalists of the army and wider layers of society, i.e. a confrontation between Islamism and secularist nationalism, lies a further religious element. The previous secular Kemalist system was seen as indirectly favouring the Shiite Aleviminority at the expense of the Sunni majority, since the Alevi form of Islam is seen as more adaptable to the modern world. At this level there is a certain resemblance between the previous Kemalist system in Turkey and  the Assad regime, which rules over a Sunni majority while being largely composed of another Shiite sect, the Alawites[3]. The present war in Syria between Alawite and Sunni can only affect and accentuate the religious and cultural rivalries between comparable elements in Turkey. In the wake of the coup, for example, there were reports of pogromist attacks on Alevi homes and shops. 

The Turkey of today is not the same country it was at the time of the  previous military putsch in 1980, whose justification was the growing disorder sown by conflicts between right and left political factions, or even ten years ago when the AKP came to power. As a result of the economic boom, which now seems to be ending, both a modern proletariat and a new elite of specialists and intellectuals has emerged in the big cities. A large part of these elements are not at all comfortable with “Islamicisation”. A dangerous situation has thus emerged where the putsch of the old elite (to the extent that they took part in it) has provoked the hatred and thirst for revenge of the AKP supporters. On the other hand, Erdogan has to take seriously the warning that this attempted coup represents. If he goes too far in his “counter-coup” he can, at worst, provoke civil war or a running conflict in the form of armed revolts or new forms of terrorism – even if the resistance of these forces has been subdued for the moment.

At a time when the country has gone from “economic miracle” to one of Morgan Stanley’s “Fragile Five” most at risk, when its productivity and growth is low, while labour costs, inflation and borrowing are rising, the results of further economic instability could be dramatic – collapse of tourism, emigration of new generation of skilled workers, etc.

Additionally, the Turkish bourgeoisie has a long tradition of “exclusion” on which the foundations of modern Turkey were born: the genocide of the Armenians, the massacres of the Greeks and long-standing opposition to any possibility of a Kurdish state. The AKP’s view that all opponents are enemies who need to be repressed has a long history in Turkey.

Further destabilisation throughout the Middle East

Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, Turkey has been affected strongly by the centrifugal tendencies unleashed. The weakening of US imperialism and that of Russia has allowed Turkey to develop its own ambitions, posing as a regional leader of the Sunni regimes. The Erdogan regime has fallen out with Israel, strengthened ties with Hamas and called the al-Sisi government in Egypt which overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood “illegitimate”. Its relationship with Russia, which after the coup and Erdogan’s August 9 meeting with Putin in St. Petersburg appears to be warming, has been complicated and fluctuating. In its present situation Turkey can blackmail the west with its links to Russia, China (and Iran), and can play its own cards in the Middle East.

The biggest nightmare for the Turkish bourgeoisie would be the establishment of a Kurdish state. The west has a dilemma here: in their war against Isis they rely on the Kurds for cannon-fodder, providing them with arms, air-cover and “advisors”. Such developments can only strengthen Kurdish nationalism and its ambitions for an “independent” state, even if the Kurdish nationalists are themselves split up into a number of different factions. The clash of interests over the Kurds, with the US, Germany and Britain on one side and Turkey on the other, is stark. Erdogan was close to the Assad regime before the war and during it both have used Isis forces for their own perceived advantages. Assad has also used the Kurdish PKK for the same reasons.  But after a five-year war and Russian (and other) intervention on behalf of Assad, there are signs that Ankara may consider leaving Assad in power while doing some sort of deal with him. Neither Assad nor Turkey has any interest in a Kurdish state or any type of Kurdish autonomous region along the border. Talks have been ongoing for about a year between Assad’s Alawite representatives in Damascus and representatives of Turkey’s Homeland Party[4]   along with elements of Turkey’s military intelligence, with a view, amongst others, of stopping Turkish military support to Assad’s enemies. These Turkish “interlocutors” appear untouched in the post-coup atmosphere, suggesting that these talks will continue. If this is the case it will be at the expense of the west and their Kurdish “allies”[5].

We also need to consider the significance of the fact that Erdogan, the leader of a NATO country,  has accused the governments of other NATO countries – in particular the USA- of having supported the putsch, while at the same time praising Russia for having warned it of the plans for a coupThere is also a question mark over the availability of the Incirlik military base for: up till now it has been considered a NATO base, but Erdogan has said that he would not oppose the Russians using it for operations against Isis. These developments, this game of bargaining and blackmail, are a further sign of the growing fragility of imperialist alliances in the region.  

Refugees: “... gasoline next to the fire”.

Sir Richard Dearlove, ex-boss of MI6, likened the EU deal with Turkey over refugees as similar “to storing gasoline next to the fire” (Belfast Telegraph, 15.5.16). Turkey will use these millions of “assets” as a further element of blackmail against the EU (which Erdogan has called “a Christian club”). He has already threatened to cancel the deal and the Europeans have been forced to try to placate him. The present purge and the hunt for opponents means that in addition to over 2 million Syrian and other refugees there may be more Turks themselves fleeing the country and adding to the general refugee crisis.

Longer-term uncertainty

As a system in accelerating decay, the tendency towards instability and chaos must be the dominant one on a historical scale. But this does mean that the ruling class is helpless in the face of it and that there are no counter-tendencies. We have seen this, for example, in the UK following the disastrous result of the EU referendum: the ruling class has reacted very quickly to the danger of serious fractures in its own ranks, reorganising its governmental cards in a rather adroit manner in order to present a unified response to the Brexit crisis.  And we can discern similar tendencies in Turkey. Although the Kemalists and Gulenists collaborated in the coup, the fact that the Gulenists were singled out is significant. In the wake of the coup, Erdogan has more and more been stressing the heritage of Ataturk and playing the card of Turkish nationalism rather than Islamism. This could signify a serious attempt to win over the Kemalists, as well as the Alevisand other bourgeois factions, behind the option of an autocratic leader pressing the claims of the Turkish nation (somewhat on the model of Putin in Russia).

The current adulation of Erdogan in the widely publicised street demonstrations could be part of this strategy to build a new unity within the Turkish ruling class. On the other hand, the official pictures showing massive support for Erdogan and the AKP are not to be taken at face value. He’s the winner for the moment having beaten off rival cliques but there are limits to Erdogan’s authoritarian project.. One strength of Erdogan and his party has been a strong economy but as we have said this phase of growth is coming to an end He has never been as popular as the propaganda suggests; anti-government demonstrations in important areas in  2013, sparked off by the protests at Taksim Gezi Park[6], showed the existence of a widespread rejection of his policies  among urban, educated youth in particular. And there remains deep resentment in the military directed against Erdogan and his party. Just a year ago AKP ministers faced public abuse and ridicule from senior military figures at funerals for soldiers killed in operations against the Kurdish PKK. The Erdogan government responded to this public humiliation – at what should be show-case events of state propaganda – by requesting the media stopped its coverage of the funerals (Times, 31.8.15). The military publicly objected to the slain soldiers being called “martyrs” and expressed the view that the military surge against the PKK was part of the strengthening of the AKP’s electoral position against the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP).

At the moment the Erdogan clique has strengthened its position as it has grabbed control back from the putschists but its social control remains uncertain with consequences both inside and outside Turkey.

Boxer, 15.8.16 (This article was contributed by a sympathiser of the ICC)

In 1915, the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, defying the wave of nationalism that had swept Germany at the outbreak of the war, recognised that this European-wide conflict had opened up a new epoch in the history of capitalism, an epoch when the ruthless competition built into the system was now posing humanity with the choice between socialism and barbarism. This war, she wrote, with its massacre of human beings on an industrial scale, was a precise definition of what barbarism means.

But World War One was only the beginning and the barbarity of capitalism soon reached new levels. The war was ended by the resistance of the working class in Russia, Germany and elsewhere, through the mutinies, strikes, and insurrections that, for a brief moment, threatened the very existence of the world capitalist order. But these movements were isolated and crushed; and with the defeat of the working class, which is the only real obstacle to capitalism’s drive to war, the horror of imperialist conflict took on a new quality.  

The first imperialist war was still, like the wars of the 19th century, fought mainly on the battlefields. The scale of the killing, proportionate to the dizzying development of technology in the decades leading up to the war, was a shock even to the politicians and military chiefs who had gambled on a short, sharp conflict, “over by Christmas”.  But in the wars that succeeded it, the principal victims of warfare would no longer be soldiers in uniform, but the civilian population. The bombing, by German and Italian aircraft, of Guernica in Spain, an event immortalised by Picasso’s tortured figures of women and children, set the tone. At first, the deliberate targeting of civilians from the air was a new shock, something unprecedented, and surely only something the fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini could contemplate. But the war in Spain was a rehearsal for a second world war which trebled the death toll of the first and in which the vast majority of its victims would be civilians. Both sides used the tactic of ‘carpet’ bombing to flatten cities, destroy infrastructure, demoralise the population, and – because the bourgeoisie still feared the possibility of a working class uprising against the war – smash the proletarian danger. Increasingly, such tactics were no longer denounced as crimes but defended as the best means to end the conflict and prevent further slaughter – above all by the ‘democratic’ camp. The incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the newly-invented atomic bomb was justified in exactly these terms.

Today, when the leaders of the ‘democratic’ world condemn the Assad regime in Syria and its Russian backers for their relentless, systematic massacre of the civilian population of Aleppo and other cities, we should not forget that they are carrying on what is now an established tradition of capitalist warfare. The deliberate destruction of hospitals and other key infrastructure such as the water supply, the blocking and even bombing of aid convoys: this is modern siege warfare, military tactics learned not only from previous generations of ‘dictators’, but from also from democratic militarists like ‘Bomber’ Harris and Winston Churchill.

Imperialist interests fan the flames in Syria

That is not to say there is nothing exceptional in what is happening in Aleppo. The ‘civil war’ in Syria began as part of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 – with a revolt by a population exasperated by the brutality of the Assad regime. But Assad had learned from the fall of his fellow dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, and responded to the demonstrations with murderous firepower. The determination of the regime to survive and perpetuate its privileges has proved to be unbounded. Assad is prepared to lay waste to entire cities, murder or expel millions of his own citizens, to remain in power. There is here an element of the tyrant’s revenge against those who dare to reject his rule, a plunge into a spiral of destruction which will leave the rulers with little or nothing to rule over. In this sense, the coldly rational calculation behind the terror bombing of Syria’s ‘rebel’ cities has become a new symbol of the growing irrationality of capitalist war.

But the insanity of this war is not limited to Syria. Following the mass shootings of unarmed demonstrators, splits in the Syrian army gave rise to an armed bourgeois opposition, and this rapidly transformed the initial revolt into a military conflict between capitalist camps; this in turn provided the opportunity for a whole number of local and global imperialist powers to intervene for their own squalid reasons. The ethnic and religious divisions that aggravated the conflict inside Syria were exploited by regional powers with their own agendas. Iran, which claims to be the leader of the world’s Shiite Muslims, supports Assad’s ‘Alawite’ regime and backs the direct intervention of the Hezbollah militias from Lebanon. Sunni Muslim states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have armed the numerous Islamist gangs which aimed to supplant the ‘moderate’ rebels, including Islamic State itself. Turkey, often on the pretext of striking back against IS, has used the war to step up its onslaught on the Kurdish forces who have made considerable gains in northern Syria.

But in this three, four, even five sided conflict, the world’s major powers have also been playing their role. The US and Britain have called for Assad to step down and have indirectly supported the armed opposition, both the ‘moderates’ and, via Saudi and Qatar, the Islamists. When IS began, like al Qaida in the previous decade, to bite the hand that feeds it and set itself up as a new and uncontrolled power in Syria and Iraq, a number of western politicians have reconsidered their position, arguing that Assad is actually a ‘lesser evil’ compared to IS. Earlier in the conflict, Obama threatened the Assad regime with military intervention, declaring that the use of chemical weapons against civilians was a line that could not be crossed. But this threat proved empty, and subsequently, the debates in Washington and Westminster have been how to intervene against IS, thus indirectly boosting Assad.

The indecisive US response to the situation in Syria is the product of a long process of decline in its world hegemony, summarised above all by its disastrous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The ‘War on Terror’ unleashed by the Bush administration has only served to foment chaos in the Middle East and has made Islamist terrorism an even greater force than it was before the Twin Towers fell. The war in Iraq proved particularly unpopular in the US and even the gun-toting Trump now proclaims it to have been a disaster. The USA is thus extremely reluctant to get drawn into a new quagmire in the Middle East.

Imperialism abhors a vacuum, and the hesitations of the US provided a resurgent Russia with the chance to reassert itself in a region from which it had been largely expelled by the end of the Cold War. Syria is the last place in the Middle East where Russia hung on to its military bases, and its support for the Assad regime has been constant. But after embarking on a policy – via the wars in Georgia and the Ukraine – of regaining its lost empire in the region of the former USSR, Putin’s Russia is now gambling on increasing its status as a world power by directly intervening in the Syrian conflict. The initial pretext was the need to hit back at IS which was gaining ground in Iraq and Syria, even threatening Russia’s only remaining outlet to the Mediterranean, the naval base at Tartus. To the extent that it was posed as a response to IS, Russian intervention was quietly supported by the US. Following IS atrocities in Paris, France even carried out some joint operations with Russian forces in Syria. But Russian imperialism has shown little interest in attacking IS bases and every interest in propping up an Assad regime that was showing serious signs of collapse. By the simple trick of branding the entire opposition to Assad as terrorists, it has become a major force in Assad’s assault on rebel strongholds, effectively turning the tide of war in favour of Assad. Russian imperialism’s answer to the conflict in Syria is a simple one, entirely in accord with Assad’s methods, and already applied without mercy in Grozny in 1990-2000 in response to the Chechen nationalist movement: reduce the city to rubble and the problem of rebellion is solved.

Russian imperialism makes no secret of its ambitions in the Middle East. “Over the weekend, marking the first anniversary of Russia’s intervention in Syria, state media was full of bold statements such as ‘Russia proved that it’s nonetheless a superpower’ and ‘Russia has become the main player in this region … The United States, on the other hand, lost its status as first fiddle’.”[1]

The assault on Aleppo, which was raised to new levels following the rapid collapse of the latest cease-fire brokered by the US, has visibly sharpened tensions between Russia and the USA.  Reacting to the charge that it is carrying out war crimes in Syria – which is undoubtedly true – Russia has pulled out of peace negotiations over Syria and also from a process aimed at reducing US and Russian stockpiles of plutonium, with Putin placing the most far-reaching conditions on a resumption of talks, including the dropping of sanctions against Russia and substantial reduction of NATO troop concentrations in eastern Europe.  

Hypocrisy in the west

Faced with the increasingly brutal policies of the Putin regime at home and abroad, with its retrograde nationalist ideology and crudely lying propaganda, the ‘democratic’ powers in the west do not find it difficult to take the moral high ground. But we have already seen that Russia’s use of terror bombing in Syria has a long pedigree in the west. And the hypocrisy of the democratic states applies equally to their recent and current behaviour. America’s condemnation of Russia for destroying Aleppo and other cities cannot efface the memory of the bombardment of Baghdad in 2003 or the siege of Fallujah in 2004, which also led to thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, even if US bombs and missiles are supposedly ‘smarter’ than their Russian equivalents and thus more focused on purely military targets. Neither should it obscure what Britain has been doing on the quiet in Yemen – supplying the Saudis with weapons in its intervention in a bloody ‘civil war’. A recent report in The Guardian showed that over a million children in Yemen face starvation as a direct result of Saudi blockades and bombing of areas held by Houthi rebels[2].

But western hypocrisy reaches its highest pitch when it comes to the millions of Syrians who have been forced to flee for their lives, and who now suffer from severe malnutrition in ill-equipped refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan or Lebanon; or, if they try to reach the ‘haven’ of western Europe, they fall into the hands of ruthless human traffickers who push them into perilous crossings of the Mediterranean in unseaworthy boats. The European Union has shown itself incapable of dealing with what Cameron once referred to as the “swarm” of refugees from Syria and other conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. While some governments, like the German, brandish their ‘welcoming’ policy to those whose labour power they need to exploit, the walls and barbed wire fences have gone up all over Europe. More and more European governments and parties are adapting to or openly espousing the politics of exclusion and scapegoating promulgated by the populist currents. We are witnessing sinister echoes of the massacre of the Jews in the 1930s and 40s, when the democracies wrung their hands over the Nazi persecutions and murders, but did everything they could to close their borders to the victims, taking in no more than a symbolic number of Jewish refugees[3].

Double-talk and hypocrisy over Syria is not limited to the governing parties. The majority of parties of the ‘left’ have a long history of supporting Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and the Baathist regime in Syria, alleging that these are, for all their faults, ‘fighting imperialism’, by which they mean the imperialism of the US, Israel or other western states. The ‘Stop the War’ coalition in the UK, for example (in which Jeremy Corbyn has played a leading role for many years) will organise massive demonstrations against Israel’s military incursions into Lebanon and Gaza, under slogans such as ‘We are all Hezbollah’. You will never see them organising an equivalent demonstration against the actions of Assad and the Russians in Syria, which are not only a mirror image of Israeli militarism, but have far surpassed it in levels of death and destruction.

Other activist organisations opt for supporting military action by the USA and the west. The Avaaz group, which specialises in massive online campaigns and petitions, and which opposed the US invasion of Iraq, now argues that the only way to protect the children of Aleppo is to call on Obama, Erdogan, Hollande and May to enforce a no-fly zone in Northern Syria[4].

Either way, we are asked to support one side or the other in what has become a global imperialist conflict.

The proletarian alternative

For revolutionaries, it is essential to defend the principle of internationalism against every case of imperialist butchery. That means maintaining political independence from all states and proto-state militias, and supporting the struggle of the exploited in all countries against their own bourgeoisies. This principle is not dependent on whether or not the exploited are engaged in open struggle. It is a signpost for the future which must never be lost. In 1914, the internationalists who opposed the war were a very small minority, but stubbornly holding onto class positions, while so many former comrades were rallying to the war effort of their own bourgeoisies, was absolutely essential to the emergence of a massive proletarian struggle against the war two or three years later.

In Syria, there is no doubt that the proletariat is absent from the scene. This is a reflection of the political and numerical weakness of the Syrian working class, which has been unable to stand up against the Assad regime and its various bourgeois opponents. But we can say that the fate of Syria and of the ‘Arab spring’ as a whole sums up the historic situation facing the world working class. Capitalism is in an advanced state of decay and has no future to offer humanity other than repression and war. This has been the response of the ruling class to the various revolts that swept through North Africa and the Middle East in 2011. But this has only been possible because the working class was unable to take the lead in these revolts, unable to propose a different aim and perspective than the democratic illusions which dominated the social movements. And this was a failure not merely of the working class of North Africa and the Middle East, but of the working class in the central countries of capitalism, which has more deeply implanted revolutionary traditions and a long experience in confronting the obstacle of bourgeois democracy.

It is these battalions of the class who are best placed to revive the perspective of proletarian revolution, which remains the only hope for a human future. This is not just wishing for the best. The Arab spring also served as an inspiration to struggles in the central countries, most notably the Indignados revolt in Spain, which went furthest of all the movements of 2011 in posing serious questions about the future of world capitalism and in developing the means of struggle against it. But this was just a glimpse of the possible, a small indication that, despite the steady advance of capitalist barbarism, the proletarian alternative is still alive. 

Amos, 8.9.16     

Politicians of left and right have condemned the increased xenophobic abuse and physical attacks on immigrants since the referendum, and indeed do not want the tensions in society to explode in ways that disrupt the exploitation of the working class. They may also recognise the role of referendum propaganda in encouraging the increase in these attacks. But they will never acknowledge the extent to which their capitalist system and their state are responsible for the very attitudes which feed xenophobic and racist populism. It is the nation state that defines who is a citizen, or subject, and who is an outsider, an illegal, or to be accepted on sufferance provided their work is needed and sent away afterwards, which encourages immigration when labour is scare, and turns away refugees when it is not wanted.

Home secretary Amber “don’t call me a racist” Rudd’s announcements at the Tory Party conference are an illustration: on the one hand a work permit scheme for EU citizens who get jobs here, so that capital can bring in the workers it needs, including seasonal fruit pickers; but on the other hand definitely no out of work benefits or social housing, and businesses to be ‘named and shamed’ if they do not make efforts to recruit and train British workers. This is, of course, in continuity with Cameron’s promise to limit net migration, with restrictions on student visas – which upset the universities - and with Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” policy. However it goes further in making concessions to populism in attacking business for employing immigrants when there is unemployment at home, taking up its anti-elitist rhetoric. If holding the referendum was already a sop to populist sentiment, the May government is taking this further by hinting at a hard Brexit and Article 50 by the end of March, even if no details have been given yet. It seems to have rattled some in UKIP with Steven Woolfe, one of its leadership candidates, getting into an altercation with a fellow member after it emerged that he had held talks with the Tory Party.

Even more dangerous for would-be refugees and migrants are the agreements made by the EU to send refugees who arrive in Greece illegally by boat back to Turkey; and in 2014 there was the EU-Horn of Africa Migration Rout Initiative (or the Khartoum process). The latter provides brutally repressive regimes such as Sudan with equipment to police its borders – in the name of humanitarian concern for the victims of people traffickers the desperate are prevented from attempting to flee to safety.

At the end of July, Byron Burgers set up a fake training session (some employees were told it was on health and safety, other that it was on a new burger recipe) to assist immigration authorities in arresting 35 suspected illegal immigrants, and deporting at least 25 including separating some from the families they have in this country. The employer’s excuse for this deception was the 2016 Immigration Act which makes parts of civil society (in this case, employers and landlords) responsible for checking the immigration status of employees and tenants, and so policing immigration controls. This sort of blatant, and mandatory, snitching is currently of limited extent and this piece of legislation only specifies the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, not the working class (although individual workers must undoubtedly be required to carry out some of the tasks involved, whether aware of the motivation behind them or not). It seems likely that the highly publicised application of this Act at Byron Burgers a month after the referendum was an attempt to use the populist mood to get us used to this sort of behaviour, or at least test its acceptability. The state will no doubt have watched carefully not just those expressing indignation about the action of Byron Burgers (there were a number of small demonstrations outside their restaurants), but also those who took the contrary, conformist view that all means are appropriate in arresting illegal immigrants.

Populism and violence

Since the vote in favour of Brexit there has been an increase in reports of “hate crimes” – 57% in the 4 days following the vote and 42% in the last 2 weeks of June, with incidents continuing at over 3,300 in the last 2 weeks of July, which is a 40% increase on the previous year. While most have involved verbal abuse or racist graffiti, in Harlow a 40 year old worker from Poland was killed, in Milton Keynes a pregnant Muslim woman was kicked in the stomach, losing her baby, and in Plymouth a Polish family whose shed was set on fire found a note threatening it would be the family next. This should be no surprise given the nature of the campaign around the referendum which lent heavily on the question of immigration, including UKIP’s infamous poster showing hundreds of refugees in Southern Europe. Nigel Farage’s “I want my country back” slogan was very useful in using, and encouraging, a mood of discontent and xenophobia. It is as though some people think they had just won a referendum to rid the country of all ‘immigrants’, no matter whether they came from the EU and no matter how many years - or generations - they had been here.

These attacks show the dark and dangerous nature of the populist upsurge that contributed to Cameron feeling the need to promise a referendum on Brexit, and to the result going against the wishes of all the central factions of the ruling class in the UK, Europe and the USA. It is not hard to understand the reasons for the discontent that feeds populism. The financial crisis of 2007/8 hit people’s savings. Decades of economic crisis and decline have left old industrial areas completely run down with no prospects. This has all been presided over by alternating Tory and Labour governments since Heath and Wilson in the 60s and 70s, all of which have imposed versions of austerity, and thus eroding confidence, and participation, in elections as a way of ameliorating the situation. ‘Elites’ and ‘experts’ are rejected. Meanwhile the perspective of the working class seems absent. Not only are strikes at a historic low, there is even a feeling that the working class no longer exists, particularly when it is seen not as the class of wage or salaried workers, but only as those who do blue collar, manual jobs and live on a council estate. Migrants are not seen for what they are, fellow victims of the same capitalist system, forced to flee war or move to seek work, but as dangerous competitors for dwindling resources. As put forward in the contribution ‘On the question of populism’ “... when an alternative – which can only be that of the proletariat – is missing, parts of the population start to protest and even revolt against their ruling elite, not with the goal of challenging their rule, but in order to oblige them to protect their own ‘law-abiding’ citizens against ‘outsiders’. These layers of society experience the crisis of capitalism as a conflict between its two underlying principles: between the market and violence. Populism is the option for violence to solve the problems the market cannot solve, and even to solve the problems of the market itself. For instance, if the world labour market threatens to flood the labour market of the old capitalist countries with a wave of have-nots, the solution is to put up fences and police at the frontier and shoot whoever tries to cross it without permission.”[1] However, while these xenophobic attacks show us the reality that lies behind populism, it is important to understand that they are the actions of a tiny minority, even of those seduced by the illusion of getting their country back, or by the idea that cutting immigration will solve any of the problems of housing, education or health services. There have been many expressions of indignation and solidarity with those attacked, even if these have also been drawn into demonstrations in favour of the democratic state. The fact is that even though the working class alternative appears absent, the class has not been defeated, and overt racists do not have a free hand to run amok and physically attack those they scapegoat for the problems in society.

False friends

With the Tories as well as UKIP making xenophobic speeches about limiting immigration, blaming migrants for all sorts of problems, and the increased verbal and physical attacks on them, how do we answer all this xenophobia and racism, how do we show solidarity? The Greens and the Corbyn faction of the Labour Party appear to be standing against the xenophobic mood, or at least refusing to join in. Corbyn was notably criticised for not taking up immigration in his conference speech and instead proposing financial aid to areas with high levels of immigration. Can we, in other words, oppose the populism of the Brexiters and xenophobes with a sort of left alternative, such as the huge influx of new members of the Labour Party supporting Corbyn, or his supporters in Momentum? Or internationally with the likes of Podemos, Syriza or Bernie Sanders? While it is beyond the scope of this article to analyse these forces (see article on the Labour Party in this issue) there are a few things we can say.

These political forces take the view that they should not try to make concessions to populism, not even at the level of propaganda, but oppose it. But they do this on a totally bourgeois basis. Their programmes are all fundamentally based on fighting elections and seeking government office; and where they have a large extra-parliamentary activity this is also based on pressurising or influencing some part of government policy. In other words they base their politics on the nation state and the national interest which they share with all bourgeois forces, however much they disagree on how to defend that national interest. No wonder such parties can completely change policy when they get into office. For instance, the Labour Party has often had a leftwing leader, often considered unelectable, in opposition, but in power it carries on the same old policies. When it comes to demonising migrants we only have to look back to the Blair government and its talk of “bogus asylum seekers” and even “bogus” gypsies[2]. Similarly, in Greece, Syriza in government found itself carrying out the very austerity it had denounced in opposition; and its positive promises to improve things for immigrants didn’t stop it aligning with the right wing, anti-immigrant ANEL (Independent Greeks).

The working class can only rely on itself

The only way we can oppose the populist idea that keeping immigrants out will protect the citizens at home from the chaos of the world today is to understand that we are all victims of the same capitalist system. It is the same capitalist crisis that has caused unemployment in old industrial areas in the advanced countries, that lies behind imperialist wars in the Middle East sending thousands of refugees fleeing for their lives, and that causes the unemployment and poverty leading to economic migration. That means to see things internationally which is the viewpoint of the working class, which is concretised in the practical unity between immigrant and ‘native’ workers that develops in their struggles, as in the strike at Deliveroo recently. It is the apparent absence of this working class perspective that has allowed populism to develop as a product of capitalism’s decay. But it is only the working class that can provide a perspective to resist capital’s attacks, unmask its rotten ideology, and offer humanity the prospect of a world without states and borders. 

Alex, 7.10.16

In response to the austerity demanded by the capitalist crisis, the proliferation of imperialist wars, terrorism on the streets, and the dismal prospects offered by the continuation of capitalism, there is much dissatisfaction. This discontent can be expressed in many ways, not embracing any solutions but expressing unhappiness with a reality that’s not understood.

In the UK Referendum on membership of the European Union millions voted to leave without any clear idea of what the consequences might be. Some were concerned about immigration, some were worried about a distant EU bureaucracy having control over their lives, some believed the propaganda about the economic prospects for the UK, and some were just expressing a negativity about the existing state of things. Elsewhere people have been attracted by other expressions of populism, like Trump in the US, Le Pen in France or the ‘Alternative for Germany’.

But it’s not just right-wing populism that people have turned to. Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, Bernie Sanders in the US have all offered a ‘new radicalism’ on the Left. It’s in this context that we can begin to appreciate the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party.

For the Left Corbyn is a hero. For the SWP (Socialist Worker 27/9/16) “His success is a clear sign of the feeling against austerity, racism and war. His victory can be a launchpad for increased resistance in the workplaces and on the streets.

We look forward to continuing to work with Corbyn and his supporters against the disastrous Tory policies that threaten to destroy key public services, deepen poverty, whip up racism and plunge British armed forces into more imperialist wars.”

And yet in the same salute they show how Syriza also “sent hope across the world” before “implementing a worse round of austerity than those imposed by its … predecessors.” They present Corbyn as something positive, but when you read the small print the SWP says (International Socialism 152) “the detail of his economic programme is standard post-crash social democratic fare—a £500 billion programme of infrastructure investment, an industrial strategy overseen by a new National Investment Bank, support for cooperatives, a National Education Service…”  And when you see the policies of deficit reduction and borrowing for investment in infrastructure McDonnell lines up with his Labour predecessors with much talk of “fiscal credibility” and “discipline”.

For the Right Corbyn is an ‘extremist’ who, with allies such as McDonnell and Abbott, will raise taxation, increase debt, reinforce state intervention in the economy, be soft on terrorists, undermine defence by not renewing Trident and stifle the ‘initiative’ of private enterprise.

For a typical right-wing take on Corbyn try the Daily Mail’s (29/9/16) report of his speech to the Labour. “Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to spend more than £100billion a year creating a socialist state was condemned yesterday as a blueprint to bankrupt the nation.” He apparently plans to “spend more on everything from education to housing.” There would be investment to increase employment, build homes, keep down rents, ban zero hours contracts, ease the pressure through immigration on public services, provide free education, move to a low carbon economy, renationalise railways, and increase taxes. There would be a “new National Investment Bank to spend cash on better broadband, railways and energy infrastructure.”

The Express (26/9/16) was a bit less hysterical. Mr McDonnell was reported as promising to work with the “wealth creators in the private sector”…He said: “We think we can get the economy growing very quickly and it will then pay for itself.”  As the SWP would say, this is ‘standard social democratic fare’ – promises to increase the role of the state when the tendency towards growing state capitalism is one of the dominant trends of the last hundred years, an expression of capitalism’s economic crisis, not a solution to it.

The appeal of leftism

So, while the Corbyn/Sanders/Syriza left –wing version of capitalism has no capacity to improve the quality of people’s lives, any more than the right-wing plans of Trump or UKIP, it has a big appeal to some workers.

In the history of the workers’ movement there have always been currents that emphasise that the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself, that the self-organisation of the working class is not only a strength of the struggle, but the basis of a future society based on relations of solidarity, a society where the state has become an anachronism. However, in the period leading up to the First World War the idea grew in social democracy that the capitalist state could provide social order, could eliminate the excesses of capitalist competition, and could guarantee social welfare. In fact this had as much to do with socialism as Louis XIV’s centralised state or Bismarck’s ‘state socialism’.

Today, despite the experience of a century of state capitalism in all its political forms – social democratic, Stalinist or fascist - the idea that the state can somehow be neutral still has enormous appeal. The ‘enemies’ of ‘ordinary people’ are typically deemed to be bankers, hedge fund managers, tax avoiders, multinational corporations, ruthless companies, exploitative bosses, and all the rest. Against this, the state is portrayed as being a force above classes that can curtail malevolent greedy individuals who are trying to rip off the rest of us. This personalisation, which in the past would dwell on a bloated capitalist in a bowler hat, now focuses on those who, behind closed doors, make decisions that affect the jobs, lives and living conditions of millions.

So, the Labour Party in the UK, while doing badly in opinion polls, is still putting forward the sort of ideas that others have to imitate. When Theresa May became Prime Minister she indicated her intentions: “The Government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few but by you. We won’t entrench advantages of the fortunate few. We will do everything to help you go as far as your talents can take you. We must fight the burning injustices. We must make Britain a country that works for everyone” (Daily Telegraph, 13.7.16).

The parties are united in their opposition to privilege and injustice, but, in practice, the Labour Party is seen as being more authentic. In research published in August 2016 by the House of Commons Library, figures were given for membership of political parties. It suggested that the Labour Party’s 515,000 members were more than all other political parties in the UK put together. And Labour members are far more likely to be committed activists than the members of other parties. They think they have identified what is wrong with the world and what needs to be done. A conservative, by definition, wants to preserve those things which they think have proved their value over time. But for the Labour activists, whatever their initial motivations, the solution to society’s problems lies in the explicit intervention of the state.

The role of Corbyn’s Labour Party is to present an alternative plan for the management of capitalism. At present there is no particular call for Labour to be introduced into government; the Conservatives will do their best to try to navigate Britain out of the EU with as little damage to the national capital as possible. The differences in the Labour Party, in particular between Corbynists and the heirs of Blair and Brown, are genuine and we can envisage continued and deepening conflict in its ranks. This in itself will make demands on the energies of activists as different factions try to ‘save the Labour Party’. The bottom line for workers to remember is that Corbyn’s programme, far from being a fresh innovation, is a programme for the running of capitalism, not its destruction. 

Car, 8.10.16

One of the fears about workers in very precarious casual jobs, with a large proportion of immigrants among them, is that they will not be able to struggle, and so will be nothing but a competitive pressure to lower wages. Firms such as Uber and Deliveroo like to claim their workers are self-employed (so not getting minimum wage, holiday or sick leave). The recent strike at Deliveroo, which spread to UberEats drivers, has answered both questions. They are most definitely part of the working class, and most definitely able to struggle to defend themselves.

Threatened with a new contract that would change from hourly pay plus a bonus for each delivery (£7 and £1) with pay only for each delivery, despite their apparent isolation from each other and their precarious circumstances, Deliveroo delivery workers organised meetings to run their struggle, a protest moped and cycle ride through the streets in London, and a 6 day strike. They insisted on collective negotiation against the managing director’s ‘offer’ to speak to them individually[1].  In the end the threat that they would lose their jobs if they did not sign up to the new contract was withdrawn, but it is being trialled by those who opt in. A partial victory.

Some UberEats delivery workers came to Deliveroo meetings. They face similar conditions, being falsely given self-employed status; pay has fallen so they barely make the minimum wage, with no guaranteed pay, only getting £3.30 per delivery. After a wildcat strike one worker was sacked (or “deactivated” since he is not protected by employment law), underlining the courage needed by workers who struggle in such precarious industries.

These small strikes by workers in such difficult circumstances demonstrate that they are fully part of the working class and its struggle.

Alex 8.10.16

This critique was one of two originally posted on our online forum by comrade Link. Because of the importance of the issues raised, both the for the ICC and the wider communist movement, we decided to reply on a more formal basis.

The original forum posts can be found here [107]and here [108].

First of all I must say that I am very surprised that the very important text in IR 156 from January 2016 still has not prompted responses from comrades.  These documents are significant signposts for the future of the ICC yet have neither been applauded nor criticised - just ignored.

I would like to applaud the approach of self-criticism in preparing the balance sheets contained in the latest IR.  In particular, the identification of an underestimation the capacity of capitalism to maintain itself,  globalisation and the restructuring of the working class, some limited recognition of the weakness of Luxemburg markets theory and responses to elongated period of decline in working class struggles since wave of period  60s to 80s.

I would criticise the text in IR however as a balance sheet that lacks incisiveness and is too keen to self congratulate itself. In saying that I do recognise the major contributions that the ICC has made on issues such as decadence,  the historic course, the working class movement  and more generally on the body of work and the range of issues raised for discussion in the workers movement.    There has been a growing tendency nevertheless to prepare overlong texts on organisational and behavioural issues, and self-analysis that just tend to disguise weaknesses, obscure issues and self justify.  Frankly I’m left with the impression that the concern demonstrated is for ICC militants not today’s working class movement as a whole.

I would like to put forward some obvious questions that the texts avoid:

1            Why the ICC has all these periodic internal confrontations?

2            Why no critical analysis if the ICCs approach to internal discussion?  Yes I’m happy to reject the extreme criticisms of Stalinism but it is still the case that internal discussion has been criticised from many quarters.   Has the ICCs approach, this determination to reach a conclusion and the determination to make swingeing criticisms of others contributed to these breakups?

3            Has orientation of international organisation in distinction to federal approach been successful?  The approach was identified uncritically in the texts but given that the oranisation has given up on being a pole of international regroupment and appears to be withdrawing from intervention in favour of a fraction’s role of  analysing past events.  Why shouldn’t this approach be questioned through a serious discussion?   If the new period changes the focus of militant activity should it not also change the organisational structure?

4            Why have obvious points of political disagreements over the past 40 years not been addressed in the balance sheets? i.e.  left as natural party of opposition, 80s as years of truth, parasitism, Decomposition and the idea that we are in the final phase of caitalism, an increasingly problematic understanding of the historic course, economic analysis and problems with Luxemburg’s analysis of role of extra- capitalist markets.

5            Why is there such an  inability to provide clarity in the explanations of certain issues?  The ICC does not appear to be able to produce definitive statements on what it thinks on proletarian morality, proletarian culture and centrism and the new role as a fraction appears now to join that list (it’s certainly not clear to me from the text).

6            Why has there not been a real attempt to draw a balance sheet of the period of the past 8 years of crisis in the ICC?  This has been the explanation for withdrawing from public interventions and reducing publications so, was it crisis and has it been resolved or was it actually just the start of this new practice?  Is it continuing or is it over.

7            How have these issues/weaknesses affected ICC political analysis in the recent period?   I am particularly interested to hear how early, major criticisms of CWO and IFICC relating to their alleged adoption of academicism and rejection of intervention and lack of understanding of historic course, can be squared with the ICC’s new approach. The ICC has adopted what it was criticising these organisations for yet has not either revised criticisms nor apologised.

Link (14/7/2016)

WR Reply

Thank you very much for your comments and questions posted on the ICC online forum about the critical balance sheet of 40 years of the ICC from International Review (IR) 156[1]. As we indicated to you then we needed more time and reflection to give your questions the answers they deserve. In order to do so in a little depth we won’t take up all the questions in one go - there are a lot - but in installments, with this first reply answering mainly the first two questions of your first post above, leaving the other questions on the fraction from the first and second post to a later date. We hope that the answers we give to your questions will not be seen as our last word on the subject but as only the beginning of a discussion with you.

In recognising the importance and seriousness of this self-critique by the ICC you firstly express your surprise that there has been no public response to it from comrades.  By this we assume you refer to the wider milieu of groups and individuals sharing the general internationalist communist left tradition with the ICC. In answer to this point it was said on the ICC forum in reply that there had been an initial reaction to the critical balance sheet from one of our contacts on the ICC forum. We have also had responses from other contacts verbally or by email. But as far as the proletarian milieu as a whole is concerned we have hardly seen any public reaction. Your surprise is understandable, since the fate of the ICC, a significant organisation of the communist left for the past 40 years, is surely of concern for those who espouse the politics of the communist left, even if they disagree with many of our political positions and analyses. More: one would think surely that many of those who disagree with the ICC on whatever question would want to express themselves publicly on the subject as you have done.

While from this political point of view the silence about our self-critique is surprising and regrettable, from the vantage point of the past four decades, such indifference has not been that unusual. Ever since the re-emergence of the left communist milieu internationally since the end of the sixties, it has lacked a significant sense of common purpose which, if it had been pursued, despite the disagreements within it, would have strengthened this whole milieu and accelerated its internationalist impact on the working class much more than it actually has. In hindsight the three Conferences of Groups of the Communist Left in the late seventies which had the goal of confronting these often profound disagreements at the necessary theoretical and political level, and making common public statements on vital current questions facing the working class, were a high water mark. The collapse of these Conferences at the end of the decade has led to a long period of dispersal of the left communist milieu – even if polemics and other limited instances of mutual collaboration have sometimes occurred.  The emergence of the phenomenon of political parasitism in 1981 has tended to further exacerbate the atomisation of the left communist milieu and reduce the solidarity between its individuals and groups . The low morale of the left communist  milieu in general may help to explain the background to the dearth of response to the 40 year self-critique of the ICC.

In respect of this lack of an effective forum of debate for the whole of the internationalist milieu over the past 40 years, some of your questions seem however to imply that in-depth critiques of our politics and analyses have already been developed within this milieu. But for us it is precisely such profound critiques that are mostly lacking and which still need to be elaborated and deepened. We will point to these below in answer to your questions.

While applauding the self-critique in general you feel that it doesn’t go far enough and that it avoids key questions which need answers.

“I would like to put forward some obvious questions that the texts avoid:

1 Why the ICC has all these periodic internal confrontations?

2  Why no critical analysis if the ICC’s approach to internal discussion?  Yes I’m happy to reject the extreme criticisms of Stalinism but it is still the case that internal discussion has been criticised from many quarters.   Has the ICC’s approach, this determination to reach a conclusion and the determination to make swingeing criticisms of others contributed to these breakups?”

As you note the 40 year balance sheet is not complete but rather at the beginning and doesn’t provide a detailed history of our method of debate nor of the different splits in the ICC over this period and whether they could have been avoided by a better method. We haven’t avoided the question though, but so far only concentrated on some key questions like that of the fraction, because the latter is closely related to the fundamental issue of whether we have carried out our initial conception of our own role, and the question of the accuracy of our analyses of the world situation and our consequent intervention.

At the moment we are not yet in a position to present a detailed history of our mistakes made in our internal debates nor the extent to which these errors may have contributed unnecessarily to the break ups. And your questions on this matter of internal discussion aren’t very specific. So we can only here try to put this question of marxist debate in the ICC, which of course is not Stalinist, in a wider context.

You commend us for the major contributions of the ICC.

“….I do recognise the major contributions that the ICC has made on issues such as decadence, the historic course, the working class movement and more generally on the body of work and the range of issues raised for discussion in the workers movement.”

The politics of the ICC, its class principles or lines of demarcation of the working class from the bourgeoisie, its analysis of the trajectory of the capitalist mode of production, its marxist method and its organisational principles, are all the product of a tradition of stormy debates in the revolutionary movement that stretches back over a century and a half.

The general conceptions of marxism for example would not exist without the blistering polemics of Marx and Engels against the Left Hegelians in their books the Holy Family and the German Ideology, or the scathing critiques directed against Proudhon’s anarchism and Dühring’s positivism.

The specific tradition of the Communist Left would not be conceivable without the fierce and repeated polemics of Lenin and Luxemburg against the renegade Kautsky concerning the opportunism and betrayal of internationalism by the German Social Democracy, nor a few years later on without the unrelenting criticism of the likes of Herman Gorter and Amadeo Bordiga against the growing opportunism of the Third International.

“At the time that it was founded the Italian Communist Party, animated by the leadership of the Left and of Bordiga, was always an ‘enfant terrible’ in the Communist International. Refusing to submit a priori to the absolute authority of leaders — even those it held in the greatest regard - the Italian CP insisted on freely discussing and, if necessary, fighting against any political position it didn’t agree with. As soon as the CI was formed, Bordiga’s fraction was in opposition on many points and openly expressed its disagreements with Lenin and other leaders of the Bolshevik party, the Russian revolution, and the CI. The debates between Lenin and Bordiga at the Second Congress are well known. At this time nobody thought about questioning this right to free discussion; no one saw it as an insult to the authority of the ‘leaders’. Perhaps men as feeble and servile as Cachin believed in their heart of hearts that this was scandalous, but they wouldn’t have dared to admit it. Moreover, discussion wasn’t seen simply as a right but as a duty; the confrontation and study of ideas were the only way of elaborating the programmatic and political positions required for revolutionary action”. IR 33 ‘Against the concept of the “brilliant leader”’[2].

The ICC in particular would not exist without the confrontation of ideas with both councilism and Bordigism by the Gauche Communiste de France in the 40s and 50s.

Of course all these polemics were accompanied by very profound study and reflection.  Painstaking marxist research has usually been stimulated by the intensive confrontation of ideas in the revolutionary movement.

In the history of the ICC itself the principles and analyses that it has developed from the heritage of the past have required the debating of differences. Most of which have not led to splits. The debates on the state in the period of transition, which were not merely internal but also conducted with other groups, or the debates on the reasons for the decadence of capitalism, were both confrontations of important differences that didn’t lead to a separation and in fact are still ongoing. Likewise the development of positions on the proletarian political milieu, on terror, terrorism and class violence, on the critique of the theory of the weak link, on centrism towards councilism, on the theses on parasitism and on the period of the social decomposition of capitalism were all elaborated in our press after extensive debate. In the last decade the International Review has seen the publication of orientation texts on Confidence and Solidarity, Marxism and Ethics and on the Culture of Debate, which were also the object of intense argument within the organisation. While these latter texts, due to the nature of their subject matter, are not final statements they nevertheless constitute in the organisation’s view a valid framework for our approach on these questions and entirely consistent with our marxist method and organisational principles.

All these debates in the history of the ICC which involved, as you might say, ‘swingeing’ criticism, and the desire to reach a conclusion – to see the discussion through to the end – didn’t of themselves lead to organisational break ups.

The decisive reasons that explain the various splits in the organisation, rather than being a result of the debates on general political questions that we mention above, were more  to do with political and theoretical questions of organisational principle, in particular that of the primacy of the unity and solidarity of the organisation as a whole against the attempt to assert  (often in grotesque ways) the sovereignty of the separate interests of individuals or groups within it. The difficulty for the new generations of revolutionaries since 1968 to understand or accept this principle and its implications, which is at the heart of the question of proletarian morality among revolutionaries, has been a common feature of the splits in the ICC. Yet without the acquisition, defence and explanation of this principle there would be no tradition of organised marxist debate within the revolutionary movement. If for example there had been no defence of organisational principles by the ICC in 1981 against the thefts of the Chenier Tendency or the gangsterism and informing of the ‘Internal Fraction of  the ICC’  twenty years later, then there would be no organisational basis for the subsequent theoretical contributions that you recognise. The need to remain united in spite of differences and disagreements is obviously an existential question.

We can also suggest that the same principle of ‘freedom of discussion, unity in action’ remains a difficult one for the internationalist milieu as a whole to understand and not just the ICC.

We won’t speculate here to what extent the mistakes the ICC made in dealing with this question contributed to the schisms. The important thing to recognise here is that matters of organisational life or death were involved.

It should also be noted that after these break-ups, the ICC was not satisfied with the fact that the dissenters had left – far from it – but attempted to draw out the details and lessons of the splits, their origins and their connection to more general weaknesses in the organisation. And it made these findings public.

After the Chenier crisis for example there were significant elaborations in the International Review of our conception of the functioning and function of revolutionary organisation which had been forgotten or not fully understood in the ICC in the lead up to this crisis.

After the crisis of 1995 a series of six articles were published in the International Review (82-88) on the contemporary significance and relevance of the Hague Conference of the Ist International involving the split between the marxists and Bakuninists.

In light of the theoretical dispersal or indifference of the internationalist milieu that we noted earlier in relation to the ICC’s 40 year self-critique, it is nevertheless remarkable that all these crises in the ICC and the extensive publication of the details and general theoretical lessons from them have not led to a serious and intensive theoretical and political debate within this milieu about them.

To tentatively conclude this reply to your first two questions: in explaining the splits in the ICC and the dispersion of the Communist Left milieu it is necessary to take into account the profound difficulty today’s revolutionaries find in pursuing the confrontation of differences within a unitary framework. 

Some short answers to some of your other points:

“I would criticise the text in IR however as a balance sheet that lacks incisiveness and is too keen to self congratulate itself….

There has been a growing tendency nevertheless to prepare overlong texts on organisational and behavioural issues, and self- analysis that just tend to disguise weaknesses, obscure issues and self justify.  Frankly I’m left with the impression that the concern demonstrated is for ICC militants not today’s working class movement as a whole”

While recognising this is your opinion we do not share it and would like to hear more of your argumentation and evidence for these views in order to answer them usefully.

“3            Has orientation of international organisation in distinction to federal approach been successful?  The approach was identified uncritically in the texts but given that the org has given up on being a pole of international regroupment and appears to be withdrawing from intervention in favour of a fraction’s role of  analysing past events.  Why shouldn’t this approach be questioned through a serious discussion?   If the new period changes the focus of militant activity should it not also change the organisational structure?”

In a second article, we shall take up this question in relation to that of the fraction. For the moment: we haven’t given up on being a pole of international regroupment or on carrying out a communist intervention.

“4            Why have obvious points of political disagreements over the past 40 years not been addressed in the balance sheets? i.e.,  left as natural party of opposition, 80s as years of truth, parasitism, Decomposition and the idea that we are in the final phase of capitalism, an increasingly problematic understanding of the historic course, economic analysis and problems with Luxemburg’s analysis of role of extra- capitalist markets.”

Please point more specifically to where the political/theoretical disagreements with all these analyses, that you think we should address, have been made. Or elaborate your own position on them a bit more.

“5            Why is there such an inability to provide clarity in the explanations of certain issues?  The ICC does not appear to be able to produce definitive statements on what it thinks on proletarian morality, proletarian culture and centrism and the new role as a fraction appears now to join that list (it’s certainly not clear to me from the text).”

See IR 127 and 128 on Marxism and Ethics. IR 111 and 112 on Confidence and Solidarity, IR131 on the Culture of Debate. And IR 43 on centrism. In order to answer your question we need a bit more explanation of why you think these statements are unclear.

“6            Why has there not been a real attempt to draw a balance sheet of the period of the past 8 years of crisis in the ICC?  This has been the explanation for withdrawing from public interventions and reducing publications so, was it crisis and has it been resolved or was it actually just the start of this new practice?  Is it continuing or is it over.”

IR’s 154 and 156 already give some serious answers to the explanation of the most recent crisis in the ICC. The 40 year balance sheet is part of this explanation which is ongoing. On intervention and the press, we will take that up more in our reply on the fraction.

“7            How have these issues/weaknesses affected ICC political analysis in the recent period?   I am particularly interested to hear how early, major criticisms of CWO and IFICC relating to their alleged adoption of academicism and rejection of intervention and lack of understanding of historic course, can be squared with the ICC’s new approach. The ICC has adopted what it was criticising these organisations for yet has not either revised criticisms nor apologized”.

You will have to explain more why you think the ICC has ‘adopted’ academicism and rejected intervention, and where you think we made those criticisms of the CWO, so we can answer more precisely. We don’t consider the IFICC as part of the revolutionary milieu.

Looking forward to your reply to all or part of the above while we work on an answer to your questions about the fraction, in the belief that such a discussion between us is a contribution to fulfilling the tasks of revolutionaries in the working class. 

WR, 8.10.16

We are publishing here a critique of the article ‘Towards a communist electoral strategy’ which recently appeared on the website of the Communist League of Tampa (in Florida, USA). We have already published previous correspondence between ourselves and the CLT, in which we welcomed their recognition of the necessity for a world communist party, while also highlighting some of the key differences between our Current and the CLT regarding the conception of the ‘mass party’, the question of whether the communist party takes power, and the relevance of the old social democratic programmes to the communist project today[1]. With the publication of the article ‘Towards a communist electoral strategy’ by Donald Parkinson[2], these differences seem to have widened, or at least become clearer. A comparable process seems to be underway in the relationship between the Tampa group and its Miami affiliate, which has now changed its name to the Workers’ Offensive Group and has adopted a statement of positions which are much more in line with those of the communist left. At the same time, the Miami group has declared that it wants to maintain the discussion with the group in Tampa[3]. We support this decision and want the discussion between ourselves and Tampa to continue as well: hence the present contribution, which we hope will stimulate a response from the Tampa group and others.

We think that this debate on elections is particularly important, not least because in the present political climate in the USA, there is a tremendous pressure on all those who see themselves as being opposed to the capitalist system to set their principles to one side and use their vote to keep Donald Trump from getting his hands on the presidency. In this article, we explain why participation in bourgeois elections in general no longer serves the interests of the class struggle, but directly opposes it.

The text by DP begins by asserting that “participation in electoral politics, and therefore an electoral strategy, are essential if communists are going to gain public legitimacy as a serious political force”.  The text recognises that electoral cycles are “endlessly nauseating, particularly this year’s in the USA with the obnoxious Trump vs the neo-liberal imperialist Clinton”. But it refers to passages written by Marx and Engels to support the view  that, nevertheless, communists should put up their own candidates, as Marx put it in his 1850 address to the Communist League, “in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces, and to bring before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint”. DP is aware of the existence of communists like Pannekoek and Bordiga who, in the new conditions created by war and revolution after 1914, rejected all parliamentary activity, but his main concern here is to deplore the fact that their views have had an inordinate influence on a contemporary ‘left’ which is to a large degree “purely based on direct action”.  He admits that the appeal of such a approach is understandable, given that “the bourgeois state presents itself as a Leviathan of sorts”, but we should not conclude that “anything that touches it is therefore doomed”. The text then outlines the main elements in the revived communist electoral strategy:

“Yet the question of whether we must smash the state and whether we participate in elections are two different questions. The bourgeois state can be smashed, yet we can still participate within its institutions with the purpose of propagandizing and politically training the working class. Election campaigns, even when lost, serve the purpose of forcing Communists to engage the public at large and argue their positions. However what if Communists actually win elections? Would we not just be managing the bourgeois state?

The first clarification to make is that we would not come to power unless we had the mandate to operate our full minimum program and essentially smash the bourgeois state and create the dictatorship of the proletariat. The party would be a party in opposition and would not form coalition governments with bourgeois parties. Unlike other organizations like Syriza, who act as if they cannot accomplish anything until they are in power, a properly Marxist party would remain in opposition and not form a government until conditions for revolution are ripe.

Another clarification is that we are not going to aim for executive powers we can’t realistically win. The extent to which communists are responsible for managing the state is the extent to which they will be forced to make compromises with bourgeois legality. Rather than running for offices like governor or president, we should aim for offices in the legislative branch such as the federal House Representatives, but also state Houses and Assemblies. In these positions we can vote for and against legislation (as well as abstain) and establish our party as a “tribune of the people” that uses its seat of power to propagandize against the bourgeois state and capitalism. By voting against reactionary laws, even if we are outnumbered by the Democrats and Republicans, we can demonstrate that our party stands firmly against the interests of the bourgeois state and develop mass legitimacy for radical positions”.

Changing historical conditions and the real history of the communist movement

What is immediately striking about this passage is that it appears to exist outside of history. There is a complete absence of any idea of the profound changes that have taken place in the life of capitalism and the working class since the days of the Second International when such dilemmas about how workers’ representatives should conduct themselves in parliamentary bodies had a real significance.  But with DP’s text, we are taken to a universe where there has been no tendency for the mass parties and unions of the working class to be absorbed into the capitalist state; no qualitative growth of the totalitarian state Leviathan in response to the new epoch of wars and revolutions; no traumatic decades of Stalinist, fascist and democratic counter-revolution which corrupted or exterminated a whole generation of revolutionaries, leaving only a few small internationalist groups fighting against the tide; no tendency, in the generations that emerged after the receding of this counter-revolution, towards a deep suspicion of politics and political organisation of any kind. The result of this real historical process has been palpable: the communists, who by definition must always remain a minority in the confines of capitalist society, have become a miniscule force, even if you are fairly wide-ranging in your definition of what constitutes the political forces of the working class today. In this actual universe, there is no party of the working class, let alone a mass one.

The CLT don’t, of course claim to be a party and don’t think the communist party is close to being formed; neither do they envisage “running any candidates anytime soon, as we are a small sect with little support and limited resources”. But the divorce from reality we saw in relation to the past also applies to a possible electoral strategy in the future, because  there is no attempt whatever to consider what changes would have to take place that would make it possible for today’s “small sects with little support and limited resources” to form themselves into a formidable communist party capable of winning a respectable number of seats in Congress or  similar parliaments, and even, possibly “winning a mandate to smash the bourgeois state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat”[4].  Such a transformation could only be the result of a massive upsurge in the class struggle on a world-wide scale, of a movement that would give rise not only a whole new generation of revolutionaries and a serious strengthening of the communist minority, but also engender new forms of mass organisation based on the principles of general assemblies and workers’ councils. This perspective has been validated not only by the soviets of the first international revolutionary wave, but in more recent mass movements – for example the inter-factory strike committees that emerged in Poland in 1980, or the general assemblies that were the focus of discussion and decision-making in the struggle against the CPE in France in 2006 or the Indignados movement in Spain 2011.

Two antagonistic poles: bourgeois parliaments vs. workers’ councils

It is already significant that the text says nothing at all about the question of the councils, and even appears to hold out the prospect of the communist party coming to power via bourgeois elections. But what is even more significant is that the text doesn’t examine the role of parliament and elections in cases where workers’ councils were being formed and the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat was being directly posed, such as in Germany in 1918, where democratic elections were used as a weapon against the councils, a means of trapping workers in the idea that parliamentary democracy and workers’ councils could in some way co-exist (providing the latter were reduced to tame trade unionist type bodies limited to the individual workplace…). In sum: communists will only be able to act as a party, an organisation which has a real impact on the development of the class struggle, in a pre-revolutionary upsurge, and then it will be more evident than ever that their energies should be directed towards the strengthening of the councils or council-type organisations against the deadly mystifications of bourgeois democracy.

And we should be aware of just how deeply these mystifications have implanted themselves in the minds of the working class, including its revolutionary minorities. The idea that the triumph of democracy and the political victory of the working class amount to the same thing is already present in the 1848 Communist Manifesto. The experience of the Commune enabled Marx and Engels to understand that the working class could not use the existing parliamentary bodies to come to power…and yet how fragile this understanding was, when shortly after writing The Civil War in France, which drew out the lessons of the Commune with magnificent clarity, Marx could still envisage the working class coming to power ‘peacefully’ in certain democratic bourgeois countries like Britain or Holland.  And when, in the phase of social democracy which made it seem that the working class could step by step build up its parties and its unions inside the framework of bourgeois society, theoreticians like Kautsky could see no other ‘road to power’ except the parliamentary road[5]. Those within the marxist movement who began to challenge the Kautskyite orthodoxy had a hard battle trying to develop the implications of the new forms of struggle appearing as capitalism’s ascendant epoch drew to a close: the mass strikes in Russia, the appearance of the soviets, the development of wildcat strikes in western Europe. It was through examining these new forms and methods of struggle that Pannekoek, Bukharin and eventually Lenin were able to break through the social democratic consensus and base their programme on the most lucid insights of Marx and Engels –  on the recognition that the bourgeois state had to be dismantled,  and not by parliamentary decree, but by the new organs of proletarian political power created by the revolution itself. These theoretical developments took place alongside, and in the case of Pannekoek were deeply influenced by, Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of the mass strike, which put into question the old social democratic (and, by extension, anarcho-syndicalist) practice of step by step forming the mass organisations that will eventually take over the running of society;  in the new conception of Luxemburg and Pannekoek, the revolutionary mass organisation of the working class is a product of the mass movement, and cannot be fabricated by the communist minority in the absence of such a movement.

Anti-electoralism as an “eternal principle”?

DP wants us to drop the idea of “anti-electoralism as an eternal principle”. But none of the militants of the social democratic, and then the communist, left fractions considered anti-electoralism as an eternal principle. They were marxists, not anarchists, and they recognised that, in a previous epoch, the period that included the Communist League and the first two Internationals, the strategy of standing workers’ candidates in bourgeois elections could indeed serve what is an “eternal principle” for revolutionaries: the necessity to develop the autonomy of the working class from all other classes. Thus in the mid to late 19th century, marxists advocated participation in bourgeois elections and parliaments because they considered that parliament could still be a field of battle between parties which were tied to an outmoded feudal order, and those which expressed the forward movement of capital, and could thus be critically supported by the workers’ organisations. In this period, it was possible to consider that such alliances could be in the interests of the working class and even a moment in the development of its political class independence. As capitalism reached its limits as a factor of progress, the distinction between progressive and reactionary bourgeois parties became increasingly meaningless, so that the role of revolutionaries in bourgeois parliaments had to be focused more and more on opposing all the different bourgeois factions – on playing the ‘tribune’ role as a lone voice in a purely bourgeois arena.  But it was precisely during this phase, the phase of mature social democracy, that the leading currents within many of the workers’ parties were drawn into all kinds of compromises with the capitalist class, even up to the point of accepting posts in government cabinets.

For the left communists, the advent of a period of open revolutionary struggle, and the concomitant triumph of opportunism within the parties of the old International – definitely completed by their role in the war of 1914 and the ensuing revolutionary wave – meant that all the old tactics, even the limited use of elections and parliament as a tribune, had to be thoroughly reassessed.  Pannekoek, writing in 1920 when he was still firmly convinced of the necessity for a communist party, accepted that participation in parliament and elections had been a valid strategy in the previous era, but pointed to its pernicious effects in the new conditions:

“Matters change when the struggle of the proletariat enters a revolutionary phase. We are not here concerned with the question of why the parliamentary system is inadequate as a system of government for the masses and why it must give way to the soviet system, but with the utilisation of parliament as a means of struggle by the proletariat.  As such, parliamentary activity is the paradigm of struggles in which only the leaders are actively involved and in which the masses themselves play a subordinate role. It consists in individual deputies carrying on the main battle; this is bound to arouse the illusion among the masses that others can do their fighting for them. People used to believe that leaders could obtain important reforms for the workers in parliament; and the illusion even arose that parliamentarians could carry out the transformation to socialism by acts of parliament. Now that parliamentarianism has grown more modest in its claims, one hears the argument that deputies in parliament could make an important contribution to communist propaganda. But this always means that the main emphasis falls on the leaders, and it is taken for granted that specialists will determine policy – even if this is done under the democratic veil of debates and resolutions by congresses; the history of social democracy is a series of unsuccessful attempts to induce the members themselves to determine policy. This is all inevitable while the proletariat is carrying on a parliamentary struggle, while the masses have yet to create organs of self-action, while the revolution has still to be made, that is; and as soon as the masses start to intervene, act and take decisions on their own behalf, the disadvantages of parliamentary struggle become overwhelming.

As we argued above, the tactical problem is how we are to eradicate the traditional bourgeois mentality which paralyses the strength of the proletarian masses; everything which lends new power to the received conceptions is harmful. The most tenacious and intractable element in this mentality is dependence upon leaders, whom the masses leave to determine general questions and to manage their class affairs. Parliamentarianism inevitably tends to inhibit the autonomous activity by the masses that is necessary for revolution. Fine speeches may be made in parliament exhorting the proletariat to revolutionary action; it is not in such words that the latter has its origins, however, but in the hard necessity of there being no other alternative.

Revolution also demands something more than the massive assault that topples a government and which, as we know, cannot be summoned up by leaders, but can only spring from the profound impulse of the masses. Revolution requires social reconstruction to be undertaken, difficult decisions made, the whole proletariat involved in creative action – and this is only possible if first the vanguard, then a greater and greater number take matters in hand themselves, know their own responsibilities, investigate, agitate, wrestle, strive, reflect, assess, seize chances and act upon them. But all this is difficult and laborious; thus, so long as the working class thinks it sees an easier way out through others acting on its behalf leading agitation from a high platform, taking decisions, giving signals for action, making laws – the old habits of thought and the old weaknesses will make it hesitate and remain passive”[6].

Here Pannekoek gets to the root of why the fight for the councils is diametrically opposed to parliamentary activity in all its forms. To make a revolution, the proletariat has to make a fundamental break with old habits of thinking and acting, with the very idea of alienating its own forces through the election of representatives in bourgeois parliaments. For him, the tactic of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’ adopted by the parties of the Communist International (which is very similar to the electoral strategy advocated by DP) could only serve to reinforce the prevailing and paralysing illusions in bourgeois democracy. And we can add that, even though the statutes of the Communist Parties contained a number of precautions against corruption by parliamentary politics, these rules did not prevent the official parties from transforming themselves rather rapidly into vote-chasing machines.

For Pannekoek and other left communists, the same problematic applied to the trade union form, which, while originally emerging as a form of working class self-organisation, had become hopelessly enmeshed in the bourgeois state and its bureaucracy. The counter-revolutionary role played by the old parties and unions in the imperialist war and the proletarian revolution that followed made it clear that the new forms of organisation would develop not inside the shell of the old society, but through an eruption that would shatter the shell itself. In a sense, this was a return to Marx’s observation that the working class is a class of civil society that is not a class of civil society, an outlaw class that by definition can never gain “public legitimacy” in the normal operations of capitalist society. The idea of seeking public legitimacy, of looking for ‘popularity’ and the biggest possible share of the vote, is a gross deformation of the role of communists, whose task is always to defend the future goals in the movement of the present, to speak the truth however unpalatable it may sound, even when this means going against the stream, as revolutionaries like Lenin and Luxemburg did in the face of the wave of nationalist hysteria which temporarily swept over the working class in 1914. Bordiga, who in the debates in the Third International actually considered the question of abstentionism to be a tactic, nevertheless further illuminates the reasons why the ‘electoral’ mentality ties us to bourgeois society. In The Democratic Principle[7], for example, he shows that the principle of bourgeois democracy, the principle of one citizen one vote, is rooted in the very operation of commodity relations, of a society founded on equivalent exchange. A movement for communism is by definition a movement that overcomes the notion of the atomised citizen exercising his rights through the polling booth, as part of a wider struggle against the reified social relationships imposed by the commodity form.

We think that the comrades of the CLT should go back to these theoretical contributions and engage much more deeply with the reasons why these militants rejected all forms of electoral participation. It’s true that DP’s text accepts that there is a danger, confirmed by the German SPD’s vote for war credits in 1914, that party representatives will develop interests independent from the working class. But his answer is that this problem “can be addressed without having to abstain from electoral activities. For example, electoral reps can be required to donate a certain percentage of their salary to the party and be subject to recall by popular vote”. Leaving aside the speculative, even fantastic nature of this whole scenario, this remains a purely formal response which does not get to the heart of the criticisms raised by the likes of Pannekoek and Bordiga.

The danger of falling into leftism

As we have noted, the CLT is not in any immediate danger of plunging into electoral practices. But its reluctance to consider the real historical conditions facing the communist minority today seems to be pushing it towards a kind of syndicalist activism on the one hand (having said they won’t be running any candidates as yet they say that “our energy right now is being put into making ourselves a more effective organisation and helping get a General membership branch of the IWW started”[8]). More dangerously, its ambiguities about the nature of the ‘left’, which can be seen in the early part of the text, seems to be opening doors to alliances with openly left-capitalist organisations like the Red Party, which looks like an American equivalent of the Communist Party of Great Britain/Weekly Worker in the UK[9], an organisation which has never put into question its historic origins as a faction within Stalinism.  Perhaps the CLT sees such alliances as a means of breaking out of its situation as a “small sect without support”, but it is more likely to drown the group in a sea of leftism.

DP’s article, as we have seen, deplores the fact that “large sections of the left” favour direct actionism to the exclusion of a viable electoral strategy. In reality, in a period of considerable difficulty for the working class,  where strikes and ‘the movement in the street’ have gone into retreat, many newly politicised elements are being mobilised in support of a ‘new Look’ left in the shape of Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, Corbyn in the UK and Sanders in the US. These currents all represent a clear attempt to pull militant energies into the dead end of elections and the ‘long march through the institutions’. Communists can only stand against the false hopes they offer by offering a clear critique of bourgeois democracy and its insidious influence within the revolutionary class. 

Amos,  October 2016

The discussions around the proposed law on “marriage for all” (same-sex marriage) in France, 2013, aroused much emotion, posturing, grandiloquence and stupidities, and more still when “gender studies” were bandied around as decisive arguments by one camp or another. Then, change of subject, the passionate controversies took a dramatic turn when thousands of refugees, forced from their homes by misery and war, knocked on the door of the developed countries, or when we had the sound of the Kalashnikov aimed at annihilating young people in Paris for their way of life, or the young of Orlando for their sexual orientation. The left, the right, the extreme-right, the extreme-left, all the elements of the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie expressed their gut feelings on the media theatre – some among them proclaiming “je suis Charlie” or again “je ne suis pas Charlie”, redoubling the demagogy so as not be outdone by the competition.

Let’s leave the theatre of official politics and return to the basic question posed by racism, xenophobia, sexism and homophobia, by all these social behaviours which reveal human alienation and which can go as far as murder. How does one explain such an unleashing of social violence, how do you understand these prejudices which seem to come from a bygone age of superstition? How, faced with these types of problems, do you guard against the ideological thinking that the bourgeois system abundantly spreads around in order to mask reality and accentuate the divisions which weaken its historic enemy, the class of proletarians?

Of course, one can sense the profound causes of these phenomena in a society divided into antagonistic classes, based on exploitation of man by man, where the commodity imposes its tyranny on all levels of existence, including the most intimate. In a society where a monstrous cold state dominates and watches each individual, it’s not surprising that social violence is extremely high. In this type of society, the Other, the individual in front of us, is straightaway felt as suspect, as a potential danger, at best as a competitor, at worst as an enemy. He is stigmatized for a thousand reasons, because there’s not the same skin colour, the same sex, the same culture, the same religion, the same nationality, the same sexual orientation. Thus the multiple facets of competition that are found at the base of capitalist society regularly give rise to pauperisation, war, and genocides but also at another level, stress, aggression, harassment and psychological suffering, the pogrom mentality, superstition, nihilism and the dissolution of the most elementary social links[i].

But this explanation remains general and is insufficient; it is still necessary to identify the dynamic which generates these prejudices and the acts that they are supposed to justify, or to explain their survival and both their immediate and more deeply-rooted causes. It is a most vital question for the working class. First of all, because in its struggles, it is ceaselessly confronted with the necessity for its forces to come together, to fight for its unity. The struggle to reject or neutralise prejudices which divide its forces, such as racism, sexism or chauvinism for example, is indispensable and it is not won in advance.  Secondly, because the revolutionary perspective carried by the working class has the aim of a society without classes, without national frontiers, that’s to say the creation of a human community finally unified at a global level. This means that the proletarian revolution intends to conclude a whole period of human history from the groupings, mixtures and alliances within primitive society up to the struggles of the XIXth century for national unity, a process based on the development of the productivity of labour leading to revolutions in the relations of production and an enlargement of the scale of society.

Defending the work of Darwin

It’s true that the working class, as a historic class that carries within itself the communist project, as the highest representative of the active principle of solidarity, is already pushed in practice to overcome these divisions. But racism, sexism and xenophobia remain a real problem, since they touch on the subjective factor of the revolution. Objective conditions are not sufficient for the revolution to succeed and it is still necessary for the class to be subjectively capable of undertaking its historic task to the end; for it to acquire, in the course of its struggles, the capacity to unify and organise itself; to develop a depth of intellectual and moral understanding. As for the communist minority, it has to be able to give clear and convincing political orientations, and to constitute a world party when the conditions of the class struggle allow it.

The little book by Patrick Tort, Sexe, race et culture, can help us to better understand these questions and constitutes a real stimulus for the most conscious workers. We already know about the scientific rigour of the works of this author[ii] which are not always easy to read, but the will to make all types of problematic accessible is clearly present here. Conceived under the form of an interview, the book is composed of two parts: the first confronts the question of racism and takes a position on the decision recently made in France by several state and scientific institutions to abandon the use of the word “race”; the second confronts the question of sexism and tries to define the relations between sex and “gender”. All these questions are to be found at the crossroads of biology and the social sciences and cannot begin to be clarified without a critique of the dominant conceptions of “human nature”; in other words, without a critique of the old, congealed opposition between “nature” and “culture”.

Here the contribution of Darwin is considerable. In his own field, the science of life, Darwin puts forward a whole series of theoretical tools and a scientific approach which allow the construction of a materialist vision of the passage of nature to culture, from the reign of the animal kingdom to the social world of man. At the international level Patrick Tort is one of the best authorities on Darwin,  and he has now published the complete works in French in the Slatkine (Geneva) and Champion (Paris) editions. The publication of the monumental Dictionnaire du Darwinisme et de l’ évolution, drawn up by him, has put an inestimable tool at our disposal. Notably through the idea of the reverse effect of evolution, he has greatly contributed to making intelligible elements in the anthropological work of Darwin which have been obscured because of their subversive content[iii]. This combat remains very much active today because we still find resistance to the fundamental advances made by Darwin. There are those, trying to avoid the fundamental questions, who feign surprise “What do you see in Darwin? Is this a new cult of a now fashionable scientist?”[iv] There are those that Patrick Tort calls “the premature gravediggers” who, forgetting that Darwin wasn’t a socialist, that he was a man of his time and thus shared some of its prejudices, use carefully isolated quotes as trophies that are supposed to disqualify the whole logic of his work[v].

Of course, we are not necessarily in agreement with all the political positions coming from the text of Patrick Tort. The essential here is to base ourselves on the contributions of different scientific disciplines in order to give more flesh, more clarity to the ideas that, for the most part, marxism has long integrated into its theoretical heritage. The great quality of this author, alongside a rigorous materialist method, is the capacity to bring together different disciplines, his critique of accepted ideas and of good old common sense, products, of both what he calls the “liberal right” and “the dominant progressivist ideology ”. It is this critical approach which enables him to keep his distance from the lumber room of the media, that “great machine of influence”.

Towards the overthrow of bourgeois civilisation

The fundamental contribution of the anthropology of Darwin consists of a coherent and materialist description of the emergence of the human species through the mechanism of natural selection, which allows individuals with an advantageous variation to give rise to better adapted and more numerous descendents. Basically the process is the same for all species. In the struggle for existence the least apt are eliminated, which ends up, when certain conditions are met, in the transformation of a species by prolonged selection of advantageous variations, and the appearance of new species. What is transmitted to the descendents, in the case of the higher animals [vi], are not only advantageous biological variations but also the social instincts, the sentiments of sympathy and altruism, which themselves serve to amplify the developments of rational capacities and moral feelings. What happens with man is precisely that the development of sympathy and altruism comes up against the elimination of the weakest and opposes it. The protection of the weak, assistance for outcasts, sympathy towards the stranger who appears similar despite differences in culture and external appearance, as well as all the social institutions responsible for encouraging these reactions, Darwin calls this civilisation. Tort briefly recalls the content:

“Through social instincts (and their consequences on the development of rational and moral capacities) natural selection selects civilisation, which is opposed to natural selection. This is the simplified and current formula of what I have called the reverse effect” (p. 21). It’s a perfectly materialist and dialectical conception. An overturning comes into operation with the appearance of man, who more and more adapts his surroundings to his needs rather than adapting to them, and thus frees himself from the eliminatory grip of natural selection. At the beginning of the process it’s the elimination of the weakest which predominates; then, through a progressive inversion, it’s the protection of the weak that finally imposes itself, an eminent mark of the solidarity of the group. The original error of socio-biology consists of seeing human society as a collection of organisms in struggle; it thus postulates a simple continuity between the biological (reduced to a hypothetical competition of genes) and the social. This is not the case with Darwin. According to him there is a continuity, but it’s a reversive continuity. In effect, the overturning that we have just described produces not a break between biological and social but a new synthesis. According to Tort this notion allows us to understand the theoretical autonomy of the science of man and society, while maintaining the material continuity between nature and culture. It’s a rejection of any dualism, of all rigid opposition between the inner and the acquired, between nature and culture.

The discoveries of Darwin, to which we can add the reverse effect as an indispensible key to understanding his work, represented a real overthrow of our scientific conceptions of the appearance of human society. By calling into question the old certainties (fixism) and the apparent stability of the living world, and by adopting the perspective of its real genealogy, Darwin opened up new horizons. It’s the same type of overturning that was provoked by Anaximander in Greek antiquity when he called into question the dominant view that our planet necessarily had to rest on something. In reality, he affirmed that the Earth floated in space and in this sense there was no up and down. By simply changing how we look at sensual reality, Anaximander opened the door to the discovery of the Earth as a sphere – where people who lived in the antipodes didn’t walk upside-down – and all the scientific advances that flowed from it[vii].

The consequences of Darwin’s discoveries are recalled by Patrick Tort:

At this stage of evolution, natural selection is no longer the main force which governs the future of human beings:

“In other words, if evolution preceded history, history today governs evolution” (p. 1).

“Biology is necessary for the social, but on one hand the social can’t be reduced to the biological, and, on the other hand it is the social which from the point of view of man, actor and judge of his evolution, produces the truth of biology in the capacities that through him biology shows itself apt to reveal” (p. 1).

As there exists a (reversive) continuity between nature and culture, and as “Historic man hasn’t for all that ceased to be an organism, evolution englobes or includes history” (p. 1).

We are not going to reproduce in full the famous quote in chapter IV of The Descent of Man, but only two phrases which are fundamental for understanding the importance of Darwin’s conclusions about man reaching the present stage of “civilisation”: “Once this point is reached, there’s no longer an artificial barrier to prevent sympathies spreading to men of all nations and races. It’s true that if these humans are separated from each other by great differences of  exterior appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shows us how it is a long time before we regard them as similar” (Quoted by Tort, p. 23).

By reading The Autobiography[viii] that Darwin reserved solely for his close friends, we can note that he was perfectly conscious of the revolutionary nature of his discoveries, notably of the fact that he called into question belief in God: he himself became an atheist. But he showed an extreme prudence in avoiding, in puritan and religious Victorian England, his book being indexed. We find in this passage the same profound and revolutionary vision of human becoming: national frontiers are artificial barriers that civilisation will have to breach and abolish. Without being communist, without even explicitly envisaging the destruction of national frontiers, Darwin in fact included in his hypothesis a disappearance of the national framework. In this spirit civilisation is not a state of fact, it is a constant and painful movement (“it’s a long time before...”), a continual process of overcoming which, by achieving the unification of humanity, must continue beyond the human species towards sympathy for all sentient beings. Bringing together the perspective forged by Darwin and the one forged by Marx, we consider that on the shoulders of the proletariat and its reconstituted solidarity rests the heavy task of overthrowing bourgeois civilisation in order to allow the free development of human civilisation.

Against mechanical materialism

One other important consequence is the way in which we conceive the famous “human nature”. We know the error of the Utopian socialists. Despite all their merits, due to their time they were incapable of defining the premises which, within bourgeois society, favoured the overthrow of existing social relations and the construction of a communist society. It was therefore necessary to invent a whole ideal society which conformed to a human nature as an absolute criterion. By doing this the Utopian socialists took up the dominant vision of their time, an idealist vision still largely extant today, according to which human nature is immutable and eternal. The problem, responded Marx, is that human nature is constantly modified during the course of history. At the same time as man transforms external nature, he transforms his own nature.

The conception defended by Darwin on the relations between nature and culture allows us to go much further than a simple abstract vision of a human nature that’s ephemeral and fluid. A continuity exists between the biological and the cultural, which implies the existence of a constant kernel in human nature, a product of the whole of evolution. Marx shared this vision. It’s what stands out in this passage of Capital where he responds to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham: “To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch”[ix].

Even if the profound roots of human nature have been recognised, the error of interpretation made by the Utopian socialists still remains dominant today. Patrick Tort shows its nature well: “The error is not to affirm the existence of a ‘nature’ in the human being, but to still think of it as an all-powerful heritage which governs it following the intangible law of a sustained and one-sided determinism” (p. 83). This sustained and one-sided dterminism belongs to mechanical materialism. Whereas modern materialism adds an active determination, as Epicurus well understood with his theory of clinamen (the unpredictability or ‘swerve’ of atoms). In his doctorate thesis, The Difference Between the Democritian and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature[x], Marx recognised the considerable contribution of Epicurus which went beyond the reductionist atomism of Lucretius and Democritus and which introduced freedom into matter. This freedom signified that in nature nothing was predestined as absolute determinism  claimed, and that there was space for the spontaneity of agents. It meant that for organisms which have acquired a certain autonomy, “at any moment, I can decide on an act, a contrary act or a non-act without the need to be ‘programmed’” (p. 83).

This active materialism – not passive and submissive – defended by Patrick Tort leads to a definition which should be etched in all memories: “’human nature’ is the incalculable sum of all the possibilities of humanity. Or again, on a deliberately existential mode: ‘human nature’ is what is in our own hands” (p. 86).

The tale of the scapegoat

We have seen above that the persistence of racism, sexism and homophobia are products of a society divided into classes. It’s important to keep this in mind because it is then possible to understand why the struggle of the proletariat, because it’s the only class that can lead to the abolition of classes, includes the struggle against these different phenomena. Whereas the inverse is not true. As soon as anti-racism or feminism claim to wage an autonomous struggle they rapidly become a weapon against the working class and take their place within the dominant ideology. It’s the same with pacifism which, when it’s not explicitly linked to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against capitalism as a social system, is transformed into a dangerous mystification.

But these are still real problems for the proletariat and we must, with Tort, refine the analysis. Xenophobia is not simply a rejection of the Other because of the perception of totally different characteristics. This element is flagrant in the case of racism, but that can and must be explained in a deeper way: “Racism is the rejection of what one exteriorises, of what one hates most in oneself” (p. 22). Fundamentally, what is rejected in the Other is not the difference, it’s what one wants to banish from oneself. “In the most extreme versions, racism must then define itself less as the simple ‘rejection of the Other’  than as the negation of similarity in similarity through the fabrication of the “Other” as vile and threatening” (p. 23).

The person or population aimed at doesn’t represent an unknown menace; it is considered a threat because it is precisely part of ourselves, the part that we consider contemptible. As Patrick Tort says, German Jews and Christians lived together for more than sixteen centuries. It is the one who is most similar that becomes the victim that it’s necessary to kill. In the Old Testament, “the ritual of the ‘scapegoat’ is a ritual of atonement, which exteriorises the guilty part of oneself and dedicates it to the demon and symbolic death in the desert” (p. 28). We know that bourgeois society has very often been the theatre of pogroms or genocides and that the dominant class bears the entire responsibility for them. But it’s necessary to widen our understanding of these phenomena and not stop at their most spectacular manifestations. We should examine to what point the search for a scapegoat and the pogromist mentality, with the extreme violence that they contain, are rooted in the soil of capitalist society, where they always find the nourishment they need.

If you re-read the passage from The Descent of Man quoted above, you can understand better what Darwin wanted to underline with these words: “It’s a long time before we regard them as similar”. The very principle of civilisation is the process of the development of sympathy, that’s to say the recognition of similarity in the other. As this civilisation is the product of natural selection before being overthrown, the process of the elimination of the elimination (the reverse effect according to Tort) is still ongoing and a backward turn is always periodically possible. But from what we’ve said above it means we can’t talk about a still primitive “human nature”. “Anthropology influenced by Darwin has never ceased to metaphorically use a biological concept in order to interpret, within civilisation, the reappearance of ancestral behaviours that return the human to his animal origins: this is the concept of the atavistic return, unfortunately inflated and besmirched in the French hereditary psychiatry of the nineteenth century and in the Italian criminal anthropology which inspired it, but which is nevertheless useful for thinking about what remains, and what can potentially re-emerge, of a persistent ancestral heritage” (p. 27).

Race and culture

The argument most used to fight racism consists of explaining that what appears as great differences in exterior appearances of human beings is objectively negligible when put on the genetic or molecular level. We know very little about “race”, the argument goes on, because in fact it’s the name used for a pseudo-reality and what we do know about it seems enough to conclude that it is non-existent. It is thus ridiculous to be racist. This argument is totally unworkable says Patrick Tort. If tomorrow, scientific research affirmed, thanks to new discoveries, that “races” existed biologically, would that then justify racism? The weakness of this argument comes from the fact that racism addresses itself to phenotypes[xi](biological and cultural) and not to genotypes[xii], to whole individuals with their observable characteristics and not to their molecules. It is thus easy for identity-based conservatism (Alain de Benoist, Zemmour, Le Pen) and for all the racists to appeal to common sense: the races are an evidence that all the world can see, it’s enough to compare a Scandinavian and an Indian.

It’s certain that the non-scientific use which is made of the word “race” totally disqualifies its use and obliges us to at least put it in inverted commas. But in reality “races” do exist and as such correspond to “varieties” which distinguish the identifiable subdivisions within a species. Certainly it’s a very difficult notion to demarcate, it is not homogenous, it remains even more in flux than the notion of species, because the living ceaselessly evolve under the effect of incessant variations and the modification of their milieu. Thus species are not perennial entities but groups that classification ranges under categories. They exist nevertheless. Darwin showed that species are in permanent transformation, but that at the same time it is possible to distinguish them because they correspond to a stabilisation – certainly relative or temporary if they are placed on a geological time-scale – imposed by the presence of other species in competition with them in the struggle for existence, and even by the need for classification. There is, under the regularity of specific forms, an effective combination in relation to a given milieu and an ecological niche which explains why individuals of the same species look alike. “Even if it’s understood that in the history of the science of organisms, classificatory divisions have only a temporary and technical value, there is still a naturalist sense to say that there is a single human species, and that this species, as roughly all biological species, comprises of varieties. In the naturalist tradition ‘race’ is synonymous with ‘variety’” (p. 33).

Racism is a social phenomenon and it is at this level that it’s necessary to respond to it. From this point of view the colonial past continues to have harmful consequences and the proletariat will have to firmly  combat “an ideology which turns human characteristics into signs of native and permanent inferiority, as well as a threat to other human beings” (p. 41).

The problematic is globally the same for the question of sexism. Sex is a biological reality, but “gender” is really a constructed cultural reality and thus a becoming, a possibility which remains open. The radical attitude of some feminists or of certain “gender studies” which want to “denaturalise” sex is as stupid as that which denies the reality of visible inter-racial differences. The fight for the social equality of men and women, which will never happen under capitalism, the fight for sympathy towards others, that’s  to say for the recognition of the Other as similar despite all the cultural differences – all these combats are at the heart of Darwin’s anthropology. Proletarian ethics continue this heritage. That’s why the struggle for communism is not the work of robotised and undifferentiated individuals, and has nothing to do with a negation of cultural differences.  It defines itself as unification in diversity, inclusion of the Other within one association, the creation of a community which has need of the richness of all cultures[xiii].

The critique of dualism and the demand for a reversive continuity between nature and culture, between biology and society, leads us to a rigorous definition of human nature and takes up the Darwinian idea of civilisation as a still unachieved process. What are the consequences for the revolutionary struggle? Within capitalism this struggle is before everything a struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat, even if it bears within it the emancipation of all of humanity. The proletariat must prepare itself for a particularly difficult civil war faced with a bourgeoisie which will never accept giving up power. However it’s not mainly by force of arms that the proletariat will carry the decision. The essence of its strength comes from its capacity for organisation, from its class consciousness and in its natural tendency, on the one hand to achieve unity and on the other hand to draw behind it all the non-exploited layers, or, at least, to neutralise them in periods of indecision about the outcome of the combat.  Does this process of unification and integration operate automatically under the pretext that man is a social being and that human nature contains the evolutionary advantage supplied by the generalisation of the sentiment of sympathy? Of course not. But the results of the scientific approach exposed in the book by Patrick Tort, confirm the marxist vision of the importance of the subjective factor for the proletariat, in particular of consciousness, and more globally of culture. They confirm the validity of the Communist Left against the fatalism of degenerating social democracy which defended the opportunist position of a gradual, automatic and peaceful passage of capitalism to socialism. They confirm that the future of humanity is in the hands of the proletariat.

Avrom Elberg

This article, written by a close contact of the ICC in the USA, looks at the current difficulties of the American bourgeoisie as revealed in the Trump candidacy and the rise of populism. Although written before the most recent scandal about Trump’s abusive attitude to women, this episode confirms a central point of the analysis in the article – the existence of a concerted attempt by the more serious factions of the ruling class, across the party divide, to keep Trump out of the White house.

A second part of the article, looking more closely at the situation of the working class in the US, and particularly the deep divisions within its ranks, will be published in the wake of the election.

As the 2016 US Presidential campaign approaches its crescendo, the media promises us this election might be the most important in US History. The bombastic billionaire Donald J. Trump, representing the Republican Party, and the much berated former First Lady and Democratic Senator from New York Hillary Rodham Clinton face one another in a dramatic showdown amid a media spectacle designed to convince the populace of the absolute importance of participating in the electoral process even when neither candidate is a source of great inspiration.

For the vast majority of the pundits, commentators and analysts arrayed on cable television each evening, and whose articles litter Facebook feeds, it is absolutely imperative for the American public to defeat the racist, xenophobic and even ‘fascist’ menace of Trump, even if it means voting for a less than stellar candidate in Clinton. Meanwhile, the minority of talking heads aligned with Trump implore the American voter to reject the politics of the status quo, take a chance on a true outsider and defeat the criminal Clinton, who they say belongs in prison anyway. This amped up rhetoric makes it all look like high stakes for the country and indeed the entire world. The main theme the media pushes day in and day out is that a veritable existential crisis of global civilization might befall us all should Trump somehow win the White House.

Against the election fraud

From our perspective, we have to once again categorically state the well-tested position of the communist left that the working class has nothing to gain by participating in this electoral swamp. Whether it is voting for Clinton to stop the country from falling into the hands of a dangerous tyrant, pulling the lever for Trump to reject the status quo and “make America great again” or supporting a minor party candidate to display one’s utter disgust with the other options, voting only serves to draw the working class onto the political terrain of the bourgeoisie and derail it from an autonomous fight to defend its living and working conditions.

At the end of the day, whoever wins the election and becomes the next President of the United States, the fundamental underlying conditions of capitalist decomposition that drive the deepening problems of bourgeois political life will remain. Electing Clinton might stop Trump, but it won’t stop the economic, social and cultural dislocations that drive Trumpism (and the populist upsurge more broadly). Electing Trump might stop the shady, corrupt, neo-liberal Clinton from assuming office, but wouldn’t the former reality TV star and neophyte politician really just turn policy over to the same old clique of “experts” as before? And voting for a minor party candidate like Jill Stein (Green Party) or Gary Johnson (Libertarian) might make one feel good about oneself for a few moments as a protest against the two main choices, but then the sad realization that either Clinton or Trump will be President will assuredly quickly set in. What is to be gained then from voting?

No, the only genuine route to struggle against all this for the working class is to resume the defense of its living and working conditions outside this sick electoral circus and beyond the control of all the bourgeois parties – right, left or center. While we recognize that present conditions may certainly hamper this process and that as a result many sections of the working class will be drawn into this electoral fray on one side or the other, we see no reason why this should alter our defense of the principle of abstaining from bourgeois elections that has been a fundamental position of the communist left for the last century

We also must say that on an objective level, the evolution of the US political scene over the last several years has been a stark confirmation of the analysis we have been developing since at least the botched Presidential Election of 2000 that led to George W. Bush becoming President over Al Gore – against the wishes of the main factions of the US bourgeoisie. According to this analysis, the conditions of capitalist social decomposition are exerting a reciprocal effect on the life of the ruling class itself, making it more and more difficult for the US bourgeoisie to control the outcome of its electoral apparatus to produce the results it desires. The botched election of 2000 led to the eight-year Bush Presidency that largely squandered the inter-imperialist advantage the 9/11 attacks gave the US state by invading Iraq in a unilateral and careless way, leading to a precipitous decline in the prestige of the United States on the international level and the increasing frustration of its imperialist goals.

While the US bourgeoisie was able to temporarily right the ship with the election of the first African-American President Barack Obama in 2008 – reinvigorating the image of the US state internationally, reviving the electoral illusion for millions, especially among the younger generations, and providing a measured response to the outbreak of the Great Recession in 2008 – these gains proved frustratingly fleeting. Obama’s Presidency served to ignite a fierce right-wing resistance in the form of the Tea Party, which over the course of his term in office saw the Republican Party increasingly fall under the influence of an erratic and ideologically driven faction of right-wing diehards who could not be trusted to take the reigns of national government.1

Although early in his administration Obama was able to ram through a health care reform plan that has so far survived court challenges from the right, as his Presidency has unfolded, it has become increasingly clear to large swathes of the American public who voted for him that he would simply not be the transformative figure of his campaign rhetoric: he has continued Bush’s mass surveillance programs, aggressively stepped up America’s droning operations abroad, done little to counter income inequality, increased deportations of immigrants and surrounded himself with Wall Street insiders from the start.

Moreover, although Obama has so far avoided entangling the US state in new Bush style Cowboy adventures abroad, his stated international policy of “leading from behind” has not endeared him to the war hawks in either party, as he has come in for increasingly harsh criticism for not standing up to Putin, allowing Syria’s Assad to cross the red line of chemical weapons use without consequences, watching Libya slip into chaos and not sufficiently bombing the Islamic State. On the domestic front, the unabated march of income inequality, the continued hollowing out of the “middle class,” and a failure to bring the contentious political rancor about immigration to a close have fueled a furious “populist” rejection of Obama’s Presidency by many in the so-called “white working class.” 2

This populist upsurge, coupled with the increasing descent of the Republican Party into ideologically driven positions, has created a dangerous situation for the US bourgeoisie at the close of the Obama Presidency. No longer able to trust the Republican Party with national office, the main factions of the US bourgeoisie have been forced to rely almost solely on the Democratic Party as the party of national governance. The increasing difficulty to manipulate election results and the now centuries old institutions of the US state have meant that Obama has had to deal with a Republican Congress for most of his Presidency. This has only increased the pressure on the Democratic Party to transform itself from the ostensible “party of the working class” to a neo-liberal party of technocratic governance and to increasingly show this face to the American public.

As a result, over the course of the Obama Presidency, the Democratic Party itself has become increasingly unmasked as a ‘neo-liberal’ party beholden to the same capitalist interests as the Republicans – discrediting it in the eyes of millions, especially among white workers and self-employed people who have become enamored by Trump’s populism, but also the younger generations, many of whom who were attracted to the insurgent candidacy of the “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders during the primary campaign.

These are the main fault lines that have defined the 2016 Presidential campaign for the US bourgeoisie. On the one hand stands a dangerous figure the main factions of the bourgeoisie simply cannot risk assuming the ship of state; on the other a largely discredited representative of the old political guard, who is despised by large sections of the population both right and left – if for different reasons. How can the bourgeoisie manage such a perilous situation? We will explore that question in some analytical detail below.

The Trump candidacy: The Republican Party commits suicide

One thing in this election campaign is certain: the main factions of the US bourgeoisie do not want Trump to win the Presidency. This is true regardless of political party. The Republican Party establishment is as much afraid of a Trump Presidency as the Democratic Party. Major figures in the Republican Party such as the Bush family have signaled they will not vote for Trump. Staples of the “movement conservative” press like the National Review actively oppose him and Republican candidates for Congress and the Senate have had to keep their distance lest they alienate the all important swing voter. While Trump may have the stated support of some Republican figures concerned about their own political future, who do not want to run afoul of the populist upsurge, it’s clear that Trump is regarded as an interloper in the Republican Party.3 Once a Democrat who supported abortion rights and socialized medicine, and who has even sung the praises of the Clintons in the past, Trump’s credentials as a social conservative are in serious doubt. Moreover, his willingness to trash the Iraq War, run down the Bushes and praise Russian President Putin are not in keeping with the Republican Party’s neo-conservative doctrines on foreign policy. So how in the heck did Trump win the Republican Party nomination for President?

The answer to this lies as much in the trajectory of the GOP itself, as in the figure of Trump. As the Obama Presidency unfolded, the Republican Party – already reeling from the disastrous second Bush Presidency – adopted an increasingly hostile and oppositional stance to the President. In the 2010 mid-term elections a new crop of hardcore ideologues associated with the Tea Party movement were elected to Congress, forcing the Republican Party establishment to accommodate an increasingly boisterous right-wing allergic to compromise and even to governance itself.

From violently opposing Obama’ healthcare reform efforts to government shutdowns and even threatening to default on the US national debt, the Tea Party insurgency gave the Republican Party new electoral life in the wake of Obama’s rousing victory, while at the same time threatening the stability of GOP institutions. From 2009, the Republican Party played a dangerous game with the Tea Party, whereby it reaped its insurgent energy for electoral success, while risking a hostile takeover by a virtual mob-like hydra of hardcore right-wingers within its ranks. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner was forced to play a careful cat and mouse game with these insurgents, balancing electoral and political success with the need for actual state governance, which always requires compromises with the other side of the aisle. Eventually however, dealing with the Tea Party insurgents proved too much for Boehner and he resigned from the Speakership in 2014, at which point it was only reluctantly assumed by Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan.

As the Obama Presidency unfolded, it became increasingly clear to the main factions of the US bourgeoisie that the Republican Party could not be trusted to contain its radicals and therefore it was not a viable option to put a Republican in charge of the White House. With a choice between functional gridlock and uncertainty of what an empowered Tea Party movement would bring forth in the Republican Party, the main factions of the US bourgeoisie opted for the former. It was in this context that the US bourgeoisie began preparations for Hillary Clinton, then serving as Obama’s Secretary of State, to succeed Obama as President.

However, just because the main factions of the bourgeoisie have decided to back one candidate in the election doesn’t mean they cancel the campaign. The state still must field candidates from each of the main parties in order to preserve its democratic façade. And although historically the US state has had remarkable success in manipulating the electoral process to produce the desired outcome – particularly through manipulation of the media narrative – the process is not guaranteed to always work as planned, as the election of 2000 showed. In politics, as in life, accidents happen. With each election there is the risk the wrong candidate will win and the US bourgeoisie will be stuck with a less than optimum choice in the executive mansion. While in times past this has not posed a dramatic problem as generally each candidate could be steered by the institutions of the state (the permanent bureaucracy) towards policies enjoying a general consensus among the main factions of the ruling class, the present day descent of the Republican Party has complicated the matter, making it that much more essential that the Democrat prevail in the end.

Historically, the long drawn out primary process has been the main tool through which the US bourgeoisie ensured that the best possible candidate, from its point of view, would become the nominee of each major party. The primary process is consciously designed to weed out mavericks and insurgents as it favors establishment candidates with the political and financial backing of the party hierarchy. However, much like in 2012, the 2016 Republican Party primary opened with a carnival-like atmosphere. With 17 candidates representing various factions of the party, including maverick billionaire Donald J. Trump, the Republican Party primary was generally billed as the contest to see who would lose to Hillary Clinton in the General Election.

Nevertheless, even if the main factions of the bourgeoisie were generally lined up behind Clinton, it was still desirable for them to push forward a Republican who could be a credible governing alternative if an accident happened or Clinton’s own legal troubles proved too much to overcome. Set up for this task were figures like former Florida Governor (and brother and son to former Presidents) Jeb Bush, Florida Senator Marco Rubio (an Hispanic who once favored immigration reform) and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (a darling of the Tea Party who nevertheless appeared to govern effectively, having faced down mass protests over his right-to-work law in 2011 and an attempt to recall him from office). Each of these candidates had their own political baggage, but they had nevertheless shown themselves to be malleable to the political consensus of the main factions of the bourgeoisie.

Nevertheless, the 2016 Republican primary would not turn out like it did in 2012 when establishment candidate Mitt Romney (considered a safe alternative to Barack Obama) fended off a series of insurgent challengers to secure the nomination. The 2016 contest would see Trump systematically take down each of his rivals with a hurl of personal insults and embarrassing call-outs of their political failures. Bush and Rubio were denounced as soft on immigration, while Scott Walker was dispatched for turning his state into a fiscal disaster.4 None of these establishment candidates ever appeared to pose a serious challenge to Trump, flooring the political pundits and seemingly putting fear into the hearts of bourgeois institutions. In fact, Trump’s only serious challenger, the Tea Party firebrand Ted Cruz, was himself a radical outsider despised by a political establishment that only belatedly coalesced around him to try to stop an even greater evil in Trump.

When Trump accepted the Republican Party nomination for President at the party convention in July, it was the culmination of some of the deepest fears of the main factions of the US bourgeoisie (outside of proletarian revolution): an unpredictable, erratic and dangerous figure, considered something like a Messiah to his followers, had usurped the mantle of one of its two main political parties. Certainly, from the point of view of the main factions of the bourgeois, the two party system was now in jeopardy, if not the democratic ideological apparatus itself. There was nothing left to do, but to furiously oppose Trump in the general election – something which, as we will see, the main factions of the bourgeoisie had already concluded required Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination.

How did Trump do it?

But how did Trump do it? How did he succeed where so many insurgent campaigns had faltered before? This is a question that will likely puzzle academic political scientists and sociologists for some time to come, but what seems clear is that Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party is a result of the intersection of his embrace of an international wave of populist politics and his unique personality and personal wealth. Not being beholden to political donors and party institutional structures, Trump was free to conduct a true maverick campaign that took up the main themes of political populism emerging across the old industrial world today: a critique of neo-liberal policies, a promise to defend domestic industries and jobs from outsourcing and international trade deals, a pledge to beef up the safety net for displaced workers and a fierce opposition to immigration – seen by many ‘lower class’ whites as the source of lower wages, declining living standards and community disintegration.5

Substantively, these policies have an appeal to many,, even if only in the sense that they appear the opposite of the bourgeois policy consensus from both major parties over the last several decades.. Copying part of the stylistic playbook of Italian fascism, Trump has built a virtual cult of personality around himself (something that goes back to his days as a pop culture icon in reality TV) that has captured the attention of millions of Americans who are so disgusted with the politics of the neo-liberal capitalist consensus they are willing to take a chance on a man every “responsible” media outlet and pundit tells them is a disaster in the making. However, from the point of view of Trump’s base, the disaster has already happened, only continues to deepen and none of the “responsible” candidates appear to want to do anything about it. Trump’s candidacy is in large part an insurgency fueled by the desperation of millions of working class people whose once relatively stable jobs and expectation of social improvement appear to have been frustrated precisely by the kind of policies liberal elite consensus tells them are in their best interests (Globalization, outsourcing, free trade, etc.).

Still, even if Trump’s stated policy preferences are not in line with the wishes of the main factions of the ruling class today, we must be clear that they nevertheless do not escape the realm of bourgeois policy itself. In fact, it is probably the case that the main factions of the bourgeoisie are right that his stated policies are simply incompatible with the objective political-economic condition of the capitalist world today. Should he by some chance upset expectations and win the Presidency, the working class should be clear that this would not result in the restoration of some Halcyon way of life from the good old days of the post-World War II economic expansion. Rather, he will likely either fail miserably in implementing his policies due to resistance from other bourgeois factions or we will find out that his Presidential aims were in fact a giant hoax all along, as he hands real executive power off to the professional politicians and policy wonks of the very same factions of the ruling class he claims to hate.6 And of course, if he ever did implement his stated policies, that would certainly make things even worse for the majority of the working class - as British workers have already found to their cost, with a collapse in the pound sterling and corresponding abrupt increase in inflation. Trumpian style populism is no answer for what ails the working class.

Clinton vs. Sanders: The Democratic Party reveals itself

As we have seen, the Republican Party has rendered itself too volatile for the main factions of the bourgeoisie to trust in the executive mansion at this juncture in time. However, the very descent of the Republican Party has had a reciprocal effect on the Democratic Party, whereby it is increasingly called upon to shed its veneer as the “party of the working class,” and reveal itself as the neo-liberal capitalist institution it is. This process has accelerated over the course of the 2016 campaign and was particularly manifested in the contentious primary showdown between the establishment candidate Hillary Clinton and insurgent upstart Bernie Sanders – the “democratic socialist” Senator from Vermont.

As the 2016 primary season began, the main factions of the bourgeoisie had already long ago settled on Hillary Clinton as their preferred candidate to succeed Obama in the White House. Whatever their fierce rivalry in the 2008 Democratic primary, which saw Obama apply a momentary brake to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions, the main factions of the bourgeoisie believed that a Clinton Presidency would be the best chance for a stable transition to a new administration and could keep the democratic electoral illusion going. Having voted in Obama as the first African-American President in 2008, the American public would now have the chance in 2016 to vote in the first female President. Having supposedly defeated racism in the 2008 election, the American voter was now ostensibly given the chance to deliver a giant victory for the feminist cause. As such, this time the Democratic primary was supposed to be a virtual coronation of Queen Hillary, as she was expected to face no serious challengers. In fact, many pundits worried that the lack of a serious primary challenger might put her off the game when the general election campaign started in the summer against a battle-tested Republican nominee.

Alas, the coronation proved to be long in coming. The Clinton campaign would face a protracted and surprisingly strong primary challenge from the left in the form of Vermont’s “democratic socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders’ insurgent campaign was likely not anticipated by the main factions of the bourgeoisie, who probably believed he would amount to little more than a protest candidate earning a paltry single digit vote share. However, as Sanders managed a virtual tie with Hillary in the pivotal Iowa caucus and then surged to clobber her in the New Hampshire primary, the main factions of the bourgeoisie – through the institutions of the Democratic Party and the liberal media – were thrown into a panic.

Buoyed by overwhelming support from the so-called “millennial” generation of younger voters who regard Clinton as part of a discredited old guard of neo-liberal politicians out of touch with the emerging “progressive” consensus, Sanders threatened to make a real game of it. Even if he wouldn’t actually win the primary, his protracted presence – running a genuine campaign in which he correctly and effectively painted Clinton as a neo-liberal friend of Wall Street – threatened to weaken the candidate preferred by the main factions of the bourgeoisie in the general election. Already facing possible indictment over her email scandals and already detested by many voters after years of right-wing attacks, Clinton could not afford to lose the millennial generation (so critical in Obama’s electoral victories) to third party candidates or protest abstentionism.

What followed can be described as nothing less than a political nightmare for the Democratic Party, and its allies in the media, as seemingly no plausible attack was left unused in the quest to make sure Clinton prevailed. Sanders was roundly attacked in the media for being a utopian dreamer out of touch with objective reality, and his supporters were painted as mostly white privileged brats who just wanted everything for free. The Clinton campaign actually employed a small army of paid operatives to patrol social media to “correct” anti-Hillary posts and degrade Sanders. The Vermont Senator’s male supporters were labeled misogynist “Bernie Bros,” while Sanders himself was said to be myopically concerned with class and economic inequality to the detriment of the Democratic Party’s tried and true identity politics around race, gender and sexual orientation. This was of course a way of slandering Sanders and his supporters as out-of-touch white guys, blinded by their “white privilege.” The Clinton campaign actually trotted out African-American surrogates, like former Civil Rights activist turned Congressman John Lewis, to delegitimize Sanders’ own background as a civil rights campaigner in the 1960s while a student at the University of Chicago.

In a bizarre turn of events, before the primary was over, the Clinton campaign, her surrogates, the Democratic Party itself and the liberal media were all basically running a campaign against Roosevelt’s New Deal itself, suggesting that it was based on “white privilege” and that many of its structures were simply incompatible with social reality today.7 Clinton ran against socialized medicine, juxtaposing it to the great “achievement” of the Obama administration – Obamacare, which still leaves millions of Americans without health insurance – and argued Sanders’ goal of free tuition at state universities was simply practically impossible. Rather than run a “Hope and Change” and “Yes, We Can!” campaign as Obama had in 2008, winning over millienials in the process, Hillary was forced to run on an “Accept and be Satisfied” and “No, We Can’t” message. Far from being a candidate of transformative progressive change, Clinton and the Democratic Party itself were revealed as part and parcel of the capitalist political infrastructure, just more useless politicians like all the other useless politicians for tens of thousands of younger voters who had become enamored of Sanders’ message of an expanded Social Democracy and political mobilization in the context of the emergence of something resembling a movement culture.

As the primary progressed and voting irregularity after voting irregularity emerged, many Sanders supporters became increasingly convinced that the Democratic Party was in fact stealing the election from their candidate and handing it over to Clinton in something of a corporate coup d’etat. These suspicions were confirmed in the summer when WikiLeaks released a series of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) showing that the party structures did in fact conspire to defeat Sanders and ensure Clinton was their party’s nominee. However, whatever the veracity of the various “vote rigging” allegations made against the Democratic Party by Sanders supporters, the fact that so many believe them is itself an ominous sign. The Democratic Party and its nominee not only appear as corporate shills to many in the younger generations, they also seem to operate on the level of a third world tyranny. The democratic electoral apparatus itself is now called into question as a result of the Democratic Party’s rather desperate and clumsy conduct in the primary campaign to ensure Clinton would fend off the challenge from Sanders.

Of course, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party wouldn’t have engaged in such tactics if they didn’t think it was to their electoral advantage and indeed this all proved too much for Bernie Sanders to overcome. For whatever his strengths among disillusioned younger voters and those liberals and progressives disappointed with the Obama legacy, Sanders simply could not make major headway with older minority voters, older women and the various levels of the “professional class” that have become the Democratic Party’s electoral base. The Clinton campaign played its advantage with minorities to the hilt, often engaging in blatant pandering to these groups in something of an absurd complement to Trump’s racial demagoguery. In one debate, Clinton promised not to deport non-criminal illegal immigrants – a promise few serious observers can believe she has any intention of keeping if elected.8 Clinton’s new found progressive discourse on race stood in stark contrast to her conduct as First Lady when she demonized black youth as “Super Predators” or in the 2008 Democratic Primary, when her campaign used racial dog whistle politics to attack Obama for attending the church of the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright.9

Clinton’s blatant flip-flopping on racial politics stood for many as another example of the Clintons’ willingness to “triangulate,” which means being willing to say whatever is politically convenient for them at the moment for a particular audience. Far from constituting the optimistic candidate of a better tomorrow, Clinton has come to be despised by many would-be Democratic Party voters as a slick but substanceless political operative who will say whatever it takes in her quest for political power. Many appear to hate her even more than they hate Trump, even if it’s only because they assume Trump is honest about his bigotry, while Clinton hides her regressive policies behind nice-sounding, but utterly dishonest rhetoric.

Sanders falls into line behind Clinton

In the end, all of Clinton’s advantages proved too much for the upstart Sanders campaign to overcome and Clinton was eventually able to secure the Democratic nomination in advance of the party’s convention in Philadelphia in July. Still, having won 45% of the vote in the primary, Senator Sanders had built up considerable political capital within the Democratic Party. While the main factions of the bourgeoisie may hate him, they also know they need him to play along if their goal of assuring Clinton ascends to the White House over Trump will be achieved. What would Sanders do? Would he go rogue and run as a third party candidate splintering the Democratic Party vote and handing the Presidency to Trump? Would he endorse the Green Party candidate Jill Stein with the same result or would he accept his defeat “graciously,” endorse Clinton and turn his attention to defeating the greater evil of Donald J. Trump?

Anyone who has followed Sanders’ career over the years already knew the answer. Although nominally a political independent, Sanders has always caucused with the Democrats in Congress. He campaigned for Bill Clinton in 1996 and has publicly criticized third party candidates in the past. However distasteful it was to him after his stinging political defeat in a contest that was almost certainly not fair even by bourgeois standards, Sanders nevertheless endorsed Clinton and promised to do whatever he could to keep Trump from becoming President. He gave a rousing speech at the Democratic convention actually claiming – after months of saying the opposite – that Clinton would make a “great President.” From a dangerous insurgent threatening to derail the main factions of the bourgeoisie’s plans, Sanders now became their “useful idiot,” nevertheless becoming among the most important figures in the general election, tasked with delivering his millennial followers for Clinton.

The problem for the main factions of the bourgeoisie was that, to many of Sanders’ erstwhile supporters, this sudden about-face did not seem at all credible. How could the beloved and incorruptible Bernie go from a harsh critic of this war-mongering corporate stooge to calling her a great candidate for President virtually overnight? Many refused to believe it or concluded that some coercion had been worked to make Sanders change course. What did they threaten him with? A harsh lesson in the realities of bourgeois electoral politics was being taught. Still others simply gave up on the Bernie bandwagon and concluded he was a sell-out politician himself who took millions of dollars in small donations, promising a new kind of politics only to turn it all over to the same corporatists he claimed to despise. Many of these voters have since moved on to Greener pastures (no pun intended), such as Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Others, impressed with Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson’s stance on legalizing marijuana, now carry his banner.

In any case, Clinton’s continuing difficulties with millennial voters is now a major problem for the main factions of the bourgeoisie. Younger voters’ fascination with Barack Obama was the main catalyst for his two electoral victories. Now eight years after Obama’s historic election, many millennials have given up on the Democratic Party altogether – seeing it as the corrupt neo-liberal capitalist institution it is. In their immediate quest to get Clinton elected over Trump, the main factions of the bourgeoisie have unleashed a massive propaganda campaign designed to make these millennials vote for Hillary anyway. This has taken the form of a typical anti-fascist campaign, attempting to convince them that whatever their distaste for Clinton, Trump will inevitably be worse. The fascist must be stopped even if it means voting for the contemptible corporatist.

But the propaganda campaign hasn’t stopped there. A viciousshame campaign has been unleashed in the media and on social networks, shaming anyone who says they will vote third party or stay at home in November. Denouncing such voters as “spoiled,” “privileged” or simply race baiting them as out-of-touch white men, the ideological mouthpieces of the ruling class are engaged in an intense campaign to discipline the younger generation and instruct them in the proper rules of American two-party democracy In the United States’ first-past-the-post system, Duverger’s Law10 is operative – you only get two choices. Voting for a minor party candidate or staying at home will only help the insurgent neo-fascist populism that is on the rise today. If Trump wins it will be the millennial generation’s fault, or Sanders fault or the fault of those political “purists” too good to cast a vote for a flawed candidate. According to this ideological campaign, it will be anyone but the Democratic Party and Clinton’s fault if the nation and the world are forced to endure Trump.

While it is reasonable to expect that the anti-fascist shame campaign will largely succeed and most erstwhile Sanders supporters will cast ballots for Clinton in November, it is also clear that many will do so only grudgingly. For many of these unenthusiastic Clinton voters, the Democratic Party has been revealed as a contemptible institution unworthy of long term electoral loyalty in the absence of a fascist menace like Trump. If it were any other Republican running against Hillary this time, she may very well lose.11 For the main factions of the bourgeoisie, this situation is indeed fraught with peril. As the Republican Party descends further into ideology, incoherence and erratic behavior, the Democratic Party must be called upon as the party of rational and responsible bourgeois governance. However, the more and more it fulfills the role, without another credible party to balance it out, its ideological veneer as the party of the working class and the oppressed is further revealed to be an illusion. Bourgeois electoral ideology finds itself sinking ever deeper into a crisis.

Henk, 10.10.16

In 2014 we published an article on the fast food workers’ struggles in the USA, ‘Capitalist astro-turfing finds its way to the trade unions [138]’, () by a comrade in the USA who appeared to share our view of the trade unions as organs of capitalist control. Subsequently the comrade has revised his view of the trade union question and has asked us to debate this with him. The following response, written by a close sympathiser, is an initial contribution to a discussion which we think is a central one for revolutionaries.  

Response to comrade mhou on the pamphlet Class, Bureaucracy and the Union-Form

"The catastrophe of the imperialist war has completely swept away all the conquests of trade union and parliamentary struggles. For this war itself was just as much a product of the internal tendencies of capitalism as were those economic agreements and parliamentary compromises which the war buried in blood and muck.” (Manifesto of the Communist International, 1919)

Introduction

The following is intended as an initial response to comrade mhou’s text Class, Bureaucracy and the Union-Form (CBUF)[1], with the aim of developing the discussion he has invited on the ICC’s forum.

The comrade directs his text “against the core left communist theories of the class struggle and by extension the trade union question”, and specifically against the position defended by the ICC, among others, that in the current historic period – the period of capitalism’s decadence – the trade unions have become integrated into the capitalist state.[2] Rather than setting out his specific criticisms of these “core left communist theories”, or showing why he thinks they are wrong, instead the comrade offers us his own alternative theory, summarised in a set of theses and illustrated by episodes from the history of the American unions from their origins up to the present day

So what, in essence, is the comrade’s argument?

1. That trade unionism is simply the organised form of the struggle of the working class in capitalism, representing the permanent tendency within capitalism for workers to combine to resist the attacks of capital against their wages and conditions;
2. That tendencies for  the trade unions to become bureaucratised or to defend reactionary policies are inherent in the nature of this struggle - but so are tendencies for them to become centres of workers’ resistance against capitalism, even today;
3. Ultimately, under the leadership of its political party, the working class organised in trade unions will seize and wield state power – which we could summarise in the formula: trade unions + the political party of the class = workers’ state.

But in many ways it is what the comrade does not say in this text that is more revealing. In fact the list of key issues that we might expect to be addressed in a Marxist theory on the trade union question is a long one, including:

• the significance of the growth of reformism in the 19th century workers’ movement
• the phenomenon of the mass strike at the start of the 20th century and the appearance of soviets or workers’ councils
• the betrayal of the trade unions at the start of WW1 and their mobilisation of the workers for global imperialist war
• the role of the trade unions as the spearhead of the bourgeois counter-revolution, especially in Germany, and the formation by militant workers of organisational alternatives to the trade unions
• tendencies for workers to take control of their own struggles outside of and against  trade union control through mass assemblies, unofficial strike committees, etc.

Decadence

The real ‘elephant in the room’ here of course is the concept of capitalist decadence. Against the persistent tendency in the revolutionary milieu today to question or openly reject capitalist decadence, the ICC has many times shown that this concept is simply the concretisation of historical materialism in the analysis of capitalism as a historically transitory mode of production.[3]   It’s therefore indispensable for understanding the historical period we are living in, and how to act as revolutionaries.

When prompted, the comrade has confirmed that his text is “primarily against the political positions derived from the conception of decadence.” While he agrees that the “material basis for socialism and the placement of proletarian revolution on the agenda were signaled by events in the class struggle (exemplified by the Paris Commune and October Revolution…)”, he does not agree with the political positions derived from this by the “contemporary or historic communist left”.[4]

So communism has been on the agenda since at least the October Revolution but the comrade sees no political implications for the class struggle or the trade unions in this momentous change of conditions for the two historic classes; or at least none important enough to mention in his theory.

The basic Marxist position on decadence is quite clear: at a certain stage of their development the productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production; from being forms of development, these relations turn into fetters on the forces of production. Then a period of social revolution is opened up, leading either to the transformation of society or to the mutual ruin of the contending classes.

For the “material basis for socialism” to exist, therefore, capitalist relations must have become a definitive fetter on the further development of human productive forces. Since at the same time capitalism is a dynamic system that must continue to extract profit in order to survive, it is forced to reproduce itself through the increasing destruction of the productive forces; either directly through wars, or indirectly through growing waste, debt, attempts to cheat the law of value, etc, and by adopting a series of increasingly drastic palliatives to prolong its life and ensure growing accumulation - palliatives that can only worsen its historic crisis in the longer term.

But capital is above all a social relationship, in which the bourgeoisie is forced to take into account the struggle of the proletariat in everything it does. With the “material basis for socialism” already negating its historically progressive character, and faced with the conscious revolutionary attempts of its gravedigger, above all in the October Revolution, capital must ensure its reproduction through the permanent and conscious suppression of the proletarian threat. We can see this most clearly in the way it was forced to unite across the battlefields of WW1 to crush the revolutionary wave, especially in Russia and Germany, but the lessons it learned from this experience were not lost; they were embedded in the development of state capitalism in the 20th century and especially in those organs charged with dealing with the proletarian threat; the left parties and the trade unions. 

So either the comrade believes that the material basis for socialism exists without capitalist relations having become a definitive fetter - in which case he needs to explain how and why this can be the case from a Marxist perspective - or he accepts that they have become a fetter, in which case he needs to explain the political implications of such a fundamental change for his theory of trade unionism.

Bureaucracy, reformism and state capitalism

Not only does the comrade avoid any mention of decadence in his text, he also avoids any analysis of the underlying tendency towards state capitalism which underpins the betrayal of the trade unions and their integration into the capitalist state apparatus. Instead, he argues that tendencies for the trade unions to become bureaucratised or to defend reactionary policies are inherent in the class struggle in capitalism from its origins. In fact he goes further, arguing that “From the twilight of primitive communism and the bourgeoning stratification of humanity, bureaucracy emerges as the administration of social relationships in societies divided into classes.”

Of course, there is some truth in this at a general level; after all, for Marxists the state itself is a product of the division of society in to classes. But this is next to useless for a historical analysis of changes in the trade unions over the last two centuries of capitalism.

In the 19th century it was absolutely necessary for the working class to fight for reforms like the shorter working day and the right to organise. This inevitably demanded an ever-increasing level of co-ordination in order to combat the organisation of employers and concentration of capital, but it was the very nature of the trade unions as permanent mass organisations within bourgeois society that created bureaucratic tendencies right from the beginning. This went hand in hand with a tendency for union leaderships to become wedded to peaceful, reformist methods of struggle; a tendency the bourgeoisie of course actively encouraged in order to prevent more dangerous class struggles.

The deepening nature of the capitalist crisis and the intensification of imperialist rivalries demanded ever greater sacrifices from the working class, but the Paris Commune clearly showed that it represented a growing revolutionary threat. Increasing state control was necessary not only to organise the national economy to compete in an increasingly saturated world market, but also to more effectively control the working class by incorporating its own organisations into the state apparatus. In return, the working class would receive minimal welfare benefits which would serve to tie it more effectively to national capitalist interests.  

The trade unions themselves - including those set up to defend unskilled workers - were strong supporters of state intervention on the basis that a healthy economy was the precondition for negotiating higher wages.  In an epoch of intensifying imperialist rivalries the logic of this position increasingly led the trade union bureaucracy to become the best defender of the national interest - and an implacable enemy of ‘disruptive’ workers’ struggles. 

Even before the first world war, revolutionaries themselves were able to identify this tendency towards the incorporation of the trade unions into the capitalist state and denounced the growth of oppressive state control disguised as social welfare measures. The outbreak of inter-imperialist warfare in 1914 and the massive increase in state control of society that ensued only confirmed this tendency. In Britain, for example, in 1917 one socialist workers’ leader concluded that:  "the trade union movement is tending to create a sort of organ of oppression within the masters' organ of oppression - the state - and an army of despotic union chiefs who are interested in reconciling, as far as possible, the interests of masters and men".[5]

Today, over 100 years after the first world war spectacularly confirmed the entry of capitalism into what the new Communist International announced in its Platform as “The epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat", we need to recognise that the nature of ‘bureaucratisation’ in the trade unions is qualitatively different, as described in the ICC pamphlet Trade Unions Against the Working Class [139]:

“What characterises bureaucracy is the fact that the life of the organisation is no longer rooted in the activity of its members but is artificially and formalistically carried on in its ‘bureaux’, in its central organs, and nowhere else. If such a phenomenon is common to all unions under decadent capitalism it is not because of the ‘malevolence’ of the union leaders; nor is bureaucratisation an inexplicable mystery. If bureaucracy has taken hold of the unions it is because the workers no longer support with any life or passion organisations which simply do not belong to them. The indifference the workers show towards trade union life is not, as the leftists think, a proof of the workers’ lack of consciousness. On the contrary it expresses a resigned consciousness within the working class of the unions’ inability to defend its class interests and even a consciousness that the unions belong to the class enemy.” (original emphasis)

The roots of the tendency towards state capitalism lie in the attempts of the system to avert its historic crisis of accumulation, ie. decadence – which may be why the comrade avoids any treatment of it in his text. The above is simply an attempt to briefly sketch out some of the connections between state capitalism, the emergence of a trade union bureaucracy and the nature of the trade unions as permanent mass organisations within bourgeois society; a sketch which hopefully shows up the inadequacies of the comrade’s arguments about ‘bureaucracy’ and the need to develop the discussion in this area.

The intervention of revolutionaries

The stated aim of the comrade in writing this text is to identify “a legitimate socialist practice”. The exact nature of this practice is not spelled out in the text but the comrade’s main argument is that despite the anti-working class policies of the union leaderships the trade unions remain working class organisations (or, at least, he argues that they still have ‘legitimacy’ in the class, in other words, workers still believe them to be their own organisations). It is therefore necessary to wage “a political struggle in the trade unions”.

But a political struggle for what? To win over the union leaderships and turn the unions back into real workers’ organisations? Or to warn the working class against the dangerous role of the trade unions and support all moves towards the generalisation and self-organisation of the workers’ struggles?

Let’s take a concrete example: the mass strikes in Poland in 1980-81, when the workers were organising themselves, extending their struggles, holding assemblies, electing delegates and creating inter-factory committees to co-ordinate and make their actions more effective. One of the first blows against this real class movement was the transformation of the inter-factory committees into a new union, which became Solidarnosc. This is how the ICC drew the lessons at the time:

“The actions of Solidarnosc in 1980 and 1981 demonstrated that, even when formally separated from the capitalist state, new unions, started from scratch, with millions of determined members and enjoying the confidence of the working class, act the same as official, bureaucratic state unions. As with unions everywhere else in the world, Solidarnosc (and the demands for ‘free trade unions’ that preceded its foundation) acted to sabotage struggles, demobilise and discourage workers and divert their discontent into the dead-ends of ‘self-management’, defence of the national economy and defence of the unions rather than workers’ interests.” (‘Poland 1980: Lessons still valid for the struggles of the world proletariat’, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/103_poland80.htm [140])

What lessons would the comrade draw from this experience for the intervention of revolutionaries in the workers’ struggles? This may seem an abstract question today in the absence of mass strikes and when the working class is still finding great difficulties in responding to the global attacks of capital, but in future waves of struggle it will be vital to warn workers against the sabotage of the trade unions. When asked whether he believes that there will be any need for the working class to break – politically and organisationally - with the existing trade unions at some point in its struggle against capitalism, the comrade responded:

“No; but not as a political choice (…) the class struggle exists regardless of the activity or inactivity of the socialist movement, and we can’t alter the fundamental processes of labor’s class struggles under the capitalist social relation but can only understand and then use them to abolish capitalism … ‘We’ can influence labor’s class struggles through to the abolition of the class struggle, but can’t alter the basic content of the class struggle.”

On the contrary, not only is it necessary for revolutionaries today to warn the working class that the trade unions are enemies of their struggles, but, if workers are to take these struggles forward across all boundaries of trade, sector, race, gender and above all nationality, it will be necessary to break from the straightjacket of union control and take the struggle into their own hands. 

It’s not accidental that the comrade appears to be drawing on Bordigist ideas for his theory. We can see this, for example, in his unqualified quote from the Bordigist PCI (Partito) on its attempts to ‘re-conquer’ the unions. The confusions of Bordigism have been  criticised many times by the ICC and others. Very briefly, when the Internationalist Communist Party was formed in Italy in 1943-45 the tendency around Bordiga rejected the position developed by the fraction of the Italian Left in exile that the trade unions had become incorporated into the capitalist state. In effect, the Bordigist current rejected the conclusion that capitalism had entered into its epoch of imperialist decay and that this had major implications for the trade union question, regressing on the union question to the positions of Lenin and the Second Congress of the Third International and continuing to argue that, despite being under reactionary leaders, the unions were still class organisations. 

On the trade union question as with others (for example national liberation), Bordigism therefore defends what we can characterise as opportunist and centrist positions and it would be helpful for the discussion if the comrade could clarify the extent to which he is explicitly defending a Bordigist political orientation.

Soviets and trade unions

Finally, let’s look at the comrade’s vision of revolution, which is based on the idea that ultimately the working class organised in trade unions seizes state power, after which it will exercise its dictatorship through trade unions. As he puts it: “This bureaucracy of the workers state differs in no way from that of the trade unions, in composition, character or function …Proletarian dictatorship is in perfect continuity with classical trade unionism…”

There are many issues with this vision – not least whether the working class can identify itself with the state that exists after it has seized power – but is it based on the historical experience of the working class?

If we take the example of the October Revolution - which after all is the only experience of the proletariat seizing political power on a national scale - through a few highly selective quotes the comrade gives the impression that it was the trade unions that made the revolution and formed the dictatorship of the proletariat.

So why in 1917 did Lenin and the Bosheviks take up the slogan “All power to the soviets!” – a slogan that was already being adopted by the most class conscious Russian workers - and not “All power to the trade unions”? And why did the Third International in 1920 affirm that “The authentic soviets of the masses are the historically-elaborated forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat”?[6]

The comrade’s ‘core theory’ is that “trade unionism appears as the content of labor’s class struggles under the capitalist social relation.” His text hardly mentions soviets or workers’ councils and where it does he gives the impression that they are simply a form of trade unionism in a period of revolutionary struggles. But if we examine even briefly the experience of the working class we can see this isn’t true.

The first appearance of soviets - unprepared and unpredicted by revolutionaries at the time – was a practical demonstration that the period of capitalism's ascendency, in which the proletariat had been able to constitute permanent mass organisations (particularly trade unions), to fight for reforms of the system, was nearing its end. The working class itself found the weapons it needed to struggle against capital in the new conditions created by the system’s decline; a struggle not just for immediate demands but ultimately for the destruction of the bourgeois state. These weapons were the mass strike and the formation of soviets or workers’ councils. Unlike the trade unions, soviets regrouped the majority of the workers in struggle, assemblies of delegates mandated by general assemblies of workers;  but above all, they were political organs, forged in the heat of generalised mass struggles, whose fundamental objective was to prepare for the seizure of power.

The problem for the comrade’s theory is that any attempt to seriously address the role of the soviets in history would not only highlight these differences but also the change in the historic conditions for the class struggle at the start of the 20th century which gave rise to these political organs in the first place.

Taking the discussion forward

Having set out to provide an alternative Marxist theory of the nature of trade unionism directed “against the core left communist theories of the class struggle”, and specifically against the position that the trade unions have become integrated into the capitalist state, the comrade has come up with a theoretical approach that studiously avoids addressing the most significant changes in the conditions for the proletariat’s struggle over the last hundred years. 

His attempt to clarify his political differences by developing such an alternative theory is a real sign of seriousness. But at the same time it may have served to exaggerate these differences and highlight the flaws in his basic approach. The political movement we know as ‘left communism’ is after all only the struggle the left of the communist movement – historically always the most intransigent and clear-sighted fraction of the workers’ movement – to defend the revolutionary content of Marxism in the new epoch of capitalist decadence, and in particular to draw out the most important political implications for the workers’ struggles. This struggle was in direct continuity with that of the left in the Second International against opportunism and centrism and in defence of internationalism, and of the Marxist tendency in the First International: the struggle to defend the historical materialist understanding of capitalism as an historically transitory society; the struggle against the rise of reformism in the workers’ movement; the implications of the rise of imperialism and the appearance of the mass strike…  

Any attempt to devise ‘new’ theories without clear reference to all these links in the chain risks throwing throwing the baby out with the bath water and we can see signs of this in the comrade’s text: on reformism, decadence, the mass strike, soviets…

To take this discussion forward, it may be better instead to focus on the comrade’s specific criticisms of the positions of the ICC and their implications for the role and intervention of revolutionaries. After all, the fact that the ICC defends the position that the trade unions have been integrated into the capitalist state does not in any way mean that revolutionaries ignore workers’ struggles that take place under union control, or that our only intervention is to stand up and denounce the unions as bourgeois. The ICC pamphlet on the trade unions includes a whole section on the intervention of revolutionaries that could act as the starting point for a perhaps more fruitful discussion.

MH (this response was contributed by a close sympathiser of the ICC)

In the twilight of ancient Rome, the madness of emperors was more the rule than the exception. Few historians doubt that this was a sign of Rome’s decrepitude. Today a scary clown is made king in the world’ s most powerful nation state, and yet this is not generally understood as a sign that capitalist civilisation has itself reached an advanced stage in its own decadence. The surge of populism in the epicentres of the system, which has brought in quick succession Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump, expresses the fact that the ruling class is losing its grip over the political machinery that, for many decade now, has been used to hold back capitalism’s innate tendency towards collapse. We are witnessing an enormous political crisis brought about by the accelerating decomposition of the social order, by the complete inability of the ruling class to offer humanity a perspective for the future. But populism is also a product of the inability of the exploited class, the proletariat, to put forward a revolutionary alternative, with the result that it is grave danger of being dragged into a reaction based on impotent rage, on fear, on the scapegoating of minorities and a delusional quest for a past that never really existed. This analysis of the roots of populism as a global phenomenon is developed in more depth in the contribution ‘On the question of populism [103]’ and we encourage our readers to examine the general framework it offers, along with our initial more specific response to the Brexit result and the rise of Trump’s candidacy, ‘Brexit, Trump: setbacks for the ruling class, nothing good for the proletariat [148]’. Both texts are published in n°157 of our International Review.

We have also published an article by our sympathiser in the US, Henk: ‘Trump v. Clinton: nothing but bad choices for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat [149]’. This article, written in early October, looked at the almost frantic efforts of the more ‘responsible’ factions of the US bourgeoisie, both Democrat and Republican, to stop Trump from getting to the White House1. These efforts evidently failed, and one of the more immediate factors which brought about this failure was the incredible intervention by the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, at the very point where Clinton seemed to be surging ahead in the polls. The FBI, the very heart of the US security apparatus, severely damaged Clinton’s chances by announcing that she may well have a criminal case to answer after it had further investigated her use of private email servers, which goes against the basic rules of state security. A week or so later, Comey tried to backtrack by announcing that, in fact, there was nothing untoward in all the material the Bureau had examined. But the damage had been done and the FBI had made a major contribution to the Trump campaign, whose rallies have endlessly chanted the slogan ‘Lock Her Up’. The FBI’s intervention was yet another expression of a growing loss of political control at the centre of the state apparatus.

Communists don’t fight for the lesser evil

The article ‘Trump v. Clinton’ begins by clearly re-stating the communist position on bourgeois democracy and elections in this epoch of history: that they are a gigantic fraud which offers no choice for the working class. This lack of choice was perhaps more pronounced than ever in this election, fought between the arrogant showman Trump, with his overtly racist and misogynist agenda, and Clinton, who embodies the ‘neo-liberal’ order that has been the dominant form of state capitalism for the last three decades. Faced with a choice between two evils, a substantial part of the electorate, as is always the case in US elections, did not vote at all - an initial estimate gives the turn out as just under 57%, lower than in 2012 [150] despite all the pressures to go out and vote. At the same time, many who were critical of both camps, but of Trump in particular, decided to vote for Hillary as the lesser of the two evils. For our part, we know that abstaining from bourgeois elections out of disillusionment with what’s on offer is at best only the beginning of wisdom: it is essential, though extremely difficult when the working class is not acting as a class, to show that there is another way of organising society which will pass through the dismantling of the capitalist state. And in the post-election period, this rejection of the existing political and social order, this insistence on the necessity for the working class to fight for its own interests outside and against the prison of the bourgeois state, will be no less relevant, because many will be drawn towards a simple anti-Trumpism, a kind of revamped anti-fascism2 which will again align itself with more ‘democratic’ factions of the bourgeoisie – most probably with those which talk the language of the working class and of socialism, as Bernie Sanders did during the Democratic primaries3

Trumpism’s social base

This is not the place to analyse in detail the motives and social composition of those who voted for Trump. There is no doubt that the misogyny, the anti-woman rhetoric so central to the Trump campaign, played its part and it needs to be studied in itself, especially as it is part of a much more global ‘male backlash’ against the social and ideological changes in gender relations during the last few decades. In the same way, there has been a sinister growth of racism and xenophobia in all the central capitalist countries, and this played a key role in Trump’s campaign. There are also particular elements to racism in America which need to be understood: in the short term, reaction to the Obama presidency and to the American version of the ‘migrant crisis’, in the longer term, the whole heritage of slavery and segregation. From the early figures, the long history of the racial divide in America can be discerned in the fact that the pro-Trump vote was overwhelmingly white (although it did mobilise a rather significant number of ‘Hispanics’) while around 88% of black voters chose the Clinton camp. We will return to these questions in future articles.

But as we argue in the contribution on populism, we think that perhaps the most important element in the Trump victory was rage against the neo-liberal ‘elite’ which has identified itself with the globalisation and financialisation of the economy – macro-economic processes which have enriched a small minority at the expense of the majority, and above all at the expense of the working class in the old manufacturing and extractive industries. ‘Globalisation’ has meant the wholesale dismantling of manufacturing industries and their transfer to countries like China where labour power is far cheaper and profits are thus much higher. It has also meant the ‘free movement of labour’, which for capitalism is another means to cheapen labour power through migration from ‘poorer’ to ‘richer’ countries. Financialisation has meant, for the majority, the domination of economic life by the increasingly mysterious laws of the market. More concretely it meant the 2008 crash which ruined so many small investors and aspiring house-owners.

Again, more detailed statistical studies are needed, but it does appear that a core strength of the Trump campaign was the support it won from non-college educated whites, and especially from workers in the ‘Rust Belt’, the new industrial deserts who voted for Trump as a protest against the established political order, personified in the so-called ‘metropolitan liberal elite’. Many of these same workers or regions had voted for Obama in the previous elections, and some supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. Their vote was above all a vote against – against the growing inequality of wealth, against a system which they felt has deprived them and their children of any future. But this opposition was framed in the complete absence of a real working class movement, and has thus fed the populist world-view which blames the elite for selling out the country to foreign investors, to giving special privileges to migrants, refugees and ethnic minorities at the expense of the ‘native’ working class – and to women workers at the expense of male workers. The racist and misogynist elements of Trumpism thus go hand in hand with the rhetorical attacks on the ‘elite’.

Trump in power: no smooth ride

We won’t speculate about what Trump’s presidency will be like or what policies he will try to implement. What characterises Trump above all is his unpredictability, so it will not be easy to foresee the consequences of his reign. There is also the fact that while Trump can say a dozen contradictory things before breakfast, and that this didn’t seem to affect his support in the election campaign, what worked in the campaign may not work so well in office. So for example, Trump presents himself as the archetypal self-made entrepreneur and talks about liberating the American businessman from bureaucracy, but he also talks about a massive programme of restoring the infrastructure in the inner cities, of building roads, schools and hospitals and revitalising the fossil fuels industry by abolishing environmental protection limits, all of which implies a heavy state capitalist intervention in the economy. He is pledged to expel millions of illegal immigrants, and yet much of the US economy depends on their cheap labour. On foreign policy, he combines the language of isolationism and withdrawal (as in his threat to scale down US involvement in NATO) with the language of interventionism, as with his bluster about ‘bombing the hell out of IS’, while promising to increase the military budget.

What seems certain is that Trump’s presidency will be marked by conflict, both within the ruling class and between the state and society. It’s true that Trump’s victory speech was a model of reconciliation – he will be a ‘president for all Americans’. And Obama, before receiving Trump at the White House, said that he wanted to ensure as smooth a transition as possible. In addition, the fact that there is now a large Republican majority in Senate and Congress could mean- if the Republican establishment overcomes its antipathy for Trump – that he will be able to get their backing for a number of his policies, even if the more demagogic ones may be put in the pending tray. But the signs of future tensions and clashes are not hard to see. Parts of the military hierarchy, for example, are likely to be very hostile to some of his foreign policy options, if he persists in his scepticism about NATO, or translates his admiration for Putin as a strong leader into undermining US attempts to counter the dangerous resurgence of Russian imperialism in eastern Europe and the Middle East. Opposition to some of his domestic policies could also arise from within the security apparatus, the federal bureaucracy and big business interests, who might see it as their role to ensure that Trump is not allowed to run amok. Meanwhile, the political demise of the ‘Clinton dynasty’ may also give rise to new oppositions and perhaps even splits within the Democratic Party, with the likely rise of a left wing around the likes of Bernie Sanders, hoping to capitalise on the mood of hostility to economic and political establishments.

At the social level, if post-Brexit Britain is anything to go by, we are likely to see a sinister flowering of ‘popular’ xenophobia as overtly racist groups feel that they are now empowered to realise their fantasies of violence and domination; at the same time police repression against ethnic minorities may reach new heights. And if Trump seriously begins his programme of detaining and expelling the ‘illegals’, all these developments could provoke resistance in the streets, in continuity with some of the movements we have been seeing in the last few years following police murders of black people. Indeed, from the very day the election result was announced, there has been a series of very angry demonstrations in cities across America, generally involving young people who feel disgusted at the prospect of a Trump-led government.

The international impact

At the international level, Trump’s victory is set to be, as he himself put it, ‘Brexit plus plus plus’. It has already given a powerful boost to right wing populist parties in western Europe, not least the Front National in France where the presidential election is due in 2017. These are parties who want to withdraw from multi-national trade organisations and favour economic protectionism. With Trump’s most aggressive statements being directed against Chinese economic competition, this could mean that we are heading towards a trade war which, as in the 1930s, will further constrict an already clogged-up world market. The neo-liberal model has served world capitalism well over the last two decades, but it is now approaching its limits, and what lies ahead bears the danger of transferring the ‘every man for himself’ tendency we have seen at the imperialist level to the economic sphere, where it has so far been held more or less in check. Trump has also declared that global warming is a hoax invented by the Chinese to support their export drive, and says he will pull out of all the existing international agreements on climate change. We know how limited these agreements are already, but scrapping them is likely to plunge us even more deeply into the mounting world ecological disaster.

We repeat: Trump symbolises a bourgeoisie which has truly lost any perspective for running society. For all his vanity and narcissism, he is not mad himself, but he embodies the madness of a system which is running out of options, even that of world war. Despite its decadence, the ruling class has, for over a century, been able to use its own political and military apparatus – in other words, its conscious intervention as a class – to prevent a complete loss of control, a final working out of capitalism’s innate drive towards chaos. We are now beginning to see the limits of this control, even if we shouldn’t underestimate our enemy’s capacity to come up with new temporary fixes. The problem for our class is that the evident bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie at all levels – economic, political, moral – is not, with the exception of a very small minority, generating a revolutionary critique of the system but rather misdirected rage and poisonous divisions in our own ranks. This poses a serious threat to the future possibility of replacing capitalism with a human society.

And yet one of the reasons why world war is not on the agenda today, despite the severity of capitalism’s crisis, is that the working class has not been defeated in open combat and still contains untapped capacities for resistance, as we have seen in various massive movements during the last decade, such as the French students’ struggle in 2006 or the ‘Indignados’ revolt in Spain in 2011 and the Occupy movement in the US in the same year. In America, these heralds of resistance can be discerned in the protests against police murders and the post-election demonstrations against Trump, although these movements have not taken on a clear working class character and are vulnerable to recuperation by the professional politicians of the left, by different varieties of nationalist or democratic ideology. For the working class to overcome both the populist menace and the false alternatives sold by the left wing of capital, something much deeper is required, a movement for proletarian independence which is able to understand itself politically and re-connect with the communist traditions of our class. This is not for the immediate, but revolutionaries have a role today in preparing such a development, above all by fighting for the political and theoretical clarity that can light a way through the prevailing smog of capitalist ideology, in all its guises.

Amos 13.11.16

If you were to ask a high school student about the Russian revolution of 1917, most likely she would reply that it was a Bolshevik coup which, despite the good intentions of its protagonists, ended up in a nightmare: the Soviet dictatorship, the Gulag, etc.

And if you to ask her what happened on 15 May 2011, it’s possible that the response would be that it was a movement for ‘real democracy’ and that it was very closely linked to the Podemos political party[1].

Anyone who is looking for the truth will not be satisfied with such simplistic answers, which have nothing to do with what really happened, stuffed as they are with the ‘common sense’ views promoted by the deformed education we are subjected to and the brow beating of the ‘means of communication’. In short, by the dominant ideology of this society.

It’s true that the proletariat is today in a situation of profound weakness. But the history of society is the history of the class struggle, and the capitalist state knows very well that the proletariat could one day return to the struggle. This is why it attacks it at its most vulnerable points, and one of these is its historical memory. The bourgeoisie has a great interest in destroying this memory by re-writing the past experience of our class. It’s as if it was trying to format the hard disc and reinstall a very different programme. 

The most intelligent form of rewriting is to take advantage of the real weaknesses and mistakes of proletarian movements. These always carry with them a whole burden of errors which posterity can then rewrite in ways diametrically opposed to what they originally stood for.

Marx, commenting on the difference between the struggle of the bourgeoisie and the struggle of the proletariat, argued that

“Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success... On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals.”[2]

This is why, for the proletariat

 “its thorny way to self-emancipation is paved not only with immeasurable suffering but also with countless errors. The aim of its journey – its emancipation depends on this – is whether the proletariat can learn from its own errors. Self-criticism, remorseless, cruel, and going to the core of things is the life’s breath and light of the proletarian movement.” [3]

The aim of this article is not to make a critical analysis of the 1917 revolution. We only want to go back over the movement of the Indignados in 2011, the ‘15 May’ movement[4] and the way it has been ‘rewritten’ by the ideology of the ruling class.

2003-2011: new generations of the proletariat enter the struggle

After the long night of the counter-revolution which crushed the revolution of 1917, the proletariat revived its struggles in 1968. But this revival was not able to politicise itself in a revolutionary direction. In 1989, the fall of the so-called ‘Communist’ regimes resulted in an important retreat in consciousness and combativity whose effects can still be felt today[5]. 

From 2003, there was a new upsurge of struggles, but they mainly involved the new generations of the working class (students, unemployed, precarious workers), while the workers of the big industrial centres remained passive, only engaging in sporadic struggles (the fear of unemployment was a major inhibition). There was no unified and massive mobilisation of the working class, but only of a part of it, the youngest part. The revolt of young people in Greece (2008), the movements in Tunisia and Egypt (2011) were in this sense the expression of a wave whose highest points were the fight against the CPE in France (2006) and the 15 May movement.[6]

Despite their positive and promising aspects (we will come back to this later), these movements took place in a context in which the working class was losing its sense of identity and confidence in its own strength. This loss of identity meant that the great majority of those who took part in the struggles didn’t see themselves as being part of the working class, but rather as citizens, Even when they talked about being ‘at the bottom of the pile’ and about being treated as ‘second class’, they didn’t break the umbilical cord with the ‘community’ of the nation.

As we wrote in 2011: “Although the slogan of ‘we are the 99% against the 1%’, which was so popular in the occupation movement in the United States, reveals the beginnings of an understanding of the bloody class divisions that affect us, the majority of participants in these protests saw themselves as ‘active citizens’ who want to be recognized within a society of ‘free and equal citizens’”. This prevented the participants from seeing that “society is divided into classes: a capitalist class that has everything and produces nothing, and an exploited class -the proletariat- that produces everything but has less and less. The driving force of social evolution is not the democratic game of the “decision of a majority of citizens” (this game is nothing more than a masquerade which covers up and legitimises the dictatorship of the ruling class) but the class struggle”[7].

There were thus two fundamental weaknesses within the 15 May movement, which mutually reinforced each other and which made their current falsification possible: most of their protagonists saw themselves as citizens and were aspiring to a renewal of the democratic game.

Because of this, the movement, despite its promising beginnings, was not articulated around “the struggle of the principle exploited class -the proletariat- who collectively produce the main riches and ensure the functioning of social life: factories, hospitals, schools, universities, offices, ports, construction, post offices.”[8], but ended up being diluted in a powerless protest of ‘indignant’ citizens. Despite some tentative efforts to extend the movement to the workplaces, this was a failure, and the movement was increasingly restricted to the city squares. Despite the sympathy that it inspired, it more and more lost its strength until it was reduced to a minority that succumbed to a desperate kind of activism.

Furthermore, the difficulty of recognising itself as a class movement was reinforced by the lack of confidence in its own strengths. This gave a disproportionate weight to the elements of the radicalised petty bourgeoisie which joined the movement, thus boosting confusion, inter-classism, and belief in the worst formulas of bourgeois politics, such as ‘no more two party system’, ‘fight against corruption’ etc.

These social strata contaminated the movement with an ideology which reduced capitalism to “a handful of ‘bad guys’  (unscrupulous financiers, ruthless dictators) when it is really a complex network of social relations that have to be attacked in their totality and not dissipated into a preoccupation with its many surface expressions (finance, speculation, the corruption of political -economic powers”[9]

Despite some attempts at solidarity based on mass action against police violence, it was the idea of struggle as a form of peaceful pressure by citizens on the institutions of capitalism that very easily led the movement into a dead end.

The ‘Nuit Debout’ movement takes on the worst of 15 May

As our section in France has pointed out, “there was nothing spontaneous about Nuit Debout. It’s something which has been prepared and organised over a long period by the radical defenders of capitalism. Behind this “spontaneous” and “apolitical” movement lurk the professionals, the groups of the left and extreme left who use “apoliticism” as a means of control.” [10]

The aim of this set-up was to imprison social discontent and all discussion “in the optic of citizenship and republican values, and diverting reflection to the problem of making capitalism more human and democratic”[11]. As a leaflet by the collective which animated the movement, ‘Convergence des Luttes’ put it, “humanity must be at the heart of the concerns of our leaders”.

This pious wish simply reiterates the reactionary utopia where governments are really concerned with human beings. But this only serves to hide their real concern, which are the problems and necessities of capital. Asking the state to defend the interests of the exploited is like asking a burglar to look after your house.

The demands put forward by Nuit Debout all go towards sowing the illusion that a capitalist system which is fleecing us more and more can still offer something. A ‘universal basic income’ is called for, healthier food, more money for education and other ‘reforms’ which are always part of electoral promises and which are never kept.

The most ‘ambitious’ demand put forward by the promoters of Nuit Debout is the call for a ‘social republic’, which is seen as going back to the ‘revolutionary ideas of 1789’, when the bourgeoisie demolished the feudal power to cries of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. This is the reactionary utopia of the “’true democracy’ promised by the French revolution of 1789. But what was revolutionary two and half centuries ago, i.e. installing the political power of the bourgeoisie in France, overcoming feudalism by the development of capitalism, building a nation…all this today has become irredeemably reactionary. This system of exploitation is decadent. It’s not a question of making it better, because that has become impossible, but of going beyond it, of overthrowing it through an international proletarian revolution. But here the illusion is being sewn that the state is a neutral agent on which we have to put pressure, or even protect from the shareholders, the corrupt politicians, the greedy bankers, the oligarchs…”[12]

The real antagonism, the one between capital and the proletariat, is replaced by an imaginary antagonism between, on the one hand, a corrupt minority of financiers and venal politicians, and, on the other side of the barricade, an immense majority which can include the good politicians, the honest capitalists, the soldiers, the people, the citizens. In this scenario the proletariat abandons its class ground and submerges itself in a conflict between all good citizens and a handful of bad guys.  

What’s more, just as the populism of Trump or the Front National blames everything on certain people and not on the social relations of production, the ‘radicals’ of Nuit Debout also put forward a project based on personalisation. The right puts the blame on migrants; the left on a few bankers or politicians. But it’s the same reactionary logic. The problems of the world can be resolved by getting rid of a few people who are seen as the root of all evil.

What is left of 15 May?

The promoters of Nuit Debout have wiped out the hard disc of the 15 May movement and written over it. But what really remains of this movement? What can we hold onto for future struggles?

The assemblies

We reproduce here what we wrote in our international leaflet drawing the lessons of the Indignados, Occupy and other movements:

“The mass assembles have concretised the slogan of the First International (1864) ‘The emancipation of the working class is the work of the workers themselves or it is nothing’. This is the continuation of the tradition of the workers' movement stretching back to the Paris Commune, and to Russia in 1905 and 1917, where it took an ever higher form, continued in Germany 1918, Hungary 1919 and 1956, Poland 1980.” [13]

The assemblies of the future will have to strengthen themselves by drawing a critical balance sheet of the weaknesses in the assemblies of 2011:

• Only a small minority of them were extended to the workplaces, the neighbourhoods, the unemployed…even though the central nucleus of the assemblies does have to be the general assembly of the city, based on the occupation of public squares and buildings, they have to be fed by a wider network of assemblies, especially in the factories and workplaces;
• The commissions (coordination, culture, actions, etc) have to be under the strict control of the general assembly and have to be scrupulously accountable to them. We have to avoid what happened in the 15 May movement where the commissions became instruments for sabotaging the assemblies by shadowy groups like ‘Real Democracy Now’[14].

Solidarity

Through all its pores, capitalist society secretes “marginalisation, the atomisation of the individual, the destruction of family relationships, the exclusion of old people from social life, the annihilation of love and affection and its replacement by pornography,”. In sum, “the destruction of the very principle of collective life in a society devoid of the slightest project or perspective.”[15]

A barbaric expression of this social decomposition is the hatred towards immigrants encouraged by populism, which won a spectacular victory with ‘Brexit’ in the United Kingdom and Trump’s election in the USA.

Against all of that, the 15 May movement and Occupy sowed the first seeds of something different

“The demonstrations in Madrid called for the freeing of those who have been arrested or have stopped the police detaining immigrants; there have been massive actions against evictions in Spain, Greece and the United States; in Oakland ‘The strike Assembly has agreed to send pickets or to occupy any company or school that punishes employees or students in anyway for taking part in the General Strike of the 2nd November’. Vivid but still episodic moments have happened, when everyone can feel protected and defended by those around them. All of which starkly contrasted with what is ‘normal’ in this society with its anguished sense of hopelessness and vulnerability”[16].

However, this very important experience could be overwhelmed and buried by the present populist wave (which is supported by politicians who present themselves as ‘antagonists’ to the ‘elite’). Proletarian solidarity still has to put down firmer roots[17]

The culture of debate

This society condemns us to inertia in work and consumption, endlessly reproducing alienated models of success and failure, manufacturing stereotypes which reinforce the dominant ideology. In the face of this, all sorts of false responses serve to further deepen social and moral putrefaction:

“ -   the profusion of sects, the renewal of the religious spirit including in the advanced countries, the rejection of rational, coherent thought even amongst certain “scientists”; a phenomenon which dominates the media with their idiotic shows and mind-numbing advertising;

• the invasion of the same media by the spectacle of violence, horror, blood, massacres, even in programmes designed for children;
• the vacuity and venality of all “artistic” production: literature, music, painting, architecture, are unable to express anything but anxiety, despair, the breakdown of coherent thought, the void”

[18].

Against these two poles of capitalist alienation, movements like the 15 May or Occupy “thousands of people began to look for an authentic popular culture, making it for themselves, trying to animate their own critical and independent criteria. The crisis and its causes, the role of the banks etc, have been exhaustively discussed. There has been discussion of revolution, although with much confusion; there has been talk of democracy and dictatorship, synthesised in these two complementary slogans ‘they call it democracy and it is no’” and ‘it is a dictatorship but unseen’”. These were the first steps towards a real politics of the majority, far away from the world of intrigues, lies and shady manoeuvres which characterise the politics of the ruling class. A politics which raises all the questions that affect us, not just economics and politics but also the environment, ethics, culture, education and health”[19]

The importance of this effort, however tentative, however weakened by democratist and petty bourgeois illusions, is obvious. Every revolutionary movement of the proletariat can only be based on mass discussion, on a cultural movement founded on free and independent debate.

The vertebral column of the Russian revolution of 1917 was this culture of massive debate

“The thirst for education, so long held back, was concerted by the revolution into a true delirium. During the first six months, tons of literature, whether onhandcarts or wagons, poured forth from the Smolny Institute each day, Russia insatiably absorbed it, like hot sand absorbs water. This was not pulp novels, falsified history, diluted religion or cheap fiction that corrupts, but economic and social theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, Gorky”[20]   

Concern for an international struggle

The proletariat is an international class with the same interests in all countries. The workers have no country, and nationalism, in all its varieties, is the graveyard of any possible perspective for the liberation of humanity.

Capitalism today is assailed by a contradiction: on the one hand, the economy is more and more global, production is more and more inter-dependent. But on the other hand, all states are imperialist and wars are increasingly destructive; the environment is deteriorating as competition between national states, especially the most powerful ones like the USA and China, gets sharper and sharper. As economic life becomes more and more international, there is a blind, irrational retreat into all kinds of false communities, whether national, racial or religious…

These contradictions can only be overcome through the historic struggle of the proletariat. The proletariat is the class of worldwide association. It produces across frontiers. It is a class of migrants, a melting pot of races, religions, cultures. No product, from a building to a threshing machine, can be made by an isolated community of workers stuck in a national or local framework. Production needs raw material, transport, machines, all of which circulate on a world scale. It can only be realised by workers trained in a universal culture, through incessant exchanges on an international level. The internet is not only a cultural instrument, but above all a means without which capitalist production would be impossible.

In 2011, expressing these realities and what they mean for the proletarian struggle, even if in a still vague manner, “this movement of indignation has spread internationally: to Spain, where the then Socialist government imposed one of the first and most draconian austerity plans; to Greece, the symbol of the crisis of sovereign debt; to the United States, the temple of world capitalism; to Egypt and Israel, focus of one of the worst and most entrenched imperialist conflicts, the Middle East.

The awareness that this is an international movement began to develop despite the destructive weight of nationalism, as seen in the presence of national flags in the demonstrations in Greece, Egypt or the USA. In Spain solidarity with the workers of Greece was expressed by slogans such as ‘Athens resists, Madrid rises up’. The Oakland strikers (USA, November,2011) said ‘Solidarity with the occupation movement world wide’. In Egypt it was agreed in the Cairo Declaration to support the movement in the United States. In Israel they shouted ‘Netanyahu, Mubarak, El Assad are the same’ and contacts were made with Palestinian workers”[21].

Today, five years on, these gains seem to have been buried deep underground. This is the expression of an inevitable feature of proletarian struggles which Marx referred to in the quote we put at the beginning of this article - that “they seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever”

But there is a vital task which the advanced minorities of the proletariat have to carry out: draw the lessons, place then in an evolving Marxist theoretical framework. This is the task we call on all committed comrades to address, to “start the most widespread possible discussion, without any restriction or discouragement, in order to consciously prepare new movements which could make it clear that capitalism can indeed be replaced by another society”[22].

Accion Proletaria ICC section in Spain, 6.7.16