On 28 December, the first sparks of a movement which brought to mind the “Arab Spring” of a few years ago began to shake the territory of Iran. The movement seems for the moment to have run out of steam as we write, although we are seeing other expressions of anger against the deterioration of living standards, such as in Morocco, Sudan and above all Tunisia.

A spontaneous explosion of anger

Iran is a country with powerful imperialist ambitions, where military expenses devoted to intervention throughout the Middle East have risen sharply. Although Iran is still suffering from the sanctions imposed by the USA, it has spent huge amounts of money in the war in Yemen, in supporting Hezbollah and the Assad regime, and its own armed gangs operating at the international level. And it has built up its stock of arms against Saudi Arabia. All this has meant austerity for the population. In a context marked by disappointed hopes in the wake of the deal over nuclear weapons agreed with the Obama administration, the economic crisis, aggravated by the international sanctions and the corruption of the regime, has plunged the majority of the population into poverty and uncertainty. For months now there have been demonstrations of discontent by pensioners, the unemployed (28% of young people are out of work), teachers, workers whose wages aren’t being paid. Finally, the 50% rise in oil and basic foods, like the doubling of the price of eggs - there has been talk of a “revolution of the eggs” – lit the fuse. The movement erupted in Mashhad, the second biggest city, in the north east, and quickly spread to the capital Tehran and all the main urban centres: north to Rasht and south towards Chabahar. In all the crowds openly rejecting the policies of the state, the working class was present, even if somewhat diluted in the rest of the demonstrators: factory workers, teachers, many unemployed especially young people: they were all there. Also many students. It is also significant that a large number of the demonstrators were women.

At the same time, despite the courage and fighting spirit of the protesters, the working class was not able to provide a real orientation to this struggle, was not able to affirm itself as an autonomous political force. And this was the case even if a minority among the students, notably in Tehran, came out against the reactionary nationalist slogan “neither Gaza or Lebanon, I will only die for Iran” with an expression of real proletarian internationalism: “From Gaza to Iran, down with the exploiters”. These elements also called for workers’ councils and rejected any idea of being dragged into the battle between the “reformist” and “hard-line” bourgeois cliques[1]. Such attitudes really scared the authorities and the students were particularly targeted in the arrests. And in general, despite the weight of democratic illusions and other political weaknesses, the bourgeoisie was extremely worried about this “leaderless” explosion of anger. The Supreme Leader Khameini was silent for some time and president Rouhani was more cautious than firm. The government even announced that the rise in fuel prices would be cancelled. It’s true that symbols of the political and religious authorities were targeted and in some cases burned down: banks, public buildings, religious centres and above all the HQ of the Revolutionary Guards, the regime’s militias. Violent clashes with the police led not only to arrests but to a number of deaths. Bit by bit the tone of the authorities, and their reaction, grew firmer. Rouhani and Khameini announced that violence and illegal actions by “troublemakers” would be severely punished. They accused the demonstrators of being “enemies of Iran”, of being in league with foreign powers, in particular the USA and Saudi Arabia.

And indeed, on the social networks like Twitter, many of the hashtags calling for demonstrations originated in Saudi; similarly, the Mujahadin organisation based in Paris, opposed to the Iranian regime and close to the Saudis, declared its support for the demonstrations. And of course, Trump with his provocative statements and the other rival powers want a weakened Iran. But this was a movement that has its origins inside Iran. Taking advantage of the movement’s lack of perspective, the regime could prepare the ground for repression. It mounted counter-demonstrations supporting the regime and its ayatollah, shouting slogans like “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” and denouncing “sedition”. The head of state could play on these divisions and announce that the alternative was “us or chaos”. By evoking the tragedy which followed the original protests in Syria and elsewhere, the leadership was clearly threatening the demonstrators, insinuating that their movement could only result in a similar chaos and bloodshed.

The difficulties of the proletariat in Iran

This spontaneous social movement is the most important since the social crisis of 2009, the year of the “Green movement”. At this time, there was a real danger of the proletariat being caught in the crossfire between competing bourgeois cliques. As we wrote at the time:

“Opposing the bloody, corrupt elements around Ahmadinajad, we see people who resemble them like two drops of water. They are also in favour of an Islamic Republic and for building the Iranian atomic bomb. All these people are basically the same because they all stand for their own personal and nationalist interests”

Today, much more than in 2009, the movement is a real expression of the exploited and the disinherited themselves, but it is without a clear proletarian orientation, apart from a few minorities. The struggles of the proletariat in Iran have without doubt been part of the struggles of the world proletariat since the 1960s, especially in the oil industry, transport, education and so on, but even when the struggles reached their high point in 1978-79, when they precipitated the fall of the Shah, the political weaknesses of the proletariat made it possible for a horde of religious fanatics led by the Ayatollah Khomeini, supported by the Stalinists and other left nationalists, to install themselves in power. Brutal repression came in the wake of the “Islamic Revolution”. Many militant workers were executed for taking part in strikes under the regime of the mullahs. The proletariat was also subjected to the terrible war between Iran and Iraq between 1980 and 1988, which left millions dead.

Since then, there have again been some important struggles, such as during the year 2007 when 100,000 teachers came out in solidarity with the factory workers, but the underlying difficulties remain today. Despite a very strong fighting spirit, and the fact that the current movement was based on economic demands which are part of any proletarian struggle, the movement has waned because of a lack of a real class identity and perspective. At the same time, the workers are still very much faced with the permanent rivalry of different bourgeois factions, and there is a real danger of the class being dragged behind one or the other[2]. On top of this, Iran is surrounded by countries at war which makes it very difficult for the workers of Iran to win the solidarity of the proletariat in these countries and strengthens nationalism within their own ranks.

But in a more profound sense, the weaknesses of the proletariat in Iran are above all those of the world proletariat, since even in the most experienced sectors of the class we are seeing a serious loss of class identity, and above all a loss of perspective that would give a real meaning and direction to the class struggle.

Nevertheless, the bravery and militancy of the demonstrators in Iran should be an encouragement to workers of the world. Fighting against austerity, raising demands in defence of our economic interests, this remains essential if the class struggle is to again raise its head. But the real solidarity with our class brothers and sisters in Iran consists in reviving and consciously taking charge of our own struggle, not only against austerity but against the capitalist system as a whole.

WH (5 january)

 

As we show in our article ‘Demonstrations in Iran, strengths and limits of the movement’, although there are promising signs of working class resilience, the danger is very real, not only of bloody repression, but also of the manipulation of the popular anger by the different fractions of the ruling class. The old conflict between “reformers” and “hard-liners” within the “Islamic Republic” has entered a new stage. The reformers around president Rouhani are convinced that a major policy change is necessary in order to consolidate the considerable gains made by Iran in recent times. These advances have taken place essentially at two levels. At the level of foreign policy, the Shia militias and other forces supported by Tehran have made important advances in Iraq, Syria and the Lebanon (the so-called revolutionary sickle from Iran to the Mediterranean) and in Yemen. At the diplomatic level, the regime was able to make an “atomic deal” with the major powers, leading to the lifting of certain economic sanctions (in exchange for a formal renunciation of acquiring an Iranian atomic bomb). Today these advances are menaced from a number of sides. One of them is the alliance against Iran which the USA under Trump is trying to construct around Israel and Saudi Arabia. Another is the economic situation. Unlike at the military or diplomatic level, Iranian capitalism has made no economic progress in recent years. The contrary is the case. The economy is groaning under the cost of the operations of Iranian imperialism abroad, and weakened by the international sanctions. The United States has failed to lift economic sanctions against Iran as it had promised as part of the nuclear agreement. Instead, it has been obstructing the engagement of European companies in Iran. Now, under Trump, the US sanctions will even be reinforced. Another central problem is that the competitiveness of the Iranian national capital is being strangled by the highly anachronistic theocratic-clerical bureaucracy, which has no idea how to run a modern capitalist economy, and by the kleptomaniac system of the “Revolutionary Guards”. From the point of view of president Rouhani, breaking or at least curbing the dominance of these structures would be in the best interest of Iranian capitalism. It would also give Iran a more liberal image, better suited to countering the sanctions, the diplomacy and the rhetoric of its enemies abroad.

But on account of the dominant position of the hardliners within the armed forces, the reformers have few legal means at their disposal to put through their policy. This is why president Rouhani began to call on the population at large to formulate its own critique of the present economic policy, and of the corruption of the Guards and their business interests. The reformers were trying to use popular discontent as a lever against the hardliners. Such a hazardous policy reveals the backwardness and lack of suppleness of the ruling class in Iran, which is unable to settle the conflicts in its own ranks internally. It was all the more hazardous when one considers that Rouhani was perfectly aware of the popular disappointment once the promised economic boom which was supposed to follow the lifting of sanctions failed to materialise. Moreover, Rouhani was apparently not the only one taking chances. The president himself has accused his hardline opponents of having organised the first demonstration in Mashhad, which is the bastion of Ibrahim Raisi, the candidate of the hardliners in the presidential elections last May. The main slogan of this demonstration is indeed reported to have been “death to Rouhani”. But as soon as the protests extended, other slogans were heard such as “death to Khamenei” (the religious hard-line head of state), “down with the dictatorship”, or “What is free in Iran? Thievery and injustice!” The appearance of such slogans directed against the regime as a whole indicates that neither of the two main bourgeois fractions is able to manipulate the popular anger at will against the other.

This however in no way lessens the danger of the working people being manipulated by the ruling class. It is important, in this respect, to remember what happened in Egypt, where popular protest (“Tahrir Square”) involving mass meetings and demonstrations, but also workers’ strikes, swept away the Mubarak regime. This was at the beginning of the “Arab Spring”. But this was only possible because the military let it happen (president Mubarak intended to curb the influence of the generals on politics and above all in the economy). In Iran (as in Egypt at the time) foreign powers were also involved. The claim of the clerical leaders in Tehran today that the protests in Iran have been instigated by foreign powers (USA, Israel, Saudi Arabia) has enraged wide sectors of the population, since these claims arrogantly deny both their very real suffering and their ability to take the initiative themselves. This does not mean, however, that these and other rival powers are not trying to destabilise the Iranian regime. In an interview given in April of last year, the Saudi crown prince Bin Salman declared that the conflict between his country and its Persian neighbour would be fought out “in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia”. One of his think-tanks in Riyadh has been advising him to stir up discontent within the Sunni religious minority in Iran, as well as among ethnic minorities (one third of the population of Iran are not Persian). In Egypt, after the fall of Mubarak, a civil war between the two main fractions of the bourgeoisie – the armed forces and the Muslim Brotherhood – was only averted through the ferocious repression of the latter by the former. In Syria, the social protests triggered off an imperialist war which is still raging. Whether in Egypt, Syria or Iran, the working class is not only relatively weak, it is also internationally isolated on account of the present reflux of class struggle, class consciousness and class identity at a world scale. Without the support of the world proletariat, difficulties and dangers for our class sisters and brothers in Iran are all the greater.

Steinklopfer. 9.1.2018.

 

Just over a year ago, the bourgeois class launched an ideological campaign around the Panama Papers. Loud publicity was given to a blacklist of fiscal havens. It was billed as the discovery of a series of murky networks and geographical areas, outside any legal controls, where enormous amounts of capital are being stashed. As it happens this is a song we have been hearing a lot since the phase of acute economic crisis opened up in 2008-9.

But now it’s all starting again! A new ideological campaign has been launched and all the bourgeois media are involved. This time they are talking about the Paradise Papers. All kinds of personalities are involved: politicians, businessmen, sports and entertainment stars. Queen Elizabeth the Second herself has not escaped the scandal. The bourgeois media and a good number of states are apparently being infected by a new virus which is obliging them to seek for truth, morality and fairness.

An ideological campaign against the proletariat

The state and the media cry about injustice: certain rich people don’t want to pay the taxes they owe to the national collective, to the state!  Even some of the biggest global companies are evading their taxes! This is theft pure and simple! And in contrast to this, most of us, even when our wages hardly allow us to survive, are paying our taxes in full…

The left of capital has a particular role to play in all this. In France, it’s Mélenchon’s party, La France Insoumise, which shouts the loudest and proclaims that it is scandalised. Their slogan is simple: “make the rich pay, not the poor!”. All the leftist parties are on the same wavelength: The NPA (New Anti-Capitalist Party) and Lutte Ouvrière also join in the refrain. If the state was doing its job, none of this would be going on. There would be more money for hospitals, schools and all the other public services. In fact these arguments are not very different from what the government itself is saying. It’s the same story in all the developed countries.

A basic law we’ve learned from the history of capitalism is that you should never take the declarations of the ruling class and its media at face value. So what is being hidden behind this deafening chorus, this demand that the cheats and thieves be caught and punished? That the rich should pay what they owe and that that no one should escape from “equality before the Tax”? What’s the reality behind all this, and what do these fiscal “paradises”, these tax havens, really represent?

Tax havens: a world-wide reality linked to state capitalism

A tax haven is a country, a part of a country, or an organism where, usually quite legally, money can be stashed with impunity. Little or no tax is paid and no questions are asked about where the invested capital comes from. There are thousands of such tax havens around the world. And they are not only to be found in more or less exotic places like the Virgin Islands or Bermuda. Nor are they limited to the small states we hear about so much in the media, such as Luxemburg, Malta or Ireland. In fact the leading tax haven in the world is the City of London. London’s financial district is the centre of a spider’s web connected to any number of offshore tax havens. In other words, the capital amassing in the parallel circuits of the tax havens comes here to be invested. The biggest banks in the world, such as the HSBC and their shadowy agencies (the “back banks”), the most powerful investment funds and the world’s leading companies use these networks to circulate a large part of their capital. Money from drugs, prostitution, arms sales, floods all these networks. Reality is very far from the picture painted by the media, who focus on this or that celebrity hiding their dough in Swiss banks. This is a whole system, managed by the states themselves. One of the essential features of decadent capitalism is the concentration of capital in the hands of the nation state, which has become the entity around which the national capital organises its struggle, both against the proletariat and against other national capitals. States are not the dupes of multinational companies who escape the rules laid down for the operation of the world market. On the contrary, they are the main protagonists on these markets and in the final instance they are in control of the banks and the companies. Despite appearances, above even the most powerful banks and multinationals, the public authority of the state takes precedence. Multinational firms like Exxon, General Motors or Apple are always closely tied to the state, whether through public investments, the nomination of directors and so on. “Contrary to an opinion often expressed, by acting as the impetus for truly innovative projects, the public organisms (public investment banks and others) don’t push out the banks or private firms. They do what the latter don’t do or can’t do. Far from being victims of exclusion, the private enterprises could not develop if the state didn’t prepare the ground for them by making investments, notably in key research, which they could not do either financially or ‘strategically’”[1]. For a state, the big multinationals which are linked to it often represent a strategic sector of the national economy. This doesn’t mean that the private interests of these enterprises or banks always coincide exactly with those of the state. The quest for “tax optimisation” or the hunt for tax fraud are very current illustrations of this. But in the world’s financial markets and stock exchanges, the authority of the state remains a preponderant one. For example, the Euronext fusion of the stock exchanges of Paris, Bruxelles and Amsterdam openly depends on public financial authorities such as the Autorité des Marches Financiers in France or the Autorité Européene des Valeurs Mobilières. These state organs survey, control and can even sanction private enterprises. Here again, the interests of private operators can often come up against those of the state, but they can’t completely escape its control.

Despite the efforts at regulation, states have permitted an exponential development of what’s called the “little by little” market[2], which paradoxically makes activities and operators more opaque. This parallel market is mainly reserved for the very big investors (precisely the ones most closely linked to the state), those whose exchanges are measured in billions. More than 50% of these transactions, a good part of them highly dubious, take place at financial centres like the City or Wall Street. And the actors are not exactly unknowns: JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Barclays Capital, etc. We should also add that central banks like the European Central Bank or the FED are key players as well.

While the finger is most often pointed at the more exotic tax havens, the World Bank stresses that “the financial systems of developing countries have less depth and a more limited access than those of the developed countries”. In short, the essential job of tax evasion or “optimisation” by the grand conglomerates, acting behind a myriad of screening companies, gets done in the “domicile”. All states encourage the formation of “offshore” resources under their aegis. The tax havens are largely dependent on the big countries, who use them to attract foreign investment as well as to avoid too great a flight towards tax havens controlled by other states, or which remain more or less out of their own control. Thus, France’s favoured tax haven is the Principality of Monaco. Britain has the Channel Islands, the USA has the Bahamas or the state of Delaware, Austria and Germany have Liechtenstein. The list goes on. But more than this, states have their own investment funds destined for these parallel circuits. On 11 November 2017, the Belgian Finances Minister Johan Owerdeveldt declared that he would endeavour to make sure in the future that the state would not support investments in tax havens via the Belgian investment society which is 64% owned by the state. All this is sheer hypocrisy, theatrical speeches that have been going on for years while nothing really changes. And for good reason. Since the 1980s, the proliferation of tax havens has become a very widespread phenomenon. They would not have been able to play such a key role in the world economy if, under the guidance of the major states, there had not been so much deregulation of finance. Since then finance capital has assumed gigantic proportions across the entire planet. It is this form of capital which has become so necessary for the state itself to maintain capitalist accumulation. The search for ever-growing investment and profit has brought about an evolution in state capitalist policy on a global scale. It is this process which lies at the roots of the possibility and necessity to develop this network of tax havens to drain off a large part of liquidity. Thus Business Bourse on 18 November 2017 wrote: “the evil given the name of tax havens function like the brothels of capitalism. You do dirty business which can’t be publicly recognised but is indispensable to the functioning of the system. Like houses of ill repute in traditional society”. The Paradise Papers, like the Panama Papers, were uncovered and made public by investigative journalists who belong to 96 of the most important newspapers in the world. The leading papers in the western world are all included. In Britain, it’s The Guardian. In France, it’s Le Monde. The bourgeois press seems to be on the trail of the tax evaders. But here again the orchestra is being conducted by the capitalist state. All this investigative journalism is tied to the interests of the national economy and the states which present themselves as the guarantors of social justice and as the victims of “financial gangsters” and “greedy bankers”. 

Tax havens: cogs of the capitalist economy in crisis

Tax havens have taken on a powerful weight in the reality of world commerce. Two thirds of Hedge Funds, speculative investment funds, are domiciled in tax havens and play a key role in investments in production and the financial sector. More than 40% of profits from the big global companies and banks end up in tax havens. Already in 2008, just after the appearance of the open crisis, 35% of financial flows were passing through these offshore locations. But even more significant is the fact that 55% of international trade depended directly on these flows of capital. And this tendency has increased exponentially since then.

A better control over the tax havens: a necessity for all capitalist states

A question is posed: why are the capitalist states now orchestrating this huge media campaign? It is well known that capitalist nations and their states are weighed down by global debt. True, not all of them to the same degree. Germany, for example, is a relative exception. But the USA, Japan, the other countries of Europe, all are experiencing dizzying levels of debt. And China has become a leading model in this trend. The capitalist economy has an imperious need for tax havens today, but capitalist states are desperate for funds. The finances of the central banks are not sufficient to bear the weight of state debts, so that governments have a real need for tax revenue at a time when a large part of such revenue is escaping them thanks to the tax havens. In July 2012 the “independent” foundation Réseau pour la Justice Fiscal published a study on tax havens and estimated that tax evasion accounts for 25,500 billion euros, more than the combined GNP of the US and Japan. This comes at a time when every big state has to increase its military expenses to face up to the spread of imperialist war around the world, and to deal with an explosion of unemployment and poverty. While each state is trying by all possible means to reduce the benefits conceded to the sectors of the proletariat who have been ejected from work, this also involves maintaining an increasingly expensive police control over these sectors and the population as  whole. So behind the international ideological campaign around the Paradise Papers we can find a ferocious fiscal competition. As much as possible, states must prevent their rivals from attracting capital to the tax havens within their sphere of influence and thus allowing companies to avoid paying taxes in the countries where their profits are being made. In other words, in every country state capitalism is stepping up the trade war. Behind these famous “discoveries” by the so-called “independent” inquiries by all the big newspapers we can discern the demands of capitalism in crisis. Along with the need to get their hands on liquidities and deal with tax fraud, the capitalist states are above all trying to get a better control over the companies acting in their sphere of influence, and this means regulating the obscure world of finances at some level. The big international organisms have been trying to do this for some time, especially in the mid-90s:

“Following the Group of Seven summit in Halifax in 1995, a series of initiatives aimed at a better functioning of financial markets was launched, to a large extent under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of International Settlements. These had the object of improving transparency and the way that financial and economic data is divulged, of strengthening surveillance of national and international financial systems and putting in place mechanisms of support for periods of crisis and providing training in the supervision of the finance sector”[3]

Despite the measures taken, the reality of the economic crisis, the short-term vision and irresponsible policies of certain private or even public operators, and the overall trend towards every man for himself - all this has increased the danger of a fragmentation of trade and of the world economy. The endless scandals like the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, blown up by the media, serve to underline the need for greater control by the state, the need to rein in those who flout discipline and work in the shadows to the detriment of the economic needs of the major states. As we can see from the whole history of the complex and fragile efforts to keep finance under control, tax havens will still be useful and are not going to disappear. But the state has to remain the chief gangster, retain the monopoly of a whole mass of capital which could escape its control if it doesn’t act firmly. This is all the more true at a time when corruption, “affairs” and what the bourgeoisie prudishly calls “conflicts of interests” are becoming more and more commonplace, undermining the higher interests of the state. The height of hypocrisy is that it is the heads of government themselves who are often the leading tax cheats and specialists in “tax optimisation”. Among the revelations in the Paradise Papers, let’s not forget all the politicians who are often the most zealous defenders of austerity and of anti-working class measures[4].

The working class has nothing to gain from increasing regulations on tax havens

Capitalism in crisis breeds both tax havens and attempts to regulate them. Just as it breeds more and more unemployment, insecure jobs, and poverty. This degradation of working class living standards has nothing to do with whether tax havens are regulated or not. It’s in capitalism’s interest to make a profit from the exploitation of the working class. A worker who doesn’t add to the growth of capital is a useless commodity that is maintained at the lowest price in order to preserve social peace. It’s an unprofitable mouth to feed and the mass of workers without work is rising inexorably. Given the level of state debt today, a bit of extra tax revenue isn’t going to solve the growing budgetary difficulties. Only a reduction in what the bourgeoisie calls “social spending” is on the agenda. Behind a supposed moralisation of capitalism, the so-called struggle against tax paradises and fraud, the real future of this system is the accelerating decline of every aspect of proletarian living conditions.

Stephen, 28.12.17

 

 

Under the heading ‘Readers’ Contributions’ we aim 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.

 

 

Some notes on elements of Marx's 1841 doctoral thesis on The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature and the profundity of the Epicurean "swerve"

Given the fragments, literally, of the works of Epicurus available to Marx at the time, the materialist analysis that he manages to develop from them is pretty amazing. After Marx's demise much more evidence of Epicurus' philosophy has been found: on charcoal remains of papyri in Philodemus' library in Herculeum, on the wall of Diogenes of Oenoanda and writings kept in the Vatican for whom Epicurus was strictly taboo. The mere mention of Epicurus (or Lucretius) led to torture or imprisonment by the Inquisition in Naples and all of their followers were consigned to the Sixth Circle of Hell. Marx was also assisted in this work on Epicurus by the poem On the Nature of Things and works of the aforementioned Roman poet Lucretius.

Titus Lucretius Carus was a great influence on the sixteenth century Italian materialist Giambattista Vico, and an even bigger influence on the workers' movement. He developed the idea of descent with modification, and understood that energy could neither be created nor destroyed. His poem was the basis for Lewis Henry Morgan's great work, Ancient Society... and thus Engel's work The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State.  He laid out the tenets and philosophy of Epicurus in his poem. The renowned Epicurean scholar, Cyril Bailey who translated his work into English, said in 1928: "Looking back on his (Marx's) work now it is almost astonishing to see how far he got considering the materials then available and he was probably the first person to see the true distinction between the Democritean and Epicurean systems". And to a large part he did this by focusing on the meaning of the Epicurean swerve.

Epicurus' study of the atom allowed him to delve into "the nature of human sensation and existence". Benjamin Farrington, noted scholar of Greek philosophy, wrote: "Oddly enough it was Karl Marx in his doctoral thesis... who first took the measure of the problem and provided the solution... making Epicurus the deeper of the two (in comparison to Democritus) inasmuch as he laboured to find room in his system both for animate and inanimate being, both for nature and society, both for the phenomena of the external world and the demands of moral consciousness" (From Marx's Ecology, materialism and nature by John Bellamy Foster).

Epicurus' work removes the gods (almost entirely) and the fear and terror that they inspire in mortal man, opening the way for chance, possibilities and freedom: "That which is abstractly possible, which can be conceived constitutes no obstacle to the thinking subject, no limit, no stumbling-block".  Continuing from this, only Marx could say from the fragments that he knew of: (that) "Epicurus therefore proceeds with boundless nonchalance in the explanation of separate physical phenomena" and this from the possibilities that brought them about. In contrast to Democritus, who also contributed to a materialist analysis, Epicurus posed the question of a tiny "swerve" in the atom against the straight, deterministic lines of the former. Cicero ridiculed this idea calling it "disgraceful" and said it was "entirely impossible" that the universe came about by "complexities, combinations and adhesions of the atoms one with another". Hegel suggested that he had nothing useful to say; similar criticisms were levelled against Epicurus by the 17th century French philosopher Pierre Bayle, but the strange reality of the quantum nature of the atom is now beyond doubt. Lucretius understood this: "... if the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate" nothing would change, but this process does take place "in time unfixt, imperceptible to the senses and in the smallest possible space". The further relevance to quantum mechanics is evident. For Marx the swerve represents "the soul of the atom, the concept of abstract individuality".

Epicurus suggests qualities to the atom, size, shape and weight whose declination (swerve) opposes any determinism: (the atoms) "are therefore opposed to one another as immediate realities". Marx agrees with Lucretius, saying that "the declination breaks the fati doedra (bonds of fate)", and applied to consciousness "the declination is that something in its breast that can fight back and resist". The declination lifts the atom out of the domain of determinism. If atoms didn't swerve they could neither repel nor attract, and it's from this repulsion and attraction that, according to Epicurus with Marx: "the world of appearance emerges", appearance that is transformed by consciousness from essence. Repulsion and attraction go beyond Democritus' determinism, just as the swerve of the atom goes beyond the relative existence of atoms falling in fixed lines. Democritus assumes an infinite number of shapes of the atom up to infinite size. But according to Lucretius, "it is rather by a definite and finite number of shapes that the atoms are differentiated from one another", which is also another way of expressing the modern theory of the conservation of energy.

As for weight, in the view of Epicurus it exists only as a different weight and the atoms themselves are substantial "centres of gravity" with weight existing in respect of repulsion and attraction. In this way Epicurus anticipates the fact that all bodies, whatever their weight and mass, have the same velocity when they fall through space. Time is discussed by these Greeks in some ways similar to that of modern-day physicist Carlo Rovelli, and both Democritus and Epicurus agree that time is excluded from the atom. For the latter, infinite time exists within infinite space comprising infinite worlds, giving rise to free-will against superstition and fear of the gods. Following Epicurus, Lucretius writes: "... time by itself does not exist... It must not be claimed that anyone can sense time by itself apart from the movement of things or their restful immobility... accidents of matter, or of the place in which things happen". Marx calls this "the 'accidens' of accidens". Time is in opposition to space, time is change as change, and further for Marx, it is the "fire of essence" which can only be seen through reason: "... this reflection of appearance in itself which constitutes the concept of time, has its separate existence in the conscious sensuous. Human sensuousness is therefore embodied time, the existing reflection of the sensuous world itself". 

There's a chapter called "The Meteors", by which Epicurus means all celestial bodies; and this is doubly important for the Greeks because their "philosophers worshipped their own minds in the celestial bodies" (like a "cult" according to Marx) and this was another factor in the elevation of the gods that Epicurus flatly rejected. Once the myth is removed from the heavens everything is possible, every explanation is sufficient. For example, there's not one explanation to a lightning strike but a number of interacting properties and reactions, and the task for Epicurus is to "trace their cause and banish the source of disturbance and dread". He takes comfort in the fact that everything is impermanent and unstable, not eternal and immortal. Marx says that Epicurus "in wrath and passionate violence" rejects those that propose one method of explanation of the Unique, Eternal and Divine in the heavenly bodies. The irregularity of orbits, the number of multiple possibilities involved in heavenly phenomena, the multitude of explanations is for Epicurus the road to calm, understanding and freedom. For Marx the contingency and freedom espoused by Epicurus, which before him was mechanical determinism, brought out the "active side".

Marx's materialism has strong roots in the swerve of Epicurus, showing that it could be an element in human emancipation from the material conditions of a world characterised by the development of human relations to its basic needs, from which consciousness develops. Chance and contingency play a part in this along with human ethical considerations. Marx wasn't uncritical of Epicurus since he was only interpreting the world, but his interpretation gave the world a direction and in the thesis Marx builds on some of his contradictions. He criticised his ideas of too many possibilities and his individualism but, again, these were part and parcel of the outcome. Engels, up to his death, was, enthusiastically with Marx all the way on the materialism of Epicurus. Engel's himself rejected much of bourgeois materialism in favour of the Greek "enlightenment", particularly Epicurus and Lucretius. He continued Marx's work on Epicurus and praised what he called the latter's "immanent dialectics". Epicurus recognised the estrangement of human beings from the human world in the shape of religion, now reinforced by the alienation of the labour-capital relationship, and had profound concerns about the well-being of the earth and the relationship of nature to man, points which Engels picked up and expanded on along with Marx.

A final quote from Marx in the thesis on Epicurus: "When human life lay grovelling in all men's sight, crushed to the earth under the deadweight of religion whose grim features loured menacingly upon mortals from the four quarters of the sky, a man of Greece was first to raise mortal eyes in defiance, first to stand erect and brave the challenge. Fables of the gods did not crush him, nor the lightning flash and growling menace of the sky.... Therefore religion in its turn lies crushed beneath his feet, and we by his triumph are lifted level with the skies.

The difference between Democritean and Epicurean philosophy of nature which we established at the end of the general section has been elaborated and confirmed in all domains of nature. In Epicurus therefore, atomistics with all its contradictions has been carried through and completed as the natural science of self-consciousness. This self-consciousness under the form of abstract individuality is an absolute principle.

Epicurus has thus carried atomistics to its final conclusion, which is its dissolution and conscious opposition to the universal. For

Democritus, on the other hand, the atom is only the general objective expression of the empirical investigation of nature as a whole.

Hence the atom remains for him a pure and abstract category, a hypothesis, the result of experience, not its active [energisches] principle. This hypothesis remains therefore without realisation, just as it plays no further part in determining the real investigation."

We are conscious now that far from being crushed, religion, particularly its fundamentalist versions in both east and west, has been fed and invigorated by decomposing capitalism. The task is to overcome this along with all the divisions that emanate from the breakdown of ruling class ideology and to this effect we have to salute the groundbreaking work of Marx on Epicurus.

Marx's appendix on Plutarch

At the end of Marx's dissertation is an appendix called: Critique of Plutarch's Polemic against the Theology of Epicurus, of which, like much of the latter's work, only fragments survive. Nevertheless, even here, Marx makes some significant points and looks at some new areas in these fragments that we can return to in the context of the whole. It's also worth remembering that this work of Marx developing on Epicurus showed his gradual independence from Hegel and demonstrated to him in the process the importance of religion and the unfolding necessity to try to develop a profound understanding of what religion meant for humanity and its emancipation, while contending that "No good for man lies outside himself".

For Plutarch, God was on the side of good against the wicked - the powerful nature of this aspect of religious ideology shouldn't be underestimated even to this day. Against Epicurus, Plutarch argued that if there was no God there was no joy or happiness. According to him, belief in God, as well as bringing relief from pain, fear and worry "indulges in a playful and merry inebriation, even in amatory matters!” Marx responds on the proof of God that gods are like imagined money - in the end there will be a price to pay. And anyway, proof of 'your' God is a disavowal of others and vice-versa. Plutarch divides society into the good, decent, intelligent and the bad and uncivilised whereas, according to Marx, Epicurus deals with the "essential relationship of the human soul in general". For Marx, Plutarch's objection to Epicurus' ungodly atomism poses the question of the eternal, unchangeable characteristics of man against those of change, free-will and self-consciousness. Plutarch's view of religion is based on the reform of the wicked by, first of all an animal-like fear and secondly, sentimentality: "There is no qualitative difference between this and the previous category. What in the first place appeared in the shape of an animal fear appears here in the shape of human fear, the form of sentiment. The content is the same" (Marx). After talking about sentiment Marx goes on to briefly talk about the "... naked, empirical ego, the love of self, the oldest love...".

Marx certainly has plenty of criticisms of Epicurus on the questions of mechanistics and "accidents" but wholly supports his view that events of human history are neither mere accidents nor merely arise out of necessity. Epicurus recognises and never denies necessity or subsistence but always insists that the bounds of both must be broken and this by the means of human reason and human consciousness.

In the dissertation Marx argues that Epicurus goes beyond the sceptical world of the Democratean atom and its "subjective semblance" by positing its "objective appearance". "Implicit in Epicurus' philosophy was the notion that knowledge both of the world of the atom (imperceptible to the senses) and of sensuous reality arose from the inner necessity of human reason embodied in abstract individuality and freedom (self-determination)." Marx's Ecology materialism and nature, John Bellamy Foster.

In his appendix on Plutarch Marx also takes aim at the German idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling, whose positions degenerated into a defence of religion and from this a cock-eyed vision of nature. Schelling's appointment as Rector at the University of Berlin indicated the closing off of universities to the Young Hegelians and a definite turn by Marx into further profound applications of his work.

Marx took what was best about the enlightenment of Ancient Greece and defended and refined the analyses of Epicurus against the determinism of Democritus; and then he defended the materialism of the modern Enlightenment against the reactionary views of Schelling. Marx went beyond Epicurus while underlining his importance for a materialist analysis. He reined in some of his "exaggerations" and sharpened up his innate dialectics.

Baboon. 15.2.18

The publication of our article ‘Reflections on the split in the Anarchist Federation’[1] has been widely read (close to 1000 reads at the time of writing), but has also ignited a storm of virulent attacks on the ICC, led by two longstanding members of the libcom collective, Steven and Mike Harman[2].

The ostensible reason for these attacks was a short paragraph in the article describing the events at the Anarchist Bookfair which had precipitated the split in the AF, a clash between a group of radical feminists (labelled “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists” by their opponents) and supporters of “transgender rights” over the question of transphobia – hatred or discrimination against transgender people. This had not been the main focus of the article – the paragraph had figured as an introduction to a more general critical analysis of the statement of the group which had left the AF. But it was the central focus of the attacks on our article. We - or “the authors of the article” – were accused either of gross ignorance of the issues (and were given sundry links to sites where the basic terminology would be made clear to us) or of outright transphobia. The main evidence provided was that at the beginning of the article we had placed the word transphobia in inverted commas, as though it was not a real thing; but more importantly, that we had referred to transgender women (ie those who have “transitioned” from a male gender identity to a female one) as transgender males. According to our critics, we were thus providing support for the radical feminists, who had distributed leaflets at the Bookfair criticising proposed government legislation which will make gender identity a matter of subjective choice, because in the view of these particular feminists it will expose women-only spaces to the presence of people who they don’t consider to be women at all.

It’s true that this misuse of the current terminology was an error on our part, and we have made certain changes in the paragraph to make it clear that we are simply describing the position of the “TERFs” and in no way supporting them. But it was clear from the approach of posts attacking us that however much we altered the formulation used, we would still be judged guilty of promoting transphobia, because we have an entirely different approach to the whole issue. This is how Mike Harman deals with it. He cites the attempt by our poster on the thread, Alf, to focus on the real questions raised by the article: “is it true that significant parts of the anarchist movement are being pulled into the politics of 'identity', whether based on gender, sexuality, race or nationality?” and replies:

“You're asking the wrong question, because you don't understand the basis of the conflict. Another question to ask would be, ‘Why did two Green party members feel sufficiently emboldened that they could distribute transphobic leaflets at the anarchist bookfair, and put up posters in the toilets?’”

Harman’s post thus provides a justification for refusing to engage with the growing impact of identity politics on the anarchist milieu. Not only that, but Steven in particular repeatedly demanded that our entire article should be taken down – a clear attempt to silence us[3].

But in insisting that the one and only issue is the action of the “TERFs”, Harman also implies that unless you side with the anti-TERF resistance, you are providing ammunition for their transphobic agenda. In other words, what the posts by the libcom collective members really show is not our insidious prejudice against trans people, but the libcom collective’s own deepening involvement in identity politics or “id pol”. Small wonder that Steven (who is a remaining member of the AF) dismisses our view of the split as being an attempt – albeit partial and inadequate – to reject the growing weight of id pol, as “bollocks”.

For our part, we want to emphasise that not only do we not take sides in this clash between different brands of identity politics: we are opposed to all of them. As our sympathiser Baboon put it in a post on our forum: “I don't think that the fight between radical feminists and trans activists has any possible advantage for the proletariat or in any way assists the pressing needs of the class … I'd seen these two groups confronting each other on the TV weeks before the bookfair on Channel 4 news where (at a Gay Pride march I think) their confrontation was turning very ugly and very nasty[4]. At the bookfair apparently the police were called by one faction and both factions were involved in mobbing and scapegoating, a situation that showed nothing positive from a working class perspective and was entirely in line with certain populist developments arising from capitalism's decomposition”[5]

At the same time, both groups are founded on deep illusions in capitalist legislation. Some feminists seem to think that women are defended by current legislation, but will be undermined by the change. Meanwhile, some trans activists seem to think that the change to the Gender Recognition Act will be a great step forward for trans people. Both milieus have profound reformist illusions. And their goals are mutually exclusive, therefore deeply divisive.

WR, February 2018

 

The Anarchist Federation, one of the main anarchist organisations in Britain, has just been through a major split. Members in Leicester and London, including a number of founder members, have left the organisation following the tumult over the issue of “transphobia”[1] at October’s Anarchist Bookfair.

If we were right in our assessment of the AF as an internationalist anarchist group[2], this is a significant event which attests to growing difficulties across the entire spectrum of groups who are seeking to develop an authentic revolutionary opposition to capitalism – not only among anarchists but also within the communist left. We think that it is essential to understand the roots of these difficulties if we are to face up to the challenge they pose, and it is in this spirit that we aim to critically analyse the statement issued by those who have decided to leave the AF.[3]

The attempt to break with “identity politics”

The statement of the seceders begins thus:

“It has been over a month since the London Anarchist Bookfair and as a movement we are still reeling, with deep divisions between people who had respect for each other and once worked well together. We are still shocked, horrified and saddened by events as are most people, no matter what perspective or interpretation they have on what happened and the role of the Bookfair collective.

We were, until recently, members of the AF who did not sign the initial statement that was issued by Edinburgh AF and signed by two other AF groups, nor did we support the statement issued by other campaigns and organisations. We did not want to respond immediately as there are so many issues involved and emotions are strong. We hoped that after some time we could give a political assessment of the situation rather than just a knee-jerk reaction based on our emotional response to events and statements from other groups”[4].

The former members have reconstituted themselves into London Anarchist Communists and Leicester Anarchist Communists[5].

It’s not possible here to deal in any detail with the events at the Bookfair, which caused such ructions across the anarchist milieu and even reached the national press[6]. In essence it involved a clash between a group of feminists who intervened at the Bookfair with a leaflet arguing that new government legislation on “transgender rights” is an infringement on women’s rights to organize separately, since it would allow people who they – the leafleters – don’t consider to be women at all into spaces reserved by or for women. The leaflet provoked a lot of anger from “trans rights” supporters, who saw it as an attempt to whip up fear of transgender people by a tendency they call “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists” or TERFS, and one of the women supporting the leafleters, a well-known activist who was involved in the MacLibel case and has been targeted in a particularly vicious way by the undercover police, was subject to mobbing and accused of being a fascist. The Bookfair Collective, which attempted to intervene in the situation to calm it down, subsequently issued a statement saying that this would be its last Bookfair – it has experienced similar clashes in a number of other Bookfairs and its patience has run out[7].

These events are not unconnected to other scandals centred on the question of morality and behavior which have rocked the anarchist movement in the last few years, the most notable of which are “Aufhebengate” and the “Schmidt affair”[8], both of which raise the problem of the role played in the anarchist milieu by individuals with a dubious relationship with the police (in the first case) and with out-and-out racists in the second. We have also seen a substantial part of this milieu plunging into support for “national liberation” in the shape of the “Rojava revolution”, armed enclaves in Syria controlled by the Kurdish nationalists of the PKK and based on a semi-anarchist ideology of “democratic confederalism”[9], and an extremely widespread support for anti-fascism which was highlighted by the incidents around Charlottesville in the USA[10].

These developments are not taking place in a vacuum. The tendency, within anarchism, to abandon class politics and look for solutions in various forms of identity politics – whether based on gender, race, or nation – while not new, are certainly being exacerbated by the characteristics of the current historic period, in which capitalism is sinking towards barbarism while the working class, weakened by all the divisions engendered by this decomposing society, has found it extremely difficult to resist as a class and above all to rediscover its own perspective for the future of humanity. In a situation where the working class is tending to lose its sense of itself as a distinct social force, it is not surprising that the problem of class identity is being obscured by a fixation on other, more specific identities – a fixation which, while linked to genuine oppressions, tend to obscure the central problem of exploitation and the capitalist social relation.

The statement issued by the seceding groups is highly critical of the mobbing witnessed at the Bookfair. And while it affirms the importance of fighting against all particular forms of oppression, including transphobia, it also contains a questioning of the identity-based politics which it feels has become increasingly dominant within the AF, and a strong desire to return to “class struggle anarchism”.  The question of internationalism is also directly posed by this split, because, although the AF published a fairly clear statement on the “Rojava revolution” some time ago[11], some of the comrades who left the organisation also consider that pro-PKK positions have also been increasingly influential within the organization[12].

These aspects of the statement are expressions of a proletarian reaction to the engulfing of the AF in the mire of identity politics and a drift towards support for radical forms of nationalism. They confirm what we wrote in our two-part article on internationalist anarchism in the UK, where we argued that for all its concessions to leftist campaigns, the AF was in the tradition of internationalist anarchism – of those currents in the anarchist movement which have stood against any participation in imperialist war[13]. The revival of the term “anarchist communism” (the AF had originally been called the Anarchist Communist Federation) is symbolic of this will to recover the healthiest parts of its tradition, which they feel can no longer be done within the AF.

And yet: the very fact that these criticisms of identity politics are carried out in the historic framework of anarchism means that they don’t – and cannot – go far enough.

Anarchist obstacles to theoretical advance

What is the evidence for this claim?

·         The statement begins by admitting how difficult it has proved to overcome all the divisions within the working class and to build a revolutionary movement committed to the overthrow of capitalism. But it gives little sign of trying to situate these difficulties in the overall context of the present period – a period, as we have noted, marked by a loss of class identity and a low level of class struggle. It’s true that prior to the split the Leicester group of the AF had held a meeting in Leicester and one at the Anarchist Bookfair, as well as writing an article that started a thread on libcom, under the heading ‘Is the working class movement dead?’[14], which posed serious questions about the problems facing the working class and revolutionaries. There is a recognition in the article that the class struggle has been weakening over a long period but the approach to the problem in the presentation to the meetings is essentially an empirical one which is unable to place it in the global, historic context of capitalism’s terminal phase of decline.

·         Although it affirms the central role of the class struggle, the statement does not pose the fundamental theoretical issue: the nature of the working class as a historic, revolutionary class, or as Marx famously put it in 1843: “a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat”. (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

It is this conception which enables us to understand why the struggle of the proletariat contains, in potential, the solution to all the particular oppressions spawned by capitalist society. But this conception of the proletariat is, of course, the one developed by Marx and the marxist movement, which affirms that the class struggle is not restricted to the economic sphere but has numerous dimensions: social, political, moral, intellectual. It was this understanding which enabled Lenin, that bugbear of the anarchists, to develop a critique of the Economist vision which limits the class movement to something that takes place in the factories and essentially on a day to day basis. And in many ways this is precisely the conception of the main currents in anarchism – most notable the anarcho-syndicalists, but also of those who produced the statement, for whom a class struggle orientation seems to boil down to “getting involved” in the workplace and the local community, which is presented almost as a panacea: “our answer to the first issue” – the reluctance of working people to get involved in revolutionary politics – “is that we need to make sure as anarchists we are directly involved in struggle, in the workplace and the community”. The issue for us here is not whether revolutionaries should engage with struggles in the workplace or the neighbourhood, but the content of that engagement – its methods and objectives, which are nowhere posed in the seceding statement. Otherwise comrades risk burning themselves out in non-stop activism whose real content is essentially a trade unionist one. This is evident in the case of the anarcho-syndicalists whose “organising” role is linked to a project of building a “revolutionary union”. But even those who appear to be more critical of trade unionism can be led back to union-building through a simple focus on day-to-day workplace organising. It was pointed out on the libcom thread about the AF split that some of those who left the AF had previously joined the IWW, which is not entirely consistent with the AF’s position on anarcho-syndicalism, while some of the campaigns of the more “autonomist” Angry Workers of the World group in West London seem to be heading towards calls to build new IWW or “independent union” branches[15].

·         This restricted view of the class struggle does not offer any real alternative to the ideas of “idpol”, for whom being working class is another particular oppression, another separate identity with its own rights to defend. The statement’s critique of identity politics and the kind of mobbing witnessed at the Bookfair makes some valid points – in particular by recognising that fighting against oppressive and divisive ideologies is one that takes place inside the working class, and that those proletarians who are weighed down by various kinds of prejudices need to be won over in the course of the class struggle, not treated as enemies. And yet the ABC of identity politics is not questioned: “We support oppressed groups to organise autonomously”, without any discussion about whether such forms of organising – by gender, sexual orientation, race – tend to become inter-classist by definition and create obstacles to a wider class unity. The statement mentions that it disagrees with the statements put out by Edinburgh and two other AF groups, but it doesn’t mention the fact that one of these groups was the “Trans Action Faction” within the AF[16], and no criticism is made of the organisational model adopted by the AF, which presents itself as a myriad not only of local groups but of groups organised around sexual and other identities. Again on the organisational question, while it’s recognised in the statement that a lot of people entered the AF without really agreeing with its Aims and Principles, the new group goes no further than reprinting the original document and doesn’t appear to have an answer to the pertinent question posed by Darren P on the libcom thread: “Just out of interest how was it that people whose politics are closer to liberal idpol than anarchist-communism came to be the majority in the AF anyhow? Isn’t there any kind of screening process for new members? In other words, is there not a need to examine the ‘entry requirements’ of a genuine revolutionary organisation?”[17]

Does any of this mean that all the problems posed by the different forms of oppression and division reinforced by capitalist society have been solved by the marxist movement? Not at all: even when we are talking about authentic marxism and not its Stalinist or leftist caricature, its various currents have not been immune from workerist ideologies, reductionist visions of class, and even overtly “patriarchal attitudes”. But we are convinced that it’s only the marxist, historical method that will enable us to understand the origins of different forms of oppression and the way to oppose and overcome them, which can only mean starting from a lucid class standpoint that states openly that identity politics are a dead-end[18].

For us, the underlying problem is that, historically speaking, anarchism itself stems from deep confusions about class: the Proudhonist tendency classically expressed a reaction by the artisan to being dissolved into the proletariat; the Bakuninist current tried to respond to the development of the proletariat with a more collectivist approach but without jettisoning the attachment to the centrality of “liberty” versus “authority; the anarcho-syndicalists, while being a healthy response to the parliamentary cretinism overcoming social democracy at the beginning of the 20th century, fell into the workerist view of the class struggle we mentioned above, evading or even rejecting the political dimension of the class movement. This means that simply returning to these historic roots will not provide the basis for a real clarification and a genuine advance.

There is also an inherent tendency within anarchism towards what many anarchists themselves describe as “the Big Tent” – a kind of family conception in which almost everyone who pins the “anarcho-“ or “libertarian” label on their jacket is welcome through the door. This is typified by the Anarchist Bookfair which has always had the vaguest and most inconsistent criteria for participation, but in a narrower sense the same criticism can be made of the AF, which reveals itself to be a marsh inhabited by different and often antagonistic species.

Anarchists have often taken offense at our use of terms the marsh or the swamp to describe the milieu they inhabit, but we see it as a necessary characterisation of a real political terrain in this society – the middle-ground between the two major classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, made up not only of direct expressions of the intermediate layers (urban petty bourgeoisie, peasantry etc) but also, on the one hand, of degenerating proletarian currents heading towards the ground of bourgeois, leftist politics, and on the other hand, of groups and individuals that are seeking seriously to reach the proletarian shore. A place of transition, but not a place to get bogged down.

In our series on the communist left and internationalist anarchism, we insisted on the need for fraternal discussion between our tendency and those anarchists who indeed express a proletarian vision even if, to our mind, they have not yet left the old swamp behind entirely. Regarding the split in the AF, for all our criticisms, we remain open to further debate, not only with those who left but also with those who chose to stay in the AF. For us, political criticism is not in contradiction with fraternal discussion, and should not be confused with sectarianism[19].

Amos 23.2.18

1. This is the current “normal” term for discrimination, hatred or prejudice against people who opt for a different gender identity than the one given when they are born. However, even among those activists involved in the issue, it is not immune from criticism:  "we’ve been intentionally moving away from using words like ‘transphobic’, ‘homophobic,’ and ‘biphobic’ because (1) they inaccurately describe systems of oppression as irrational fears, and (2) for some people, phobias are a very distressing part of their lived experience and co-opting this language is disrespectful to their experiences and perpetuates ableism." https://lgbtqia.ucdavis.edu/educated/glossary.html [10]

2. https://en.internationalism.org/series/1292 [11]

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/344/brit-anarchy [12]

https://en.internationalism.org/wr/345/brit-anarchy [13]

3. Certain changes have been in this article since it was first published  on 5.2.18. The reasons for these changes are explained in our accompanying article 'On recent attacks on the ICC on Libcom' https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201802/14928/recent-attacks-icc-libcom [14]

4. https://communistanarchism.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/class-struggle-anarchist-statement-on_1.html [15]

5. [email protected] [16]; https://leicesteraf.blogspot.co.uk/ [17]

6. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/26/transgender-anarchist-book-fair-transphobia-row [18]

7. Statements by the Bookfair Collective can be found at anarchistbookfair.org.uk [19].

8. See our statement on “Aufhenebgate”:  https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201305/7746/aufhebengate [20] on the “Schmidt affair”: https://libcom.org/discussion/ak-press-allegations-against-michael-schmidt [21]

9. https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201412/11625/anarchism-and-imperialist-war-nationalism-or-internationalism [22]

10. en.internationalism.org/icconline/201709/14390/anti-fascism-still-formula-confusion [23].
We should also mention that there has also been a split in the main international organization of the anarcho-syndicalists, the International Workers’ Association, which appears to centre round its most numerous section, the CNT in Spain. See for example https://libcom.org/article/cnt-and-iwa-part-2-crisis-iwa-seen-cnt [24].

11. https://libcom.org/article/anarchist-federation-statement-rojava-december-2014 [25]

12. See https://libcom.org/forums/anarchist-federation/whats-going-afed-27122017 [26], especially p 2 and 3

13. See note 2 for references

14. https://libcom.org/article/working-class-movement-dead [27]

15. Post 184, Steven [28]. On the AWW’s drift towards syndicalism: “Workplace groups: Currently we work in a major warehouse of a supermarket chain and factories of a major ready-meal producer and try to establish workers groups. Together with the IWW we try to organise independent union structures in ten local companies”. https://libcom.org/article/migration-and-national-social-democracy-britain [29]

16. afed.org.uk/afed-trans-action-faction-statement-in-response-to-events-at-london-anarchist-bookfair-2017 [30]

17. Post 19, Darren P [31].

18. This is why we are also publishing the article ’The dead-end of racial identity politics’ by the US group Workers’ Offensive in this issue (www.workersoffensive.org/single-post/2017/10/13/The-Dead-End-of-Racial-I... [32])

19. In this regard we note that the new group carries on a practice established for some years now by the Anarchist Bookfair (not to mention numerous other radical websites), in that it publishes a link to the Communist Workers’ Organisation, a left communist organisation whose positions are close to ours, but not to the ICC – just the Bookfair allowed the CWO to hold a stall and meetings while requests from the ICC to do the same were rejected year after year. This attitude is incoherent and a real expression of sectarianism.  If anyone in the anarchist world considers that the ICC deserves to be treated like a pariah, let them argue the case, and we will respond with our own arguments.

Faced with the torrent of “celebration” about how women (or some women) were given the vote in 1918, we are pleased to publish this short response by a comrade who has moved close to the views of left communism – and thus to the ideas of Sylvia Pankurst in 1918, who exposed the granting of the vote as a deception aimed at stemming the tide of revolution that had been provoked by the horrors of the First World War[1]. ICC

 

The Workers’ Socialist Federation began life as the East London Federation of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the primary organisation for women’s suffrage led by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. In contrast to the WSPU, the East London Federation was disproportionately composed of working-class (as opposed to middle-class) women, and open to men. Sylvia Pankhurst was therefore concerned with social reforms and industrial action for the improvement of the dire conditions of the working-class, whilst the WSPU privileged [propertied] women’s suffrage above any other cause and aimed to appeal to middle-class women. The working-class and reformist nature of the East London Federation led to its expulsion from the WSPU in 1914.

During the First World War, most of the international, women's suffrage movement – e.g. the WSPU in Britain, or National American Woman Suffrage Association in the US – rallied to the support of their countries’ war efforts, engaging in patriotic/nationalist, pro-war sloganeering. The war exacerbated the poverty and hardships of the working-class in East London, and Sylvia Pankhurst tried in vain to alleviate the suffering of workers through charity, lobbying for reforms and co-operatives.

The Russian revolution led to a radical alteration in Sylvia Pankhurst’s politics. When Pankhurst changed the name of her organisation from the “East London Federation of Suffragettes”, to the “Women’s Suffrage Federation”, to “Workers' Suffrage Federation”, and finally the "Workers' Socialist Federation", and the name of her paper from Women’s Dreadnought to Workers' Dreadnought, it illustrated this shift in her politics, away from ‘women’ (an interclassist category), towards working-class women, finally to the working class in general, and her ultimate rejection of the politics of reformist suffragism in favour of communism.

By 1918/9, Pankhurst recognised that it was pointless, and in fact reactionary, to campaign for suffrage amidst a world, proletarian revolutionary wave. At a time when the very existence of parliaments and nation-states was put into question by the revolutionary working-class, whether or not the working-class, or women, or middle-class women, should have the right to vote in elections to capitalist parliaments had simply lost all relevance. Parliaments were no longer a site of meaningful, political contestation for the proletariat, the future was to be found in the form of territorial soviets (workers' councils).

“The Communist Party, believing that instruments of capitalist organization and domination cannot be used for revolutionary ends, refrains from participation in Parliament and in the Bourgeois Local Government system. It will ceaselessly impress upon the workers that their salvation lies not in the organ of the bourgeois “democracy,” but through the Workers’ Soviets.

The Communist Party refuses all compromise with Right and Centrist Socialism. The British Labour Party is dominated by Opportunist Reformists, Social Patriots, and Trade Union Bureaucrats, who have already allied themselves with capitalism against the workers’ revolution at home and abroad. The construction and constitution of the British Labour Party is such that the working masses cannot express themselves through it. It is affiliated and will remain affiliated to the Second International, so long as that so-called International shall exist.” (The Communist Party: Provisional Resolutions towards a Programme, 1920)

This great public campaign around celebrating suffragism, and the attempt to portray Sylvia Pankhurst as a suffragette, rather than the anti-parliamentary communist she became, is part of a ruling-class ideological offensive: to recuperate what can be recuperated, to cover-up what can't be recuperated, to rewrite history, leaving-out all the revolutionary bits. In general, undermining the historical memory of the workers' movement in the centenary years of the worldwide, revolutionary wave of 1917-23.

Why is the ruling-class so loud in its celebration of the Representation of the People Act 1918, as some great moment in British history? Why does the ruling class portray suffragettes as national heroes? What would the left communist Sylvia Pankhurst have thought about this national celebration of suffragism?

“It is interesting to observe that the legal barriers to women’s participation in Parliament and its elections were not removed until the movement to abolish Parliament altogether had received the strong encouragement of witnessing the overthrow of Parliamentary Government in Russia and the setting up of Soviets.

Those events in Russia evoked a response throughout the world not only amongst the minority who welcomed the idea of Soviet Communism, but also amongst the upholders of reaction. The latter were by no means oblivious to the growth of Sovietism when they decided to popularise the old Parliamentary machine by giving to some women both votes and the right to be elected.” (Workers’ Dreadnought, 15th December 1923)

Is it not the case that all those celebrating suffrage are falling for democratism?

“Even were it possible to democratise the machinery of Parliament, its inherently anti-Communist character would still remain. The King might be replaced by a President, or all trace of the office abolished. The House of Lords might disappear, or be transformed into a Senate. The Prime Minister might be chosen by a majority vote of Parliament, or elected by referendum of the people. The Cabinet might be chosen by referendum, or become an Executive Committee elected by Parliament. The doings of Parliament might be checked by referendum.

Nevertheless, Parliament would still be a non-Communist institution. Under Communism we shall have no such machinery of legislation and coercion. The business of the Soviets will be to organise the production and supply of the common services; they can have no other lasting function. ” (Pankhurst, 1922)

Craftwork, 12.2.18

 

In number 523 of its paper, Le Proletaire, dated February/March/ April 2017, the International Communist Party (PCI) published an article: Populism, populism you say?, in which it confronts this phenomenon and its current growth and, on the basis of this analysis, also undertakes a criticism of the analysis of the ICC on this question. The first part of our response to this polemic will be centred on the elements of analyses used by the PCI itself in order to evaluate its capacity to explain the phenomenon of populism.

We must say first of all though, through its positions, the PCI places itself in the defence of a proletarian point of view. Through this it demonstrates that it is still situated in the camp of the proletariat and that it globally defends the positions of the communist left.

 

What is populism, according to the PCI?

 

The comrades of the PCI correctly note:

- that other parts of the bourgeoisie use populism ideologically so as to drive proletarians onto the electoral terrain around the mystification of the "defence of democracy". We are thus in agreement with the PCI on the fact that the false opposition between populism and anti-populism is an ideological trap which serves the interests of the bourgeoisie.

- that the greatest danger for the working class is not the extreme-right but the left of the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie: "(Populism) cannot however replace the infinitely more powerful counter-revolutionary role that classic reformism plays (qualified by the PCI as the parties of the left), solidly implanted as it is in the working class and thus able to paralyse it" and these comrades are equally clear on anti-fascism, which completely distinguishes them from the positions of the extreme left of capital. They were unambiguous in denouncing the call to vote for Chirac in 2002 and at the last elections they once again denounced the electoral and democratic mystifications[i] .

Also Le Proletaire rightly emphasises that demagogy is not at all peculiar to populism, and the same goes for electoral promises. We undoubtedly share the same proletarian ground.

But what is the analysis of populism advanced by the PCI? Above all, it assures us that it is of a petty-bourgeois nature. In order to support this it provides a quote from Marx taken from the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte: "Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided".

This general characterisation of the petty-bourgeoisie remains perfectly valid but what relationship, what link does that have with the billionaire Trump; with the advocates of Brexit? We have no idea... it explains nothing about the present situation. The only historic element that it gives is the reference to populism of Russia in the XIXth century. Again, we don't see any relationship between Russian populism of the XIXth century (relationships between the intellectual petty-bourgeoisie and the peasantry, the methods of this petty-bourgeoisie of the time oriented towards individual action and terrorism) with the present day, except instead of referring to Trump, the Tea Party or the currents of the extreme right today (the Front Nationale and other extreme right wing populists in Europe) the PCI talks to us about populism "in general".  In this way, through its indistinct rejection it mixes up in the same "petty-bourgeois" rubbish bin the populism of the extreme right (Trump, Le Pen and the partisans of Brexit) or again the zealous propagandists of bourgeois democratic mystifications (‘Democracy Now’ in Spain or the altermondialists) with authentic reactions of the working class, certainly still influenced by illusions in democracy, such the Occupy and Indignados movements...

What can one draw out of such a confusion that sees populism equivalent only to the petty-bourgeoisie, while schematically glossing over an analysis of reality and seeking to track down everything that it thinks points to the ideology of the petty-bourgeoisie? Nothing! Other than it shows a total absence of an analysis of the phenomenon of populism and its historic evolution in order to understand how it corresponds to the present situation.

By substituting an assortment of ready-made schemas for an analysis of populism, Le Proletaire ends up with aberrations and stupid affirmations completely disconnected from reality: such is the case when it raises the question of a "workers' aristocracy" in order to explain the influence of populist themes in the ranks of the workers. This "theorisation", made by Engels and followed by Lenin, was already an error in their times because it aimed to explain the propagation of bourgeoisie ideology (not specifically that of the petty-bourgeoisie) in the workers' ranks. Moreover, the most experienced workers who have the best living and working conditions with the highest wages are not those most open to the present populist ideology. The reality is contrary: it is those who are most hit with the full force of the crisis and unemployment in the most grim and ravaged regions (the ex-mining basin in the north of France or the old steel-working bastions of Lorraine, where the FN made an electoral breakthrough), who are the most permeable to the themes of populism. Reality contradicts the absurd thesis of the PCI on the weight of a "workers' aristocracy" in the question of populism today[ii].

 

A schematic vision of a bourgeoisie without contradictions

 

Le Proletaire thus sees populism as a sort of rational and mechanical defensive reaction of the layers of the petty-bourgeoisie, of its particular economic interests globally compatible with, or assimilated to, the interests of the national capital. This leads them to avoid the real problem. The text even labours to show that populism doesn't pose the least problem for the bourgeoisie by using photographic empirical findings as "evidence": thus it refers to the fact that just after Trump's election Wall Street registered a stock-exchange record (along the same lines it uses a similar sledge-hammer argument of the highs of the London stock exchange after the Brexit vote in order to affirm that "the leadership of the British bourgeoisie do not at all think that this rupture is a serious problem for them"). The PCI take up the outdated and erroneous vision of the XIXth century of a bourgeoisie which plays the stock-market, whereas the stock-market is the domain par excellence of a day-to-day, short-term vision, guided by the immediate profits of the capitalists. Moreover it's for that reason that the bourgeoisie never calls into question this type of institution but make it depend on the general interests of its state, its administration, its "schedules". In reality, if the election of Trump was immediately followed by a hike in the Wall Street stock market it was simply because it was already announced that taxes would be lowered on businesses and this could only lead to a favourable welcome by the shareholders.

Another reason developed by the article doesn't get much traction either: the idea that Trump definitely serves the common interests of the bourgeoisie, since there have never been so many billionaires in the same government. There's no doubt about the capitalist nature of the government and the fact that it's full of the richest elements. That doesn't mean that it’s guaranteed to serve the best general interests of the capitalist system. We can suppose that the PCI also think that Brexit will definitively serve the interests of British capital. But we don't really see how Brexit strengthens British capital and the PCI doesn't say anything to support this notion.

It's important to reveal what the PCI doesn't say and the questions that it doesn't pose. What is the strategy followed by the American bourgeoisie with the election of Trump? What is the interest of the British bourgeoisie in carrying out Brexit? Do these results strengthen them in the defence of their economic and imperialist interests in the arena of global competition? The PCI says nothing about that and provides not the least serious argumentation in this respect. The PCI is certainly correct to affirm that nationalism is, given the competition between states, a privileged means to try to draw the ranks of the bourgeoisie together behind the defence of the national capital, but that gives no explanation nor any other framework for understanding the phenomenon of populism and still less, its present development. That makes it unfit to report on the numerous problems of present society and analyse their evolution.

The article of the PCI is obliged to pay lip-service to the idea that populism bothers or concerns a part of the bourgeoisie but it doesn't explain why when it says: "Without doubt some of its striking declarations have raised the eyebrows of certain capitalist sectors: the threat of hitting imports with raised tariffs would be a severe blow for a number of industries which have delocalised a part of their production or for the large distributions centres. But one can bet that the capitalists at the head of powerful groups of interest would make that clear to their colleague Trump". Similarly the PCI is obliged to recognise that the programmes of the populists "at certain points come into contradiction with the interests of the biggest, most internationalist capitalist groups". But they see that as an epiphenomenon that has no consequences and they depart from the presumptuous explanation that the bourgeoisie will as always use these contradictions for its own profit and overcome them. It is clear that the election and the policies of Trump a year on go in a totally opposite direction to those foreseen by the PCI, according to which the bourgeoisie would listen to reason and put a stop to the pretentions of Trump. At the present time a great part of the American bourgeoisie is plunged into disarray and several sectors, including his own camp, are trying to find the means to remove him or look for some other means to dislocate the presidential functions. For a year we've seen a growing discredit, a denunciation of Trump’s lack of seriousness, of the incoherent and chaotic  policies being undertaken by the leading world power at the international level. For example, Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel constitutes, among other things, a flagrant illustration of an international policy which has only thrown oil on the fire and stirred up a new focus for uncontrolled violence in the Middle East. At the same time we see an accumulation of obstacles facing the policies favoured by the administration (including the repeal of "Obamacare", the great Trump warhorse), the incessant waltz of resignations of the highest officials, to name just some examples of this disorder at the highest levels. In Britain, for a year now Brexit has posed serious problems to the health of the national capital, particularly by weakening and considerably undermining its power through the flight of international capital that it has provoked; and this despite the financial sector always being a strong point of the British economy.  Faced with a succession of setbacks and contradictory initiatives to reach an agreement with the EU, Theresa May is more and more weakened and openly accused by her peers of incompetence, lack of preparation and confusion[iii].

That doesn't at all mean that Trump becoming president, nor the victory of Brexit, are fatal blows to capitalism, no more than it will prevent the United States or Great Britain remaining dominant imperialist powers. Neither does it prevent the bourgeoisie from trying to channel the problems linked to populist decisions and even utilising and exploiting the manifestations of the weight of populism to accelerate the decline in class consciousness, especially themes like nationalism or the defence of democracy. But the PCI, by focusing on the undoubted ideological use of populism by the bourgeoisie, totally misses the problems posed by the general dynamic of capitalism today, by the accumulation and exacerbation its contradictions, including within the bourgeoisie itself. It completely misses the stalemate between the classes and the growing tendency towards barbarism, of which populism in its present form is one of its most significant manifestations. Similarly, it completely underestimates the threats, the dangers and the traps (nationalism, channelling of the false choice between populism and anti-populism) and the growing disorientation and disarray in the class identity of the proletariat.

The consequences, following the election of Trump and the referendum on Brexit, of putting populist programmes and policies into practice are totally denied and ignored, as if the bourgeoisie of these two powers, although among the most powerful and experienced in the world, were immunised from danger and the policies undertaken and the economic orientations taken since these events run no risk of disastrous consequences for the national and world capital. The recent example of the situation in Germany following the legislative elections and the first time entry to parliament of the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany), with 87 seats and 13.5% of the vote, once again confirms the historic tendency for the development of populism. This phenomenon in Germany is particularly strong in the old industrial centres, in particular the ex-GDR (East Germany) which doesn't at all correspond to the reductionist and false vision of the PCI.

 

"Nothing new under the sun": a fixed vision of history

 

Instead of analysing and explaining the growth, development and the dynamic of the populist phenomenon, the PCI stubbornly say in respect of the present phenomenon of populism there is "nothing new under the sun". Thus they have no framework of analysis. For it, the question of the growth of populism is almost an invention by the media, a simple instrument of propaganda. As it says at the beginning of the article, populism is nothing other than "a political orientation which denies the division of society into classes" aiming solely "to make the proletariat lose its class orientations". Which is an extremely reductionist view and comes down to saying that the growth in power of populism only corresponds to a manoeuvre, set-up and orchestrated by all parts of the bourgeoisie against the working class.

Rather than explain a phenomenon that it doesn't understand, the PCI denies reality and really gives the impression that there are no genuine contradictions within the bourgeoisie, as if it was a simple sum, an aggregate of different interests: bosses, shareholders, states, parties and candidates... It has the vision of a conscious, all-powerful bourgeoisie that has no internal contradictions and which puts forward such and such a card according to its needs, aimed exclusively against the working class, thus allowing it to divert the latter's discontent. It's paradoxical because at the same time as the PCI advances this need of mystification, it recognises that the threat to the bourgeoisie from the working class is actually at a very low level. The problem is that the PCI tries to shoehorn not only populism, but also the development of different national situations, into a pre-established mould, into finished schemas, fixed and "invariant" (to use its own term) without integrating them into the least framework of analysis nor grasping the reality of a movement. There is an incapacity of the PCI to provide a lucid analysis of reality.

Why do we attach so much importance to the necessity of better understanding the phenomenon of populism? Because in this debate where divergences could be taken for simple, Byzantine quarrels, a discussion in the coffee shop or a debate between "intellectual circles", it is essentially a question for revolutionary organisations to methodically draw out the clearest vision of the stakes, the dynamic and evolution of capitalism in order to better arm the proletariat in its class combat.

 

To be continued...

 

CB, December 28 2017

 

ICC introduction

A number of comrades have been reflecting seriously on the importance of the October Revolution in Russia. The text that follows has been sent to us by a close sympathiser of the ICC in Belgium. The comrade had prepared this contribution for a previous meeting in September 2017 in Belgium on the topic of the October Revolution – we have already published a contribution by another sympathiser written at the same time (see Contribution to the discussion of the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917, November 2017).

We are publishing these contributions in the hope that as many comrades as possible will read them and that they will stimulate further reflection and discussion. We encourage all our readers to consider making further contributions themselves, either in the form of texts or participating on our forum at our website.

The text aims to draw the lessons from the revolution in Russia for today and the comrade takes a closer look to how Trotsky’s three-volume History of the Russian Revolution can help us in applying the lessons of this experience in the twenty first century. The contribution discusses what it means for communists to make up a balance sheet of a movement, a theory, an author, etc. – and how this can help us to reconsider our tasks today. Drawing a balance sheet, like any theoretical work, has as its goal to create the conditions for overcoming our weaknesses and give us the strength we need to struggle.

As the author concludes: “Reviewing a work of this magnitude is part of drawing a larger balance sheet. But it cannot be seen as an isolated event, a chapter that we have now closed. Only discussion amongst the revolutionary minorities and inside the proletariat can ultimately help us understand our predicament today. We do not live at the turn of the 20th century and much has changed during the last century. Some experiences have been vital, but all in all, the proletariat has lost more than it has gained. We can only hope that future struggles will provide new experiences that will allow us to overcome capitalism”.

We are in complete agreement with the text as a whole, but in the paragraph on the Kornilov coup and the United Front, towards the end of the article, there is a passage that gives the idea that Kerensky was merely an opportunist at the time, when in reality he was the head of the bourgeois government that was continuing the war effort and aimed to liquidate the revolutionary movement. So the reference in this paragraph to “compromise with opportunists” as a tactic in certain circumstances seems rather ambiguous. There is an article on the ICC website that we think clarifies this issue, pointing out that the Bolsheviks called for support to the workers’ militias and other class organs, not for support to the Kerensky government: ‘The Kornilov coup, August 1917: military blocs or autonomous class struggle?’( https://en.internationalism.org/wr/306/1917-Kornilov [38]).

 

In the centenary of the Russian Revolution the reaction of the bourgeoisie and its political and intellectual representatives has generally been twofold. On the one hand, especially from the left wing of bourgeois democracy, we are told that the Russian Revolution was one of the most singular, liberating events in history, and yet, at the same time, that “October” never died but lives on in the parties that claim historical ties to the Bolsheviks. In other words, to honour the Russian Revolution means to pay homage to the subsequent Soviet Union and the various extreme left groups of Trotskyist, Stalinist, Maoist and other varieties. In practice, all these different flavours of leftism invariably end up to be some variant of fervent red flag waving social democracy, different state capitalisms distinguished only by a preference either for the “democratic” form or for coming “from the barrel of a gun” [39]. To be clear on the matter, we believe that the “positions” of these bourgeois parties, which have nothing to do with the historical positions of the Bolsheviks, have only legitimized brutal state capitalist regimes in the name of communism.

On the other hand, it has been held by conservative and liberal thinkers that the Russian Revolution had to end in political repression and economic stagnation. In other words, the uprising of the proletariat in Russia must be held as monstrous from its very inception, because it had to lead to Stalin’s dictatorship and his brutal betrayal of the revolution. It is interesting how few authors of this vulgar-teleological type are willing to use this kind of reasoning to say something about capitalism and the First World War. Other, more “sophisticated” histories of the Russian Revolution use more developed conceptual frameworks. For instance, the “Russian character” is used to demonstrate that it had to be expected that a dictatorial regime had to eventually rise in Russia - see, for example, the recent biography of Stalin published by Prof. Dr. Kotkin [40]. An actual sociological explanation for the rise of Stalin and the state capitalist regime that bears his name, such as the isolation of the backward Soviet Union after the failure of the expansion of the communist revolutions to expand to Germany (1918), Hungary (1919) and other countries, is generally brushed aside. According to these gentlemen and gentleladies, such ideas must be dismissed as speculation and ideological babble. In the end, most of these authors tend to assume that the cause of the decline of the Soviet Union after a short revolutionary, progressive period was the return of the never-changing political struggle for “power”. In other words, according to these learned idiots, the historical significance of the Russian Revolution is that it replaced Czar Nicholas II with General Secretary Stalin.

In this review, I wish to first draw up a short balance sheet of twentieth century “communism” and the “official” story about the Russian Revolution. Then, I will ask the question how the three volumes by Trotsky can aid us in bringing back the proletarian movement in the twenty first century. Then, I take up some issues with Trotsky’s approach to the events and the Russian Revolution in general. Finally, I discuss what it means for communists to make up a balance sheet of a movement, a theory, an author, et cetera – and how this can help us to reconsider our tasks today.

I would argue that to even begin to contextualise the Russian Revolution means to draw an honest and clear balance sheet of the twentieth century. We must break with much of the intellectual garbage that has been strewn on the road to understanding what “communism” means.

After the decomposition of the Russian Revolution under the influence of the failed world revolution, the proletarian movement went into a steep decline, both theoretical and organizational. The state emerging from the proletarian revolution deformed to a state capitalist regime because it had to trade on a world market to survive. In the end, all those who resisted the new capitalist bureaucratic elite were silenced and finally murdered. The so-called ‘Communist’ movements and parties in Europa, Asia, Africa and South America, which took centre stage in twentieth century geopolitics, were nothing more than alternative bourgeois elites supported by the capitalist regimes in Moscow, Beijing or Havana. If these parties or movements were ultimately victorious in their struggle against other fractions of the bourgeoisie, they founded their own state capitalist regimes with material and ideological support from the Eastern bloc, enjoying similar despotic benefits as the political and economic elites in the Soviet Union.

Today, there is no communist party and the few groups of revolutionaries are small and have no real influence within the proletariat. Communist politics has been in a steady stagnation for almost eighty years. Despite the powerlessness of communist politics, the proletariat has had some important moments of resurgence since the end of the Second World War. So, despite all odds, the working class has not yet been defeated. But neither has the bourgeoisie yielded. The rule of capital continues to ravage our lives and holds the futures of our children to a kind of permanent ransom. The continuing civil wars in Syria and Iraq, climate change, racism, hatred of minorities: all these small and large horrors of our time, new and persisting, cannot be understood without the drive to keep the working class divided, to accumulate at all costs, to divide and conquer markets.

It remains to be seen if movements will arise that will be able to break with bourgeois ideology, whether such movements will be able to dispel the illusions of leftism. And more importantly, it remains to be seen whether the revolutionary minorities will be able to find the momentum to rebuild a revolutionary and proletarian party on a world scale when the moment arrives.

Trotsky’s History

How can an almost 100-year-old historical work aid us in rediscovering the foundations for a struggle of the class in our times? In other words, how do the three volumes by the famous Russian revolutionary Trotsky help us in recovering the “lessons of October [41]”, in other words, the lessons of the Russian Revolution?

The importance of Trotsky’s work lies with the centrality of the Russian Revolution to the imagination of the non-communist majority when communism is mentioned, discussed or in any other way touched upon. The Russian Revolution is consciously or unconsciously held to be the only example of a proletarian revolution, although any serious survey of the last century tells a rather different story. Similar proletarian revolutions and revolts inspired by the Russian Revolution took place in developed countries like Germany (1918), Hungary (1919), and many other countries worldwide. In the case of the German Revolution, the proletariat was able to maintain its struggle for power for almost a year. The Russian Revolution was nevertheless the only revolution in which the proletariat could hold state power despite the bourgeois forces opposing it in the February-November 1917 period of dual power[1] and in the subsequent Civil War-period (1917-1922). Thus, it is also the only revolution that the bourgeoisie and its army of intellectuals have to deal with, while the other revolutions are ignored, belittled or blatantly erased. And as we have already noted, because the Russian Revolution was so completely derailed owing to its isolation from the proletariat of the industrialized core of the world, the Russian Revolution also invites us to talk about communism in the negative, dismissive manner that is constantly rewarded by the bourgeois intellectual circles and academia.

It is precisely here that Trotsky’s work allows for a critical reassessment of the Russian Revolution. In addition to the available historical sources of the Russian Revolution and his own experiences, Trotsky not only uses numerous eyewitness accounts of his allies, but also of his foes. In doing this, he brings forward the entirety of the truth without becoming apolitical or irrelevant. The three volumes deal chronologically with the various events and figures of the Russian Revolution leading up to the proletarian bid for power in February 1917 and the final dismantling of the bourgeois state in October of 1917. Both singular volumes and an abridged version of the three volumes are available for free on marxists.org in different digital formats (pdf, epub, …). The collected three volumes can also be bought at a relatively cheap price (45 dollars) in a new abridged, hardcover edition from the North America-based publisher Haymarket Books, that has been somewhat promoted in light of the centenary of the Russian Revolution.[2]

It is without a doubt a lengthy work that requires one’s full attention if one is to grasp the totality of the subject studied. Trotsky simply does not summarize, he enumerates, contextualizes, in other words, explains. There can be no doubt that the different events and dramatis personae can be confusing at times and sometimes the author seems to assume that his audience will simply understand after a first or second mention. Trotsky himself is aware of the wide, multi-faceted scope of his work and addresses the issue by criticizing some of the assumptions about what good writing means:

“Thousands and thousands of books are thrown on the market every year presenting some new variant of the personal romance, some tale of the vacillations of the melancholic or the career of the ambitious. The heroine of Proust requires several finely-wrought pages in order to feel that she does not feel anything. It would seem that one might, at least with equal justice, demand attention to a series of collective historic dramas which lifted hundreds of millions of human beings out of non-existence, transforming the character of nations and intruding forever into the life of all mankind.”

Introduction to Volumes Two and Three, Volume 2, History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky

 

Despite perhaps the issue of their length, the three volumes are written in an accessible style that never leaves room for obscurantism. Even more, irrespective of the seriousness of the matter, Trotsky never fails to engage his readers. One cannot pay a better compliment to a work. The author provides a good overview of the events during the Russian Revolution between February and August of 1917, but more importantly, he lays bare the meaning of these events as instances of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Most works of history suffer from the fact that they remain on the level of the phenomena, on the level of the dates and the specific figures involved. While Trotsky does not fear the individual names or the dates to the moment of a particular day, he clearly places them within the context of the broader developments of Russian class society.[3]

In what follows, we will discuss some of the insights into the Russian Revolution that Trotsky provides to contemporary communists. In particular, we focus on the original insights of the communist movement that have come under scrutiny by so-called “modernizers”, including communizers and other new tendencies. While some of the errors of the modernizers, such as the dismissal of the necessity of the party, are due to the historic ties of the modernizers to the council communists, e.g. the later Anton Pannekoek and others, other ideas are more recent, such as the dismissal of the transitional state.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Russian Revolution is the February Revolution in which the czarist government was toppled after the formation of Soviets in the major cities. In its primary incarnation, the February Revolution was, to a certain extent, spontaneous. The figureheads that we now instinctively connect to the Russian Revolution (Lenin, Trotsky …) were either abroad in political exile or imprisoned in a Czarist punitive colony in Siberia. At the inception of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky was still living and working in New York, eating breakfast in the same Bronx-based diner almost every day[4]. The February Revolution was not planned. It was also not predicted beforehand. The first moment of the revolution is traditionally held to have been the march of women workers on International Women’s Day. However, as Trotsky points out, the march of the workers was not intended, the Bolsheviks had even tried to contain any outburst of proletarian anger due to the possibility of firm state repression:

“The 23rd of February was International Woman’s Day. The social-democratic circles had intended to mark this day in a general manner: by meetings, speeches, leaflets. It had not occurred to anyone that it might become the first day of the revolution. Not a single organisation called for strikes on that day. What is more, even a Bolshevik organisation, and a most militant one – the Vyborg borough committee, all workers – was opposing strikes.” (History of the Russian Revolution, chapter 7)

Nevertheless, the march of the women workers was soon to be joined by other workers from other industries, ultimately growing into a mass demonstration. In these mass demonstrations, the forces of the proletariat and the forces of the Czarist state measured their respective strength and resolve. To aid the proletariat in its struggle against the regime, the Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Councils arose. Ultimately, these councils ended up routing the armed forces of the Czarist state, thus becoming a state power of their own. The seamless but unplanned transition between the events seems to suggest that the revolution was “spontaneous”. The slow emergence of the revolutionary moment in the Russian Revolution might be accommodated to argue that the proletarian revolution is somehow the necessary consequence of the increasing contradictions of capitalism: the revolution as a volcano of long grinding tectonic plates, a missile that somehow hits its mark without itself knowing. Especially during the 1960’s and 1970’s, students and workers were drawn to the idea that revolutions happened spontaneously, as a means of understanding why they went out into the streets to struggle for a different world. As few of them had any prior knowledge of marxism or proletarian politics, they argued that it was the historical moment itself that leads the proletariat to rediscover the struggle against the bourgeoisie and its rule.

While the idea might sound reasonable at first glance, even dialectical in the naïve sense of the word, to argue that the revolution has nothing to do with consciousness suffers from the dualist presupposition (i.e. metaphysical confusion) that consciousness is not part of the material world but separate from it. While it is true that there will always be the contradictions in capitalism to lead the proletariat to come into conflict with the rule of the bourgeoisie, our understanding of class struggle as a revolutionary minority is as much part of the struggle against the bourgeoisie as these tensions themselves. In other words, we cannot simply “wait out” for class struggle to occur and fight the struggle “for us”. It is precisely in this idea of the revolution as somehow “occurring” that materialism is exchanged for the most vulgar metaphysics, a de-Christianised Judgement Day, the moment of its arrival promulgated but unknown to even the highest of angels. Trotsky correctly takes aim at the idea that spontaneity explains revolutionary processes by explaining that it involved a fundamental role for the party and revolutionary workers to fight for revolutionary consciousness during seemingly “calm” periods between openly revolutionary moments. He points particularly to the role of the earlier revolution of 1905, and to the consciousness of a very particular set of workers (the Petrograd and Moscow workers). More importantly, Trotsky argues for the importance of the revolutionary workers and their party, who fought tirelessly against the perspectives of the liberals and the reformists between the revolutions:

“The mystic doctrine of spontaneity explains nothing. In order correctly to appraise the situation and determine the moment for a blow at the enemy, it was necessary that the masses or their guiding layers should make their examination of historical events and have their criteria for estimating them. In other words, it was necessary that there should be not masses in the abstract, but masses of Petrograd workers and Russian workers in general, who had passed through the revolution of 1905, through the Moscow insurrection of December 1905, shattered against the Semenovsky regiment of the Guard. It was necessary that throughout this mass should be scattered workers who had thought over the experience of 1905, criticised the constitutional illusions of the liberals and Mensheviks, assimilated the perspectives of the revolution, meditated hundreds of times about the question of the army, watched attentively what was going on in its midst - workers capable of making revolutionary inferences from what they observed and communicating them to others. And finally, it was necessary that there should be in the troops of the garrison itself progressive soldiers, seized, or at least touched, in the past by revolutionary propaganda”. (History of the Russian Revolution, chapter 8)

In other words, the February Revolution was not an organized revolution, although the proletariat had been prepared by revolutionary minorities for the re-emergence of a revolutionary situation. Trotsky justifiably emphasizes the role of the individual Bolsheviks on the shop floor and in the streets before and during the revolution. His conclusion is that although the working class will come into conflict with the bourgeoisie due to the antagonistic yet interdependent interests of both classes in capitalism, it is only through the coordination of the practical and theoretical work of an organized and prepared party that a revolution can hope to succeed.

Moreover, and more importantly, Trotsky argues that the party played a vital role during the months after the February revolution, by leading the proletariat onwards to its historic tasks. No-one can argue against the important role of the communist party in realizing the Russian Revolution. It was only through the positions that party took that the broad masses came to find an explanation of why and how they felt power slipping through their hands. During the months before October, the Bolsheviks were held in contempt by a large part of the proletariat because of an immense smear campaign by all parties. But, through the dissemination of Bolshevik propaganda amongst the proletariat, in addition to the attribution of all problems to the Bolsheviks by the other parties, led them to find the Bolsheviks again due to the correctness of their positions. In a fictional situation in which the Bolsheviks would have been defeated during March or June, the proletariat would have been led into the demolition of proletarian power and the return of bourgeois rule, covered in red flags.

To say that an organized minority (i.e. the party) has an important role to play in a revolution is not to say that the higher levels of the party of the Bolshevik party were without their errors during the months after February. In the months after February, most of the Bolsheviks took it for granted that there would be workers’ councils until the creation of a Constituent Assembly. Trotsky makes note of the role that the tendency around Stalin and Kamenev played in steering the Bolshevik Party into line with the Menshevik party after the February Revolution. In their minds, the Revolution in Russia should not and could not move beyond a bourgeois revolution due to the backwardness of Russia. In other words, they had not understood that the proletarian revolution can only be an international revolution. Lenin and his current would fundamentally shake up this belief within the Bolshevik party from the end of March and the beginning of April, most importantly through the publication of the so-called April Theses. The present leaders of the Bolsheviks, with Stalin at its head, were wavering on the question of whether it was the opportune time to strike at the state. To them, the existence of the worker’s councils and the Provisional Government was not an expression of the existence of a situation of dual power. At some point after February, Trotsky argues, Stalin held that the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks should merge, because there were no substantial differences in position between the parties.

In other words, with regards to the immediate tasks that the historical situation demanded of the revolutionary party, many of the leading members of the party wavered and seemed stupefied during the months after February. Theoretical examination of the development of the class struggle was forgotten in the name of reconciliation with centrist and opportunist elements. Some believed that there was still a role to play for the bourgeoisie in creating a full-blown capitalist order. The central role of Lenin during these days of confusion, and especially the role of his April Theses [42] in changing for the better the consciousness within the party, are thoroughly examined by Trotsky’s History. It set the task of insurrection firmly on the agenda, even when most in the party were still wavering.

Yet despite the important role of the party, if there is one specific strength for our times specifically in the historical work done by Trotsky, it is that he demonstrates very clearly that the communists in Russia stood at the head of a mass mobilization of the proletariat. There is no contradiction between the action of the masses and the party. Workers halted the Czarist war machine by coming out in the street during the February Revolution. Although it is clear that the October Revolution required active preparation by the Bolsheviks, the conquest of power by the communists was not the consequence of the covert conspiracy of a minority (commonly called “Blanquism”). To speak of a coup, or even worse, “Lenin’s coup” as some scholars have, is utterly indefensible when one takes the historical data seriously. The historical moment was present for a communist revolution. In October power was taken by the Military Revolutionary Committee, led by Trotsky (delegated by the Soviet for this task). Against the vision defended by Lenin (that the Bolsheviks should take power urgently at the end of September-beginning of October) it was Trotsky who defended that power should be taken by the organs mandated by the soviet, regrouped under the command of the MRC. The assembly of the All Russian Congress of Soviets accepted with widespread enthusiasm the taking of the power in the name of the Soviet. As Trotsky correctly points out, the fact that the working class does not come out en masse to take over the streets in the early stage of the Civil War doesn’t mean that the Bolsheviks had no support from the majority of the proletariat. On the contrary, by October 1917, the working class was in general agreement with the taking over of power by the more developed, communist layers of the proletariat – which demonstrated itself precisely in the calmness of daily life surrounding the breaking down of the surpassed capitalist state.

There is in the book also an important lesson about the necessity of a transitional period. The proletarian revolution does not immediately do away with bourgeois influences or achieve the immediate abolition of capitalist exchange and accumulation. Political power is always the first step, even before any economic steps can be taken. While the abolition of capitalist relations is a precondition for any transition from capitalism, it is not an unconscious or spontaneous process. On the contrary, the book demonstrates that it requires a clear consciousness from the proletariat to follow through on the preliminary step that is the taking of political power. Also, theorists from communization and other modernizers fail to consider the danger of immediate counter-revolution from the expropriated class and its intellectual and state supporters. Any real revolution is clearly a period of chaos and uncertainty. The outcome of a revolution is never set in stone from its outset. The period of transition and the workers’ councils are, just as the party, a tool that is necessary for the revolution to establish communism. That does not mean that we cannot and should not criticize the concrete figures and policies of the party and the instruments of proletarian power, expressed by the workers’ councils. On the contrary, it is precisely because the wielding of political power by the proletariat has the concrete goal of abolishing capitalism, that we have a clear framework from which we can and should criticize all elements that fail to aid the proletariat in its task.

For our times it is interesting to note that the book places Russian Czarism and the February regime firmly within the historical framework of capitalist decline and the moral and political failure of bourgeois rule worldwide. With regards to those who consider capitalism as a system that exists without real contradictions, Trotsky firmly argues that the nature of the Czarist regime reflected both the national and international development of forces. The chapters on the situation of the Czar and his household, the intrigues with Rasputin, that are some of the first chapters of the book, are also among its most powerful. The lack of intelligence, the absence of any passions, let alone moral passion, in the Czar, are immediately linked to the backwardness of the Russian social formation. It is also one of the few humorous passages within the book, but it is a kind of sad, ironic humour that encourages us to identify the idiocy of our times. Trotsky knows, like all communists before and after him, that societies have their ascendant and descendent phases. And, more importantly, as a world system, capitalism has phases of its own. Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and others, all knew, unlike contemporary so-called “communists” and “socialists”, that we are fighting in increasingly worsening conditions. Even the introduction to the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International, a confused document of  an organization headed by Trotsky, that failed to clearly see the failure and the total defeat of the proletariat in its time (1938), still clearly identifies the uphill battle that communists have to wage and the fact that time is ticking for the proletariat:

“All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet ‘ripened’ for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened’; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.”[5]

Finally, and as a warning for our times, Trotsky also points out the introduction of the parliamentary spectacle by Kerensky and his bourgeois allies to draw the attention of the proletariat away from its goals and its power in the councils. More importantly, the idea that we are “all in this together”, to create an inclusive community that supposedly communists do not want to belong to due to their principled stance regarding the revolution and the interests of the proletariat, has at its core the goal to demonstrate bourgeois power. It also creates a scapegoat of those who are supposedly working against the full deployment of bourgeois power, those who are working against the “nation” by emphasizing that the final battle has not been fought yet, i.e. the communists. But in the end, these ideological obfuscations cannot hold faced with contradictions that they cannot abolish and thus come back to haunt them. The History of the Russian Revolution demonstrates so clearly the failure of any such ideological spectacles to really confront the problems of a capitalism that is slowly imploding under its own weight:

“All those who were about to retire from the political arena behaved as though they had agreed for one last time to play their best rôles on the stage of a theatre. They were all eager to shout with all their might: Here is what we wanted to be! Here is what we would have been, if they had not prevented us! What prevented them was the workers, the soldiers, the peasants, the oppressed nationalities. Tens of millions of ‘slaves in revolt’ prevented them from demonstrating their loyalty to the revolution.”[6]

There are, however, some criticisms to be made with regards to the book. A major recurring aspect of all these different criticisms is the historical time in which it was written and the tasks that the history holds itself to. But I also wish to further explore some of the gaps within the book that I find to be important when discussing the Russian Revolution one hundred years later.

There have always been internal criticisms of the Bolshevik policies in the Revolution and the Civil War by other communists. One of the most important criticisms has been by Rosa Luxemburg, who argued that the destruction of pluralism within the proletarian democracy was a danger to the proletarian revolution and a disgrace to the emancipation of humankind communism strives for. Trotsky makes the argument in his history that it was not the Bolsheviks who closed ‘state power’ to other tendencies within the proletarian movement, such as the anarchists and the Left Mensheviks. According to him, the other tendencies simply walked out during the final destruction of bourgeois rule (i.e. the capture of the Winter Palace), leaving the proletarian democracy solely in the hands of the Bolsheviks. However, it is noteworthy that Trotsky is not willing to discuss the immediate history following the Russian Revolution, in which high-ranking members of the other parties were accused and acquitted of political crimes. In some cases, the death penalty was demanded against the former political figureheads of opposing parties. Imprisonments and shootings of opposition members simply became a daily matter very quickly after the monopolization of power by the Bolsheviks, and Trotsky is suspiciously silent about the possible consequences of this monopolization of power.

Some well-known and important examples. According to the much-repeated statement of an anarchist who went by the pseudonym Voline, Trotsky, when he stood at the head of the Red Army, was at one instance in December 1919 asked over the telegraph by one of his regiments whether to shoot a handful of anarchists who had been taken prisoner, amongst which was Voline. In reply, Trotsky is supposed to have answered “shoot them out of hand”, that is to say, shoot them out of principle. Victor Serge, who wrote an important autobiography in which he discusses his experiences during the civil war period, tells the story of the abolition of the death penalty in the year 1919. The evening before the decree would become active, the Soviet Secret Police (i.e. the Cheka) “cleared out”, i.e. executed, the approximately 600 prisoners left in its Moscow and St. Petersburg prison cells (p. 116).

Even then, we have not even touched upon the important Kronstadt uprising (1921) against the Bolshevik domination over the Soviets, an uprising which, if we take a close look at the fifteen demands raised by the sailors and workers of the rebellion, can only be deemed legitimate. But due to the exclusion of other voices than those of the Bolsheviks, there was not a platform to resolve these matters within the Soviet state itself. Trotsky and his army did not even consider the possibility of negotiation with the demands: they drowned the uprising in blood. The citadel was stormed. Even more ghastly is that Trotskyists of all shades have until this day been creating false evidence to suggest that the uprising was nothing but a plot or machination by the agents of French imperialism and the White Army. As I see it, and as most communists see it, contemporary Trotskyists insist on defending the indefensible, on both a moral and an intellectual level.

Proletarian democracy, if we are to use such a word, cannot be made a fetish. Democracy is, as Jacques Camatte argues in his Democratic Mystification (1969): "the behaviour of humans, the organisation of those who have lost their original organic unity with the community.” In other words, proletarian democracy exists because there is a contradiction within society that has not yet be resolved and must therefore be programmatically resolved. Institutions of representation, of which the councils are the primary form, are a means for the proletariat to make certain that the proletarian revolution can find a continued consensus amongst the proletariat in its task of dismantling capitalism.

Is violence a part of revolution? The answer is yes, unfortunately. History has shown that those in power never give up their privileges without a struggle. But that does not mean that violence, on the part of a revolutionary movement, can exist outside of any consideration of humanity or even proletarian legality. Even then, proletarian violence is essentially directed violence, it is not the wild and random violence of the state or of the various bourgeois terrorisms. Above all, it can never be directed against other tendencies within the class itself. The proletariat wields violence to maintain its class rule to end the bourgeoisie’s class rule, nothing more. In this sense, it is remarkable that Trotsky regularly laments in his history the “naivity” of the early revolution. He notes that the Bolsheviks tried to prevent the lynching of high officials during the capture of the Winter Palace:

“In the crowd, which had made its sacrifice of dead and wounded, there was in truth a flare up of spite against the conquered. ‘Death to them! Shoot them!’ Individual soldiers tried to strike the ministers. The Red Guards quieted the intemperate ones: Do not stain the proletarian victory! Armed workers surrounded the prisoners and their convoy in a solid ring.”[7]

It is even noted by him that to a certain extent, the bloodlessness of the October Revolution demonstrates the support of the proletariat for the Bolsheviks. But then he fails to ask the question what this says of the months and years after those bloodless days in October 1917.

Rosa Luxemburg remarked that for Trotsky and Lenin, democracy and dictatorship are opposites, while she argued that it precisely that every democracy has a form of dictatorship at its core. One might argue that this is what Camatte is referring to when he argues that democracy is unthinkable in a truly ‘human community’, a concept developed by Bordiga to clarify what communism is. We might therefore argue that it is not so much democracy that a revolution needs as a form of legality, underpinned by a form of morality that reflects the enormous potential of the proletariat. While the ICC and other left communist organizations have produced new insights into the question of morality, there is still work to be done of the questions of concrete civil rights, legal procedures and limits to the power of the state, that can aid in maintaining both the moral power of the proletariat in addition to the political and economic power of the proletariat in the period of transition. A discussion on what form a proletarian legality should take, based on the insights from earlier struggles of the proletariat and scientific and philosophical theories, is not merely an idealistic struggle. In the hands of proletarian power, there does not have to be a contradiction between a concrete tool for increasing the power of the proletariat and an increasing sensitivity to the possibility of human emancipation and the value of human life.

Trotsky writes his three volumes leading up to 1930. Nevertheless, the Russian Revolution is only discussed by Trotsky in the very narrow framework of February 1917 to October 1917. The timing of the book is remarkable because the histories and testimonies of his opponents (Miliukyov, Sukhanov and others), with whom he polemicizes in these books, had been soundly defeated in 1930. Sukhanov, with whom Trotsky particularly takes up a few questions, was to be shot in 1931 by Stalin and his allies. In many ways, it seems a little unholy to attack a man who was already scapegoated by the Stalinists yet was, by all accounts, politically marginalized and powerless.  Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution is primarily a polemical work in which the revolution is defended against the bourgeois distortions. Nevertheless, in the year 1930, we wonder whether Trotsky has even considered that more pressing questions are on the agenda than the remnants of a caste of mostly exiled bourgeois politicians. Only in very few instances does Trotsky polemicize with Stalin and the ‘official historians’, and generally these arguments can still be used against the Stalinists. In general, this book would have answered the questions of 1922, but it does not answer the questions of 1930 or of later periods.

But the question of Stalinism and the Russian Revolution goes further. Trotsky uses a few appendices to argue that Stalin played no part in the October Revolution despite Stalinist distortions produced to the contrary during the 1930’s. All in all, this is without a doubt correct to point out, but it fails to answer the real political questions that go with the matter of the Stalinist counter-revolution. The History of the Russian Revolution lacks any comparison or discussion of the world-historical meaning of the Russian Revolution. It might be true that Stalin was a scheming, not very bright and cowardly bastard, but that does not change the fact he became the head of the counter-revolution via the state very quickly. The explanation for Trotsky’s failure to address some of the real questions surrounding the Russian Revolution, especially for us now, can only be explained by his own problems in seeing beyond the Russian Revolution and grasping its place in the international situation. While Trotsky was always willing and able to argue that the Russian Revolution would not survive without a revolution in the more developed centres of capitalism, he was never fully able to give up on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, even when he was exiled from the country in 1929.

Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism always remained lacking. Generally, Trotsky tends to assume that the developments within the Soviet Union are still open to change. Even when the horrors of the Gulags started unfolding, Trotsky still felt able to look beyond the horrors and see a bright future ahead. In this sense, revolutionary enthusiasm, being present at the birth of a new society, is a twofold curse. On the one hand, it was this enthusiasm that the Stalinists used to mislead their own population and the rest of the world with the idea that something wonderful was unfolding in the Soviet Union and that the “issues” with the Soviet Union were merely bumps on the great road towards a future of endless possibilities. On the other hand, to those who knew what the Soviet Union really was, a slaughterhouse, their original revolutionary enthusiasm blocked them for formulating a true understanding of what was unfolding, because it was difficult to let go of the original enthusiasm and admit that all had been lost due to forces outside of one’s own power.

Especially Trotsky, with his later activity within the Fourth International, was more blind than others of his own generation to the ultimate sliding of the Russian Revolution towards state capitalism. In the History, one does not really find much with which to argue against Stalinism. Even more, he celebrates the revolution so much that one might ask whether Trotsky actually lived through the slow decomposition of the Bolshevik Party in the subsequent decade. Is the revolution still worth celebrating without some necessary remarks about its later fate? How can one, without mixed feelings, celebrate the birth of something precious that by then has already perished and withered?

This leaves one major criticism that can be directed at Trotsky and his History of the Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution was a major event that not only saw the first seizure of power by the proletariat, but it also fundamentally altered the nature of the relations between the left fractions that came from the parties of the Second International, after the Second International accepted that their constituent parties would support their respective states during the First World War. In the period of 1914-1917, the left fractions were generally weak, fragmented and confused. The Junius Pamphlet, written by Rosa Luxemburg in 1915 to put into perspective the First World War as an imperialist conflict, still addresses its appeal to social democracy as a whole, not only the left fractions. Even though leading figures of the left fractions had previously fought difficult, uphill struggles inside the old parties (e.g. SPD in Germany, SDAP in the Netherlands …), they did not hold it possible that the old parties had fully lost the internationalist outlook of the proletariat.

Slowly, generally after having been expelled or pestered out of the parties of the Second International, the left fractions existed either in marginal groups or in broader, centrist groups that combined elements that favoured class struggle (i.e. the left fractions) and other social democratic elements who were against the war (“pacifists”), but who opposed the pursuit of international class struggle against imperialist war. But in Russia, the left fractions had split from the other currents within the social democratic party much earlier. The discussions going on between different German social democrats in 1914-1917 had already been finished in Russia. Already in 1903, Lenin and others on the left had actively fought against reformist tendencies within Russian social democracy, leading to the final split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1905. Due to the creation of a revolutionary party, as opposed to a party wavering on the question of revolution, the Bolsheviks could actively intervene in the proletariat to work towards the October Revolution.

After the Russian Revolution, Lenin, Trotsky, and the other Russian revolutionaries quickly became authorities amongst the different left fractions. The left fractions, significantly, now generally called themselves communists after the 1918 Russian fraction’s change of name from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) into the All-Russian Communist Party. Even before Stalinist “bolshevization” during the 1920’s (i.e. total submission of other parties to the interests of the Russian state), Russian communists actively influenced the policies of newly founded communist parties by means of their worldwide organization (the Communist International), in which the Russians wielded enormous power and prestige. The authority of the “Russian experience” led other communist parties to adopt positions and use tactics that many within those parties opposed: how could one go against the lessons of October, given that it was the only successful proletarian revolution? Much has been written on the questions of parliamentarism and trade unionism during this period, especially by some remarkable Dutch-German communists like Anton Pannekoek, Herman Görter, Jan Appel, and others, who correctly argued that the struggle for reforms is in the period of imperialist conflict and capitalist decadence is pointless. However, the German Communist Party (KPD) was influenced to adopt policies that failed to consider the material differences between the Russian revolutionary situation and pre- or post-revolutionary situations in many of the Western nations.

One tactical question is, however, of major importance: the united front. There were countless discussions in the Communist International on the scope and the intent of the united front. Especially in Italy and Germany the Communist International found that there was much resistance to the tactic amongst communist militants. The central idea of the united front was that communists were supposed to work with the social democrats to the fullest of their abilities in struggles against the bourgeoisie, against the growing fascist danger. However, as many left communists could point out, the social democrats and other supporters and legitimizers of the bourgeois state had supported the growth of the fascist movement as a means to save the state. Especially the German communists had not forgotten who had given the order to shoot communists in the streets: Friedrich Ebert, a social democrat and a former student of Rosa Luxemburg, had given his and his party’s blessing to the reign of the right-wing militias (Freikorps) in the first place. Now, the Communist International asked of the communists to work together with those same elements who were clearly a danger to the working class and its revolutionary minorities.

What does this have to do with the Russian Revolution? The Trotskyists, after having split from the Communist International much later (1928) than other left fractions of the communists (1922-1926), still held that the united front is a valid tactic to be used against fascism. They held one episode from the Russian Revolution as a primary example of the efficacy of the united front: the Kornilov Affair. In August 1917 the leaders of the bourgeois government, Kerensky at its head, felt that the situation was ripe to finally crush the revolutionary movement, expressed in the soviets and the factory committees and its revolutionary political organizations with military force. To a large extent the goal was shaped by an increased understanding amongst the proletarians (especially the proletarians of St. Petersburg) that their power was slowly being corroded by their supposed allies (Mensheviks and others); the Bolsheviks correctly felt that the moment was right to clearly state that the situation of dual power, in which proletarian and bourgeois powers contend in a final bid for dominance, is only temporary. In other words, the Bolsheviks insisted that there were still tasks ahead. In this phase, in which the revolutionary perspective was not finally crushed, General Kornilov took his soldiers from the front and departed for Petrograd with the claim that he would return Russian politics to “normality”, in other words, crush the revolutionaries. Kerensky played an important role in the rise of Kornilov. He advanced Kornilov as the “saviour” of the Russian people at different occasions and praised his military achievements. He communicated with him many times in the lead-up to the Putsch, suggesting that Kornilov should act. Now, when Kornilov was heading for St. Petersburg, Kerensky was afraid that his plan might backfire: Kornilov had no reason to keep him, the “reconciliatory” figure of Kerensky, once the Bolsheviks had been destroyed. Thus, he came to arm the proletariat, who quickly disarmed any counter-revolutionary regiments that made it into St. Petersburg in the first place.

Trotsky uses the example of the Kornilov Affair to argue that the united front had previously been used effectively and should therefore be used in Germany during the rise of fascism:

“On August 26 (old style), 1917, General Kornilov led his Cossack corps and one irregular division against Petrograd. At the helm of power stood Kerensky, lackey of the bourgeoisie and three-quarters a confederate of Kornilov. Lenin was still in hiding because of the accusation that he was in the service of the Hohenzollerns. For the same accusation, I was at that time incarcerated in solitary confinement in Kresty Prison. How did the Bolsheviks proceed in this question? They also had a right to say: ‘In order to defeat the Korniloviad – we must first defeat the Kerenskiad.’ They said this more than once, for it was correct and necessary for all the subsequent propaganda. But that was entirely inadequate for offering resistance to Kornilov on August 26, and on the days that followed, and for preventing him from butchering the Petrograd proletariat. That is why the Bolsheviks did not content themselves with a general appeal to the workers and soldiers to break with the conciliators and to support the red united front of the Bolsheviks. (Bulletin of the Opposition, No. 27, March 1932)

The problem with using the Kornilov Putsch as an example of the united front is that the Kornilov Affair was clearly a counter-revolutionary measure. In other words, that the revolutionary process was threatened with being smashed by the Kornilov Putsch. The united front tactic differs from the Russian situation, at the time, in that it stands for the defence of reformist, supposedly half- or semi-proletarian parties in a period when revolution is internationally isolated and degenerating. Communists will agree that they have to defend the proletariat in its revolutionary tasks, even if it involves ‘ad hoc’ compromises with centrist or opportunist elements in order to prevent the crushing of the revolutionary process. Kornilov was frightened and made a mistake during a critical period, and the proletariat made good use of this mistake – that is to say, the weapons in its hands – after the Bolsheviks made clear to it the real nature of the situation. But the Kornilov experience teaches us that such compromises can only be used as a tactic when there is a powerful revolutionary drive concentrated in the hands of the proletariat. At the current stage, as in the case of the German social democrats during the rise of fascism, there was only a danger to strengthen the state. Ultimately the state does not fear fascism in any form, because historical fascism only existed to aid the state in its struggle to make capitalism survive yet another few years by crushing any reminder of the subsided revolutionary moment. Bilan, the periodical of the Italian Communist Left in exile, accurately argued around the same time as Trotsky that fascism is yet another disguise of bourgeois rule, but rule of the bourgeoisie fighting for its life:

“Experience has shown – and this annihilates the possibility of any distinction between fascism and capitalism, that capitalism’s conversion to fascism does not depend on the will of certain groups within the bourgeois class, but on the necessities of a whole historical period, and the specificities of states which are less able to resist the crisis and the death-agony of the bourgeois regime.” (Bilan, no.7, 1934, ‘Anti-fascism, formula of confusion’)

Even then, we could argue that in our historical moment none of these concepts make any sense anymore: there are no centrist or opportunist elements in our current day. No-one in their right mind would still argue that the contemporary social democrats defend the interests of the masses of people. Still, much of the left continues to defend the idea of a united front, especially now (2017) that the self-styled neo-Nazis and other right-wing “historical re-enactment societies” are openly part of the entourage of the Trump presidency. They hold that we need a shared defence against the supposed return of a right-wing conspiracy. The confusion rests upon two errors. First, they falsely hold that fascism can somehow return despite that the fact that there has been no revolutionary situation, which is a historical precondition for fascism. We can sufficiently prove this by using Trotsky’s own history. Second, that such a defence would hold against fascism has historically been disproven time and time again.[8]

Trotsky correctly points out the development of the Russian Revolution, the balance of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie at critical moments in the struggle for power. But ultimately, he does not draw any lessons with regards to the revolution as a general method of the proletariat. In other words, he does not draw lessons from the Russian Revolution that might aid us in understanding the current political condition, even when there are clear possibilities to do so. For instance, in the work, Trotsky does not clearly explain what demarcates a proletarian party from a non-proletarian party. Nevertheless, the question is very important giving the important role that the Mensheviks played in confusing the proletariat in the Russian Revolution. Nevertheless, Trotsky considers the Mensheviks to be at least partially proletarian, despite the fact that a general consensus within the Mensheviks was willing to continue the war in a new “revolutionary” form. For us, such a discussion would have been invaluable. It would have given up a weapon to fight against the contemporary Trotskyists that hold the social democrats are somehow proletarian. It would have allowed us, to some extent, to save Trotsky from the Trotskyists, by showing the grand distortions that underlay the idea that there is a continuity between leftism and communism. Alas, speculation will lead us nowhere. Here, we can merely conclude that much that we would have liked to see in Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution reflects the things that we would have liked to have seen in Trotsky as a communist.

Ultimately these volumes of history by Trotsky have become a historical work in their own right, distinguished by great insights, but also political shortcomings. Of course, we have the hindsight of more than eighty years. Trotsky had only ten. Still, we have pointed out that Trotsky fails in a few important instances, despite the fact that his work remains an incomparable history of the Russian Revolution.

We have drawn up a few elements of such a balance sheet in this review. We have made a balance sheet of the Russian Revolution, and of Trotsky and his work. Balance sheets serve a purpose: we do not scrutinize the words and deeds of others because we have to demonstrate that we are somehow brighter than someone else (as is the rule in academia). Neither do we draw balance sheets to demonstrate how theoretically developed our arguments are, as a purely masturbatory exercise. Our goal is the destruction of the bourgeois state and the transformation of capitalism into a truly human community, communism. To this end, we need to overcome the obstacles that are placed on our path. These obstacles do not only exist outside of the class (as in repression and the political fractions of the bourgeoisie), they also exist inside of the proletariat as errors and confusions. Drawing a balance sheet, like any theoretical work, has as a goal to create the conditions for overcoming our weaknesses and create the power we need to struggle.

By way of a conclusion: reviewing a work of this magnitude is part of drawing a larger balance sheet. But it cannot be seen as an isolated event, a chapter that we have now closed. Only discussion amongst the revolutionary minorities and inside the proletariat can ultimately help us understand our predicament today. We do not live at the turn of the 20th century and much has changed during the last century. Some experiences have been vital, but all in all, the proletariat has lost more than it has gained. We can only hope that future struggles will provide new experiences that will allow for new means of overcoming capitalism.

Pjotr, October 2017

 

I

ICC introduction

We welcome this declaration in the leaflet from Yeryuzu Postasi, an anarchist group in Turkey, which is made in the clear spirit of internationalism and the working class. If we make some comments and ask questions, that is engage in debate, we do so in the same spirit and not at all in the sense of "having a go" but because in the face of such tragic and complex events the greatest clarity is needed. Our approach is therefore similar to the one we took over the leaflet of some South Korean internationalists in relation to their declaration regarding rising tensions on the peninsula last autumn[i]. We agree with the fundamentals of the comrades from Turkey on the denunciation of the war and the need for international class struggle but nevertheless a discussion about the analysis of the situation and its underlying roots is also a major part of internationalist solidarity, and to this end we are responding to some areas that we think need clarification.

The leaflet says: "We can see that power-holders in different countries are rubbing their hands with glee about the Afrin operation. It is understood that Russia and the USA are constructing their plan for dividing Syria in line with their spheres of influence and probably they have agreed on it". "Rubbing their hands with glee" doesn't seem quite appropriate given that the Afrin situation is a crystallisation of the confrontation of all the powers engaged in the region: Turkey obviously because of its unbridled determination to eliminate any Kurdish attempts to establish strongholds in the region, which would further encourage Kurdish nationalism to set up other similar zones. For Syria, the Turkish action threatens a loss of authority and control over this region - Afrin and Manjib - which Assad had more or less deliberately left in Kurdish hands as a kind of buffer zone or what the US originally called a "border force". But with the Turkish action here the threat to Assad is that he would lose territory to a full-blown Turkish occupation, and the threat to the Kurds is that they would be overwhelmed by the military superiority of the Erdogan regime. This is why the Military Council of Afrin, part of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Force (SDF) which is also part of the so-called Rojava revolution, has called on the butcher Assad to help them[ii] . Thus the tensions between Turkey and Assad's backers, Russia and Iran, are increased at the same time as a confrontation between Turkey and the US, who has been supporting the Kurdish YPG and the Iraqi Kurds, looms larger[iii]. The US, Britain and others want to continue to support the Kurds as cannon fodder, possibly with more destructive weaponry, in order to justify their own presence in the country. Afrin and its surrounding region therefore becomes a concentration of the antagonisms of all the imperialist sharks, big and small, in the region.

"European governments facing refugee crises are quite happy with the statement of Erdogan that '3.5 million of Syrians will be settled in Afrin'". Leaving the lunatic ramblings of Erdogan aside for the moment, here YP underestimates the misery and displacement of many more refugees that will come from the increased fighting in and around Afrin. As the leaflet suggests, many European countries have been supporting the Kurds so there's not only the Turkey/Assad/Iran/Russia/USA tensions but also those between Turkey and Europe... plus Nato, the latter being very significant. Even if they are fulfilled, Erdogan's promised refugee camps will not only be centres of concentrated misery and all sorts of abuse but also recruiting grounds for those seeking jihad or revenge. The leaflet goes on to talk about there being no "better opportunity for Turkey to prevent (a planned) strike of metalworkers". Given its largely conscript army and its intense war economy the Turkish bourgeoisie will have to reckon with any working class reaction. However there doesn't seem much evidence that the working class in Turkey is at present up to staying the military arm of the bourgeoisie which is first of all determined to crush Kurdish ambitions.

"The war in Syria... motivated capitalists and powers of the world about greater profits" and earlier the declaration mentions the plunder of resources by the major powers, including France and Britain. While profit remains a fundamental motivation, globally speaking military and strategic interests have dominated decisions on an imperialist level since World War One. The leaflet itself points out the similarities with today and the two world wars. Rather than a profit to capitalism, though profits will be taken here or there by arms manufacturers and oil companies for example, the downward spiral into militarism is towards a bottomless pit that has become totally irrational from an economic point of view. The cost of US military operations alone dwarfs any possible economic advantages. It's very difficult to get reliable figures on the cost of wars but Linda J. Bilmes estimated in 2016 that the Afghan war alone cost the US $5 trillion, $2 trillion more than her 2008 estimate and rising every year due to medical care, compensation, etc. And there's huge interest to be paid on this money as it's all borrowed[iv]. We can't estimate the costs to Russia of its war in the Middle East but they will follow the same lines as all the military regimes. We agree with the leaflet that the war has brought nothing but "... death, destruction and poverty to the labourers of Syria. And with this operation the war will intensify more and the chaos will deepen in the region. This means more death, more poverty and more misery for us" and we would add that for the rival powers there's no winner because today's victory can be reversed or transformed into disasters tomorrow - as we've already seen. The policies of weakened US imperialism are an example of these sorts of "fiascos" but it applies to all the powers involved.

There's a clear denunciation from YP of all rival powers involved but there does appear a bit of a weak link regarding Kurdish nationalism; and we think it important to clarify this given the support that Kurdish nationalism, and through this support to the wider imperialist tendencies of the major powers, has received from many anarchists. The Kurds have received the support of the US, Britain and France and now its leaders in Afrin and Manjib are asking for support from the devil himself, Assad, to defend Kurdish nationalism particularly against Turkish ambitions. The web of alliances around Syria has been scrambled and it's sometimes said that the situation in the Middle East is too complex to get to the roots of it all, but what is confirmed is the position of Rosa Luxemburg in her 1915 Junius Pamphlet that all countries, and aspiring countries, are imperialist. The leaflet is correct to talk about the lack of ethics of these imperialist manoeuvres and says that none of the powers "has intention(s) to stop the war". But it's not a matter of choice, intentions or ethics because all the powers, including the USA and Russia, are caught up in the irrational "logic" of being forced to defend their own interests through military deployments. The whole spiral of militarist cancer is dictating its "rules" to all the players. None of them has the means to stop the war because they are all in the irrational grip of imperialism. Statements from the UN and EU show that there is no strategy and there are not the troops to bring a decisive end to the war. It's all the more important therefore to make the clearest possible analysis of the situation and denounce all sides, big and small.

"We think that to struggle against this war is a historical duty for anarchists, communists and other internationalists all around the world. We are calling on all comrades to struggle against the operation in Afrin, against AKP's oppression to war resisters and against all states that are responsible for the actual situation in Syria". Calling for a "struggle against the operation in Afrin" needs a clear denunciation of the Kurdish component as well, a component that is well implicated in this war. And the drama is far wider and deeper than Afrin: another massacre is underway in Eastern Ghouta, just a few miles from Damascus and this follows Aleppo, Raqqa - where the Kurdish YPG were backed by US air power in the 4 month siege - and, probably the bloodiest of them all, the nine-month siege of Mosul (see our press for more analysis on these) with Idlib probably next. There has been so much scorched earth, so many battlegrounds, besieged towns, bloodletting, displacements that the answer cannot be to "struggle against" this or that operation here or there; the whole spiral must be broken and for this we must admit that the working class locally is not up to imposing sufficient resistance. Those doing the fighting are either professionals as from Russia, the torturers of Assad's troops, all kinds of Jihadists from a reconstituted al-Nusra, the Saudi-backed Jaish al-Islam militia, the Qatari proxy Rahman Legion, killer commandos, modern mercenaries (some from Latin America reportedly), Syrian and Kurdish nationalists, Isis remnants, all of them ready to fight anybody or alongside whoever's contingent. International solidarity means international class struggle and that doesn't just mean calling for action here or there. Any struggle against imperialist confrontations requires a clear analysis and a very clear and unambiguous denunciation of all the sides involved.

ICC, 27.2.2018

For an international struggle against capitalist division and war

Led by the AKP government, an operation of invasion against Afrin has been started with a consensus between all factions inside the state. Boss organizations such as TÜSİAD, MUSIAD, TOBB, unions that defend the interests of bosses against workers and all the constitutional parties have made statements with “national reconciliation” supporting the operation. They became so wild that some bosses dared to say “You can take from workers of my factory to military operation as much as you want.”. In this way, a new phase in the imperialist fantasies of the state has begun, which is represented by AKP who has been aiming at suppression of the opposition and wild implementation of denial and extermination policies regarding Kurdish question.

We can see that power-holders in different countries are rubbing their hands with glee about the Afrin operation. It is understood that Russia and USA are constructing their plan on dividing Syria in line with their spheres of influence and probably they have agreed on it. As far as we’ve inferred from statements of England, they are willing to take a share from oil reserves and other natural resources – possibly, again, via a partnership between Shell and Koç Holding. France wants to re-establish its activity in the region. Probably, European governments facing refugee crises are quite happy with the statement of Erdoğan that “3.5 million Syrians will be settled in Afrin.” And can there be any better opportunity for Turkey to prevent the forthcoming strike of metal workers?

The war in Syria that motivated capitalists and powers of the world about greater profits haven’t brought anything other than death, destruction and poverty to the workers of Syria. And with this operation, the war will intensify more and the chaos will deepen in the region. This means more death, more poverty and more misery for us.

Powers, who seemed to be accompanying Kurdish national movement until now, made contradictory and unclear statements. From this fact, not surprisingly, we’ve seen again that dominant classes and their servile countries are not acting with ethical motivations or supreme goals. As it was in the World War 1, imperialist powers are conducting their competition for spheres of influence by forcing people in Syria and Middle East to fight each other. Even though they establish a strategic alliance with the Kurdish movement, they don’t really care what will happen to Kurdish people in the end. Although we aren’t able to know the content of secret and dirty diplomatic negotiations between states, it is obvious that they only care about their interests and this war is dragging not only the region, but also the world, into an unknown situation.

None of the dominant classes or states that are serving to their interests has the intention to stop this war. Statements of UN and EU allow us to see that they don’t have any strategy to do it and they don’t have troops they can use. Structural crises of capitalism are pushing the dominant powers to make crazy moves that will drag the humanity into a barbaric era. Just like the period before World War 1 and 2.

The only power that can stop this course of events is the working class. For now, war drums’ voice might be drowning the sigh of young soldiers forced to fight in fronts and their families’ secret cries; it might be drowning the scream of the people in Afrin that are killed or forced to leave their home. Today, the voice of politicians from different parties, the voice of clowns that call themselves experts in TVs and the voice of warmongers, in general, might be overshadowing the voice of people who are opposing war. They’re all sitting on their comfortable seats and while children of the workers are dying, they are distributing heroic ranks to themselves.

However, they also know that it will not continue in this way. Therefore, the state is trying to prevent the reaction of the mass of people, who are killed, impoverished and forced to leave their homes, by increasing the oppression. The police are wildly attacking press statements in public places, people are handcuffed just because they made posts in social media against war and arrested. Against all these attacks, as anarchists, communists from Turkey and other international comrades, we should stick together and all together continue to raise our voice against war.

Furthermore, people of Afrin and people of Turkey who are fighting against this invasion are in need of international solidarity more than ever. This international war, in which the only winners are capitalists and the only losers are workers of all nations, can only be stopped with international solidarity.

We think that to struggle against this war is a historical duty for anarchists, communists and other internationalists all around the world. We are calling all of our comrades to struggle against the operation of Afrin, against AKP’s oppression of war resisters and against all states that are responsible for the actual situation in Syria.

Internationalist Class Solidarity or Capitalist War and Barbarism

War to the Palaces, Peace to the Slums!

No to war between nations

No war but class war

Yeryüzü Postası, 18 January 2018

First published here: https://www.yeryuzupostasi.org/2018/01/26/to-the-international-struggle-against-capitalist-division-war/ [45]

We have made a few minor changes to the English translation.

 

 

On the one hand, incessant, murderous wars, whole regions bombarded, terrible massacres of the population. On the other hand, barbed wire fences, walls, boats hunting down migrants and camps set up for the tens of thousands of people trying to flee the destruction of their homes, from misery and starvation.

Syria in the spasms of imperialism and decomposition

Eastern Ghouta in Syria, to the east of Damascus, is once again at the epicentre of the bloody conflicts raging across the planet. Like others, especially those in other parts of the Middle East, this conflict is dominated by an imperialist free for all. This is a war of each against all, implicating both global powers and regional states[1]. It is an expression of the historic dead-end reached by the capitalist system.

Further north, bringing its own sinister contribution to the military chaos, to the spreading slaughter of civilians and the mass exodus of populations, we have Operation “Olive Branch”, launched on 20 January by the Turkish army against the enclave of Afrin, in the province of Aleppo, where the Kurdish forces of the YPG are dug in and have been reinforced by pro-Assad militias[2]. Alongside these rivalries between local gangs and factions, there are the manoeuvres of imperialist powers trying to take advantage of the situation. The putrefaction of the capitalist system is expressed by the bloody actions of all the different protagonists, whether we are talking about the troops and current allies of Assad, the various opposition factions, Isis and other jihadists, or the big democratic powers.

As for the new offensive of the Syrian army, supported by pro-Iranian militias and Russian air cover, against a region that has been occupied by Isis and other jihadist groups fighting the Assad regime, it has given rise to a concert of protests, each more hypocritical than the other. The false indignation of the western media, the NGOs and the so-called “international community” in the face of attacks which systematically make use of chemical weapons (which the “international coalition” has also used without shame[3]) is only equalled by the ineffectiveness of the resolutions voted by the UN, against the use of chemical weapons, for the protection of the civilian population and respecting cease-fires. This once again shows the lack of credibility of what Lenin, describing the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations, called a “den of thieves”. None of this is new in Syria: since 2012 at least, chemical weapons have been used regularly in aerial bombardments, notably in the siege of Aleppo and Homs, and then at Khan Shaykhun on 4 April 2017. They have also been used massively in eastern Ghouta since March 2013, notably in the raid of 21 August of that same year, which left around 2000 dead. The balance sheet of death and suffering has been further increased by the continual bombing of hospitals, which are supposedly used as a shield by rebel forces, and the systematic destruction of homes. Between 2013 and October 2017, 18000 deaths have been counted, including around 13,000 civilians and 5000 children, to which must be added 50,000 wounded. Between 18 and 28 February 2018, the death toll of the aerial offensive has officially been another 780 deaths, at least 170 of them children. All this leaves out the numberless victims of the lack of essential supplies which is a direct result of the war. The Assad regime is now beginning a land offensive in Ghouta which threatens to be no less barbaric.

Migrants and refugees, victims of capitalist states

This situation can only be aggravated by another phenomenon which has in turn been amplified by the decomposition of capitalism: the mass deportation or exodus of populations fleeing massacres and misery in the Middle East, Africa or Latin America. Masses of impoverished people are heading towards the richest countries, desperately searching for a place of shelter, mainly in Europe or the USA. But none of these states have a real solution for this wave of migrants, except to block them at all cost, to set up walls and barbed wire fences, to send them back to their deaths. And the western governments have continually played on the fear of “foreigners”, even punishing those who have tried to help them.

The cynicism of the states involved, especially the European ones, knows no bounds. Turkey, seeking economic and financial aid, has the job of blocking the passage of migrants towards Greece and parking them in refugee camps where inhuman conditions prevail. This agreement is based on a real commodification of human beings, in which a select few are allowed to reach a European country while the vast majority stay in the camps. This also is nothing new. We should recall, for example, the hypocrisy of Zapatero’s “Socialist” government in Spain. In 2005, in Spain’s Moroccan enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, a triple row of barbed wire fences was set up, snagging many migrants, while others were simply shot, and still others ended up on deadly bus journeys through the desert, but it was the Moroccan government which was fingered as the bad guy in all this. All the western bourgeoisies (including the Spanish government) orchestrated an intense media campaign against this “flagrant violation of human rights”[4]. The more recent contracts of this ilk, which have been drawn up with Turkey and, more discretely, with Libya, have had an immediate impact on the efforts of migrants to reach Europe.

All the media, no doubt to their immense satisfaction, have also celebrated the reduction by a third of illegal immigrants landing in Italy. In fact, “the EU has chosen to stop the influx of migrants at source instead of continuing to maintain reception centres in Italy and Greece - a strategy which seems very dubious morally” (Courrier International, no 1414). But in spite of these “good” figures from Italy, Spain saw a significant increase in those arriving by sea in 2017, so much so that a new prison built in Malaga is now being used as a detention centre.

A report by CNN which shows migrants being sold as slaves in Libya has provoked a lot of indignation internationally, the press also tells us. But the same media don’t tell us much about the joint measures adopted by the EU and Libya which have contributed to this situation. The same article from Courrier International tells us: “On 3 February 2017, the 28 EU countries agreed on a ‘declaration’ supporting the recent accord between Italy and the Libyan government of Faiez Sarraj. The principle is the same as the one between the EU and Turkey drawn up two years earlier: Europe will supply funds, training and material to the Libyan coastguards who, in exchange, will intercept migrant boats and take their occupants to detention centres in Libya…human rights organisations and the press very quickly denounced the limitations of this plan, questioning the capacity of the Sarraj government (which is only one of the rival forces on the ground in Libya) to put it into practice, and the consequences it would have for the migrants who are already known to be suffering from inhuman treatment on Libyan soil”. The concerns of the “human rights organisations” serves to pull the wool over our eyes, just like the supposed humanitarian concerns of the Spanish government in 2005. These gesticulations merely hide the repressive agreements which already allow 700,000 African migrants to be stuck in camps in Libya.

But for all the agreements and measures aimed at barring the migrants more effectively, it is clear that the accumulation of regional wars, massacres, famines, and social dislocation all over the planet, can only dramatically increase the whole refugee phenomenon[5].

Proletarian solidarity offers the only perspective to the drama of the migrants

The crisis of the capitalist system is undoubtedly at the heart of this historic wave of migration. Faced with the barbarity of its system, the bourgeoisie can only offer more chaos, more exclusion and division, all in the name of the “national interest”, that ideological mask for the cold calculations of capital.

However, for the exploited there are no frontiers. The workers have no country. The working class has always been a class of immigrants, everywhere forced to sell its labour power, from the countryside to the town, from one territory to another, from one country to the next. An immigrant class, it is also an exploited class. It can only resist the barbarism of capital by drawing on its greatest strength: its international unity, cemented by solidarity and class consciousness. Against the xenophobic, fear-mongering campaigns of the ruling class, the proletarians of Europe and of all the developed countries must become aware that the migrants and the refugees are victims of capitalism and the cynical policies of its states. They are our class brothers and sisters who are being bombed, massacred, or shut away in open-air concentration camps.

The affirmation of this solidarity can only come through the development of the class struggle, through resistance against the attacks of capital. Behind the question of the migrants is the question of the international struggle for the overthrow of capitalism. And the proletariat remains the only revolutionary class, the only social force capable to doing away with the contradictions of this dying system, of tearing down all borders and ending exploitation in all its forms.

PA, 3.3.18

 

 

Theresa May has been talking tough about Russia since the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with a nerve agent, mobilising support from the USA and the EU. 23 Russian diplomats were quickly expelled from the UK. When we remember that this is the same Mrs May who, as home secretary, refused an enquiry into the murder of Litvinenko by 2 Russian agents until 2014, because of fears that this would worsen relations with Russia, it is impossible to believe that her present response is guided by indignation at an attempted murder by a foreign power on British soil. Rather we must look first and foremost at the imperialist relations and tensions between the powers concerned.

There have also been wider international ramifications of the conflict with first the USA, France and Germany expressing support for the UK and more recently over two dozen countries, including the USA, much of the EU, NATO, Canada and Australia, joining in the diplomatic expulsions of suspected spies. The expulsion of 60 Russians from the USA is greater than any similar expulsions during the Cold War. These actions, like those of the Britain and Russia, must be seen in terms of the imperialist relations of the powers concerned. We should also note that several EU countries, including Austria, Greece and Portugal, declined to expel Russians, that the expulsions were questioned by some politicians in Italy and Czech Republic, and that Trump failed to mention this event in his tweets, even while the Russians were being expelled.

If there is such an escalation between Russia and GB and many “Western” countries behind the latter, it is not an isolated clash, but is part of a  sharpening of imperialist tensions world wide, where there are a number of increasingly chaotic confrontations, with a growing involvement of the bigger imperialist sharks (US, China, Russia) as well as more regional rivals (such as Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East). Even though at first sight it might leave the impression that this is a remake of the Cold War, when two blocs were confronting each other, in reality in the present phase, , imperialist tensions are no longer marked by antagonisms between blocs, but by a  more centrifugal tendency towards every man for himself,  even though there is a growing polarisation between China and the US, and between Russia and a number of Western powers.

Declining powers

What is most obvious about both Britain and Russia is that they are powers in decline, although they are both nuclear powers, reflecting their former strength. In little over 100 years Britain has declined from imperialist top dog, first of all seeing its industrial strength overtaken, falling into debt to the USA in World War 2, and subsequently losing an empire it could no longer control. Its weakened state has been highlighted, and accelerated, by the disastrous Brexit decision. Russia became leader of an imperialist bloc by conquering much of Eastern Europe in WW2, a status it maintained throughout the Cold War. However its economy was too weak to sustain the arms race against the USA and it lost its empire in 1989 and then much of the former territory of the USSR. It now functions as a kleptocracy, with a great degree of melding between Mafia gangs and the state apparatus[1]. While it will never regain its former strength, it has recovered sufficiently to play a destabilising role in many areas, such as maintaining a toe-hold in Syria by supporting the Assad government militarily, invading Crimea, meddling in Ukraine, and engaging in cyber attacks and vote meddling elsewhere. The latter question of using on-line resources to influence elections, of course, is not limited to Russia as the recent allegations against Cambridge Analytica illustrate.

The collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc nearly 30 years ago ushered in a period of instability, not least in foreign relations. The USA was left as, and remains, the only superpower, but the collapse of the other superpower meant that many of its allies and clients were no longer in immediate need of its protection from the rival bloc and could play a more independent role. This was illustrated when NATO powers supported different states in the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, or when France and Germany openly opposed the second Gulf War in 2003. The greatest gains have been made by China, which has taken no part in the diplomatic spat between Russia and Britain.

The use of Novichok

The use of Novichok, a nerve agent developed 500 miles from Moscow, implies that it was intended that the attack should be seen as the work of Russia. Along with the British government, the EU has thus concluded that it is “highly likely” that it was done by Russia. For Lithuanian foreign minister Linas Linkevicius, Britain is being tested, “Russia is always looking for weak points, and may feel the UK does not feel very strong… The Russian assumption may be that in the process of Brexit, the UK is weaker…” (The Guardian, 16.3.18). They may also be testing NATO, already weakened by some of Trump’s less than enthusiastic statements about it and by conflicts within the alliance, as between the USA and Turkey over Kurdish fighters in Syria. We can certainly have no doubt that Russia is monitoring the response, noting how NATO, the EU and other countries have made statements in support of Britain, and which countries have followed that up with diplomatic expulsions, and which have not. They will also have noted that, in spite of the US expulsion of 60 Russian spies or diplomats, Tillerson was sacked by Trump shortly after a speech condemning Russia for the attack in Salisbury. In any case, divisions inside the US bourgeoisie are plain for all to see after 15 months of the Trump presidency and the Russiagate investigation.

Putin is, as ever, playing the strong leader, recently announcing new missiles that can get through the USA’s defences, essentially claiming to have a first strike capacity, shortly before his re-election. His response to this event projects the same strong nationalist message, standing up for Russia against the allegation of use of a nerve agent, for which there is no definitive proof, matching the initial 23 expulsions from the UK, and then adding to this by banning the British Council from Russia. This certainly did him no harm in the presidential election, not that his success was ever in doubt after the most likely rival was banned and the ballot boxes stuffed. Russia has continued in the same vein since, matching all the expulsions from countries around the world and then adding some more for Britain.

How the UK has been able to orchestrate an international response

It’s also true that the British government has turned these events to its advantage as much as it can. From a situation of looking weak, divided and indecisive over Brexit negotiations, Theresa May and her government have been able to project an image of not just the government but Parliament and the whole country united behind their strong response to an outrage committed on British soil. Statements of support, first by USA, France and Germany, and then by NATO and the EU, as well as the international wave of diplomatic expulsions, have added to this. We have even seen Jeremy Corbyn castigated for reminding the government not to rush to judgement before the police investigation has taken place, despite the fact he fully supported the actual measures taken by the government.  For a large part of the bourgeoisie, this was too much opposition in words, even when there was none at all in policy!

Unfortunately for Mrs May and her government, none of this changes the very real weaknesses and divisions in the British bourgeoisie that have been highlighted and worsened by Brexit. The international response she has orchestrated from countries that have previously ignored many murders on foreign soil says much more about the need to counter Russian destabilisation than her leadership or powers of persuasion. Condemnation of Russia is simply hypocrisy on the part of countries that carry out their own murders on foreign soil, as with the drone strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.. However, weeks before announcing the expulsion of diplomats in support of Britain, at the time of its first statement with France and Germany, the USA imposed sanctions on 19 Russians over cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and meddling in the election of Trump. Russia is also suspected of trying to influence the Brexit referendum.

More important is the fact that Russian support for Assad in Syria, rapprochement with Turkey against Kurds there, and its support for Iran, have weakened the USA in that region, which in turn has increased Putin’s aggressive policies. Russia also has common interests with China, a much more important imperialist competitor, in Syria and Iran, and against Japan and the US. However, these can only lead to unstable and temporary alliances since the two powers are rivals in the Indian subcontinent and in Asia over the New Silk Road. Also it is unlikely Russia will easily tolerate the reversal of roles with China, which it dominated for much of the Cold War. Russia remains a nuisance that the USA and much of Europe would like to put in its place, but after its collapse nearly 30 years ago it can no longer build a solid alliance around itself. It is even possible there are some in the US (in the Trump camp for example) who would like to use it against China.

Russia’s defenders

Corbyn essentially agreed that it was most likely Russia was behind the poisoning in Salisbury, and supported the measures taken, and is therefore not one of Moscow’s open defenders. However, in demanding that the government not rush to judgement and in pointing to donations to the Tory Party by various Russian oligarchs he echoed the themes of some of those who really are defending Russia  - a stance that that may be tolerated, even useful, in a back bencher with no hope of office, but not in a leader of the opposition who may be seen as PM in waiting. This has been too much for many in the Parliamentary Labour Party, who have been reminded why they – and the central parts of the British bourgeoisie – don’t trust him, particularly on foreign policy, and he has come under renewed pressure after a period of truce since the last election. Apart from direct criticism of his Commons performance on the Skripal case, they have used the issue of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and particularly among Corbyn supporters in Momentum to put pressure on the leader[2] Anti-semitism is certainly a reality in the Labour Party and the capitalist left, as we argued in an article on ICC online during the last furore in the Labour Party[3]. However, the fact that it is being raised so loudly today when little has really changed suggests that it is being honed as a weapon against Corbyn. 

For an outright defence of Russia, we can refer to John Pilger, who wrote an article in the Off-Guardian that demands Russia be given ‘due process’ before it is condemned[4]. In an interview with Russia Today he went further and argued that Russia has demonstrated that it has destroyed all its chemical weapons, that Porton Down is not far from Salisbury, and that the Skripal case is a drama carefully constructed by Britain[5]. Essentially giving the Russian line, in other words.

We cannot trust any of the protestations of innocence, neither the claim that Russia has destroyed all its chemical weapons, nor the denial that the nerve agent used could have come from Porton Down. The UK government is just as capable of cynical extra-judicial murder as the Russian government or the mafia. And since we have no access to proof all we can rely on is an analysis of the imperialist interests of the various players in the situation. In the present situation of weakness of the UK and NATO it seems that Russia had the most to gain by probing weaknesses and divisions. It is also consistent with its role as a force for destabilisation. At the same it is possible to say that if the Russian state did order this assassination, it has not turned out particularly well for it so far, since it has not resulted in increased divisions among its main rivals.

Socialist Worker, on the other hand, echoes Jeremy Corbyn on donations, “The Russians are coming and have bought the Tories”, noting that this includes oligarchs who are both pro and anti-Putin[6], and call for a rejection of “Tory’s warmongering”[7].

Let us be quite clear, Britain, Russia and all states today are capitalist and imperialist, and so they are all capable of warmongering when this is in their national interest. There is nothing specifically “Tory” about warmongering. Russia was at war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and is at war in Syria today. The Labour Party supported the Falklands War in the 1980s and went to war in Iraq in 2003 (while the SWP called for the defence of Iraq “against imperialism”). In fact, since the Russian revolution degenerated, and was defeated, there has been absolutely nothing ‘anti-imperialist’ about the country, not in the 1930s, not in World War 2, not in the Cold War, and not today. To put about the idea that only the Tories who are warmongers is to disarm the working class in front of all the other bourgeois political ideologues who are also warmongers.

Alex  2.4.18

 

“My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all”.
 

The celebrated cosmologist Stephen Hawking died on March 14 in Cambridge. He was one of the greatest specialists in black holes. Along with his theoretical discoveries, from the explanation of the very existence of black holes – which the scientific community had been sceptical about up until the 1960s – to the “Hawking radiation” (according to this hypothesis, black holes emit a “black body” radiation), he became known around the world for trying to make the scientific mysteries of the universe more accessible to the general public. His 1988 book A Brief History of Time became a best seller and still enraptures all those who want to understand the beauties of the Milky Way.  

But Stephen Hawking had also, since the age of 21, fought against motor neurone disease, a terrible affliction which usually leads to complete paralysis and death in a few years. And yet this illness played a huge role in his way of perceiving the world and his place within humanity. In his 2013 autobiography, My Brief History, he tells us

“Not knowing what was going to happen to me or how rapidly the disease would progress, I was at a loose end. The doctors told me to go back to Cambridge and carry on with the research I had just started in general relativity and cosmology. But I was not making progress because I didn’t have much mathematical background – and anyway, it was hard to focus when I might not live long enough to finish my PhD. I felt somewhat of a tragic character. I took to listening to Wagner….

My dreams at that time, however, were rather disturbed. Before my condition was diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of the hospital, I dreamed that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realised that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I was reprieved. Another dream I had several times was that I would sacrifice my life to save others. After all, if I was going to die anyway, I might as well do some good”

Stephen Hawking is saying something fundamental here. At 21 the doctors gave him at best no more than a few years to live. He could then have burned the candle at both ends, thinking only of himself and the immediate moment – which was a bit like the way he had been living when he was a student in good health. But he chose another path: that of linking himself to a greater whole, humanity and its future: “I might as well do some good”. For him, the “good” was taking part in the general development of science and of our knowledge of the world.

In the conclusion to his autobiography, he explains the moral and intellectual flowering produced by the feeling of being a link in a very long chain, by having contributed the best of his capacities to the good of all:

“When I was twenty-one and contracted motor neurone disease, I felt it was very unfair. Why should this happen to me? At the time, I thought my life was over and that I would never realise the potential I felt I had. But now, fifty years later, I can be quietly satisfied with my life…I have travelled widely. I visited the Soviet Union seven times…I have also visited Japan six times, China three times, and every continent, including Antarctica, with the exception of Australia…My early work showed that classical general relativity broke down at singularities in the Big Bang and black holes. My later work has shown how quantum theory can predict what happens at the beginning and end of time. It has been a glorious time to be alive and doing research in theoretical physics. I am happy if I have added something to our understanding of the universe”

Today, the whole of humanity seems to be suffering from a deep and potentially fatal malady: it no longer believes in its future. More exactly, the working class has forgotten what it is and what it is capable of. It has lost the perspective of a new world, which it alone can bring into being. This perspective has been trapped in the present, where minds are more and more infected by the spirit of every man for himself, by irrationality and fear. Stephen Hawking’s spirit should be an inspiration to us: even in the face of the worst, of imminent death, he rejected the egoistic illusions of the present instant and instead projected himself into the future of humanity through his scientific research.

Today however it is necessary to go beyond all individual solutions. While science contains within itself the potential for “doing good” for all, it is up to the proletariat, the revolutionary class, through organisation, solidarity and consciousness, to lead humanity out of its prehistory by freeing it from the yoke of capitalist exploitation. However great the scientific discoveries of the future, only the international victory of the proletariat can achieve the flowering of humanity.

Sousso, 18.4.18

A leaflet currently being distributed by our section in France to the strikes and demonstrations taking place there.

In the hospitals, at Air France, in the supermarkets of Carrefour, in the care homes, in the universities, on the railways…strike days have been multiplying for several weeks now. There’s no doubt that president Macron and his government are hitting us hard. Yesterday it was the ‘Labour Law’, today the reform of the SNCF[1], tomorrow a new generalised attack on pensions. Everywhere and for all workers and their families: falling wages and social benefits, job cuts and speed ups, flexibility and precarious jobs, impoverishment of those who have retired, hassling of the unemployed.

THE WHOLE WORKING CLASS IS UNDER ATTACK!

How can we respond to this new degradation of our living conditions? How can we organise ourselves? How can we develop our unity and solidarity?

Can we push the government back?

Over the last 15 years, the only time the ruling class, its government and its democratic state have really been forced to retreat was at the time of the movement against the CPE[2] in the spring of 2006. Why? This social movement, initiated by students conscious of being the precariously employed workers of the future, developed in a spontaneous way, its mobilisations based on solidarity between working class generations. The young people involved rediscovered the vital importance of sovereign, autonomous general assemblies. As a result of many animated debates, it became aware that its fight was not a particular one but belonged to the whole working class. This is why the students in struggle opened their assemblies to high school students, the unemployed, to workers and to pensioners. At each demonstration, the numbers marching became more and more impressive. At each demonstration, other sectors of the working class joined the movement. The slogans that flourished at the time revealed this quest for unity: “Jeunes lardons, vieux croûtons, la même salade”, “Students, high school pupils, unemployed, semi-employed, public and private, the same struggle against unemployment and casualisation!” The movement of the students against precarious employment began to win over workers from the private sector, forcing the Villepin government to withdraw the CPE legislation.

This is what scared the bourgeoisie in 2006: the extension of the struggle, solidarity across the whole working class, all the generations together. The trend towards the students – many of whom had no choice but to take on part time jobs to support their studies -  taking control of their struggle, the massive general assemblies, the slogans putting forward the unity of the working class, the challenging of the unions – this was what constituted the strength of the exploited class.

A huge offensive of the ruling class aimed at derailing social discontent

Is the present social movement inspired by this victory in 2006, by what forms our strength, our unity in the struggle? They certainly want us to believe this. The mass meetings of the railway workers in the train stations are well covered by the media. The trade unions present themselves as being “united”, “militant”, and even “imaginative” (the great discovery of the “go-slow strike”!). They promise us victory, even a “new May 68”.

Is this the reality? No! Because behind the façade of “trade union unity” there hide the worst sectional and corporatist divisions. The strikes are isolated from each other. Each sector puts forward its particular slogans and its own days of action.

Because behind the “inventiveness” of the unions in the go-slows lies the poison of division. The aim of the unions is to make this strike on the railways unpopular, to set workers against each other, in the end to exasperate those who can’t get to work or get home in the evening “all because of the rail strike”. It’s the old tactic of blocking any solidarity with the strikers who are “creating chaos” (as president Macron put it soon after coming to power and who is now insisting that “people should not be taken hostage”).

Because behind the “solidarity funds” set up by the unions there hides an attack on real workers’ solidarity. Active solidarity in the struggle is replaced by a Platonic support based on collecting funds for a long drawn out go-slow.

Finally, because behind the “militancy” of the unions lies the reality of a powerless, exhausting movement, totally isolated from the rest of their class, the rail workers are threatened not only with a considerable loss of wages but above all with the demoralisation of defeat.

A classic ploy: push a key sector into struggle in order to defeat it on its own

Faced with growing social discontent, the bourgeoisie has isolated a key, symbolic sector, the railway workers, to inflict a defeat that is visible to everyone and thus to spread its message: struggle gets you nowhere; struggle doesn’t pay.

This is a trap that has been used many times before, dividing the workers sector by sector and exhausting their fighting spirit in order to push through the attacks and “reforms” of the government and the bosses.

Remember the rail strikes of 1986-7. After several weeks of paralysis in the transport sector, the workers, isolated and imprisoned in their own sector by the unions, went back to work without winning anything.

Remember the strikes and demonstrations in 2003 in the public education sector. For several long weeks, the teachers were in struggle. But these mobilisations, instead of acting as a locomotive for a wider struggle, remained totally isolated because they were rigidly contained by the unions. A crushing defeat followed, allowing the Raffarin government to claim cynically that “It’s not the street that governs!”.

Today, the same trap is being set. What the ruling class wants is to prevent this very strong social discontent against Macron’s “reforms” from exploding. What it wants is to stifle this anger so that it can push through all the reforms and attacks planned by the Macron presidency.

We need to discuss the lessons of the past to prepare the struggles of the future

It has to be clear that allowing the unions to run our struggles can only lead to defeat. We need o discuss and reflect about the dirty work of the unions, these professional dividers who are united against us using the legitimate anger of the railway workers. We need to denounce their anti-working class practices, their duplicity and their complicity with the bosses and the government.

The slow-down strikes organised by the big union federations like the CGT, CFDT and FO (while at the same time negotiating behind the workers backs in the government ministries) will not allow for the development of the struggle. On the contrary, they are aimed at sabotaging it. The “stop-start” strike, isolated and “unlimited”, advocated by SUD-Rail is no less pernicious. It cuts off any solidarity and prevents the unification of our struggle. The famous “convergence of struggles”, so dear to “radical” trade unionism, is just another form of corporatism that keeps us isolated from each other. This idea of “convergence”, seen in the practice of simply juxtaposing different marches, is radically different from a real unification. A real unification demands the formation of general assemblies in which everyone can take part, in the workplaces, on the streets, on the public squares, in the neighbourhoods, in the universities.

Contrary to what the unions and the entire bourgeoisie wants us to think, the working class is perfectly capable of taking control of its own struggles without conferring it on “specialists”. All the great experiences of the past are the proof. In May 1968, the workers were capable of struggling massively, spontaneously, opposing the unions and even tearing up their union cards.  The students who organised the massive movement against the CPE in 2006 did not allow the unions to confiscate their struggle. In Poland in 1980, the workers of the Gdansk shipyards were able to develop a mass strike which extended across the whole country without any union, with delegates elected and revocable at any moment by general assemblies. Only the working class can defend it own interests against its exploiters.

Today, faced with this new manoeuvre by the bourgeoisie and the its unions to sabotage any sign of struggle and any reflection on the experiences of the past, not only in France but in other countries as well, the most militant and conscious workers need to seek each other out and gather together. They need to discuss, reflect together on the increasingly dramatic situation imposed on us by capitalism. This remains true whatever clique is in power.  What future can this system of exploitation offer the workers and their children? Nothing but growing poverty and endless barbarism. How can we fight not only for ourselves but also for future generations?

Questions that can only find practical answers through collective discussion and reflection.

The only possible future for society is in the hands of the working class, a class which has nothing to lose but its chains, and a world to win.

Révolution Internationale. ICC section in France, 19.4.18

 

 

This article, written by a close sympathizer in the US, attempts to draw a balance sheet of the recent struggle by teachers and other public sector workers in West Virginia.

For two weeks in late February and early March, public school teachers in the state of West Virginia were on strike. This strike was not a manoeuvre by the state to set the teachers up for a defeat at the hands of the union. On the contrary, the teachers’ anger, resilience, militancy and willingness to buck the established institutional channels for voicing their grievances appear to have taken the bourgeoisie, at both the state and national levels, rather by surprise. Although the strike is now over and the teachers’ have returned to their jobs having won only part of the concessions they sought from the state, this episode marks perhaps the most important development in the class struggle in the US since the mass mobilizations of 2011—in particular the resistance to public sector austerity in Wisconsin and the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

In fact, the West Virginia teachers’ strike is itself a part of a broader movement, both within the United States and internationally, transpiring within education and other parts of the public sector. The mobilisations of US high school students over gun violence, the public sector strikes in France against the Macron government’s “labor market reforms,” and the mobilization of university lecturers and support staff in the UK over attacks on pensions are all part of what appears to be a developing international response to the effects of years of state budget cutting.[1]

The education sector in particular embodies the contradictions inherent in social reproduction under capitalism. While subject to the capitalist logic of productivity and valorization like everything else, the education sector is nevertheless also where the vital social function of training, preparing and disciplining the next generation of workers (the reproduction of labor power at the generational level) takes place. As such, as much as the wages of teachers and the costs of investing in educational infrastructure and services are a burden on state coffers, capitalist society would simply be unable to reproduce itself without a functioning educational system. Moreover, the need for individual national capitals to remain competitive on the international level by developing a workforce with the skills most relevant to the technical development of society mitigates against reducing educational investments below a certain functional level (at least in areas and communities deemed worthy of such investments). This is one of the major functions of state capitalism in decadence—to protect the overall national interest from the most vulgar expressions of capitalism’s logic by directing social resources to areas like education, even when a certain market logic would dictate otherwise, through “redistributive” measures like taxation. 

Nevertheless, in the wake of the “Great Recession” that broke out in 2008, the resulting “fiscal crisis” of states and the often ham-fisted attempts of various factions of the bourgeoisie to manage the crisis by cutting the state budget into oblivion, the tension between education as an investment in future productivity and education as a major cost for the state to bear, was often resolved in favor of austerity. In the United States, this process was abetted by the rightward ideological degeneration of the Republican Party, which, especially at the state level, locked in on increasingly maximalist policies of tax cuts to aid wealthy campaign donors and business interests, while reducing state services as close as they could to the minimum functional level, mostly through attacks on public sector workers’ salaries, benefits and working conditions, but also by seeking to eliminate the added costs of the public sector union middle man though various state-level “right-to-work” policies.

While this process found its most extreme expression in “red states” like Kansas, it also took place in more traditionally “blue” and “purple” states in the rust belt, like Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, particularly in the aftermath of the so-called Republican wave election of 2010, which saw public sector austerity hawks like Scott Walker come to power in Wisconsin. In Michigan—a state whose electoral votes went to Obama twice—the state government became dominated by Republicans and many localities were subject to the cost-cutting whims of “emergency managers” appointed by the Republican Governor, resulting in outrages that shocked the public conscience, like the 2014 Flint water crisis and the Detroit school crisis.

In Wisconsin during the of spring 2011, Walker’s attempts to ram through legislation stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights was met with an unexpected mobilization of workers, students and concerned citizens, who in the spirit of the then still burning Arab Spring, occupied the state house and walked out of schools in a spirited attempt to obstruct what many perceived to be a right-wing coup. However, these mobilizations were quickly recuperated by the media-state complex, which quickly constructed a narrative that situated them as part of a broader anti-Republican resistance movement, pulling them behind the state Democratic Party and the unions. Tellingly, this movement ended without achieving any tangible concessions from the state, dissolving itself into the failed intra-bourgeois electoral effort to recall Walker from office.

Later that year, the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street Movement—really part of an international reaction to the economic fallout of the Great Recession that included the Indignados movement in Spain—challenged established and official forms of protest with the emergence of the general assembly as a kind of embryonic form of proletarian struggle reflecting a desire to go beyond electoralist, union and leftist forms. Nevertheless, since the crushing of the main centers of the Occupy Movement by state repression and the petering out of its peripheral expressions, the last six years have been marked by stagnation, if not a retreat, in class struggle. The tendency for working class grievances with stagnating or declining living and working conditions to express themselves through the distorted lens of populism, and conversely by the “democratic” resistance to populism, have largely driven the proletariat off its class terrain.

While the emergence of populism has posed new and challenging problems for the main factions of the bourgeoisie in a number of states, it has nevertheless served a perhaps unintended purpose in forming an alternative political option under bourgeois democracy that can recuperate proletarian anger and disgust at the “system.” In the United States, both the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns[2] served an important function in 2016 and beyond in appearing to offer an alternative to establishment bourgeois politics that was nevertheless fully within the realm of the electoral circus. Moreover, in the wake of Trump’s victory, a so-called “resistance” movement in both official (the Women’s March of 2016) and unofficial (Antifa, leftist and identity-based movements, etc.) forms, along with the emergence of a perverse media-driven Russophobic and anti-“deplorable” moral panic, have seemingly stunted the emergence of genuinely proletarian actions, based on the defense of workers’ living and working conditions.

However, while it is clear that the conditions of capitalist decomposition and the political effects of populism are still making it very difficult for the proletariat to find its footing on its own class terrain, the West Virginia teachers’ strike nevertheless appears to confirm our analysis that the working class, even in regions dominated by some of the crassest factions of the bourgeoisie, is not yet defeated in the historical sense.

Two weeks in winter: the unfolding of events:

The first thing to say about the West Virginia teachers’ strike is the extent to which it undercuts a certain media-constructed liberal “resistance” narrative that attempts to paint the Trumpian world as a fierce battle between two opposed Americas: an enlightened, educated, diverse, forward-moving coastal and urban metropolitan one and an angry, resentful, ungrateful, racist and xenophobic, mostly white, backward-looking heartland. Having given Trump his largest margin of victory of all states he won in the 2016 election (68.5 to 26.4 percent, with no counties going for Clinton)[3], West Virginia has often been painted by the media as the epicenter of Trumpism—a dark and frightening place metropolitan liberals only venture to when on an anthropological quest to understand the inner workings of their enemy’s mind.

When West Virginia teachers went out on strike on February 22nd, it likely came as a shock to the liberal media establishment who must have assumed the state was one solid block of impenetrable social reaction. For whatever reason, the mainstream national media virtually ignored the strike until it was clear a resolution was imminent. Limited to a few throw-away lines at the bottom of the newscast, there was no coordinated attempt to drum up the strike as some kind of anti-Republican movement, despite the fact that the teachers were confronting a Republican Governor and a Republican controlled legislature led by a particularly obdurate Senate President (Mitch Carmichael) ill-disposed to compromise. Quite clearly, something about the events didn’t fit a certain narrative.

First of all, it is clear that the strike occurred against the initial tepidness of the unions who feared that an illegal strike would result in sanctions against the union and worsen their already tenuous position in the state’s political apparatus. Nevertheless, the teachers walked out anyway, dragging the union bureaucrats behind them, in what many in online alternative media described as a “wildcat strike.”

The grievances that motivated the walk-out were situated firmly on the proletarian class terrain of the defense of living and working conditions. West Virginia public school teachers earned less than teachers in almost all other states (48 out 50) and were facing a serious erosion of their take-home pay as a result of a planned increase in their expected contributions for health care costs. The West Virginia Public Employee Health Insurance Agency (WVPEIA), which provides health coverage to state employees, was facing yet another funding crisis, this time resulting in a possible increase in employee costs of hundreds of dollars a month. When the increased health care costs were factored, the state’s proposed wage increases—originally a 2 percent increase in the first year and then a 1 percent increase in each of the next two—would likely have resulted in a cut in take-home pay for most teachers.

When the strike quickly spread to all of the state’s 55 counties, it began to become clear to more astute members of the state’s ruling class that some contrition would be necessary to contain the anger. Governor Jim Justice—once a Democrat, but now a Republican out of political necessity—met with teachers in an attempt to calm their anger. Contrary to the union’s fears, the Governor wanted to use the carrot more than the stick to end the strike. Nevertheless, any pay increase for the teachers would have to be approved by the state legislature, where more intransigent budget hawks held sway in the Senate. On Wednesday, February 28th, Governor Justice appeared to have negotiated a deal to give teachers a 5 percent raise in the first year in exchange for ending the strike.

Although the House of Delegates approved the deal, the state Senate rejected it, offering a 4 percent raise. The teachers vowed to fight on and continue the illegal strike. In addition to the rejection of the 4 percent wage increase, teachers were angry that there appeared to be no solution to the chronic underfunding of the WVEIA, meaning that the threat of future premium and deductible increases remained patent. In the recounting of one participant, teachers were furious at this lack of action on health insurance and chanted, “Back to the table, back to the table,” at their union reps.[4]  Swarms of teachers, parents and students descended on the State Capitol building in Charleston in what looked like a potential repeat of the mobilizations in Madison, WI seven years earlier. Despite the national media’s lack of interest, in West Virginia public opinion appeared to be clearly on the teachers’ side.

However, by now the stage was set for various parts of the state apparatus to engage in a political division of labor to end the strike. Governor Justice, who in the first week of the strike was told by a group of teachers that they couldn’t promise not to shoot him,[5] could now attempt to pass himself off as an honest broker against the unreasonable and intransigent budget hawks in the Senate. The union played its part, sending out a memo on Friday, March 2nd, essentially blaming the continuation of the strike on one man—Senate President Mitch Carmichael. The union thus turned a general mobilization of teachers and support staff across the state against the attacks to their living and working conditions into a quest to petition one man to change his mind—a kind of plea to the Tsar. After putting up a bit of a show on talk radio, Carmichael could only relent and a five percent pay raise for all state employees was signed into law by Governor Justice on Tuesday, March 6th. The union promptly ended a strike it hadn’t called in the first place with a robo-call, instructing the teachers to show up for work the next day.

Victory or Defeat?

Much of the post-strike commentary in leftist and alternative media—but also from elements closer to the proletarian milieu—has centered around analyzing the meaning of this strike in the broader context of US labor relations and assessing the extent to which it should be regarded as a victory or a defeat. On the one hand, the teachers appear to have won a very tangible material gain in forcing the state to grant 5 percent pay raises to all public employees against the initial plans of the state to offer a much more modest increase. On the other hand, the issue of funding for the state employee’s health insurance fund remains unresolved even if there will be no premium hikes or increased deductibles for now. The only concession won on this issue was the formation of a commission, made up of various representatives from government and unions, to study the issue of how the WVPEIA could be placed on a more solid financial footing. Moreover, rumors have been swirling that the state plans to pay for the pay increases by cuts to public welfare programs like Medicaid.

For many in the emerging “social democratic” milieu in the US—expressed mainly through the pages of the increasingly popular journal Jacobin—the teachers’ strike is being regarded as a momentous event that “has the potential to change everything.” One writer, Eric Blanc, claims that this strike was, “the single most important labor victory in the US since at least the early 1970s.”[6] Another writer in Jacobin, Cathy Kunkel, described the strike as a “major victory” in that, “The strike also deepened the political understanding of school employees, as rank-and-file leaders made demands not only about funding, but also about where that funding should come from.” For Kunkel, the demand put forward in the context of the strike to fund the WVPEIA, not through cuts to social programs for the poor, but through a “severance tax” on natural gas extraction, was a major step forward in workers’ political sophistication. This demand was concretized by a Democratic political ally of the strike, State Senator Ojeda, who introduced a bill to “go after” the coal and natural gas industries who have “extracted wealth from West Virginia for decades.”[7]

Closer to the proletarian milieu, the statement “Not All Strikes Are Created Equal” at anticapital0.wordpress.com,[8] made by a politicized former West Virginia public employee, is somewhat less sanguine about the overall significance of the strike. While seeing some promise in the fact that the strike evidenced “impeccable solidarity across jobs, workplaces, geography and social divisions” and in “flaunting the law when the law is in your way,” the statement laments that it is not enough for there to be a strong mobilization in the public sector, and that “we have to confront capital on its explicit terrain—on the terrain of private property.” Contrasting the teachers’ strike with the simultaneous strike at Frontier Communications (which remains isolated), the author argues “a strong fraction of the working class in the public sector is not a substitute for a weak working class in the private sector.”

Moreover, the author suggests that the task force appointed to study the funding issue for the WVPEIA is likely a “sham” and will only lead to more austerity in the form of reduced coverage and higher premiums along with more invasive data collection in the form of “wellness programs.” The statement ends with an unambiguous declaration that “The strike did not end in a workers’ victory.”

The statement published on the International Communist Tendency’s (ICT) website regarding the strike has the somewhat curious title of “West Virginia School Employees Strike Sold Out?”[9] This statement is also much less celebratory and points to the many limitations of this strike in failing to go beyond a kind of shop floor radicalism (walking out without the sanction of the union), which would have meant forming independent assemblies and strike committees. The statement declares, “There is a stark contrast between the ability to organize a walk-out of that size and on the other hand issue instructions to go back to work with a promise and a robocall. (…) If workers can get themselves out on strike, they certainly have the capacity to form a workers’ assembly or strike committee independently of the unions and the feuding clans of the bourgeoisie.” In a sense then, the ICT see this strike as evidence of a certain level of combativity in the class—a kind of raw energy for struggle bursting forth after years of attacks and austerity.

Still, for the ICT this combativity is in and of itself insufficient to push the struggle forward: “However, without the presence of an organization representing all the workers that serves as a pole independent of the unions, the eventual suffocation of the unions and the capitalists is inevitable.” The ICT comrades thus argue against viewing this strike as a victory, “when it is more like a temporary pause than a real gain.”

Nevertheless, it is unclear how the ICT imagines that the strike might have been “sold out.” Sold out by whom? The unions? If the unions are there to “suffocate the struggle,” in what sense can they be said to have sold the strike out?

Clearly, the evaluation of this strike as a victory, defeat or something in between has tremendous import for how one views the prospects for the development of the class struggle in the period ahead, as well as the nature of the tasks facing the working class and revolutionaries. For our part, we agree with Anticapital0.wordpress and the ICT that this strike should not be understood as some kind of profound victory on the material level.

Moreover, we do not think that this strike means some kind of new age of class struggle is about to break out, one that takes place through the established institutions like the unions and their allies in the Democratic Party. Contrary to the views of the newly emerging social democratic milieu, we don’t think that capitalism is capable anymore on the historic level of offering humanity a “new New Deal” that improves the standard of living of the working class in some substantial and permanent way in a society that remains capitalist. On the contrary, this strike shows us that in order to really struggle at all, the working class will increasingly find it necessary to go beyond these outdated forms and push forward demands that the capitalist system is, in the long term, simply unable to meet. In fact, it is only in the realization of the ultimate futility of achieving lasting material victories through the existing institutions that the working class can develop the revolutionary consciousness it needs to go beyond this failing system.

But to return to the current juncture, it remains the case that globally—despite evidence of an increasing will to struggle— that the working class remains very disoriented by a series of blows to its consciousness since the break-up of the blocs at the beginning of the 1990s. The massive ideological campaigns around the so-called “death of communism” (really a particular Stalinist form of state capitalism), the illusions in material prosperity bred by repeated speculative bubbles over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, the ideological campaigns around the “war on terrorism” after 9/11 etc. have all taken a profound toll on the working class. Even with the reemergence of open economic crisis after 2008, the brutal austerity unleashed on the proletariat has itself been disorienting, accompanied by the twin ideological threats of right-wing populism and the so-called “democratic” resistance to populism.

Moreover, the restructuring of the labor market towards increasingly tenuous jobs and long-term unemployment, along with the looming retirement of the generation of workers who remember the struggles of the 1960s-1980s and the difficulty the younger generations have in integrating themselves into the labor force, have intensified the problem of a fading of “working class identity.” All of this has made the prospect of an emergence of class confrontations more difficult than we have previously imagined.

However, if we highlight all of these difficulties facing the working class today, it is not to throw cold water on events like the West Virginia teachers’ strike. Our goal is not to foster a sense of resignation and despair. Instead, we seek to avoid an immediatist and opportunist reaction that would see us compromise our revolutionary principles by celebrating apparent material “victories,” in an historical context that does not allow them.

For us, the capitalist system has long since passed into an historical phase of decadence in which it is no longer capable of granting any lasting material reforms to the proletariat. As such, it is simply not possible for the working class to win real, tangible, durable, material victories anymore on the level of its living and working conditions.  In a sense, every struggle ends in defeat. As Rosa Luxemburg put it in 1919, “Because of the contradiction in the early stages of the revolutionary process between the task being sharply posed and the absence of any preconditions to resolve it, individual battles of the revolution end in formal defeat. But revolution is the only form of ‘war’ – and this is another peculiar law of history – in which the ultimate victory can be prepared only by a series of ‘defeats’.”[10] While Luxemburg was referring here to the revolutionary process underway in Germany at the time, the same logic holds true to the class struggle in general under the conditions of decadence.

Of course, we are not blind. We recognize that the West Virginia teachers won a 5 percent increase in pay for all state employees and held off any immediate attacks on the level of their health benefits. However, in our view these gains, while real, can only ever be temporary. Under the logic of decadent capital, they will quickly be eaten away: whether it is through inflation, an eventual rise in health care costs, lay-offs, attrition or some other mechanism, the workers simply cannot win durable reforms from a system condemned by its own logic to permanent crisis. We can already see this logic at work in West Virginia with suggestions that the public employee pay raises will be paid for by cuts to social programs. In other words, the teachers may have only won their rises by setting in motion of chain of events that leads to cutting other sectors of the proletariat’s benefits. Even if the “progressive” legislation advocated by Democrats to make the coal and natural gas operators pay to stabilize the WVPEIA is ever adopted, it is nevertheless in the logic of the system that the capitalists will seek to recuperate their increased cost of business by making workers somewhere else in the chain foot the bill.

Even if it is not right to say that the West Virginia teachers won some kind of material victory, it is also not the case that the experience of the strike was without any benefit for the development of a proletarian response to capitalism’s continuing attacks. Contrasting the events in West Virginia with the 2011 uprising in Wisconsin, it is clear that there appears to have been some clear advancement in how the struggle took place. First and foremost, the workers went out on strike against the wishes of the unions. Second, the workers appear to have caught the state-level ruling class rather off guard and forced it to concede to demands it was not initially prepared to grant. [11]

Even if the 5 percent raises will eventually prove fleeting, it is nevertheless important that the teachers were able to force the state to make concessions, in contrast to Wisconsin in 2011 when the state rammed through almost the entirety of its agenda in spite of the mass protests. If the material gains will only be momentary, the sense of collective power that such an action and result portends may not be so temporary. In decadence, the importance of the struggle comes from the lessons learned, the gains in consciousness and the appreciation of the power proletarian solidarity can have when confronting capital and the state. Moreover, as other comrades have remarked, the struggle evidenced the power the working class can have when overcoming barriers of age, seniority and job description as was shown when school support staff, bus drivers. etc. supported the teachers. While much of these less tangible gains will undoubtedly appear to fade as the struggle dies and normalcy returns, the subterranean percolation of ideas born from this experience will hopefully continue and manifest themselves in an even more profound and conscious way in the next struggle.

In this sense, the debate over whether or not this strike was a “victory” or a “defeat” seems to us to somewhat miss the point. On the material level, it is not possible for the working class to win lasting reforms anymore from a decadent capitalist system doomed to permanent crisis—in this sense every struggle that does not generalize into a revolutionary confrontation ends in a defeat. The real question revolutionaries must ask in analyzing such events is to what extent does a particular struggle mark an advance or a retreat in the working class’ level of consciousness and combativity. In this regard, keeping the overall historical context in mind, the West Virginia teachers strike showed important signs of a proletariat that remains undefeated and is looking for ways to struggle on its own terrain despite the political and social headwinds of the period.

Beyond West Virginia: continuing unrest in the education sector

As this article is being written, teachers in several other states are mobilizing. In Kentucky, many teachers have walked off the job in protest to the Governor’s plan to make unwelcome changes to their pensions. In Arizona, teachers are demanding a 20 percent rise in advance of state budget negotiations and are threatening job action if there isn’t a serious effort made to increase education funding. In Oklahoma, teachers are now on strike and staging massive rallies at the state Capitol building, demanding increased funding of education, even as the Republican Governor Mary Fallin has offered up a spending package that purportedly includes an average additional pay increase of $6,100 per teacher. The Oklahoma teachers appear to have the support of the public and many students, parents and otherwise concerned citizens are joining the protests.

While the situation is still fluid and it is not possible to make a definitive analysis of any of these mobilizations here, it is possible to make a few preliminary observations, which suggest that the ruling class is rapidly attempting to co-opt the anger brewing among teachers and other public employees into a broader anti-Republican resistance movement that is firmly situated on intra-bourgeois political terrain. Whereas the West Virginia teachers strike appears to have caught the ruling class, including the unions, off guard, the actions in some of these other states seem to have been anticipated well in advance.[12]  While the West Virginia strike was met with something of a media black-out, the mainstream media have been more actively covering these actions in other states and actually promoting them as a kind of “red-state rebellion” against the Republican ideological orthodoxy which has governed in many red-states for the last decade, based on the philosophy that tax cuts always take precedence over investment in public goods. While there are signs of teachers expressing frustration with their unions (particularly in Oklahoma), the unions in these states appear to have much better control of the situation—or at the very least of the narrative.

The bottom line is that while there is undoubtedly some serious frustration and anger among teachers and other public employees, the main factions of the bourgeoisie are now attempting to recuperate the outrage into safer channels and domesticate it into a more comfortable political narrative in advance of the 2018 mid-term elections and the 2020 Presidential Election, in which they will undoubtedly do their utmost to unseat Trump or otherwise hamstring him.  They will attempt to make the moral indignation of the teachers and the public at the underfunding of education a theme in a broader campaign to dampen not only Trumpian populism, but also the more extreme ideological factions of the Republican party, whose budget hawkishness has reduced investment in public education below what the main factions of the bourgeoisie might consider sustainable for the national interest. [13]

For the working class, it is important to resist getting dragged behind such a campaign. We should be cognizant that the problem of a lack of investment in education is not limited to so-called “red states.” Only a few months before the outbreak of this round of struggle, there was a minor outrage in the media because public schools in Baltimore, Maryland—often considered the epitome of a “blue state”—having to close due to a lack of heat in school buildings.[14] Moreover, we should remember that blue state Democrats like Corey Booker and even Obama himself have been advocates for charter schools that divert funding from public schools and other education policies that tie funding to “performance”—inevitably meaning that schools in lower income areas suffer. Democratic mayors and governors are no strangers to the politics of demonizing public school teachers—painting them as greedy leeches sucking on the public teat and too often delivering a “failing product.”[15]

While it is critically important for the teachers to avoid getting drawn into some kind of “coalition” political campaign to defend public education itself and remain on the class terrain of defending their living and working conditions, it is also evident that there is a potential for education issues to activate a broader public moral indignation around the increasingly brazen attempts by factions of the state to disinvest in the future generations of humanity due to immediate budgetary or ideological concerns. It is here where the current teachers’ movement could potentially intersect with the public outrage over gun violence in schools. The so-called “March for Life” in response to the massacre of 17 students at Parkland High School in Florida by an emotionally deranged individual, for all its defects and for all its recuperation by the media and celebrity culture, nevertheless touched this same nerve in the populace, increasingly concerned by the decomposition of society into an ever more atrocious spiral of violence, to resist the ever more barbaric ways this process negatively impacts the younger generations, whether by snuffing out their lives in increasingly irrational outbursts of violence or by denying them the effective education they need to compete in the capitalist labor market. [16]

Nevertheless, it is clear from the point of view of revolutionary marxism that these attempts to resist society’s descent into barbarism cannot succeed on their own accord. Expressing a certain human instinct to defend the species’ young and a moral indignation at the increasingly inhuman features of a capitalist system in its period of historical rot, they nevertheless lack the proletarian perspective they need to pose a real alternative to this system. As such, these movements and marches will inevitably end by being recuperated into the state behind this or that faction of the bourgeoisie. In order to transcend the current capitalist system, which is the real author of all this misery, it is critically necessary that the working class develop its own class perspective through struggles on its own class terrain around the defense of its living and working conditions. The West Virginia teachers have shown us that a real, if imperfect in its immaturity, path forward still exists.

--Henk

04/03/2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Emmanuel Macron to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, from Figaro to Marianne, from BFM TV to Radio France, the extreme-right to the extreme-left, whether criticising or celebrating it, all in their own way commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of May 68 by covering it with a shed-load of lies.

No, May 68 is not a "specificité française"!

No-one can deny that May 68 took place within a dynamic that was international. But in focusing on the night of March 22 at Nanterre, on the "electrifying" eloquence of Cohn-Bendit, the smothering paternalism of De Gaulle, the impact between "the new and old France"... this international dimension is deliberately pushed into the background in order to finally make May 68 a "specificité française". In reality, the wave of student unrest started in 1964, at Berkeley University in California with demands for the right to speak, the end of racial segregation and an end to the war in Vietnam. This wave spread to Japan in 1965, Britain at the end of 1967, Italy, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Turkey and to Mexico at the beginning of 1968. But above all, May 68 was part of an international workers' movement. The wave of strikes which began in France in 1967, reaching its heights in 1968, reverberated throughout the world up to 1974: the famous Cordobazo in Argentina, the "Hot Autumn" of Italy in 1969, Spain and Poland in 1971, ranging through Belgium and Britain in 1972, Scandinavia, Germany...

Nor is May 68 a "student revolt"!

The proletarian character of May 68 is often masked by the emphasis put on the student movement. The most sophisticated and devious version of this mystification clearly comes from the leftists and the unions: "The strength of May 68 is the convergence of the students and the workers!" Lies! If May 68 dynamised the struggle throughout the world, it's precisely because the working class wasn't dumbly following the movement but, on the contrary, it was its motor force.

The student movement of the 1960's was of a petty-bourgeois nature, one of its clearest aspects being its desire for “immediate change". At the time, there was no major threat of not being able to find a reasonable job at the end of your studies. The student movement which began in 1964 developed in a period of prosperity. But, from 1967, the economic situation seriously deteriorated, pushing the proletariat into struggle. From the beginning of 1967 important confrontations occurred: at Bordeaux (Dassault aviation factory), at Besançon and in the region of Lyon (strike and occupation at Rhodia, strike at Berliet), the mines of Lorraine, the naval dockyards at Saint Nazaire, Caen... These strikes prefigured what was going to happen from the middle of May 1968 across the country. You couldn't say that this storm broke out of a clear, blue sky. Between March 22 and May 13 1968, the ferocious repression of the students increasingly mobilised a working class carried along by its instinctive feelings of solidarity. May 14, at Nantes, young workers launched a strike. The next day the movement won over the Renault factory at Cléon in Normandy as well as two other factories in the region. On May 16, other Renault factories joined the movement and red flags flew over Flins, Sandouville and le Mans. The entry of Renault-Billancourt into the struggle was then a beacon: it was the biggest factory in France (35,000 workers) and the saying went "When Renault sneezes, France catches a cold". On May 17, the strike wave hit the whole of France. It was a totally spontaneous movement and all over France it was the young workers who were at the forefront. There weren't any precise demands: this was the expression of a general discontent. On May 18, there were a million workers on strike; on May 22, eight million. This was therefore the biggest strike in the history of the international workers' movement. All sectors were involved: industry, transport, energy, post and communications, teaching, administrations, media, research laboratories, etc. During this period, occupied faculties, some public buildings like the Theatre de Odeon in Paris, the streets, places of work, became spaces of permanent political discussion. "We talk and we listen" became a slogan.

Neither was May 68 a "lifestyle revolution"!

Fraudulently reduced to its "student" dimension, May 68 is presented as the symbol of sexual and women’s liberation.

The great movements of proletarian struggle have always put forward the “woman question”. At the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, in the mass strike of 1905 and the 1917 Russian revolution, women workers played an inestimable role. But what the student petty-bourgeoisie of 1968 extolled is something else altogether: it's liberation “right here and now” within capitalism, it's the liberation of humanity through sexual liberation and not as a product of a long struggle against the system of capitalist exploitation. In short, it's the forsaking of all forms of reflection which aim to really call into question the roots of the established order; it's the negation of the whole process of strikes, self-organisation and discussion within the working class in France during those weeks in May. The importance to the world bourgeoisie of reducing May 68 to burning bras is thus evident. 

Nor was May 68 a union general strike!

Today, with the rail workers' strike in France, the unions and leftist organisations are pretending that another general strike is possible. As in May 68, the unions are about to organise the "convergence of struggles" faced with the policies of Macron[1]. Lies! In May 1968 the workers took up their struggle spontaneously, without union slogans or union orders. The latter in fact ran after the movement in order to sabotage it all the better. The contemporary cartoon by Sine at the head of this article is very explicit about the resentment of the working class towards the dirty work of the unions.

The Grenelle Accords that the left and the unions celebrated as THE great victory of 68 were the outcome of the government and unions working hand-in-hand to stop the movement and defeat it. These accords brought in a rise in purchasing power much less than those gained in the preceding years. A fact that's hidden today is that the workers immediately felt these accords as an insult.  Coming to Renault Billancourt on the morning of May 27, Seguy, Secretary General of CGT, faced plenty of booing and whistling and many union cards were torn up. On May 30, De Gaulle announced the dissolution of the National Assembly, elections at the end of June, and the opening of branch by branch negotiations. The unions took this opportunity to send back to work the sectors (such as EDF-GDF) where the bosses went beyond the Grenelle Accords. They strengthened this pressure in favour of a return to work through all sorts of manoeuvres, such as the falsification of votes, lies about who had or hadn’t gone back to work, and intimidation in the name of the struggle against "leftist provocateurs". One of their biggest arguments was that the workers had to go back to work so that the elections, which were supposed to "seal the workers' victory", could take place normally.

And May 68 is not "a thing of the past"

May 68 is presented as a movement of the period of prosperity. In other words it belongs to the past, another time. Once again, nothing is more false! From 1967, the world economic situation began to deteriorate, opening the period of the permanent crisis that we've known since and confirming that capitalism is a decadent system that it's necessary to overthrow. May 68 confirmed that the proletariat was the revolutionary class; that it had the strength to organise itself and develop its consciousness through debate in autonomous general assemblies; that it could stand up against the established order and shake it to its roots. Above all, May 68 marked the end of 40 years of Stalinist counter-revolution! The importance of this event shouldn't be underestimated. May 68, and the wave of struggles which then swept through various countries, signified that the working class was not ready to accept all the sacrifices demanded in the interests of Capital, and still less to sacrifice its life. It is this, and nothing else, which prevented the confrontation between the Eastern and Western blocs from degenerating into a Third World War! Since then, the development of the proletarian movement has met many difficulties. The idea that "revolution is possible but not really necessary" has given way to "revolution is absolutely necessary but has become impossible". The proletariat has lost confidence in itself. But the reality of proletarian strength in May 68 must be a source of inspiration for the future. The bourgeoisie knows it and that's why it covers it with so many lies!

Bmc, April 28, 2018

 

 

The events of spring 1968 in France, in their roots and in their results, had an international significance. Underlying them were the consequences for the working class of the first symptoms of the world economic crisis, which was reappearing after well over a decade of capitalist prosperity.

After decades of defeat, disorientation and submission, in May 1968 the working class returned to the scene of history. While the student agitation which had been developing in France since the beginning of spring, and the radical workers’ struggles which had broken out the previous year, had already changed the social atmosphere, the entry en masse of the class struggle (10 million on strike) overturned the whole social landscape.

Very soon other national sectors of the working class would enter the struggle.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the struggles of 68, the ICC is holding a public meeting to discuss the meaning of these events. Anyone interested in discussing this important moment in the history of the working class is welcome to attend.

 

Saturday 9th June, 11am-6pm

The Lucas Arms

254A Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 8QY

 

Morning Session: The events of May 68, their context and significance.

Afternoon Session: The development of the class struggle since May 68.

 

 

 

A few months ago, the world seemed to be taking a step towards a nuclear confrontation over North Korea, with Trump’s threats of “fire and fury” and North Korea’s Great Leader boasting of its capacity for massive retaliation. Today the North and South Korean leaders are holding hands in public and promising us real steps towards peace; Trump will hold his face-to-face meeting with Kim Jong-un on 12 June in Singapore.  

Only weeks ago, there was talk of World War Three breaking out over the war in Syria, this time with Trump warning Russia that his smart missiles were on their way in response to the chemical weapons attack in Douma. The missiles were launched, no Russian military units were hit, and it looked like we were back to the “normal”, everyday forms of slaughter in Syria.

Then Trump stirred the pot again, announcing that the US would be pulling out of the “Bad Deal” Obama made with Iran over its nuclear weapons programme. This immediately created divisions between the US and other western powers who consider that the agreement with Iran was working, and who now face the threat of US sanctions if they continue to trade or cooperate with Iran. And in the Middle East itself, the impact was no less immediate: for the first time a salvo of missiles was launched against Israel by Iranian forces in Syria, not merely their local proxy Hezbollah. Israel – whose Prime Minister Netanyahu had not long before performed a song and dance about Iranian violations of the nuclear treaty – reacted with its habitual speed and ruthlessness, hitting a number of Iranian bases in southern Syria.

Meanwhile Trump’s recent declaration of support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has inflamed the atmosphere on the occupied West Bank, particularly in Gaza, where Hamas has encouraged “martyrdom” protests and in one bloody day alone, Israel obliged by massacring more than 60 demonstrators (eight of them aged under 16) and wounding over 2,500 more who suffered injuries from live sniper and automatic fire, shrapnel from unknown sources and the inhalation of tear gas for the ‘crime’ of approaching border fences and, in some cases, of possession of rocks, slingshots and bottles of petrol attached to kites.

It’s easy to succumb to panic in a world that looks increasingly out of control – and then to slip into complacency when our immediate fears are not realised or the killing fields slip down the news agendas. But in order to understand the real dangers posed by the present system and its wars, it’s necessary to step back, to consider where we are in the unfolding of events on a historical and world-wide scale. 

In the Junius Pamphlet, written from prison in 1915, Rosa Luxemburg wrote that the world war signified that capitalist society was already sinking into barbarism. “The triumph of imperialism leads to the destruction of culture, sporadically during a modern war, and forever, if the period of world wars that has just begun is allowed to take its damnable course to the last ultimate consequence”. 

Luxemburg’s historical prediction was taken up by the Communist International formed in 1919: if the working class did not overthrow a capitalist system which had now entered its epoch of decay, the “Great War” would be followed by even greater, i.e. more destructive and barbaric wars, endangering the very survival of civilisation. And indeed this proved to be true: the defeat of the world revolutionary wave which broke out in reaction to the First World War opened the door to a second and even more nightmarish conflict. And at the end of six years of butchery, in which civilian populations were the first target, the unleashing of the atomic bomb by the USA against Japan gave material form to the danger that future wars would lead to the extermination of humanity.

For the next four decades, we lived under the menacing shadow of a third world war between the nuclear-armed blocs that dominated the planet. But although this threat came close to being carried out – as over the Cuba crisis in 1962 for example – the very existence of the US and Russian blocs imposed a kind of discipline over the natural tendency of capitalism to operate as a war of each against all. This was one element that prevented local conflicts – which were usually proxy battles between the blocs – from spiralling out of control. Another element was the fact that, following the world-wide revival of class struggle after 1968, the bourgeoisie did not have the working class in its pocket and was not sure of being able to march it off to war.

In 1989-91, the Russian bloc collapsed faced with growing encirclement by the USA and inability of the model of state capitalism prevailing in the Russian bloc to adapt to the demands of the world economic crisis. The statesmen of the victorious US camp crowed that, with the “Soviet” enemy out of the way, we would enter a new era of prosperity and peace. For ourselves, as revolutionaries, we insisted that capitalism would remain no less imperialist, no less militarist, but that the drive to war inscribed in the system would simply take a more chaotic and unpredictable form[1]. And this too proved to be correct. And it is important to understand that this process, this plunge into military chaos, has worsened over the past three decades.

The rise of new challengers

In the first years of this new phase, the remaining superpower, aware that the demise of its Russian enemy would bring centrifugal tendencies in its own bloc, was still able to exert a certain discipline over its former allies. In the first Gulf War, for example, not only did its former subordinates (Britain, Germany, France, Japan, etc) join or support the US-led coalition against Saddam, it even had the backing of Gorbachev’s USSR and the regime in Syria. Very soon however, the cracks started to show: the war in ex-Yugoslavia saw Britain, Germany and France taking up positions that often directly opposed the interests of the US, and a decade later, France, Germany and Russia openly opposed the US invasion of Iraq.

The “independence” of the USA’s former western allies never reached the stage of constituting a new imperialist bloc in opposition to Washington. But over the last 20 or 30 years, we have seen the rise of a new power which poses a more direct challenge to the US: China, whose startling economic growth has been accompanied by a widening imperialist influence, not only in the Far East but across the Asian landmass towards the Middle East and into Africa. But China has shown the capacity to play the long game in pursuit of its imperialist ambitions – as shown in the patient construction of its “New Silk Road” to the west and its gradual build up of military bases in the South China Sea.

Even though at the moment the North-South Korean diplomatic initiatives and the announced US-North-Korean summit may leave the impression that “peace” and “disarmament” can be brokered, and that the threat of nuclear destruction can be thwarted by the “leaders coming to reason”, the imperialist tensions between the US and China will continue to dominate the rivalries in the region, and any future moves around Korea will be overshadowed by their antagonism.

Thus, the Chinese bourgeoisie has been engaged in a long-term and world-wide offensive, undermining not only the positions of the US but also of Russia and others in Central Asia and in the Far East; but at the same time, Russian interventions in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East have confronted the US with the dilemma of having to face up to two rivals on different levels and in different regions.  Tensions between Russia and a number of western countries, above all the US and Britain, have increased in a very visible manner recently. Thus alongside the already unfolding rivalry between the US and its most serious global challenger China, the Russian counter-offensive has become an additional direct challenge to the authority of the US.

It is important to understand that Russia is indeed engaging in a counter-offensive, a response to the threat of strangulation by the US and its allies. The Putin regime, with its reliance on nationalist rhetoric and the military strength inherited from the “Soviet” era, was the product of a reaction not only against the asset-stripping economic policies of the west in the early years of the Russian Federation, but even more importantly against the continuation and even intensification of the encirclement of Russia begun during the Cold War. Russia was deprived of its former protective barrier to the west by the expansion of the EU and of NATO to the majority of eastern European states. In the 90s, with its brutal scorched-earth policy in Chechnya, it showed how it would react to any hint of independence inside the Federation itself. Since then it has extended this policy to Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014 onwards) – states that were not part of the Federation but which risked becoming foci of western influence on its southern borders. In both cases, Moscow has used local separatist forces, as well as its own thinly-disguised military forces, to counter pro-western regimes. 

These actions already sharpened tensions between Russia and the US, which responded by imposing economic sanctions on Russia, more or less supported by other western states despite their differences with the USA over Russian policy, generally based on their particular economic interests (this was especially true of Germany). But Russia’s subsequent intervention in Syria took these conflicts onto a new level.

The Middle East maelstrom

In fact, Russia has always backed the Assad regime in Syria with arms and advisers. Syria has long been its last outpost in the Middle East following the decline of the USSR’s influence in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere. The Syrian port of Tartus is absolutely vital to its strategic interests: it is its main outlet to the Mediterranean, and Russian imperialism has always insisted on maintaining its fleet there. But faced with the threat of the defeat of the Assad regime by rebel forces, and by the advance of ISIS forces towards Tartus, Russia took the major step of openly committing troops and warplanes in the service of the Assad regime, showing no hesitation in taking part in the daily devastation of rebel-held cities and neighbourhoods, which has added significantly to the civilian death toll.

But America also has its forces in Syria, ostensibly in response to the rise of ISIS. And the US has made no secret of backing the anti-Assad rebels – including the jihadist wing which served the expansion of ISIS.  Thus the potential for a direct confrontation between Russian and US forces has been there for some time. The two US military responses to the regime’s probable use of chemical weapons have a more or less symbolic character, not least because the use of “conventional” weapons by the regime has killed far more civilians than the use of chlorine or other agents. There is strong evidence that the US military reined in Trump and made sure that great care would be taken to hit only regime facilities and not Russian troops[2]. But this doesn’t mean that either the US or Russian governments can avoid more direct clashes between the two powers in the future – the forces working in favour of destabilisation and disorder are simply too deeply rooted, and they are revealing themselves with increasing virulence.

During both world wars, the Middle East was an important but still secondary theatre of conflict; its strategic importance has grown with the development of its immense oil reserves in the period after World War II.  Between 1948 and 1973, the main arena for military confrontation was the succession of wars between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, but these wars tended to be short-lived and their outcomes largely benefited the US bloc. This was one expression of the “discipline” imposed on second and third rate powers by the bloc system. But even during this period there were signs of a more centrifugal tendency – most notably the long “civil war” in the Lebanon and the “Islamic revolution” which undermined the USA’s domination of Iran, precipitating the Iran-Iraq war (where the west mainly backed Saddam as a counter-weight to Iran).

The definitive end of the bloc system has profoundly accelerated these centrifugal forces, and the Syrian war has brought them to a head. Thus within or around Syria we can see a number of contradictory battles taking place:

-          Between Iran and Saudi Arabia: often cloaked under the ideology of the Shia-Sunni split, Iranian backed Hezbollah militias from Lebanon have played a key role in shoring up the Assad regime, notably against jihadi militias supported by Saudi and Qatar (who have their own separate conflict). Iran has been the main beneficiary of the US invasion of Iraq, which has led to the virtual disintegration of the country and the imposition of a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. Its imperialist ambitions have further been playing out in the war in Yemen, scene of a brutal proxy war between Iran and Saudi (the latter helped no end by British arms)[3];

-          Between Israel and Iran. The recent Israeli air strikes against Iranian targets in Syria are in direct continuity with a series of raids aimed at degrading the forces of Hezbollah in that country. It seems that Israel continues to inform Russia in advance about these raids, and generally the latter turns a blind eye to them, although the Putin regime has now begun to criticise them more openly. But there is no guarantee that the conflict between Israel and Iran will not go beyond these controlled responses. Trump’s “diplomatic vandalism”[4] with regard to the Iranian nuclear deal is fuelling both the Netanyahu government’s aggressively anti-Iran posture and Iran’s hostility to the “Zionist regime”, which, it should not be forgotten, has long maintained its own nuclear weapons in defiance of international agreements.

-          Between Turkey and the Kurds who have set up enclaves in northern Syria. Turkey covertly supported ISIS in the fight for Rojava, but has intervened directly against the Afrin enclave. The Kurdish forces, however, as the most reliable barrier to the spread of ISIS, have up to now been backed by the US, even if the latter might hesitate to use them to directly counter the military advances made Turkish imperialism. In addition Turkish ambitions to once again play a leading role in the region and beyond have not only driven it into conflict with NATO and  EU countries, but have reinforced Russian efforts to drive a wedge between NATO and Turkey, and  to pull Turkey closer to Russia, despite Turkey’s  own long-standing rivalry with the Assad regime.  

-          This tableau of chaos is further enriched by the rise of numerous armed gangs which may form alliances with particular states but which are not necessarily subordinate to them. ISIS is the most obvious expression of this new tendency towards brigandage and warlordism, but by no means the only one.

The impact of political instability

We have seen how Trump’s impetuous declarations have added to the general unpredictability of the situation in the Middle East. They are symptomatic of deep divisions within the American bourgeoisie. The president is currently being investigated by the security apparatus for evidence of Russian involvement (via its well-developed cyber war techniques, financial irregularities, blackmail etc) in the Trump election campaign; and up till recently Trump made little secret of his admiration for Putin, possibly reflecting an option for allying with Russia as a counter-weight to the rise of China. But the antipathy towards Russia within the American bourgeoisie goes very deep and, whatever his personal motives (such as revenge or the desire to prove that he is no Russian stooge), Trump has also been obliged to talk tough and then walk the talk against the Russians. This instability at the very heart of the world’s leading power is not a simple product of the unstable individual Trump; rather, Trump’s accession to power is evidence of the rise of populism and the growing loss of control by the bourgeoisie over its own political apparatus - the directly political expressions of social decomposition.  And such tendencies in the political machinery can only increase the development of instability on the imperialist level, where it is most dangerous.

In such a volatile context, it is impossible to rule out the danger of sudden acts of irrationality and self-destruction. The tendency towards a kind of suicidal insanity, which is certainly real, has not yet fully seized hold of the leading factions of the ruling class, who still understand that the unleashing of their nuclear arsenals runs the risk of destroying the capitalist system itself. And yet it would be foolish to rely on the good sense of the imperialist gangs that currently rule the planet – even now they are researching into ways in which nuclear weapons could be used to win a war.

As Luxemburg insisted in 1915, the only alternative to the destruction of culture by imperialism is “the victory of socialism, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism. Against its methods, against war. That is the dilemma of world history, its inevitable choice, whose scales are trembling in the balance awaiting the decision of the proletariat”.

The present phase of capitalist decomposition, of spiralling imperialist chaos, is the price paid by humanity for the inability of the working class to realise the promise of 1968 and the ensuing wave of international class struggle: a conscious struggle for the socialist transformation of the world. Today the working class finds itself faced with the onward march of barbarism, taking the form of a multitude of imperialist conflicts, of social disintegration, and ecological devastation; and - in contrast to 1917-18, when the workers’ revolt put an end to the war – these forms of barbarism are much harder to oppose.  They are certainly at their strongest in areas where the working class has little social weight – Syria being the most obvious example; but even in countries like Turkey, where the question of war faces a working class with a long tradition of struggle, there are few signs of direct resistance to the war effort. As for the working class in the central countries of capital, its struggles against what is now a more or less permanent economic crisis are currently at a very low ebb, and have no direct impact on the wars that, although geographically peripheral to Europe, are having a growing - and mainly negative – impact on social life, through the rise of terrorism and the cynical manipulation of the refugee question[5].

But the class war is far from over. Here and there it shows signs of life: in the demonstrations and strikes in Iran, which showed a definite reaction against the state’s militarist adventures; in the struggles in the education sector in the UK and the USA; in the growing discontent with government’s austerity measures in France and Spain. This remains well below the level needed to respond to the decomposition of an entire social order, but the defensive struggle of the working class against the effects of the economic crisis remains the indispensable basis for a deeper questioning of the capitalist system.

Amos, 16.5.18

 

Raoul Peck’s film, which has recently been released in Britain, provides us with much to think about on the bicentenary of Marx’s birth, and we certainly recommend it to our readers. But as the following article shows, it still needs to be viewed with a critical eye… 

This is a film that's surprising because it seems to rehabilitate the character of Karl Marx. Surprising because in choosing to cover five years which perhaps were the most decisive in Marx’s life  - from 1843 to 1848- Raoul Peck aims to break with the caricature of a solitary genius acting outside of the world of the workers. But does he really achieve this? Without doubt the angle from which Raoul Peck deals with the life of Marx corrects somewhat the idea that Marx and Engels were inventors of abstract notions such as "class struggle", "revolution" or "communism". The film does show how these two men, who played a key role in the revolutionary movement, were won over to a cause that had been born well before them from the womb of the proletariat of the most industrialised countries of the 19th century. In this we think that the vision of Peck is totally different from the more rabid intellectuals who, not without a great deal of dishonesty, try to demonstrate that the works of Marx carry the germs of the Stalinist tragedy[i]. And yet this film doesn't totally break from the image of the providential hero, which considerably weakens the attempt to show the militant dimension of Marx, his contemporary relevance, as well as the decisive role that the proletariat will have to play in the transformation of society.

The film correctly emphasises the decisive meeting and the unshakeable collaboration between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the rebellious son of an industrialist, who opened Marx’s eyes to the political potential of the working class and to the importance of political economy. However there is a lack of subtlety in the portrayal of this meeting, where the coldness of the formal introductions in Arnold Ruge’s drawing room suddenly gives way to declarations of mutual fascination in a night of drinking and games of chess where the two men come to perfect agreement and Marx compliments Engels for having opened his eyes, drunkenly declaiming the celebrated phrase: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the task from now on is to change it". Paradoxically, it's a central scene since it announces the vision of the character that the film will develop: a Marx who is not a philosopher, a historian, or an economist but a militant of the workers' movement, addressing himself to workers in meetings, polemicising with Proudhon and his petty-bourgeois reformism or with Weitling and his Christian idealism.

What’s more the hardships of the life of a militant are not neglected. If the element of repression is somewhat flippantly depicted when Karl and Friedrich play cat and mouse with the police in the Paris suburbs, the frustrations and traumas of exile, the poverty of daily life, are shown in their cruel reality. These moments show the strengthening links of friendship and love but also those feelings engendered by militant passion. Raoul Peck thus reproduces a whole revolutionary milieu first in Paris and then in Brussels and London. But, despite all this, these scenes offer an excessively personalised image of the debates and the process of clarification within the revolutionary milieu of the time. For example, Raoul Peck seems to attribute to Marx the discredit suffered by Weitling in the League of the Just, whereas the first to call into question the idealist and messianic aims of the latter were Schapper[ii] and a great majority of workers of the German Workers’ Association in London. We know that Marx followed this polemic with a great deal of attention since it revealed a break between a sentimental communism and the scientific communism that he himself advocated. Through the creation of correspondence committees, the London Association got closer to the conceptions of Marx on the direction to give to the movement and consequently distanced itself from the conception of Weitling. Thus the virulent discussion at the Brussels Correspondence Committee of March 30 1846, shown in the film, ended up in a split that was already a long time coming. In fact the director remains a prisoner of the democratic vision of debate and political action because the attention is regularly drawn to the theoretical jousting between leaders and charismatic chiefs, which obscures what was essential: the theoretical effervescence and the complex, collective reflection which already characterised the workers' movement at that time.

This confusion increases in the way that the relationship between Marx and the League of the Just is treated. We recognise that Raoul Peck wants to show that Marx and Engels had understood that the salvation of humanity resides in the historic role that the working class has to play. They also understood that it was necessary to rid themselves of all idealism, all ethereal, illusory and utopian speeches on the means to attain a superior stage of human society; that the working class needed a practical theory in order to understand the world which had engendered it, and to understand that its situation was not set in stone but transitory.  What the film tries to show, with a certain fidelity it seems to us, is the need for the working class to develop a revolutionary theory and the conviction to act upon it. On the other hand, the way in which the rapprochement between Marx and the League of the Just is shown contains the idea that Marx was ready to engage in intrigues, an ambitious Marx playing on his intellectual stature in order to win the majority of the revolutionary avant-garde to his side. In this version of events, Marx and Engels seem almost to seduce the leaders of the League; they go out of their way to get into contact with them, not hesitating to exaggerate their closeness to Proudhon in order to extend the network of correspondence committees into the east of France. Contrary to the wooliness of the film’s treatment of this event, it was the League, under the aegis of its spokesman Joseph Moll, who invited Marx to join. In their Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, Boris Nicolaevskyi and Otto Maenchen-Helfen write: "he explained in his own name and that of his comrades that they were convinced of the rightness of Marx’s views and agreed that they must shake off the old conspiratorial forms and traditions. Marx and Engels were to be invited to collaborate in work of reorganisation and theoretical reorientation”[iii]. However Marx hesitated in accepting, still doubting the real will of the League to reorganise itself and get rid of the old conspiratorial and utopian conceptions. But "Moll stated that it was essential that he and Engels should join the League if it were really to shake off all its arcane shackles, and Marx overcame his doubts and joined the League of the Just in February or March 1847”[iv].

While it’s true that the weight of personalities was quite strong in the workers' movement of the 19th century, the film, by isolating the theoretical contribution of Marx and Engels, gives the basic impression that this movement depended entirely on personalities of genius. This is confirmed in the unfolding of the congress of the League of the Just on June 1 1847, which Marx didn't actually go to - officially for lack of money but really because he wanted to await the decisions of the congress before definitively joining the League. This scene is a caricature because it presents the congress as a fight between personalities where a minority of "elite" militants are supported or contested by applause and cries from the great majority who remain passive. This is a deformed vision of the real proceedings of a congress of a revolutionary organisation.

Despite the harsh nature of their living conditions, the politicised workers attached great importance to learning and to the deepening of political questions, especially through reading pamphlets. Thus the congresses were not some sort of oratory competition where each side had its own champion, but fundamental moments in the life of a revolutionary organisation with long debates where each militant takes part in the expression and confrontation of positions whatever their theoretical capacity. In his Contribution to the History of the Communist League Engels shows the studious reality of the first revolutionary congresses of the proletariat: "At the second congress which took place at the end of November and beginning of December the same year (1847), Marx was also present and in a debate that was quite long - the congress lasted for ten days at least - he defended the new theory"[v].

To sum up: it's not a question here of denying the decisive role of Marx and Engels in the evolution of the revolutionary movement but of situating their trajectory within the proletarian movement and of underlining that their inestimable contribution could not have happened without this great movement which still makes the working class the active subject of history. The caricatures that the director sometimes gives us mask this reality by putting the accent on the preponderant place of individuals and their providential role.

Art doesn't have the job of serving a political cause. However, the content and form of a work can send a message. While we applaud Raoul Peck’s efforts to exhume Marx from the cemetery of history, the manner in which the film relates certain moments of his life tends to pervert and deform the political lessons that we can draw from them[vi] . This is what we want to try to correct with this article.

DI, 28.10.17

 

 

Under the heading ‘Readers’ Contributions’ we aim 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. Here, a close sympathiser looks at recent discoveries of ‘Neaderthal art’  and the implications for a marxist understanding of ‘pre-history’.

 

Of late, the general tendency of scientific research into the history of humanity has been to put significant dates of certain profound historical events further and further back in time[i]. This has happened quite often over the last quarter century as dating techniques have advanced greatly and as the ideology of the bourgeoisie of the incremental rise of mankind to the natural order of an, albeit slightly imperfect, capitalism has cracked in the face of reality. In some senses science here, following the evidence it has unearthed, has shown a certain independence from the economic base that funds it. At the same time the marxist perspective on the importance of prehistory is reaffirmed through a deepening of its understanding of the past, including  "primitive" communism and its means of production; the intellectual and the no less important spiritual means of production, consciousness, solidarity and the ubiquitous power of belief systems.

The discovery of Neanderthal cave art in Spain

The findings, reported in Nature, 22.2.2018, show that in La Pasiega, a cave in northern Spain there are red linear motifs on a painted stalagmite older than 64, 800 years; at Ardeles in southern Spain, there are different paintings including one between 43,300 and 48,700 years old and another up to 65,000 years old; in Maltravieso, west-central Spain, there's a red hand stencil that was made no less than 66,700 years ago. These dates go back twenty-thousand years before Homo Sapiens arrived in Europe. Providing the dating technique is correct, this shows that these depictions were made by Neanderthals. This is quite an interesting development given that cave art, whose antiquity and sophistication has always been questioned by the proponents of bourgeois ideology, is one of the main tenets of what is supposed to make us "human", and by this is meant to be Homo Sapiens as distinct from all other species.  The Guardian's art critic Jonathan Jones is one of these bourgeois vectors, advocating "representational art" as a sole feature of Homo Sapiens. There's no doubting the power of observation in the depictions of Upper Palaeolithic animals but, leaving that aside for the moment, a concept of "representational art", i.e., painting what you see, completely underestimates the magic, complexities, meanings and fundamentally spiritual nature of cave art even if made by Sapiens. Jones suggests that Neanderthal art is the work of "three-year olds", primitive and "childish", showing himself as nothing more than yet another ignorant art critic. Homo Sapiens' Upper Palaeolithic cave art lasted in all its essentials for a period of twenty-eight thousand years and while quite stunning, its earlier development by Neanderthals is not entirely surprising. If the dates stack up it's quite a discovery that tends to break down further distinctions between Sapiens and Neanderthals.

 Radiocarbon dating is difficult when applied to cave art but the uranium-thorium method used in dating these paintings is a better option and is a well established geo-chronological technique which measures the decay in the calcium deposits covering the painting. Further verification would be useful to be absolutely sure, bearing in mind the uncertainty around Neanderthal cave art at the Nerja caves in Spain where the charcoal remains besides stalagmites painted in a kind of double-helix design were dated by radiocarbon and are open to dispute. But while it's always good to have these dates confirmed, particularly with multiple lines of converging evidence (archaeological, etc.), there's plenty elsewhere to demonstrate that Neanderthals were perfectly capable of such activities.

The humanity of Homo Neanderthalensis

Even without any of these latest depictions there's already more than enough evidence to make a compelling case for the human qualities of Neanderthals. They had a common African ancestor with Sapiens in Homo Erectus and existed and evolved from northern Europe to Central Asia from 400 to 40 thousand years ago. They were the first, and remain the first, human species to survive a glaciation event, which must have required an intellectual and body strength based on a fair degree of wit and organisation. Just as bourgeois ideology and its "specialists", accompanied by the ignorant chatter of its "critics", always look to emphasise division so, since their discovery in 1829, it has sought to paint Neanderthalensis (henceforward, HN) as an ignorant savage in much the same way it used to talk about earlier Sapiens. Thus the extinction of is often described as "the first genocide" by humans,  which neatly turns Sapiens back into murdering savages again[ii].  Demonstrating its fundamentally reactionary nature The Guardian, through it "science" editor Robin McKie, allows such sub-headings as: "How Neanderthals met a grisly fate: devoured by humans". Neanderthals and Sapiens worked alongside each other at an "industrial" flint site in France for up to a thousand years and there's evidence of a HN/Sapiens overlap of ten thousand years in Siberia (Chris Scarre, The Human Past) and, though its impossibility was clearly stated by the scientific hacks of capitalism for ages, the inter-breeding between both is beyond any doubt[iii].

Four hundred metres deep inside the Bruniquel cave in the Pyrenees there is evidence of wall-like structures built out of stalagmites by HN 175 thousand years ago, one of the earliest known building structures. They made tools from bone and had a sophisticated range of tools that would have included those which could be used in making fine etchings on cave walls. At Cueva de los Aviones in south-eastern Spain researchers found HN perforated sea-shells, beads and pigments dated no less than 115 thousand years ago, and no less than from forty thousand years ago, deep in Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar, are ten-foot square etchings of Neanderthal abstract art. Evidence of their varied diet disproved the current idea that they were strictly meat-eaters incapable of cooking and processing food, and they provided themselves with fire, shelter and clothing. There's clear evidence that they buried their dead with some care in some places, that they knew about medicinal plants and cared for the sick, injured and weak (in Shanidar cave in Iraq, amongst others), again qualities that were supposed to be exclusive to Sapiens. All in all these suggest that Neanderthals were perfectly capable of producing a cave art that was some way beyond and much more profound than simple representation.

The paintings

It's very early to comment on the paintings discovered in the Spanish caves above and there's been very little said in the reports about the techniques used. There's a need for detailed text describing them from direct observation and, ideally, 3-D images of sufficient scale in order to fully examine them. Photographs don't tend to do cave paintings justice, distorts them even, particularly as prehistoric cave art is always painted on rough, craggy, uneven and fractured surfaces as flat surfaces were deliberately ignored everywhere, possibly by taboo. This fact alone shows a certain spiritual connection with the act of application, the surface, the pigment and "what lies beyond" the cave's surface. That HN should be using these surfaces, deep into the caves, in deliberately selected locations sometimes in almost inaccessible places, show that, as with Upper Palaeolithic Homo Sapien's cave art, spirituality and belief systems play a big part.

But there are some more or less speculative observations that we can make from a first look at the paintings: the red dotted curve in the composition at La Pasiega comes round perfectly before a sudden turn backwards on itself while rising in a stronger vertical column. This is reminiscent of the description of the Sapiens prehistoric cave art curve by Max Raphael that "The straight line and rigid geometrization and symmetrisation of the concave-convex curve into a sine curve are avoided everywhere. The originally complementary parts of the curve are shifted and their measures and positions become asymmetrical in relation to its turning point..". I think that Raphael would have been amazed that his analysis could be applied to and reflected within Neanderthal art. And this particular curve also raises his analysis of it being related to magic, motion, time and being.  Elements of Epicurean philosophy painted on a cave wall by Neanderthals? Surely not? Why not? "That which is abstractly possible, which can be conceived constitutes no obstacle to the thinking subject, no limit, no stumbling-block" (Marx). At any rate, I think that the expression of free will is undeniable in this composition. The "ladder" symbol adjacent[iv] to the dotted curve is a common "sign" in Upper Paleolithic cave art and to the right of this there's a complex abstract design. What's immediately striking about this element of the composition is its expressive asymmetry[v] which is a feature of all Upper Paleolithic  Sapiens art where the asymmetrical dominates (full face or head-on depictions of animals are very rare in Upper Paleolithic cave art). What's even more interesting in the La Pasiega composition is that "inside" the ladder there are two animals, one of which is a large quadruped, possibly pregnant, which is disappearing into the cave wall[vi]. Underneath this is what looks like a hind (a series of curves) emerging from the cave wall. As with most spiritual elements of cave art there are no ground lines and the feet of the animals disappear into the ether. As with the great majority of animal depictions in this epoch, the feet and the lower part of the leg fade away, giving a "floating" appearance and accentuate the curvature of the animal. This particular disappearance into and emergence from the surface again, possibly transformed, shows the spiritual nature of the action and its depiction of these animals as spirits. It's not clear from the reports if these two animals have been dated to the same time as the rest of the painting, but there are two interesting possibilities: either these were painted by HN which further emphasises their interest in the spiritual[vii] and takes the paintings of animals back twenty-eight thousand years further; or they were added later by HS, which itself shows an important cooperative development in the historical process of art and belief systems. And it raises the question of the African heritage for all art forms.

The hand-print at Maltravieso, red ochre blown over an outstretched hand, dated to 66,700 years, do belong to HN and points to the spiritual nature of this action. The hand was vital; it was the hand that produced everything including this work and the hand is not just stencilled onto the wall, it connects to the surface and penetrates it. This particular symbolism is absolutely everywhere in Upper Paleolithic art from Europe, to Africa, Australia and south-east Asia[viii]. This shows a solid continuity and given that it was probably the shaman who was the artist in the Upper Paleolithic caves, given the spiritual nature of this recently discovered (or recently dated) art, and given that HN would likely had medicine men or women, then these painting show the probability that belief systems, based on magic and expressed by certain individuals, played a very dynamic role and go a very long way back at least to Neanderthals and longer I suspect. But that's speculation.

To give one example of the continuity of these belief systems: Ethnological evidence shows us that when the shamans of the San Bushmen go into their trance-dance - in which everybody joins - they often suffer a nasal haemorrhage and bleed from the nose. Depiction on Upper Palaeolithic caves 40,000 years ago show significant animals in meaningful circumstances bleeding from the nose. There is continuity but it can be argued that any "specialisation" of shamanism is a comparatively recent development that, as with the San Bushmen, it is more diffused among the community, or at least there were gradations and artistic stages of shamanic ability. While there is continuity, this is not a monolithic belief system and neither is it static.

What are the implications?

I've put forward some speculative ideas above on some of the implications but first of all this discovery widens and deepens a marxist perspective on prehistory, adding more weight to a materialist understanding of the development of mankind of which Homo Neanderthalensis is an important component.

With their direct antecedents over 2 million years old, and not much different from them, Homo Nadeli, a small-brained genus of Homo, were burying their dead at a site north-west of Johannesburg (there's some debate about this) over a quarter of a million years ago. At any rate this was a persistent character roaming the African bush around the same time, 300 thousand years ago, as the first Sapiens were appearing in Jebel Iroud, Morocco. And these two species weren't alone. Around the same time, in the Kapthurian Formation of Kenya, Homo Erectus was processing ochre. Ochre is not only used for pigment, it has medicinal properties and a wide range of practical uses. Liquefied red ochre, no less than 200 thousand years old, has been found at a Neanderthal site at Maastricht in the Netherlands. The hematite material was transported sixty kilometres to be processed by heat. At Twin-Rivers, Zambia, there's evidence of a range of ochre production 350-400 thousand years ago, possibly by Homo Heidelbergensis, which includes a "startling purple". This is only (a big "only") Africa and all these "species", all around the same time and there's at least two more, raises the possibilities of inter-action, breeding across various divisions and so on, none of which precludes confrontations, regressions and struggles.

The whole question of "species" is once again raised by this art. Scientific classification delineating different species of Homo is extremely complex and contentious and not something we can go into here. Skull size is one of the factors determining species but this is somewhat fluid. Homo Nadeli, mentioned above, has a skull size about a third of ours but this species managed to survive and flourish alongside another half-a-dozen Homo divisions; and the diminutive Homo Floresiensis had a skull size less than half of Homo Erectus but still produced relatively modern looking tools. And a glance around a modern high street will see people of around the same size and age with any number of different shaped and sized skulls, just as a look around the same high street will reveal both men and women with clear Neanderthal features[ix]. The fact that there were so many extant species of Homo shows that each had in common the defence of the bonds of their society, which could well have included some kinds of belief systems and an extension and openness to others which including breeding with them (the full extent of this has yet to be revealed by DNA). It does show that there was no evolution in the sense of a gradual, linear and incremental progression, an evolutionary determinism which is just as much a distortion of Darwin as Social Darwinism. There is no deterministic outcome but a common African origin and a universal human spirit. Rather than clearly different species there's more than an element of subdivision of species, with definite species not being perennial but groups ranged under different classifications which could be fluid. Of course those less well adapted would have died out for one reason or another.

Homo Sapiens represent a conclusion to the whole period of human history from the Australopithecines onwards. And within the former, the proletariat represents the future for the whole of humanity and it has to struggle for unity against all divisions in order to bring an end to the whole period of prehistory. In the ICC text ‘The question of the relation between nature and culture (on the book by Patrick Tort, Sex, Race and Culture)’ there's a quote which I think applies to the whole history of Homo: "At the beginning of this 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 solidarity of the group". I don't think that this process of the elimination of the weakest would have lasted long given the significant advantage conferred by solidarity; and, further, I think that in order for them to survive, solidarity and some form of society would have existed among the much earlier Australopithecines[x]. The better adapted, with more numerous descendents and advantageous variations, frees them from the grip of natural selection[xi] and imposes, amongst a whole range of the species Homo a non-deterministic development towards a new synthesis. The whole process is one of transformation and, as Marx indicated, as man transforms nature he transforms his own being. This transformation has resulted in our species, Homo Sapiens, becoming the dominant species on the planet and this itself has been a struggle. Archaeological evidence of the early stages of Sapiens in Africa show significant developments in the means of production quickly disappearing and ensuing regressions - it's not been a one-way process. There's no evidence that Sapiens "wiped out" Neanderthals and what evidence there is points to other reasons for their demise. DNA shows that our species bred with them and possibly others but the main reason for the emergence and ultimately "winning out" must be that Homo Sapiens - for a whole range of historical circumstances and developments, not least theory, practice and organisation - adapted better to the spaces that they moved into.

The discovery of the cave art of Homo Neaderthalensis doesn't re-write the history of humanity but it does throw more light on it and shows the variety of the human species. I also think that it underlines the dynamic and independent role that belief systems have played from a long way back.

Baboon 18.4.2018

 

 

This article, written by a close sympathiser of the ICC, shows that for all its political weaknesses, the British ruling class is still able to defend its imperialist interests and is as strong as ever when it comes to hypocritical justifications.

The big lies

In many ways it's useful to have a Foreign Secretary who's widely regarded as being a bumbling, incompetent fool because it tends to hide the gravity of the lies, deceit and involvement of “Perfidious Albion” in a number of wars, some of which, as in Libya, involve the direct support of al-Qaida type fundamentalists. As well as "The war on terror", there's a sort of "war alongside terror" where the latter is used for British imperialist interests. Thus the week that Boris Johnson was widely mocked across the mainstream and social media for asking for his own aeroplane, he quietly announced "the expansion of the UK's role in Yemen. The Foreign Secretary said British personnel will provide 'information, advice and assistance' to help Saudi Arabia..." (Independent, 24.5.18). That the increasingly aggressive involvement of the British military in yet another shocking and bestial war in the Middle East should arouse so little comment in the news media - as opposed to the "plane" story - shows just how subservient it is to the interests of British imperialism. Similarly, up to September 2017, the British have launched 1600 air-strikes in Syria and Iraq, often on densely populated areas; three thousand, four hundred bombs or missiles have been launched[1] and there's not been one civilian casualty - according to the Ministry of Defence. The democratic state of Great Britain and its media's perpetration of the lies of capitalism have nothing to learn from Goebbels.

At present, Britain is militarily engaged in a number of wars: Afghanistan (where, following a recent request from President Trump, Britain is considering doubling the number of troops there), Iraq, Syria and Libya (where the UN said on May 30 that fighting had reached "unprecedented levels") and has troops active in Sierra Leone, Malawi, Somalia, Rwanda and Kenya. There are probably other "engagements" that we are not aware of; in East Africa, for example, where Turkish, Iranian, Saudi, Israeli and Emirati forces are increasingly present as imperialist war "organically" spreads from the Middle East to Africa. The totalitarian nature of the British state is indicated in the deceit of government ministers who assured us that the British role in Syria was limited to its (entirely benign, it insists) air-strikes  - and then a few days later a British Special Forces soldier was killed on the ground in Manjib. Another outright lie promoted by Britain is that of the "moderate, democratic, opposition to Assad" which they back and which doesn't appear to exist. The British, through the Foreign Office, have also actively supported the Syrian "White Helmets"[2] and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (based in Coventry), with the former praised by Prime Minister May and presented as a heroic, life-saving force when in reality it's closely linked to the Foreign Office and works with the permission of the jihadists. The White Helmets, whose website calls for more western bombing in Syria, must have some sort of accommodation and modus operandi with ex-al-Qaida outfit, Jahbet al-Nusra which remains a significant jihadi force in Syria.

The Labour Party contributes to the deliberate underestimation of the role of British imperialism in Syria with its right wing calling for the "protection of civilians" through more British bombing, while on the left the "Stop the War Coalition" calls for Britain not to get involved, behind which lies its objective support for Russian and Syrian imperialism. Both obscure the real implication of British imperialism in Syria, the first by asking for what's already happening on a larger scale and the second bringing discredit to any critique of Britain's role in the war while actually underestimating it.

An example of this is the reported chemical attack on the Syrian city of Douma on April 7, which the US, France and Britain responded to with further air strikes on Syrian positions a week later. Why the Syrians would drop chlorine or sarin on Douma when the jihadists were giving up their heavy weapons and being bussed out the next day is a legitimate question. The war is increasingly irrational in Syria and this may just be another irrational act. But there are many doubts about the western narrative and some of these are expressed by reporter Robert Fisk, who, along with two Syrian friends, toured Douma with no minders and no cops after the event and found little evidence of a gas attack[3] and scepticism about this from the local population. He wanted to talk to the White Helmets but all of them had left the population and fled in Russian-controlled buses to the jihadi enclave of Idlib, where various Saudi and Qatari-backed fundamentalist military units are holed up. The "gas attack" could have been the result of a firestorm and brick dust - the rub is that the effect of brick dust from all the bombings in Iraq and Syria will probably kill many more people, in the short, medium and long-term, than all the explosions and gas attacks themselves.

Enemies of the state

On the present political problems and general historical weakening of British imperialism there are two articles in World Revolution no. 379, "Churchill and the Brexiteers: the delusions of British imperialism" and "Britain, the ruling class divided" which cover these issues in some depth. But the "deep state", the less visible part of the totalitarian state, adjusts somewhat and continues its dirty work in the generalisation of warfare and instability in what it sees as the "defence of the national interest", i.e., the defence of British imperialism, the defence of a decaying capitalism.

On top of this decay, and a result of it, sits the capitalist state and its propaganda machine. Any criticism of the British position and its involvement in the Syrian war (and others) is not tolerated and those that make any critique are labelled as "conspiracy theorists" and "pro-Assad apologists". Thus The Guardian began a campaign against the Sheffield University professor, Piers Robinson[4] and his academic colleagues, who have made meticulous analyses of the media coverage of British wars over the past decades, when they raised some pertinent questions over Syria and the circumstances around the increasingly mysterious Skirpal poisoning. The Times took up the witch-hunt and the BBC inevitably followed suit, with an interviewer asking one of the "dissidents" if it wouldn't be better if he just kept quiet given he was supporting Russia. The new Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, wound up the issue earlier in the year with his warning that a Russian cyber attack would "kill thousands, thousands and thousands" of Britons.[5]

On "conspiracy theories" ex-left wing "firebrand" Jack Straw said this as the Labour British Foreign Secretary: "Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States ... There is simply no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition, full stop".[6] But they have, and the British government have admitted it and apologised to Abdulhakim Belhadj, who was kidnapped, rendered and tortured along with his pregnant wife at the hands of the then British ally, Libyan leader Gaddifi. We don't need conspiracy theories to understand that the British state murders and tortures, plots and schemes along with the best of them, and that it's reasonable to assume that the Belhadj case, fortuitously discovered, is the tip of the iceberg.

Blood on their hands

Just over a year ago, Manchester Arena was bombed by a terrorist, twenty-three people were killed and 139 injured, half of them children. The British security services said that the jihadi bomber, Salman Abedi, was "known" to them. He was more than "known" to them: he, his family and their Manchester-based fundamentalist cohorts of ruthless killers were "assets" of the British state, working for them and their imperialist interests in the war in Libya. In the language of the state these casualties were what are generally called "collateral damage" in foreign wars. MI6 hasn't had much luck lately with the Libyans: in 2014 several hundred Libyan mercenaries (the MoD coyly called them "cadets") being trained by the British at an army base in Cambridgeshire were sent back home after they went on a violent rampage which included the sexual assaults of women and the rape of a local man.[7] However, good use of them has been made in the past with many credible reports of the CIA and MI6 transporting Libyan fundamentalists and their heavy equipment through Turkey in order to fight Assad's army in Syria along what the CIA called "the rat-run". Seymour Hersch, the investigative journalist who fleshed out this story, also reported in 2016 that there were plans in the US to send Sarin gas from Libya in order to set up the Assad regime with the blame for an attack, athough that's not been confirmed.[8]

None of this is aimed at giving any support whatsoever to the butcher Assad or his imperialist backers, the Russians, but rather to demonstrate concretely the ruthlessness, mendacity and reality of the so-called democracy of "Great Britain". We shouldn't be at all surprised that while it pursues "The war on terror" it works hand and glove with the terrorists, even if in places one stage removed. In the recent past it has given enormous direct support to the Muslim Brotherhood and in the late seventies, MI6, the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (ISI) were responsible for setting up, financing, training and directing the Mujahedeen in order to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. In short, they effectively created al-Qaida. And the desperation of the British state to defend its interests, particularly against the working class, come what may, can be gauged by examining its role and that of its intelligence services in response to the Russian Revolution. Its actions and its backing of various butchers and reactionary elements fighting against the revolution can be read in the ICC article "The world bourgeoisie unites against the October Revolution".[9]

These elements of material and moral decay, already apparent a hundred years ago, apply even more to every state today as the capitalist system rots on its feet and drives itself towards war and destruction, and us along with it. The current problems in the bourgeoisie's political apparatus and the long-time weakening of Britain's position in the world have not reversed the tendencies towards the strengthening of the totalitarian state - on the contrary they contribute to it. The British state has had plenty of practice in making the world a hostile environment for the whole working class.

Baboon 11.6.18

 

In this second part we're responding to the main criticisms that the International Communist Party (Le Proletaire) makes of us by opposing their approach with our method and our framework of analysis.

The role of revolutionaries is not limited to proclaiming proletarian principles; it consists above all of contributing to proletarian consciousness, analysing and explaining the balance of forces posed by the situation in order to draw out the real stakes of the struggle. In other words, it's a question, as Lenin put it, of "making a concrete political analysis from a concrete situation". Workers trying to understand the present situation, who look to go to the roots of problems, will not unfortunately find a satisfying explanation of the international and relatively massive phenomenon of populism in the publications of the ICP but affirmations which, from our point of view, only feed confusion. The development of the populist phenomenon corresponds to a historically new concrete situation which remains to be analysed and for that a rigorous and methodical debate must be undertaken through polemics. But in order to have this debate, which is absolutely vital and necessary within the proletarian camp, we must first avoid false debates.

A clear framework of analysis: a necessity for proletarian consciousness

The ICP ascribes to us the idea that "the victories of Trump and the partisans of Brexit constitute a 'setback' for democracy" [1] by referring to an article in Révolution Internationale no. 461. In no way should it be deduced from our analysis that populism calls into question bourgeois democracy and its state. For us, all factions of the bourgeoisie are reactionary; populism, as a political expression, belongs to the bourgeoisie and is fully implicated in the defence of capitalist interests. Populist parties are bourgeois factions, parts of the totalitarian state apparatus. What they spread is the ideology and behaviour of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie: nationalism, racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, cultural conservatism.  They catalyse fears; express the will to fall back into individualism and a rejection of "elites". That said, populism is a product of decomposition which causes problems for the political game, resulting in a growing loss of control by the bourgeoisie's political apparatus on the electoral level. That doesn't prevent the bourgeoisie from exploiting this negative political phenomenon as much as possible for the defence of its interests, turning it back against the proletariat in trying to strengthen the democratic mystification in emphasising that "every vote counts", adding the accusation that electoral abstentionism "lays the ground for the extreme-right". In this framework, the traditional parties themselves tend to attenuate their unpopular image by, despite everything, presenting themselves as more "humanistic" and more "democratic" than the populists. This is a dangerous trap which consists of presenting to the workers a false alternative: populism or the defence of democracy.

Contrary to the ICC, the ICP reject the idea of the decadence of capitalism, although this is an essential concept for marxists, as the founders of the IIIrd International understood, inscribing it  into their 1919 platform after the period of World War I and October 1917: "A new epoch is born, the epoch of the disintegration of capitalism, of its inner collapse. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat". More than a century ago, the Bolsheviks and Rosa Luxemburg in particular affirmed that the historic period opened by the First World War was definitively marked by the alternative: war or revolution, socialism or barbarism. Le Proletaire on the contrary, on the basis of its "invariant" interpretation of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 continues to repeat that the crises of capitalism are "cyclical" and ignore its entry into decadence, particularly in regard to the question of war. Because it rejects the fundamental notion of the decadence of capitalism, the ICP lacks clarity on the nature of the crises and imperialist wars of the twentieth century and thus lacks clarity on the analysis of the present situation and its evolution into the final phase of the agony of capitalism, decomposition. [2]

The ICP is not armed politically to understand that decomposition has been determined by a new quality borne by the contradictions of decadent capitalism and initially "the incapacity (...) of the two fundamental and antagonistic classes, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, to put forward their own perspective (world war or revolution) engendering a situation of 'momentary blockage' and of society rotting on its feet". On the contrary it interprets this with irony without getting to grips with its real nature: "Proletarians who daily see their conditions of exploitation worsen and their living conditions degraded, will be happy to learn that their class is capable of blocking the bourgeoisie and preventing it from putting forward its 'perspectives'".

The ICP interpret what we are saying about the idea of the "blockage of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat" without seriously looking at the political content that we really defend: all society finds itself without a perspective affirmed by one of the two fundamental classes of society. It thus finds itself deprived of any future other than the immediate exploitation generated by capitalism. In this context, the bourgeoisie is no longer up to offering prospects or policies capable of mobilising or arousing support. Inversely, the working class cannot recognise itself as a class and does not really play any decisive and sufficiently conscious role. It is this which leads to a blockage in terms of perspective. The phase of the decomposition of capitalist society is not at all an "elaboration", a "vague idea", "invented" by the ICC. Marx himself, at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto envisaged this eventuality drawn from the historic experience of class societies when he wrote: "The history of all societies up to now, is the history of class struggle. Free man and slave, patriarch and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time  ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes". Among these "contending classes" today, we only have the bourgeoisie and proletariat.  Marxism has always posed the denouement of the historic alternative in a non-mechanistic manner. Today, with the present conditions, either the revolutionary class will end up by imposing itself, opening the way to a new mode of production, communism, or through incapacity or historic defeat, capitalist society will definitively sink into chaos and barbarism: this would be "the mutual ruin of the contending classes".

The basis of the phase of decomposition

What determines and explains the current phase of the collapse of decadent capitalism into the decomposition of society? [3]

The bourgeoisie is enveloped in an endless economic crisis that compels the proletariat to submit to still more misery, uncertainty, attacks against its living conditions and exploitation. At the same time, the ruling class has been incapable of imposing its "solution" to this crisis: a new world war. Between 1968 and 1989, with the international resurgence of the class struggle onto the scene of history, the ruling class couldn't dragoon the proletariat into preparations for another world conflict. After 1989, with the dissolution of the two imperialist blocs born from the collapse of the Russian bloc, the diplomatic and military conditions for a new world war disappeared: the bourgeoisie was no longer capable of reconstituting new imperialist blocs.

However, the disappearance of the blocs hasn't put an end to military conflicts.  Rather than imperialism disappearing, it has taken other forms where each state tries to pursue its own interests and appetites against the interests of others, at the expense of stable alliances; where a situation of the war of each against all predominates and which generates murderous chaos and barbaric warfare. Since 1989 we have seen the multiplication of conflicts in which the major and secondary powers confront each other through smaller states, rival armed bands or even opposed ethnicities.

Equally, the bourgeoisie can no longer mobilise the proletariat in a plan for society: the promise of a "new world order of peace and prosperity" promised by Bush senior following the collapse of the Russian bloc fizzled out almost immediately.

For its part, the working class which, from 1968 up to the end of the 1980's developed waves of resistance to the crisis and the attacks on its conditions, demonstrated in the central countries that it was not ready to sacrifice itself in a new world war. Nevertheless, it has not succeeded in politicising its combat and from that draw a conscious perspective of world revolution to overthrow capitalism, not least because of the enormous weight of the years of counter-revolution and the survival of very strong illusions in the working class nature of the parties of the left and the unions. Contrary to 1905 and 1917, it has been incapable, notably after August 1980 in Poland, of affirming itself on a political terrain as a force for the revolutionary transformation of society, of raising its defensive struggles to an international political combat that affirms a revolutionary perspective.

Moreover, the bankruptcy of the Stalinist regimes at the time of the brutal collapse of the Eastern Bloc allowed the bourgeoisie to strengthen the greatest lie of the twentieth century - the identification of Stalinism with communism - and to feed an enormous campaign of ideological overkill that proclaimed the "bankruptcy of marxism" and the "death of communism", leading to the idea that there's no longer any alternative to capitalism. This explains the present enormous difficulties that the working class is facing: the loss of its class identity, the loss of confidence in its own strength, its loss of its direction, its disorientation.

The growth of populism and anti-social phenomena

These difficulties, among other things, have allowed the development of populist ideas in society, including in the ranks of the most fragile layers of the proletariat, because this class is also affected by the noxious atmosphere emitted by the decomposition of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois politics.

In the context characterised by the absence of any political perspective, the defiance towards anything that calls itself "political" increases (so too the discrediting of the traditional parties of the bourgeoisie) to the advantage of the populist parties that preach a so-called rejection of "elites". This is all combined with a widespread feeling of “no future” and the growth of all sorts of individualist ideologies, a return to reactionary, archaic and nihilist models.

The article of Le Proletaire says: "the populist orientation is typical of the nature of the petty-bourgeoisie: the petty-bourgeoisie placed between the two fundamental classes of society, dreads the struggle between the two classes in which it risks being pulverised: that's why it loathes everything which evokes the class struggle and only swears by "the people", "popular unity", etc." For the ICP, populism since its origins is the expression of the nature and ideology of the petty-bourgeoisie and that's all there is to it. It doesn't analyse populism as an expression of a capitalist world without a future, caught up in the dynamic of the period of decomposition. If the present growth of populism is fed by different factors (2008 economic crisis, impact of war, terrorism and refugee crisis), it appears above all as a concentrated expression of the present incapacity of one or the other major classes to offer a perspective for the future of humanity.

This is the global reality which confronts the proletariat and the whole of society. It's important to see how the present growth of anti-social behaviours and the present weakness of the proletariat in developing its revolutionary perspective are essential aspects of the situation. It shows a basic problem which is not identical to that of the period preceding the 1990's, still less to the simple petty-bourgeois nature of the populism of the nineteenth century.

The ICP does not share such an analysis, but it must then furnish a general framework of alternative understanding adapted to the current situation. An ironic response on its own is insufficient.

The real stakes for the proletariat faced with populism

In time, if the proletariat turns out incapable of again taking up the road to revolutionary struggle, society will be engulfed in all sorts of disasters: bankruptcies, ecological catastrophes, the extension of local wars, rising barbarity, social chaos, famines... None of this has anything to do with a prophecy: it can't be anything other for the good and simple reason that the destructive logic of capitalism and profit that we see at work every day of the week is totally irreversible. By its very nature capitalism cannot become "reasonable", and can only get further bogged down in its own contradictions.

1. The struggle of the proletariat is not, as the PCI thinks, the mechanical "instrument" of an absolutely determined "historic destiny". In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels strongly criticised such a vision: "History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. This can be speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier history, e.g. the goal ascribed to the discovery of America is to further the eruption of the French Revolution".

2. It shouldn't be assumed that because a part of the working class votes for populist parties it has become xenophobic or fundamentally nationalistic. As we underlined in our Resolution on the international class struggle adopted at the twenty-second ICC Congress: “Many workers who today vote for populist candidates can from one day to the next find themselves struggling alongside their class brothers and sisters, and the same goes for workers caught up in anti-populist demonstrations”.

However, there's nothing inevitable about the class struggle, contrary to the erroneous vision that Bordiga drew from it: "a revolutionary (according to us) is someone for whom the revolution is as certain as if it had already happened". [4] The proletarian revolution is not written in advance. It can only come about through the conscious action of the proletariat, through a real historic combat faced with all the obstacles and against a bourgeoisie that will defend itself and use all its venom and bestiality like a cornered, wounded animal.

Faced with the difficulties confronting the proletariat, more than ever revolutionaries need to understand, analyse the stakes and denounce the ideological use that the bourgeoisie makes of the tendencies towards disintegration inherent in this society.  

To understand populism we need to understand decomposition, that's to say the danger which weighs on the working class and all of humanity, the difficulties and the obstacles that we must confront, in order to fight them more effectively. Despite the weight of populism and its dangers, the proletariat still offers the only alternative perspective, and it retains the potential to undertake and develop its  combat to the level demanded by the historic situation.

CB, March 26, 2018.

 

An article from a close sympathiser showing that despite and even because of the omnipresence of war in the Middle East, the class struggle can still raise its head.

At the end of May this year a wave of strikes and protests by workers and unemployed in Jordan against tax increases, price rises and state corruption was widely reported in the media. In fact the movement by lower-paid workers against gas and electricity price increases began several months earlier in the provinces, building up to mass protests in the capital Amman that lasted for over a week, with the trade unions showing some difficulties in harnessing and controlling the movement. That this movement took place around the same time as the workers in Iran were striking and protesting  against more or less the same conditions shows that, even in the imperialist cauldron of the Middle East, the working class is capable of raising its distinctive head and fighting back against the attacks of the state on its own ground. As in Iran, some of the attacks have been pushed back with price rises rescinded and tax increases withdrawn, although this can only be a slight and temporary relief until the attacks are renewed under other guises, with more force or a combination of both.

The leader of Jordan, King Abdullah, sacked some of his government in response to the protests and noises from the state blamed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the attacks, just as the left of capital always has its bogeymen - "greedy bankers", "the EU", "the World Bank", etc., in order to promote their own nationalist and "anti-imperialist" (i.e., usually anti-American) ideology[1] . But the problems of the Jordanian economy go far deeper than IMF loan repayments: there's a droll joke in Jordan along the lines that "we have less water than oil, and we haven't got any oil". And its problems pre-date the massive influx of refugees that it's taken in (two-thirds of its population is Palestinian and there are also Muslim and Christian refugees from across the region, not least Syria) and also pre-dates the withdrawal of "aid" from the major Gulf states. The Kingdom was a vital military outpost for British imperialism until the 1950's when the Americans took it over, continuing to work with their UK "junior partners". Jordan has a skilled working class but the country's war economy is integrated into the imperialist essentials of the Middle East, firstly by Britain, then America and also France and Germany. And there are the specific imperialist aspirations of the Jordanian state, even if subordinated to their masters: taking part in a secret war in Libya, troops in Afghanistan and other "peace-keeping" manoeuvres. Its war economy, the militarised nature of the Jordanian state directly gives rise to graft, nepotism and cronyism (Wasta, in Arabic), something that British and American imperialism has used to divide and rule over the Hashemite Kingdom.

On the imperialist level, the future of the Jordanian state becomes more uncertain as the team around Trump turn to a Saudi/UAE/Israeli axis, and this makes it all the more unlikely that there will be any sort of effective bail-out of the Jordanian economy, which spends 15.8% of its economy on military spending[2], by the wealthier but struggling Gulf States. This poses a possible turn towards Turkey or Iran by Jordan, fuelling more instability in the region; and if this is speculation at the moment what's certain is that Jordan's position will become more perilous within the regional imperialist free-for-all. On the economic level, university graduate unemployment is registered as 24.1% and unemployment overall around 18%, figures that are widely derided as substantial underestimations. In fact, across the whole of the Middle East, youth unemployment and unemployment generally is a major problem for all the states. Thus protests also took off again in Iran just over a week ago, this time focused on Tehran rather than in the provincial cities; but, as promised by them after the previous struggles, they were ruthlessly repressed by the Revolutionary Guards using the riot police, tear gas and mass arrests of "trouble-makers". Slogans were again raised against Iran's wars and the war economy. The involvement of the workers isn't clear here though the Iranian government immediately met with union bosses.[3]

The proletariat in Jordan is no stranger to class struggle, being involved in movements in 1989, 1996 and particularly from 2009 to 2012. In 2011 almost every sector in the Jordanian economy took part in strikes and protests including precarious expatriate workers.[4] Some new "independent" trade unions emerged from this, though their recent actions show them as bound to the Jordanian state as the old union structures.  But for both capital and labour in Jordan, as elsewhere, the economic crisis and its consequent attacks have further deepened, presaging further attacks which are not just cyclical but ever more vicious.

There are signs from the proletariat in Jordan (and some from Iran) that the struggles are more profound than before: there is almost no mobilising role by the religious authorities (the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan's case), in contrast to events around the Arab Spring; there is a dearth in the protests of Jordanian flags or any sort of "coloured" flags denoting a nationalist movement; the appearance, numbers, diversity and solidarity of the working class is much more pronounced and the struggles better organised; the trade unions, 33 of them now, up from around 16 in 2011, have been sidelined and vocally criticised by the workers and the youth movement (mostly of the unemployed which the unions tried to separate the workers from) refused to get involved in pointless confrontations with the British-trained[5] security forces, the Darak, showing a certain consciousness and maturity.

Given their peripheral nature, their numerical weakness and the sea of imperialist atrocities that surrounds them, the struggles in Jordan further point to the centrality of the working class in the heartlands of capital to really push back against the attacks in the first place. But despite the evident difficulties that confront it, this was a clear expression of the proletariat and its attempts to unify its combat. And completely contrary to leftism's phoney "revolution" in Rojava, northern Syria, which strengthens imperialism, the class struggle in Jordan is an example of the beginnings of a potential blow against it.

Baboon, 1.7.2018

 

 

In The State and Revolution, Lenin wrote: “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”

During the life of Marx, the bourgeoisie did everything to prevent him from operating by demonising him and persecuting him through the apparatus of the police.[1] After his death they did everything to distort his fight to destroy capitalism and open up the future to communism.

An infamous propaganda

All of the publications, radio and television programmes produced on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Marx stuck by these rules. A number of academics salute the work of Marx on the economy, philosophy or sociology, while presenting him as "out of touch with reality", totally overtaken or completely mistaken on the political terrain: it's nothing less than blunting the edge of this trenchant and militant revolutionary! One of the arguments put forward today is that Marx was only a "nineteenth century thinker"[2] , his work incomprehensible for the future evolution of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Following this reasoning, a revolutionary perspective has no validity today. The working class doesn't exist and, moreover, its political project can only lead to a Stalinist horror. Every political aspect of the works of Marx is finally thrown into the dustbin of history.

But a more subtle aspect of this propaganda affirms that it's necessary to draw from Marx, the "real" Marx, elements which in the final analysis could validate the defence of democracy and liberalism and the critique of alienation. Fundamentally, this is a question of presenting Marx not as the revolutionary that he was, but as a sort of great thinker of whom certain aspects of his work allow us to understand and ameliorate an "unregulated" capitalism which, without the control of the state, engenders inequalities and economic crises. Within the bourgeoisie, there are many who like to paint Marx as an "economic genius" who foresaw the crisis of capitalism, predicted globalisation, the growth of inequality, etc.

Numerous among the flatterers of Marx are his so-called heirs for more than a century, from the Stalinists to the leftists, including the Trotskyists who have never ceased, in the same sense, to disfigure, distort and tarnish the revolutionary Marx by transforming him, as Lenin justly denounced above, into a semi-religious icon, canonising him and putting him up on a pedestal.  All this in order to untruthfully present socialism or communism as the domination of state capitalism along the models built up in the USSR, the countries of the eastern bloc and China –forms assumed by capitalism in its epoch of decadence and as a product of the counter-revolution.

Marx was a fighter first of all

Straightaway, it's necessary to say, along with Engels, that Marx was first of all a revolutionary; a fighter, in other words. His theoretical work is incomprehensible without this point of departure. Some want to turn Marx into a pure savant, surrounded by books and cut off from the world, but only a revolutionary militant can be a marxist. From his participation in the group of Young Hegelians in Berlin, 1842, the life of Marx was a combat against Prussian absolutism. This turned into a fight for communism when he tried to understand the misery of a considerable part of society and when he saw the potentialities of the working class in his discussions with the workers of Paris. It's this fight which made him an exile chased from one country to the other, pushing him into an extreme poverty which led to the death of his son. In this regard it's really obscene to attribute this poverty to Marx himself, hinting that neither he nor his wife could manage a household budget because of their well-to-do origins, which is what the French TV "culture" programme Arte did recently. In reality, Marx was totally impregnated with proletarian solidarity and regularly used his small income for the cause of the revolution!

Moreover, and contrary to what Jonathon Spencer says, Marx wasn't a "journalist", but a militant who knew that the struggle, first of all against the authoritarian Prussian monarchy then against the bourgeoisie, demanded a work of propaganda that he took on in Rheinische Zeitung, then in Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung and Les Annales franco-allemande and finally in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. As a fighter Marx was fully involved in the combat of the Communist League and responded to a mandate from it to write a major text of the workers' movement: the Manifesto of the Communist Party. It is also because he was a fighter (as indicated in the title of his biography written by Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen, Marx, Man and Fighter) that the regroupment and organisation of revolutionaries was at the heart of his activities. In the same way, the whole of his theoretical work was a driving force for the struggle for clarity going on within the working class.

The theoretical work of Marx

Marx developed an immense theoretical elaboration since he started off from a working class point of view, a class which had nothing to defend within capitalism and had "nothing to lose but its chains" through its struggle against exploitation. It was in going on from this postulate that he understood that this combat potentially contained the end of the exploitation of man by man, a condition in which humanity had floundered since the appearance of social classes, and that the liberation of the working class would bring about the reunification of humanity through communism. When Jaques Attali affirms that Marx is a "founding father of modern democracy", it is just a lie in the service of the bourgeoisie, a lie which claims that the present society is the best there is. The aim of this propaganda is to prevent the working class from understanding that the sole perspective possible for emerging from the horror of a dying capitalism is communism.

It is also by proceeding from the needs of the working class that Marx established a scientific method, historical materialism, allowing the working class to direct its combat. This method criticises and goes beyond the philosophy of Hegel while "turning on its head" what the latter had discovered, which was that the transformation of reality was always a dialectical process. This method allowed Marx to draw the lessons from the great workers' struggles, such as 1848 and the Paris Commune. The transmission of this same method to subsequent generations of revolutionaries, like those of the communist left, also made it possible for the lessons to be drawn from the failure of the revolutionary wave of 1917. Marx's approach is effective: it's by examining reality with his method and confronting it with the results obtained that revolutionaries are able to enrich the theory.

Starting off from the point of view of the working class also facilitates the essential understanding of what the working class was up against and what it had to destroy in order to free itself from its chains. Marx was thus engaged in a study of the economic fundamentals of society in order to make a critique of it. This study allowed him to show that the basis of capitalism was commodity exchange and that it's this exchange which is at the basis of wage labour, that's to say the form taken by the exploitation of man by man in capitalism. It is interesting to compare this fundamental result with what Liberation says in its celebration of the anniversary of his birth: "Karl Marx shows that the purchase of labor power by the capitalist raises a problem of uncertainty as to the reality of the effort made by the wage earners"; in other words, if one could measure the labour of the worker so that their effort is endurable, the exploitation of man by man would be a good thing. Here's an example of the way in which Marx is used to justify capitalism! Whereas for Marx, "the purchase of labour power" signifies "production of surplus value" and thus exploitation!

It is also through the profoundly militant aspects of his theoretical works that Marx was able to conclude that capitalism wasn't an eternal system and that, like other modes or production which preceded it, this system would come up against its limits  and historically fall into crisis because: "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution." (Contribution to a Critique of the Political Economy). On the other hand Marx demonstrated that capitalism gave rise to its own gravedigger: the proletariat, which is both the last exploited class in history, dispossessed of everything, and the only social class with revolutionary potential because of the associated character of its labour. It is a class which, by unifying across frontiers, is the sole force capable of overthrowing capitalism at the world level in order to establish a society without classes and without exploitation.

At the end of the day, the "great analyses" of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries pretend either that Marx has been overtaken, is a thing of the past, or that he is still valid by virtue of his "economics" or  as a "great prophet" in the current theory of the anti-globalists who aim to "correct the excesses" of capitalism.  All of this ideological confusion has the function of obscuring the struggle for proletarian revolution.

Marx’s concern for the organisation of revolutionaries and the working class

For Karl Marx, the identification of the working class as the sole actor able to overthrow capitalism and bring about the arrival of communism went hand-in-hand with the necessity for the proletariat to organise itself. On this level, as on others, the contribution of Marx is essential. He was involved in the "Correspondence Committee" in order to put German, French and English socialists in touch with one another because, according to him: "at the time of action, it is certainly of great interest for everyone to be educated about the state of affairs abroad as well as at home". The necessity for self-organisation is concretised in his constant participation in struggles for the defence and constitution for an international revolutionary organisation within the proletariat. The fight for communism and the most profound understanding of what this represented pushed him to fight for the transformation of the League of the Just into the Communist League in 1847. It's because they had an acute understanding of role of revolutionaries that Marx and Engels defended the necessity for the Communist League to adopt a programme, which resulted in the writing of the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848.

The Communist League couldn't withstand the blows of the repression after the defeat of the revolutions of 1848. But after that the struggles took off again at the beginning of the 1860's and other efforts of organisation appeared. From its beginnings Marx involved himself in the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), formed in 1864. He had a major role in writing up its statutes and was the author of its Inaugural Address. His conviction about the importance of the organisation and his theoretical clarity made him central to the organisation. In the IWA as in the Communist League he undertook a determined struggle for the organisation to fulfil its function. His theoretical preoccupations were never separated from the needs of the struggle. It's for this reason that in the Communist League he said, when faced with Weitling, "up to now ignorance has been of no use to anyone" because of the latter's utopian and idealist vision of communism.  It's for the same fundamental reasons that he fought in the IWA against Mazzini who wanted the organisation to be focused on the defence of national interests, and against Bakunin who plotted to take control of the IWA and got involved in conspiratorial adventures substituting himself for the mass action of the proletariat.

The theoretical elaboration undertaken by Marx shines a formidable light on bourgeois society as much in the nineteenth century as in the following two. But if one considers this elaboration merely as a means of "understanding the world", like the pseudo-experts of the bourgeoisie celebrating his year of birth, his work remains surrounded in a fog of mystery. On the contrary, while the bourgeoisie cultivates the idea of "no future" the working class must free itself of its chains. In order to do that it must not only make use of the theoretical studies of Marx, but take inspiration from his life of struggle, his life as a militant. The means that he was able to develop were always in accord with the very aim of proletarian struggle: "to transform the world"!

Vitaz, June 1, 2018

 

This article was written soon after the formation of the new populist coalition government in Italy. It places immediate events in a global context, so its overall analysis has in no sense lost its validity a few months later. In future, we will try to update the analysis, particularly given the need to examine the swollen growth of Salvini's political influence, and the encouragement, by his government, of a pogrom-like atmosphere in Italy.  

It's certainly not the first time that the Italian bourgeoisie has suffered a serious crisis in its political apparatus that has impacted on its ability to form a government, as for example the Monti government in 2011 and the Letta government in 2013, which only lasted for ten months. However the troubled management of the League-5 Star government coalition has taken on a particularly serious political significance which could even bring about a constitutional crisis, with the threat of a demand for the dismissal of the head of state of the 5-Star Movement (5-SM) and the Brothers of Italy.

After a very hard and confrontational election campaign from the forces in play, in which each one declared that they would never govern with the others, and where the most audacious promises were made in the name of the defence of families, young people and the insecure, the result saw the triumph of populism, but without a clear government majority and an intersecting series of vetoes (the League against the Democratic Party (PD), the PD against the League, 5-SM against Berlusconi, etc.). After several rejected attempts by the distinguished Christian-Democrat President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, he returned to negotiate with the parties concerned and finally an agreement was reached to form a government, avoiding the immediate prospect of another election, which would have been an additional problem for the Italian bourgeoisie both because of prolonging a period of great instability with major economic consequences, and because the result of a new vote was far from predictable, risking an aggravation of the problem. How can one explain this political storm?

Populism, a problem for the bourgeoisie at an international level

The main problem is that the bourgeoisie is confronted with the development and weight of populism at an international level, as it is with the effects of decomposition on its political parties, with the dominant tendency of "everyman for himself".[1] As we've already shown in other texts[2] this development is the consequence of the present historical phase of capitalism. Deep layers of the population, above all the proletariat, have suffered daily from the effects of the aggravation of the crisis: an increase in economic instability, the rise of uncertainty and social insecurity, the causes of which are extremely difficult to understand. This generates a great deal of anger but also a profound loss of references, a feeling of impotence and a fear of everything which seems to contain more dangers for present and future situations. Furthermore, the "historic" parties, who, by reason of their political experience have been essential instruments for the bourgeoisie in diverting and containing discontent in the alternating right/left game of democracy, have suffered a great loss of credit. In particular the social democratic parties, historically portrayed as defenders of the workers, have for a long time themselves had to adopt all the measures of economic reform which have seriously degraded the situation of the working class, thus revealing their anti-proletarian character.

As we said regarding the victory of Brexit, "populism is not another actor in play between the parties of the left and right; it exists because of the generalised discontent which can find no other means of expressing itself. It is entirely on the political terrain of the bourgeoisie but is based on opposition to elites and the establishment, an aversion towards immigration, on distrust towards the promises of the left and the austerity of the right, expressing a loss of confidence in these institutions of capitalist society but at this stage blinded to the revolutionary alternative of the working class".[3]

From this point of view these forces, in a certain way, can also be useful to the bourgeoisie because they can channel this anger and distrust onto democratic and institutional grounds. As Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the 5-SM, Luigi Di Maio, affirmed, it is they who have brought back onto the domain of democratic protest and elections the majority of those distancing themselves from it due to disgust, disillusionment and anger against the political class and its institutions. But, contrary to the "historic" parties of the bourgeoisie (the right as well as the left) who, despite everything, still retain some sense of state, the vision of the populist forces is shown through the concrete policies which frequently come up against the global interests of the national bourgeoisie, as much on the economic as the political and ideological levels. For this reason, they constitute a threat to the coherence and political interests of the same ruling class.

The presence of the populist phenomenon and the discrediting of the historical parties also explain the growing difficulties for the bourgeoisie internationally and, particularly in Italy, its capacity to control the electoral circus and predict its outcome. This unpredictability is seen for example with the Democratic Party where Matteo Renzi (PM from February 14 to December 16), on the basis of 40.8% votes obtained at the elections of 2014, took a slap in the face with the referendum on the constitution in 2016 which anticipated the current collapse of this political formation. In the past, voters maintained a certain loyalty to the traditional parties because that also corresponded to political ideals and programmes which, at least in words, suggested different choices. The right and left of capital expressed different choices for the management of society; the voter, however critical, identified with one or the other of these parties. Today, this distinction no longer exists because the economy no longer allows alternative global options. Any party or coalition in power can only follow a policy of austerity and impoverishment for the great majority of the population and can do nothing about the deterioration of living conditions at other levels (precariousness, insecurity, degradation of the environment, etc). The vote is thus cast for the political force which, at that moment, seems to be the "less worse", the one which perhaps doesn't seem to make false promises or responds more closely to doubts. It's not by chance that the electoral "battle bus" of the 5-SM has been the "minimum payment for the citizen" and the promise of reductions in the cost of living, above all in the south of Italy where poverty, insecurity and the lack of perspectives weigh heavily in the daily life of the majority of the population. For the League (ex-Northern League, with the "northern" dropped in order to broaden its appeal) however, it's security with the expulsion of migrants and more police on the streets, the right to self-defence and the flat rate tax which gives advantages to small and medium entrepreneurs who are strong in the north.

We've recently seen a similar phenomenon with the difficulties of the British bourgeoisie to manage the effects of Brexit, of the Americans to contain the irresponsible policies of Trump, of the German bourgeoisie to form a coalition government which, although it must include the anti-European CDU, will have to maintain internal and international policies which conform to the interests of the German state. It was only in France, faced with the danger of an eventual victory of Marine Le Pen, that the bourgeoisie found the Macron solution which ensured the continuity of the national and international political choices and which, at the same time, was presented as "a force for renewal", "neither right nor left", thus responding to growing distrust and discontent.

That also explains why, in relation to the elections in Italy (just prior to and during the political crisis), there was a strong preoccupation (particularly from the European countries) and pressure from influential personalities in the EU and the business world, insisting that whatever the composition of the new government, it shouldn't call into question the results obtained by Italy thanks to reforms put into place in recent years, with a strong recommendation not to change tack towards thoughtless and irresponsible policies for Italian capital which would create international instability.

... and for the Italian bourgeoisie

We can look a little closer at the Italian situation in order to understand a series of important stages in the policies of the national bourgeoisie. For example, why has the President of the Republic, Mattarella refused to sign the nomination of Poalo Savona for Minister of the Economy? Why this desperate struggle over just one name? In reality, Mattarella, who represents the most responsible part of the national bourgeoisie and has a broader and longer term vision of the interests of the national capital and the instruments necessary to defend it, finds himself managing a situation characterised by:

1. The electoral victory of two forces which, although in different ways,  are both expressions of a populism characterised by a strong irresponsibility, combined with lack of experience and lack of political depth. 5-SM, born with the slogan "Screw you!" aimed against "the cast of parliamentary buffoons and crooks", once in parliament had to take on a more moderate and institutional role in order to enlarge its consensual base and move into the corridors of power, but it remains a force totally bereft of experience in managing the state and is strongly characterised by policies which are based on immediate knee-jerk reactions of the "people". That means it's an uncertain force, difficult to rely on in a situation which demands rigour and responsibility by taking drastic and unpopular measures. After all, it's enough to see the irresponsible and infantile reaction of Di Maio and Di Battista (also 5-SM, and both in good company with Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy) immediately after Mattarella's rejection of their proposed government. The repeated threats to resign in various interviews and at the Naples meeting, as well as declarations from the League through its leader and joint Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, have stirred things up against Mattarella and the higher functions of the state. Finally, despite present assurances, the 5-SM still stands out against interference from the EU in the political economy of Italy and for the return of a national currency.

The League, having already assumed some governmental responsibilities in the past with Umberto Bossi, former League leader, presents itself today as less variable and more coherent and (after dumping its regionalist character), as a national force. However, it remains a force with a strong anti-European significance ("Italy must not be restrained by Germany"), as Russophile and xenophobic ("If I get into government, I'll begin with a big clear-out, make rules to arm and protect the frontiers from the Alps to Sicily)[4].

These two parties could call into question Italy's choice of imperialist alliances, both being more or less favourable to an "overture" from Russia:

2. A governmental programme (that of a deal between 5-SM and the League), which behind a torrent of words hides a total incoherence on some crucial choices regarding the economy, such as employment, while on others it proposes measures such as the "citizen's income", the low "flat rate tax" and the abolition of the "Fornero reform" on pensions (which envisaged higher retirement age, higher contributions, etc.). There's not only no financial budgeting for all of this, but it also dangerously calls into question the positive results (from the point of view of capitalism's interests) obtained by the state over the last years from this so-called reform. This deal moreover, was associated with the economics minister Savone who, although he says today that he doesn't want to come out of the EU, is a declared fervent anti-European. Putting his policies in place would mean evident problems for the Italian state within the EU;

3. A strongly discredited political apparatus (the Democratic Party and the Forza Italia of Silvio Berlusconi, this latter fraction of the centre-right having only gained power in the past as a member of a coalition with the League and the Brothers of Italy), incapable of setting up a real alternative to the populist forces and equally torn apart by internal divisions and conflicts.

All this is in the context where beyond such phrases as the "defence of Italian interests", each element tries to defend their own interests, to maintain and strengthen the place they have on the political stage to the detriment of the others. For example, in the case of the refusal of the DP to accept 5-SM, which would have probably discredited it even more, or the League, which has played on its electoral success as much in negotiations with 5-SM as with the centre-right coalition.

Taking account of this framework and of the absolute priority of the Italian state to assure a relative stability in its budget, of its hard-won capacity to negotiate within the EU and its respect for present imperialist alliances, it is clear that the planned government would cause a great deal of concern to the dominant class. The veto on the nomination of Savona comes from this, with Mattarella fulfilling the role conferred on him through the Constitution to the President of the Republic as the guarantor of the defence of the national interest. In fact Di Maio has a point when he said at a meeting in Fiumicino: "In this country, you can be a condemned criminal, condemned for fiscal fraud... you could have committed crimes against the public administration, you could be subject to an enquiry for corruption and become a Minister. But if you've criticised Europe, you can't even be allowed to become a Minister of the Economy". In fact that's how it works because contrary what to what he, Grillo (comedian and co-founder of 5-SM) Salvini, Meloni, Travaglio (a journalist investigating corruption among Italian politicians) and their consorts want us to think, the Italian Constitution, as well as that of any other state, is nothing less than a tool in the hands of the ruling class for controlling and managing its domination over society in the best way possible, in a democratic framework, safeguarding the national capital on the economic level and on the international political scale.

However, the bourgeoisie, as much in Italy as Germany, Britain or the United States, has another problem: it can't exclude from the populist forces which win elections from forming governments, because that would demolish the democratic mystification which constitutes the most powerful tool of its domination. The extremely prudent and patient waiting-game of Matterella is based on this recognition and his attempt to form a government that is as weak as possible is similar to what Angela Merkel is manoeuvring around in Germany. The supplementary problem posed by the situation in Italy is that here there isn't the possibility of deploying a third force along with Salvini and Di Maio. It's not by chance that the first attempt by Matterella was to try to form a government of all of the centre-right forces with 5-SM and with the presence of Forza Italia, because despite all the discredit he has suffered, Berlesconi (who has served in four governments as Prime Minister), has nevertheless shown his loyalty to NATO and the EU.

The finally constituted Conte government maintains all its problematic nature and it will have to be mastered. But the firmness of Matarella on the Economy minister and on the institutional role of the President of the Republic have at least forced 5-SM and the League to fall into line from previously irresponsible attitudes of protest and to express their opinion on the position of Italy at the international level.

What are the consequences for the proletariat?

As we've already said, the programme of this new government will do nothing to stem the increase in poverty and precariousness, the lack of perspectives, the social degradation that the vast majority of the exploited are living through, many of whom can't even sell the only thing that they have: their labour. Or, if they have a job, it's in conditions of slavery which often doesn't even allow them to survive. The great measures promised by the government are the "citizen's income" and the flat rate tax (a 15 - 20% tax rate). The first, already largely re-scaled down from the electoral promises, doesn't rise much more than 80 euros and carries with it growing conditions of blackmail: either you accept any type of job with whatever wages going or you get nothing. In fact that means that you must live on 780 euros a month which hardly covers the rent or the cost of a roof above your head. For its part, the flat rate tax raises nothing and adds nothing for lower incomes but allows a lot of saving for higher incomes. Paradoxically it favours businessmen of the Berlesconi type and certainly not the ordinary wage earner. It's clear that in judging the first steps of the Conte government, the consolidation of the public accounts and international politics can only be made at the expense of the workers who are the producers of all the national wealth.

However, the greatest effect of this electoral farce and the recent events on the proletariat is situated on the ideological level.

Democracy at work against the proletariat

There's no doubt that events over the last months have caused incredulity and confusion but they have also further discredited a divided political class that is hesitant in its political choices and incapable of facing up to a tragic situation. There's no doubt that this gives rise to some reflection and questioning and an attempt to understand the reasons behind it, beyond the contingencies of the formation of a government. But this process of reflection is trapped and skewed by a whole series of mystifications used by the League and 5-SM in order to push the proletarians to look for the reasons for their suffering in this or that particular evil, this or that institution, but never in the economic system of capitalism itself which, based on exploitation, competition and the struggle between nation states, can only favour a small, dominant minority to the detriment of the rest of humanity. Thus, in this lying framework, refugees and immigrants become the scapegoats, "invaders" against whom it's necessary to protect ourselves; together with dependence on Germany, all this is presented as being responsible for crippling taxes and the loss of life savings, for people losing their jobs and living on miserable wages of misery, for depriving the new generation of a decent life.

However, the most damaging mystifications which have regained their full force over the last months are those of the defence of democracy and nationalism. Matterella’s veto on Savone has unleashed a ringing choir from 5-SM, the League, the Brothers of Italy and a whole series of media representatives such as Travaglio, according to whom democracy has been trampled underfoot, preventing the parties freely chosen by the "sovereign people" from governing. For this reason Matterella and his clique are painted as puppets manipulated by other nations who want to dictate their law to the Italian "people".

This campaign has had a certain echo in the population and also among the proletariat, provoking a division between two opposing camps: between those defending the institutions (represented by Matterella in this business) and those defending the sovereignty of the "Italian people" against interference by foreign states. This opposition is more apparent than real because the idea that unites the two positions is the defence of the democratic state as expressing the interests of the "citizens" of a given nation who decide their own destiny through voting.

But it's precisely the weight of this mystification which prevents the development of consciousness within the working class on the fundamental nature of this system and its political apparatus. Democracy carries with it the idea that the basis of society is not that of classes but of the individual and that the individual as a "citizen" can only act by delegating the defence of their interests to a larger group (party, union or institution). This is what leads millions of workers to vote, to think that such and such a party can change anything despite the growing disillusionment and distrust towards the parties, despite the anger faced with the inhuman living conditions imposed upon them. Nationalism strengthens this idea by posing the defence of the individual as part of a national whole, in which our interests as the exploited are the same as those that exploit and oppress us, and where we all have an interest in a minimum of security faced with a common enemy (whether this takes the form of the interference of other powers or an influx of migrants). This strengthens still more the difficulty of the proletariat in seeing itself as part of one class with distinct interests from the rest of society; a world class where millions of workers are in the same position and must defend themselves against the attacks of capital whether in Italy, Germany, China or America. The two aspects of this mystification thus tend to keep the workers attached to the state and to its institutions but, above all, they hold back the development of class consciousness in a collective, social force which can not only defend itself but can also radically change society.

Populism feeds these mystifications which are the main weapons of the bourgeoisie. It is only by taking up its class identity, its status as a class that is both exploited and revolutionary, that the proletariat will be able to confront the traps of democracy and populist ideology and, above all, overcome the capitalist system and its noxious consequences for humanity.

From Rivoluzione Internazionale, the ICC's section in Italy, June 13 2018.

 

 

 

In a region scarred by imperialist war and sectarian divisions, the recent social protests in Iran, Jordan and Iraq offer hope that there is another possibility: the united struggle of the exploited against capital and its brutal violence. This article, written by a close sympathiser, looks at the massive demonstrations that have swept through central and southern Iraq.

Starting on July 8 a number of spontaneous protests broke out in central and southern Iraq involving thousands of demonstrators. It spread through eight southern provinces very quickly and, about a fortnight later, onto the streets of Baghdad. These followed significant protests in Jordan and Iran on exactly the same issues. The movement in Iraq would have been aware of these protests and inspired by them given the basic similarities.

The working class in Iraq is numerically and generally weaker than in the two other countries and though there are reports of protesters and oil workers meeting up, the content and context of those meetings are not known. But the driving forces of the protests are class issues:

- Unemployment: the official figures of 18% youth unemployment are believed by no-one as over four-hundred-thousand youths come onto the labour market every year with little prospect of a job;

- Lack of basic services: the 50 degree heat has further increased the misery resulting from restrictions on and outages of electricity which is only available for a short part of the day and this is despite $40 billion allocated since 2003 to rebuild the country’s network.

- Healthcare: cancers and other serious congenital illnesses of the brain and the body in children and numerous other serious health failings are rising throughout Iraq. As long ago as 2009, Reuters reported that many families were making the terrible decision to let their children die (December 1)[1]. The lack of care in these serious instances is reflected in all levels of health care in Iraq.

- Water: similar to the demonstrators in Jordan and Iran (where in the south the military was siphoning vast amounts off to feed their agri-businesses), the protesters have demanded access to clean drinking water. The demand for this basic need of potable water shows a convergence of economic and ecological issues within the protests. [2]

- High rents and unpaid wages (Rudaw Media, 20.7.18).

- Corruption and cronyism: as in Jordan and Iran these are essential elements of the war economy and those that live high on it incur the indignation of the masses as living conditions decline throughout the country. Protesters have also denounced the "election fraud".

Iraq's most senior Shia cleric, Ali al-Sistani, has called on the government to accept the protesters’ demands; similar "support" for the protests has come from the populist Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr[3] who, subject to a recount, won the May 12 elections with the help of the Iraqi Communist Party; the Prime Minister of the ruling Sawa Party, Haider al-Abadi, has promised funding and projects to respond to the protests; and the Saudis, sniffing an opportunity to counter Iranian influence, have promised "aid".

Not only have government and municipal buildings been the target of demonstrators’ attacks but so have the Shia institutions belying their hypocritical "support" for the wave of protests. The "radical" populist al-Sadr had his delegation to the protesters attacked and seen off – this was shown in footage on social media.  Every major Shia institution has been rejected and their offices attacked and what makes this even more important is that the attacks have come from their own constituents in the Shia heartlands, with the protesters ironically using the term Safavids to describe their leaders, an  expression referring to past Shia dynasties by often used by Sunnis as a term of abuse. Iranian planes were ransacked at the airport of the Shia holy city of Najaf and the HQ's of pro-Iranian militia including the Popular Mobilisation Units have been targeted and burnt along with government offices. According to Kurdistan News 24, 14.7.18, regular Iraqi army units joined the protests in at least one province. When the protests took a step forward and hit Baghdad, Middle-East Eye, 19.7.18, reports the slogan "Not Sunni, not Shia, secular, secular!" coming from large crowds.

Prime Minister al-Abadi has sacked a minister and some officials and promised reform but the overwhelming response of the state has been repression, round-ups, arrests and torture, while further protests have seen the release of detainees. The government declared a "state of emergency" and imposed an internet crackdown early on, and tear gas, water cannon and live ammunition has been used against the protesters. Counter-terrorism units were mobilised against the protesters in Baghdad, unthinkable without the say-so of the US and British high command in the "Green Zone". At least 14 people have been killed and 729 injured according to Human Rights Campaign, 20.7.18. But the protests, going on for some three weeks now, have continued up to this week-end when security forces attacked demonstrators outside the provincial council and oil field of Qurna, Basra.

Like Iran and like Jordan these outbursts are directed against a war economy and all its parasitic detritus. Like Iran and like Jordan the protests of 2018 in Iraq are more widespread and more profound that the previous outbreaks (in 2015 in Iraq's case) and it's fairly obvious that the religious leaders have much less influence. The promises of the government and the influence of the religious leaders are losing their sway as the proletariat and the masses fight for their own interests in these skirmishes against capital and its war economy.

Baboon, 30.7.18

 

The following article is one of several through which we plan to deal with the rise of China and its consequences for imperialist relations worldwide. For reasons of space we will focus in this article on the New Silk Road. In future we look in more detail at Chinese ambitions in Africa and Latin America and examine its overall rivalry with the US.

 “For now however, China is not looking for direct confrontation with the US; on the contrary, it plans to become the most powerful economy in the world by 2050 and aims at developing its links with the rest of the world while trying to avoid direct clashes. China’s policy is a long-term one, contrary to the short-term deals favoured by Trump. It seeks to expand its industrial, technological and, above all, military expertise and power. On this last level, the US still has a considerable lead over China”. ICC Report on Imperialist Tensions, June 2018

 

In May 2017 with the presence of 27 heads of states or governments the Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) project also called the “New Silk Road”. This project is composed of two elements: the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB), and Maritime Silk Road (MSR). This project involves around 65 countries, making up for 60% of the population of the planet and around 1/3 of the GNP of the world. The Chinese president announced investments over a period of the next 30 years (2050!) up to 1.2 trillion dollars. This is not only the biggest economic project of this century, but it is also the outline of the most ambitious imperialist projects that China has made public. Behind this Xi Jinping declares the goal of overtaking the US and becoming world power number one by 2050.

This project corresponds to the ambitions of China to reconquer its old leading position in the world – which it occupied until the penetration of the capitalist powers into China in the early 18th century.[1] With this proclaimed goal China aims at the biggest shift in the imperialist power constellation for more than a century. The Silk Road project is only one, albeit essential, move in China’s ambitions. After having expanded massively on an economic level, China also began laying a “String of Pearls” in the Indian Ocean, allowing China to encircle India via Burma, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the Maldives. After this maritime expansion, the Silk Road project aims at a new overland expansion on the Asian Continent.

China has become the most populous country on the planet: almost 1.4 billion people live there (India ranks second with 1.32 billion). It is the second economic power in the world and in many branches it has already become number one; and it has the third largest land mass. After more than three decades of capitalist modernisation and opening-up, China has become the world's largest trading country, e-commerce country, and consumer market. Between 1979 and 2009, in thirty years, Chinese GDP in constant 2005 dollars has grown from about 201 billion to about 3.5 trillion; Chinese exports have grown from almost 5% of their share in GDP to about 29%; imports from about 4% to 24%. Trade surpluses have led to a large growth in China’s reserves, which has allowed Chinese capital to move out for investments, mergers and acquisitions and to become an important FDI[2] source on the world’s financial stage. It is expected that by 2030 China will account for one fifth of the global economic output of the world. The country has been investing massively in the most modern industrial techniques such as quantum technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI). As for its military expenses they amount to the total of all European countries put together. No other country could entertain such ambitions, and no other country could develop such a vision, stretching out its tentacles across the Asian continent. For the moment not through direct military occupation (except for the coral reefs in the South China Sea) but through building an economic network with a whole geo-strategic policy behind it: developing new infrastructure, implanting outposts, forging privileged links. Chinese ambitions are shaking the entire imperialist constellation and not only in the surrounding Asian area: it has an impact on the Pacific countries, on the Indian Ocean, on Africa, on South America, on Europe and of course on its relationship with the US. In short, it has the most far-reaching international and long-term repercussions. At the same time, its ambitions will bring it into conflict not only with the US, but also with other countries. Already resistance has been gathering from some of its closest neighbours (Vietnam, India, Japan), and China’s plans will also pose a new challenge for Russia. This project also aims at thwarting any possibility of strangling China by blocking maritime transport in the strait of Malacca or the South China Sea. By establishing railway connections to Iran, Pakistan, Burma and Thailand China hopes to circumvent possible means of strangulation or to alleviate some of the worst effects.[3]

The New Silk Road project will be linking China via Central Asia and Russia with Europe, and the maritime connection will allow it to establish new links with Africa and Europe through the China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Six corridors between China and Europe are to be established.

The first major corridor: railway connection and pipelines connecting China and Europe via Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan.[4]

The other two major corridors: Western China – via Central Asia – and the Middle East towards Turkey via Iran; and the China-Pakistan corridor linking it to the Indian Ocean.[5] Three of the six corridors pass through the Central Asian part of Xinjiang.

In addition three “secondary” corridors will be connecting a) China-Mongolia-Russia, b) Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM), c) China-Indochina – (through northern Laos – stretching into Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia-Singapore -i.e. to South East Asian waters). In Asia a railway line of 873 km is to establish a link between China and the Thai coast.

In Africa China has financed and constructed a railway line between Djibouti and Addis Ababa (Djibouti Silk Road Station); it will be financing a railway line of 471 km in Kenya between the capital Nairobi and the port of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean. The long-term goal is to establish a network of railway connections between the new port of Lamu (Kenya), South Sudan, and Ethiopia  (LAPSSET). Following Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt and Djibouti, Morocco has also started cooperating in the New Silk Road project.[6]

A whole chain of ports and big investment projects is to offer the logistical basis for further investments in the area.

In addition to the overland railway connections, and building on the “String of Pearls”, the Maritime Silk Road is the second plank of the mega-project, which requires the expansion and construction of ports along the main sea routes connecting China via the South China Sea, the Malacca Strait, the Indian Ocean to the coasts of Africa. Plans in the Arctic of an “Ice Silk road” to establish a short cut between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic along the Northern Siberian route, as well as plans to build a second canal in Central America through Nicaragua, are part of the global Chinese strategy.

Furthermore, China also plans to build fibre optic cables, international trunk passageways, mobile structures and e-commerce links along its Silk Road corridors. While this will certainly boost connectivity and information exchange, it can easily enable China to carry out electronic surveillance and increase its cyberspace presence, raising its espionage capabilities…

An enormous gamble

Of course this “master plan” will need a long time to implement and it faces a number of obstacles. The capacities of resistance by other powers are impossible to assess realistically at the moment. However, the Chinese State seems to be ready to throw maximum resources at it:

- China’s state-owned commercial banks are being pushed to supply money for the government plans;
- the State controlled China Development Bank (CDB) and Export-Import Bank of China (EXIM) have already provided $200 billion in loans to several of the countries participating in the project;
- CDB and EXIM have imposed debt ceilings for each country and set limits on borrowers’ credit lines;
- most infrastructure loans were negotiated primarily between governments with interest rates below the commercial ones. For example CDB offered Indonesia a 40-year concessionary loan, without insisting on Indonesian government debt guarantees to finance 75% of the $ 5 million Jakarta-Bandung railway;
- China has facilitated loans to countries that would have difficulty getting loans from Western commercial banks;
- 47 of China’s 102 government-owned conglomerates participated in more than 1600 Belt and Road projects;
- the China Communications Construction Group snatched $40 billion of contracts.

And so forth … So while this may be seen as a huge economic and financial gamble, it certainly reflects the determination of the Chinese state to fortify its position at all costs. At the same time, the project, whose implementation is planned over a period of 30 years, will have to face the storms of world-wide escalations of the economic crisis, trade wars, political turbulences and the growing resistance by China’s rivals – from the US to a number of other countries.

In short, all the mounting contradictions of the capitalist crisis and the sharpening antagonisms between the US and China make it impossible to answer the question whether the project will ever be completed. Not to mention the unpredictable development of the Chinese economy and its financial resources in the long-term.

In addition, the speed with which China built its railway lines within China during the past years – with the State mobilising all sorts of resources and brushing aside any ecological doubts or resistance from the local population – will not be easily duplicated on an international level. Several of the projects pass through areas under attack by jihadists. And a number of countries participating in the project will be piling up so many debts implying that any future financial storms may mean the end of their solvency. For example, building the Kunming-Singapore Railway through Laos will cost the country $6 billion, nearly 40% of GDP of Laos in 2016. Pakistan’s external debt has risen by 50% over the past three years, reaching nearly $100 billion, and around 30% of that is owed to China. Turkmenistan is facing a liquidity crunch due to debt payments to China. Tajikistan has sold the right to develop a gold mine to a Chinese company in lieu of repaying loans. And many of the participating countries have been marked and will be marked by political instability, civil unrest and armed conflict.

However, while the question marks hanging over the project are almost endless, these high risks have not prevented the Chinese government from drafting this plan.

China’s re-emergence in the context of decomposition

The fact that China is now openly putting forward such ambitions is based on the new position which China occupies in the world economy and in the imperialist pecking order. As we have developed in previous articles[7] China had been a world leading power until the turn of the 18th century, when it was dismembered mainly by the European colonial powers Britain and France, and when it was partly occupied by Japan until 1945. When Mao Zedong took power in 1949, the Chinese state did not have the means to revive the old Chinese ambitions. In the context of a long period of dependence on Russia, the Peoples’ Republic of China desperately tried to overcome its backwardness. Already in the early 1950s in the Korean war it showed its desire to break US domination in the region, and later, in the 1960s, China began to clash with India, and above all with Russia. In relation to Russia and the US China was the underdog for decades. Neither the “Great Leap Forward”, nor its decade-long autarky, nor the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s enabled it to develop the power to compete with its bigger rivals. And the division of China into Taiwan and mainland China, the permanent stand-off with the US over Korea, in Vietnam and the Pacific (Taiwan, Japan), the year-long conflict with Russia along the Ussuri River, left China surrounded and dead-locked on the geo-strategic and military level.

However, having suffered a military humiliation at the hands of the much smaller Vietnam in the 1979 conflict, the Chinese army was determined to modernise its forces. And in the context of a collapsing Stalinist regime in Russia and Eastern Europe, the Chinese Communist Party resolved to adapt the country to the new conditions which have existed since 1989. Its spectacular economic growth and its determination to reconquer its position in a world where the US has been on the decline for decades, meant that China would have to throw in its economic weight to translate this into geo-strategic, imperialist triumphs.[8]

Its prodigious economic development of the last few decades unleashed a strong push for putting forward its interest on the imperialist chessboard, which since the late 1980s has been marked by: a) the fact that the former Soviet bloc began to fall apart and imploded in 1991 and b) the US - as the only remaining super-power – has and is being undermined and challenged in many areas; by India, Iran, Turkey and many other countries advancing their own imperialist ambitions. In other words, a world where there has been a “free-for-all” of imperialist tensions. The confrontation between the US and China in the region is but one polarisation (even though the most dangerous in the long-term) in the midst of an increasingly complex minefield of imperialist tensions.

The New Silk-Road – only an economic project?

For two decades the Chinese economy recorded very high growth figures, in some years even double-digit growth rates. These have now slowed down (in 2017 to 6.5%) and it is undeniable that the New Silk Road project is also a response to these difficulties. Chinese national capital must find more outlets for its gigantic overproduction. In particular in the branches developing infrastructure, or the sectors of iron and steel, cement, and aluminium, overproduction is at its highest. Between 2011 and 2013 China produced more cement than the US during the entire 20th century. With insufficient demand on the Chinese market Chinese companies must at all cost find outlets abroad.

Infrastructural projects offer not only the necessary logistics for conquering new markets and installing new corridors for the transport of troops; they also require massive investments themselves. Of the 800 million tons of steel produced in 2015 by Chinese state-run companies, 112 million tons were exported at giveaway prices, because sales possibilities have shrunk on the internal market. Thus with the new Silk Road project the Chinese state is launching one of the biggest ever state capitalist interventions to boost the ailing economy. And the Chinese state has planned to invest the most massive financial resources to achieve this. China is said to have already released $1000-$1400 billion for the first financing of the Silk Road projects, but the total cost is expected to amount by 2049 (the year of 100 years of existence of the Peoples’ Republic of China) to twice the size of the present GNP of China If we compare the amount of funds already available, proportionately they supersede by far the USA’s Marshall Plan funds of 1948, through which the US granted $5 billion in aid to 16 European nations[9].

Unlike Russia and the US, China can still mobilise such enormous amounts. Russia never disposed of such funds, largely because of the weight of the war economy at the time of the Cold War and its traditional “backwardness” linked to the mechanisms of Stalinist rule.

Russian capitalism under Putin has not become more competitive on the world market. The strong dependence on the income it generates through energy resources and the weight of its war economy mean that it simply does not have the funds to develop projects comparable to the New Silk Road. And the US, also, among other reasons, as a result of its gigantic military expenses, can no longer play its “financial joker” as it could in the past. In many sectors US industry is lagging behind and in many areas parts of its infrastructure are derelict. Thus China is presently the only country able to make such colossal amounts available, even if much of this is financed with state seconded credits. But while the past two decades allowed for China’s dizzying ascent, future conditions of the development of world capitalism are unlikely to offer the same advantageous framework for China.

Can we compare the construction of such a new gigantic railway network across Asia and in other continents to the role which the construction of the railways played in the expanding phase of capitalism in the US in the 19th century?

As Rosa Luxemburg developed in her writings (The Accumulation of Capital and An Introduction to Political Economy) the construction of the railways in the US and their advance to the Far West was accompanied by the conquest of land from the native population through a combination of force and the penetration of commodity relations. The railways pushed into a zone dominated by pre-capitalist production. The combined efforts of the railway companies, the state with its judicial apparatus and its armed forces, began to eliminate any local resistance and paved the way for the integration of the area into the capitalist system. With the construction of the Silk Road railways across Central Asia and elsewhere, it is true that some areas which have hitherto been in the periphery, or even existing outside of the capitalist market, will be faced even more with a flood of Chinese products. And since Chinese workers have been often been engaged in the construction of infrastructure or other major projects, probably only a small portion of the local population will find (temporary or permanent) jobs thanks to these new transport corridors. On the whole this construction is unlikely to have an economic spin-off similar to the extension of the US railways had in the 19th century. The most likely scenario is that of a widespread ruin of local producers and shop owners crushed by more competitive Chinese products...

Competition between China and Russia

China’s economy is about eight times larger than Russia’s (and its population is 10 times larger), but China is extremely dependent on energy supply from abroad, and Central Asia plays a particularly vital role for China’s energy supply. 

The Chinese state is trying to reduce its dependence on energy delivered by Russia (it receives 10% of its oil and 3% of its gas from Russia). And China is now aiming to secure new energy supply routes to its west, by-passing the dangers hanging over the Middle East and the transport routes from there to China. 43% of Chinese oil and 38% of gas consumption come from Saudi Arabia. The maritime transport passes along the coasts of Hormuz, Aden and the straits of Malacca, all within the reach of the US 5th and 7th fleets, stationed in the Indian and Pacific Ocean. In other words, China is attempting to make the energy resources of Central Asia more accessible to its needs.

However any Chinese plans to establish closer links with Central Asia and beyond will profoundly alter its relationship with Russia. This comes after a period when, during the past 20 years, China has already been expanding its influence into Siberian territory to its north.

Since 1991 the Russian Far East (RFE) has lost about a quarter of its population. The number of Chinese immigrant workers in the RFE has gone by up 400,000 since January 2017, while Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District has lost two million people since 1991 (about a quarter of its population) as a result of higher death rates and emigration. Russia has been leasing land – hundreds of thousands of hectares – to Chinese companies and allowing cheap timber extraction. There is the possibility that the Chinese population will at some stage outnumber the Russian population and that Chinese commercial influence will become dominant. For Russian nationalists this means the goal of the Russian Czar when constructing the Siberian Railway - to keep control over Siberia and to be able to play a crucial role in Far East - is being threatened.[10] And after its expansion into the Russian Far East, with the new Silk Road project China is now launching another offensive to its west. 

Up till recently, Russia could consider Central Asia as its “backyard” but now Russian trade with Central Asia has been falling continuously. In 2000 the Chinese share in trade with Central Asia was only 3%, whereas in 2012 it had risen to 25% - mostly at the expense of Russia.[11] Moscow’s means of avoiding further damage resulting from Chinese expansion are limited. Even before the project was announced officially by the Chinese president Xi Jinping, Russia had tried to stabilise its position in Central Asia by setting up, in 2014, the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union) which excluded China.[12]

But for the Central Asian countries the Silk Road project seems to be more attractive, because of the promise of Chinese investments in the region and more free trade. The Russian-dominated EEU only offers a tariff union, while Russia itself is short of funds. This sheds light on the chronic lagging behind of Russian capital. Russia has been trying to compensate for its economic inferiority through the increasing role of its military. But China is also acting as a growing rival to Russia on the military level in Central Asia. For example China has begun delivering military equipment to Central Asian countries. Common manoeuvres have begun between Chinese and Central Asian troops. Even though Russia still dominates the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)[13] (Armenia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Russia belong to it), China has been declaring its intention of safeguarding security in the region, counting on its own forces. Negotiations have begun with Turkmenistan to open a military base in the country (the second after Djibouti). And China also engaged in a security alliance with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan to fight terrorism. Military cooperation between Central Asian countries and China mark a turning point, because previously China had abstained from establishing a military presence and won sympathy among many regimes because of its “non-interference in the affairs of other countries”. Its policy of either keeping a low profile or acting more aggressively, as in the South China Sea, correspond to the “push” and “pull” tactics.

More globally the development of Russian-Chinese relations show the contradictory nature of their relationship, where one country has either been heavily dependent on the other (as China was on Stalin’s Russia in the early days of Mao,) or where they have been developing their rivalry and even directly threatening each other with mutual destruction (as in the 1960s). Each time both countries had major antagonisms with the US (even though temporarily, in the early 1980s, China supported the US in Afghanistan against Russia). Since 1989 China has aimed at a closer cooperation with Russia in order to counter the US wherever possible, and in an initial period China also received most of its weapons and military technology from Russia. This is changing. 

China has also always used Russia as a source of energy. After the Russian occupation of Crimea and Russia’s hidden presence in Eastern Ukraine, China benefited from the Western sanctions against Russia. Looking for a counter-weight to the sanctions, Russia had to find markets in China, but China could put pressure on Russia and lower both Russian prices of energy products and receive concessions for investing in Russia. Thus while Russia scored points by occupying Crimea and being present in Eastern Ukraine, it paid a heavy price by getting somewhat blackmailed into bargain deals for China. This shows that the Russian war economy comes at a high price. At the same time, Russia, which feels threatened by the Chinese “invasion through the backdoor” in East Asia and its Silk Road ambitions westwards, is aware of the asymmetric nature of the relationship between the two rivals. The more China develops its own armaments industry and technology the less dependent it will be on Russian arms exports and arms technology transfers. China could not openly welcome the Russian occupation of Crimea, because it would have discredited China’s intransigence on territorial integrity – indispensable with regard to Uighur independence aspirations in Xinjiang. Russia is also in a dilemma vis-a-vis China’s expansion in the South China Sea (SCS), especially after China has more or less occupied a number of coral reefs in the South China Sea, transforming them into military bases. Military ties between Russia and Vietnam could also create tensions between China and Russia.[14]

However, as we have shown elsewhere,[15] Russia and China work together as much as possible against the US. The two countries have held common military manoeuvres in the Far East, in the Mediterranean and in the Baltic Sea. But the Silk Road project is certainly one of the Chinese schemes which will force Russia to react. At the same time it will push other countries to try and deepen any antagonistic interests between China and Russia.

With the Chinese advance in Central Asia, China has managed to benefit from the weakening of both the US and Russia in the region. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet empire the US managed to develop privileged links and even to open some military bases in Central Asia. However, in the context of US decline worldwide, the US has also been losing ground in Central Asia – with China being the main beneficiary.[16]

But the Central Asian countries fear both Russian military hegemony and Chinese expansion and may try to gain as much as possible for themselves by taking advantage of divergent interests between Russia and China.

China’s push towards Europe is also driving a wedge between Europe and Russia

Since Europe presently absorbs 18% of Chinese exports, any improvement of trade connections would strengthen the Chinese position in Europe itself.[17] It is therefore particularly keen on speeding up freight traffic from the recently acquired port of Piraeus near Athens to Central Europe. The project of building a high speed train between Athens and Belgrade and further on to Budapest reflects China’s attempts to achieve a growing influence in Central Europe. China will use the Silk Road as a way of “sidelining” Russia (or if necessary enter into an alliance with it), in order to expand its position in Europe. This would at the same time threaten in particular the interests of European rivals in Central Europe itself, where Germany above all has achieved a dominant position. Reactions by German capital have already signalled that – in addition to the efforts to fend off Chinese attempts to get a stronger foothold in hi-tech sectors - German capital will counter-act the Silk Road project on different fronts. This may even mean that this will compel German capital or other national capitals to make tactical alliances against rising Chinese influence in the region. This brings in another unpredictable element - possible common steps by European countries together with Russia against China.

Turkey has also been a major target of Chinese investments. Chinese companies are involved in several of the megalomaniac projects of President Erdogan. Over the next three years the number of Chinese companies active in Turkey is expected to double. At the same time, China and Turkey have had tensions over the role of the Islamic Uighur in Xinjiang. Since Turkey is in a key position on the imperialist chessboard where Russian, European, American, Iranian ambitions are all clashing with each other, any Chinese move towards Turkey will add more explosive elements to this deeply conflicted area.

The Maritime Silk Road and its counter-moves

As part of the “One Belt - One Road” project, Iran has a specific importance. New transport corridors between Iran and China have been opened, and new port facilities in Iran are under construction.[18] At the same time, renewed US sanctions against Iran will make it possible for China to gain more influence in Iran – almost similar to the effects of the Western sanctions against Russia, which also led to increased dependence of Russia on China and thus to a globally increased weight of China.

The Chinese expansion in the Indian Ocean compels all bordering states to position themselves. On the one hand China must push its Maritime Silk Road along the coasts of the Indian Ocean up to the Iranian coast. This creates additional tensions between Pakistan and India. In Pakistan, the port of Gwadar, not far from the Iranian border, will be connected to the extreme west of China after the construction of a 500 km road connection. The port should give Chinese trade easier access to the Middle East than by sea through the Strait of Malacca (between Malaysia and Indonesia). India is protesting against this road project that crosses the part of Kashmir claimed by New Delhi. A new international airport is to be built in Gwadar.

And the Maritime Silk Project also pushes India to take counter-measures. On the one hand Iran does not want to be too dependent on China: this is why it seeks to strengthen its ties with India. India contributed to the construction of the new Iranian port of Chabahar, allowing India to avoid passing through Pakistan to reach Afghanistan. At the same time, India itself which has had special links with Russia for decades, has intensified these, despite the fact that on a military level India has also tried to diversify its arms purchases at the expense of Russia and that India is seen by the US as an important counter-weight against Chinese expansion. It has received American backing for its stronger militarisation, in particular increasing its nuclear capabilities. And together with Russia, Iran and Azerbaijan, India has been attempting for some time to establish an International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) which is to connect Mumbai to St Petersburg via Tehran and Baku/Azerbaijan.[19]

In addition India and Japan have launched the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC), trying to intensify links between Japan, Oceania, South-East Asia, India and Africa…. with the plans to build an India-Burma-Thailand motorway. As for the scramble for port facilities in the Indian Ocean, China has signed deals to set up new port facilities in Hambantota in Sri Lanka and begun the modernisation of ports in Bangladesh. Both in Pakistan and in Sri Lanka this led to spiral of new debts. The construction of the port facilities in Hambantota will give China a 99 year control over the port.

The development in Afghanistan sheds light on the main beneficiaries of the almost 40 years of war in the country.

Russia had to withdraw its troops after its occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-1989, following a 10 year- long war of attrition, which contributed to the implosion of the Soviet Union. The US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan have also experienced a real fiasco, where after more than 15 years of occupation of the country by western troops, the coalition has not been able to stabilise the country. On the contrary, in the midst of widespread terror across the country, their own troops fear for their lives wherever they go. While the western countries poured billions of dollars into Afghanistan for waging war and have stationed thousands of troops (many of whom have become traumatised), China has bought mines (for example at the price of $3.5 billion for a copper mine in Aynak) and is building a railway line connecting Logar (south of Kabul) with Torkham (a Pakistan border town) without any military mobilisation as yet. But while China has so far been spared from military attacks in Afghanistan, there is no guarantee that this will continue. [20]

The increasing Chinese influence along the “String of Pearls” in South-East Asia and the geo-strategic advance along the Maritime Silk Road will thus sharpen contradictions in this part of the Asia.

Africa: China set to challenge European domination

In addition to the expansion of Chinese influence on the Asian continent in different directions, China has also begun advancing its pawns into Africa, where Chinese boats arrived as early as 1415. At that time China did not settle in Africa. This left room for the European colonial powers, whose expansion across the world began shortly afterwards. Now, 600 years later, it is above all European influence in Africa which China is pushing back. In 2018 it is estimated that around one million Chinese live on the African continent (workers, shop and company owners). The construction of the above mentioned railway lines in Ethiopia and in Kenya and plans for more extensive railway connections highlight their long-term ambitions in Africa. A number of countries (Djibouti, Egypt, Algeria, Cape-Verde, Ghana, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Angola) have begun buying Chinese military technology; Namibia and Ivory Coast plan to have centres facilitating the supplies for the Chinese navy. As mentioned above, we will deal with Chinese expansion into Africa in a future article.

Concluding this article, when we examine the ambitions behind the “One Belt One Road” project, we are left in no doubt that this huge undertaking is more than an economic “recovery” program. Building such a gigantic infrastructure is inseparably linked to long-term Chinese ambitions of becoming the leading power, with the goal of toppling the US. Even if nobody can predict at the moment whether this project can be implemented in view of the unpredictable factors and risks mentioned above, such an expansion is not only bound to reshape the imperialist constellations in Asia - it will also have far-reaching implications in Europe and in the other continents.

Gordon, September 2018

 

 

On 25 May, Harvey Weinstein, the now notorious American film producer, was led in handcuffs from a New York police station to a court where he was charged with rape and sexual abuse. He was freed on bail while awaiting trial and fitted with an ankle bracelet to monitor his movements.

Ideological uses…

The “Weinstein affair” has been known all over the planet since the New York Times and the New Yorker published an inquiry into the numerous cases of sexual abuse committed by Weinstein, who has been denounced by dozens of women. Since then an even greater number of women have exposed similar aggressions and crimes by other men in all sectors: cinema, business, politics, etc.

At the beginning the media coverage of the “Weinstein affair” served mainly as a pretext for embarrassing Trump and pushing towards his impeachment. In the days of Bill Clinton, sexual abuses committed by a man who had a feeling of impunity because of his powerful position were used to weaken the president: the famous “Lewinsky affair”[1]. In October 2017, when the Weinstein affair came to light, the ignoble behaviour of this character was an open secret in American intellectual and cultural circles. By mediatising the resulting public anger, the American bourgeoisie had found yet another way of implicating the president, who also has form in this same area (among other things, the difficulties he now faces for his pay-offs to two women, a playboy model and a porn star, to keep them quiet about extra-marital affairs early in his marriage.)

At the same time, the international impact of this case shows that there is much more involved than yet another Machiavellian strategy of the bourgeoisie. It reveals a real and profound indignation around the condition of women in this society. The participation in International Woman’s Day demonstrations on 8 March 2018 was much bigger than in previous years  and held in more countries (there were demonstrations in Turkey, Russia, Philippines, India, Pakistan, Switzerland, South Korea, Congo, the Ivory Coast, etc) and with more determined slogans denouncing rape and other forms of aggression against women.

This legitimate anger was however rapidly recuperated by the bourgeoisie through a social network campaign orchestrated by the media and entertainment industry, marked by a tendency to blame men in general and to spread feelings of victimisation and guilt. The truth is that the ruling class only wants people to express themselves freely when they are dragged into false dilemmas: men against women, good men against chauvinist pigs, while at the same time making full use of traditional reactions of puritanism and prudery. Righteous speeches proliferated; in several countries governments passed new laws or planned to do so, claiming to strengthen “equality between the sexes” around issues of pay, or to ensure harsher penalties for sexual harassment and attacks. The ruling class could not remain silent in the face of widespread anger which was, however, unable to break out of an inter-classist, sectional framework, unable to raise itself onto a class terrain, and which thus posed no real threat to the bourgeoisie’s class privileges. The bourgeoisie thus took advantage of this situation to keep everything inside the mystifications of democracy, inside the illusion that discrimination could be eliminated in the context of existing society.

This is a mystification. When prisons are full of men who have harassed women in the street or beaten up their wives, what has to change in society to remove the material basis of such behaviour? The bourgeoisie knows perfectly well that imposing harsher penalties on base behaviour towards women is just applying sticking plaster to a deep wound, and this makes its empty gestures even more despicable. By offering women the protection of the state, the bourgeoisie is simply imprisoning the “woman question” in the cage of bourgeois democracy, reducing it to a matter of deviant behaviour in a society where there is supposedly no inbuilt obstacle to “equality between men and women”.

This is precisely the trap that has to be avoided by this wave of legitimate indignation. If women are viciously exploited, mistreated, considered as slaves and sexual objects to men, this is not the product of a kind of “deviation” in this society, or of a tendency for it to go backwards, but an expression of its real nature as a system of class exploitation and oppression.

…of a real oppression

The workers’ movement didn’t take long in highlighting the specific condition of women in capitalist society. In 1845, Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in which he described how capitalism was destroying the health, the future, the lives of children and women by integrating them into the inhuman conditions of production in the big factories and mines. He also explained how a boss could easily abuse women in his employ because he wielded the power of life and death over them. But it was above all in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State that Engels showed that the subordination of women was deeply linked to the division of society into classes, to the existence of private property, arguing that the historic struggle of the proletariat contained within it the possibility for the real emancipation of women. Basing himself on the work of Morgan, Engels demonstrated that the appearance of private property gave rise to the family, the initial economic cell of class society. The man was now in charge and the woman was turned into an object, the property of the man and the procreator of children who would inherit the property of the male head of the family.

In the same period August Bebel, in his classic work Women and Socialism, described how capitalist relations perpetuated this position of women in the service of the man and how the social structures of capitalism were based on this position, especially bourgeois marriage. In capitalism women remain the property of men, reduced to a useful object at the beck and call of masculine desire. Bebel demonstrates that the logical expression of this situation is the fact that prostitution is necessary to the good functioning of capitalist society.

Marxism was thus very early on able to show that the subordination of women to men was not fundamentally a moral or even physical question, but a material and social one.  With the development of the productive forces, humanity was led to abandon the collective social forms of primitive communism and adopt a form of organisation based on private property and the division into social classes. Capitalism, by integrating men, women and children into production has got rid of the old sexual division of labour but its social structures retain the framework of the subordination of women to men, particularly through marriage and the family.

The behaviour under the media spotlight today fully confirms this. Social evolution since the days of Engels and Bebel, far from putting women in a better place, has perpetuated her situation as an object for use. Women are still considered as fundamentally inferior beings, and the material development of the system has led to a growing dehumanisation of women’s relationships with men. Advertising, for example, makes brutal use of the female image, treating women as sexual objects. Pornography has become increasingly widespread thanks to the internet and acts as a vehicle for educating young people in completely reified relations between the sexes, normalising the most degrading behaviour and justifying sexual violence and harassment, especially at work where relations of domination and submission are more visible than elsewhere. 

Furthermore, the workplace less and less supplies the minimal conditions for a social life. The decomposition of the social fabric and current conditions of exploitation produce and accentuate an atomisation of the individual which plunge many into solitude and sexual misery.

At the same time, the bourgeoisie has also developed a concern for the “woman question”. Feminist movements are nothing new and have appeared regularly throughout the history of capitalism. After all, don’t bourgeois women also suffer from the rule of their husbands? No doubt: but the feminist movement begins from a basis of inter-classist demands which, on the one hand, can only have a very limited effect in the context of this society, and, on the other hand, present a real danger for the proletariat in the sense that, like all inter-classist movements, feminism draws us away from the class demands and positions which alone contain the solution to the problem.

The necessity for a fight on class lines

Through a deep understanding of the inextricable link between the oppression and exploitation of women and the organisation of capitalist society, the workers’ movement was able to take up the concern for the situation of women while demarcating itself very clearly from the feminist movement developed by a part of the bourgeoisie that was calling for women to have access to education, the right to vote and so on. Clara Zetkin and August Bebel, within German social democracy, and Alexandra Kollontai in the Bolshevik party, to mention only a few, all emphasised the primary responsibility of capitalist society in the condition of women and thus the importance of linking this question to that of the working class as a whole, to the united struggle of male and female workers for the construction of a new society where men and women will live without chains.

What’s more, it was the workers’ movement which was behind International Women’s Day, the first of which took place on 28 February 1909. After 1914, International Women’s Day saw militant marches against the imperialist war, and in Russia, on March 8 1917[2], the mass demonstration of women (and male) workers raised slogans against war and hunger and was the spark that lit the fires of the proletarian revolution.

What has changed for women under capitalism since the situation described by Engels in 1845? In the developed countries, women have gained a certain number of rights: access to education, the vote…some are even at the head of big companies or even big countries! But their condition, in a more subtle and hypocritical way, is not that different. If women are no longer forced to work up until the day they give birth as Engels saw in English industry, an unemployed woman is bound to remain unemployed if she is pregnant and the chances of young women finding jobs is reduced by the “risk of maternity”. As in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the working class is basically faced with the same problems. But in the past workers’ parties could take up these questions and develop propaganda and education which had a real impact on the working class. Today, when capitalism can only keep going by engendering the decomposition of social relations, the working class is experiencing great difficulties to recognise its class identity. This is a major obstacle to understanding the necessarily revolutionary character of its struggle, which has to integrate the fight for a radical change in the feminine condition. What the workers’ movement has always put forward - that women will only lose their chains when the whole of humanity is freed by the victory of the proletarian revolution and the building of communism - the proletariat is finding hard to understand because of the low level of its class consciousness.

In this situation the bourgeoisie is posing the problem on the rotten and dangerous ground of inter-classism. According to this ideological standpoint, which derives from the ruling class, women must unite to free themselves from men and seize some of the power that men try to conserve for themselves and against women. Not only does this conception hide and exclude the antagonistic character of social relations (as though female workers have the same social or economic interests as bourgeois women), it also encourages the illusion that the state is the guarantor of “equality”, the force that restrains the powerful and slightly reduces their advantages in favour of the weak. In this framework, the feminist struggle is supposed to put pressure on the state to obtain more rights and more equality. Above all, it’s the old formula of divide and rule, the cultivation of obstacles to the unification of the class struggle, both in the future and in the immediate. 

The indignation being expressed against the unjust, humiliating, and degrading treatment of women reveals the visceral incapacity of the capitalist system to allow a real improvement in the living conditions of the exploited. In complete opposition to all the arguments about the existence of social and economic progress, these conditions are getting worse given the continuing tendency towards the unravelling of the social tissue. All the “oppressed categories” (women, immigrants, homosexuals, this or that race or ethnicity, etc) who feel threatened or rejected are not suffering as a result of their particular condition as such but because the capitalist system only operates on the basis of two categories of human beings - the exploiters and the exploited - and through the competition of each against all which, under the pressure of the crisis, and above all of social decomposition, tends to exclude any form of difference, to restrict solidarity to the ghettoising framework of the defence of particular interests or identities.

What August Bebel wrote in the introduction to Women and Socialism remains impressively relevant today:

“The woman question deals with the position that woman should hold in our social organism, and seeks to determine how she can best develop her powers and her abilities, in order to become a useful member of human society, endowed with equal rights and serving society according to her best capacity. From our point of view this question coincides with that other question: in what manner should society be organized to abolish oppression, exploitation, misery and need, and to bring about the physical and mental welfare of individuals and of society as a whole? To us then, the woman question is only one phase of the general social question that at present occupies all intelligent minds, its final solution can only be attained by removing social extremes and the evils which are a result of such extremes”.  GD, 2.7.18

Picture: International Women's Day, March 8 1917, a spark for the revolution in Russia

 

 

Germany and the world revolution, 1918-23

2pm-6pm, November 24th, May Day Rooms, 88 Fleet Street, EC4Y, 1DH

On November 4 1918 the sailors of Kiel on the Baltic coast mutinied, refusing the order to engage in yet another futile naval battle. Faced with the threat of brutal repression against the sailors, the workers of Kiel responded with a massive strike movement. Within days armed workers’ and soldiers’ councils were springing up all over Germany. This revolt spelt the end of the imperialist slaughter: the bourgeoisies of the world, who had been at each others’ throats for four long years, now united to face a bigger threat: the extension of the proletarian revolution from Russia to the most industrialised countries in Europe. In December the revolutionary groups who had opposed the war came together to form the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which stood for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the political power of the councils.

Germany was to be the theatre of a whole series of major class confrontations for the next five years. But the great hope that a Soviet Germany would break the isolation of the proletarian fortress in Russia was never to materialise. The German workers faced a far more sophisticated ruling class than their Russian comrades, a bourgeoisie that showed itself to be highly skilled in diverting the revolution towards false goals and in defeating the centres of proletarian resistance one by one.

Thus as soon as the threat of revolution took shape, the bourgeoisie understood the need to jettison the Kaiser, bring the war to an end, and call on the loyal services of the “workers’ party”, the German Social Democracy, the majority of which had already come to the aid of the ruling class by throwing its energies into the national war effort. The social democrats still enjoyed the confidence of a large part of the German working class and they were able to act inside the councils with the aim of persuading them to hand over power to the newly “democratic” capitalist state. But the bourgeoisie also understood the need to provoke premature uprisings by different sections of the working class – a strategy employed with tragic results in Berlin in January 1919, which resulted in the massacre of thousands of workers and revolutionaries, including Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

The defeat of the revolution in Germany, and the stemming of the revolutionary tide in numerous other countries, was to have catastrophic consequences for humanity: the degeneration and demise of the revolution in Russia, the rise of Stalinism and Nazism, the march towards the second imperialist world war.

A century later, the German revolution has almost been written out of history. It is still in the interests of our rulers to present the revolution in Russia as a purely Russian affair and to pretend that the world revolution was and is an idle dream. And yet the revolution in Germany showed that it was indeed a possibility, despite its failure. It is up to us to draw its principal lessons for future revolutionary movements of the working class, and this will be the main focus of the meeting.

Below are some lengthy extracts from an article in our territorial press of the ICC section in Mexico.

The electoral campaign, running from 2017 to June of this year, has been so overpowering and invasive that it succeeded in turning out 56 million people to vote, that's 63.4% of electors which represents the highest level of participation in the history of the country. The six-yearly ritual[1] of promises about change in order to mobilise people has resulted this time in an unusual victory for the candidate "of the left", Lopez Obrador (or AMLO, as he's known from his initials). Everything has been done to feed the image of democracy and elections among the population, in particular among the exploited.

For that, the bourgeoisie has played on the present disorientation of the workers and their difficulties in expressing themselves as an exploited class whose interests are opposed to the capitalist system. Even if the bourgeoisie is also experiencing more problems and divisions in trying to reach agreements and define its choice for the head of the state apparatus (as we've seen with fractures within the PRI and the PAN and the breaking up of the PRD[2], the violence of the confrontations between political clans and the large number of candidates threatened or assassinated during the electoral campaign), it has nevertheless been able to exploit its own difficulties by turning them against the workers, turning these same problems into supplementary arguments to push the population towards the polling booths.

For this reason, even if Lopez Obrador wasn't the first choice candidate of the clans holding political and economic power, the whole of the bourgeoisie has profited from his anti-corruption and patriotic speeches in order to polish up the illusion of change and also reinvigorate an electoral terrain around a population exasperated by violence, permanent insecurity, fraud and corruption.

Through its candidates, its institutions and its media, the bourgeoisie has continually hammered home the idea that voting is a matter of choosing someone and respecting individual will, thus trying to spread the idea that the individual alone and in isolation equipped with "the freedom of the citizen" can transform society, whereas the atomised workers are reduced to maintain the system that exploits them. The bourgeoisie pretends the voice of a worker carries as much weight as that of a capitalist boss and that, consequently, the resulting government is the product of a collective decision and the "will of the people".

It's precisely because of this fallacious image that elections and democracy are the rulers’ best weapons of submission. Let’s recall the words of Lenin on the democratic republic, who said that it was nothing other than: "a governmental machine to crush labour by capital" and that "all the cries in favour of democracy in reality only serve to defend the bourgeoisie and its class privileges and exploitation" (Theses and reports on the democratic bourgeoisie and the proletarian dictatorship, 1919)[3]. 

Each speech and each appeal is accompanied by summoning up the "citizen's responsibility" and phrases making allusions to the "country",  thus injecting a nationalist poison in order to try to anesthetise the workers and throw them into even greater confusion, preventing them from recognising themselves as a class suffering from misery and condemned to exploitation, but also as the "gravedigger of capitalism". It's for this reason that the nationalist speeches and the use of "patriotic symbols" have been fundamental to the election campaign of Meade (PRI candidate) and Anaya (PAN candidate) and included in this is the most marginal campaigns as those of the EZLN[4] through its candidate Marichuy.

The electoral triumph of Lopez Obrador is the victory of the bourgeoisie not that of the exploited.

Lopez Obrador (standing for the third time for the presidency, this time under the banner his new MORENA [5] party) has thus benefitted from the discontent of the population because of the generalised violence, the precariousness of living conditions and the widespread, open corruption at all levels of previous governments, that's to say from the weariness and frustration expressed towards the traditional parties. Never before have the elections so dominated and weighed so heavily; not in 2000 with the "fight for an alternative" which led to the PAN government with Vincente Fox as president, nor in 2012 with the anti-PRI mobilisations led by the #yosoy132 movement. The context in which the elections took place in Mexico is, as elsewhere in the world, strongly affected by the weight of capitalist decomposition, characterised on one hand by the tendency of the bourgeoisie to lose control of its political apparatus, marked by deep internal fractures and a desperate, competitive fight among the big parties, making its unity difficult; and, on the other hand, a disorientated working class, badly placed to find the ground  to develop its struggle against capitalism.

All this has been utilised and exploited by the bourgeoisie against the workers, strengthening its left political apparatus  and bringing forward a charismatic and demagogic character. In order to convince the whole of the bourgeoisie of  its seriousness to govern, it has profited from these political fractures by offering a hand to various capitalist groups that it was in competition with, even obtaining the support of business sectors who, in previous electoral campaigns in which it took part, accused him of being "a danger to Mexico". Some businessmen, assembled within the Council for Mexican Business (CMN) were until recently stubbornly keeping up attacks on AMLO, but these became counter-productive because it made him look like a victim, adding credibility to his image as the "defender of the poor and oppressed".

By allowing the different factions of the national capital to come to a consensus, the elected candidate looked for agreements and cooperation with big business and his political competitors by putting in these agreements an emphasis on the supposed fight against corruption (while promising to forget about certain indiscretions and wrongdoing of the past) and, above all, the promotion of national unity. In this way AMLO has not only reached agreement with a large number of employers but also with the union leaderships such as the CNTE[6] . This is evidently not a lasting solution but it does allow the Mexican state to better prepare for the ALENA[7] negotiations for example, and in the perspective of an intensification of the trade war, of being able to ride the consequences and justify  the coming attacks on the workers.

In its majority the bourgeoisie was thus convinced that another election fraud was pointless and risky; it was easier to accept the electoral win and that of the new left party.

Its election victory, which has been hyped as a "glimmer of hope", does not change the situation of the millions of exploited who voted for it one iota. There will be no modification in the exploitation of the workers; on the contrary the new government, invoking the defence of the economy and national sovereignty, will try to justify policies making their living conditions worse, claiming the necessity for a "republican austerity" in order to justify job cuts and other measures against the workers. The only thing that will change is the representatives of the bourgeoisie at the head of the state; but the mandate that they must defend is the same as that defended by Pena Nieto and all the governments of the world whether right or left: to maintain and protect the system of capitalist exploitation.

As in all elections it's the bourgeoisie which has won, but the results of this particular election has allowed for the strengthening of patriotic sentiments: the proliferation of national flags and the patriotic cries of "Long live Mexico!", present throughout the campaign and intensified with the victory of AMLO, show that there has been good use made of the emotions behind the victory of the left, aimed at implicating the workers in the defence of capitalism through the call for national unity.

On this occasion, and in a particular way, the elections have deepened the confusions of the workers, and the bourgeoisie is preparing to profit from this in order to strengthen its control and class domination.

AMLO and MORENA, in opposition or government, always the enemies of the workers

The living conditions of the exploited in the towns and countryside, marked by the violence of mafias, the police and the army, as well as the degradation of conditions caused by the advance of the world economic crisis, has facilitated the rise of illusions in Lopez Obrador, as well as the lying idea that capitalism can be "ameliorated" by simply putting a new government into place.

The partisans of AMLO pretend to be "radical" by defending the idea that the main problem of the system is corruption rather than exploitation. It's not surprising that a faction of the bourgeoisie tries to disguise the fact that capitalism is nothing other than a system of exploitation; but it also disguises the fact that corruption, which is the central theme of MORENA's propaganda, cannot be eradicated within capitalism because, like fraud and violence, it is a permanent part of the life of capitalism and more particularly in the present phase of capitalism's decomposition.[8]

Even the groups of the left who pose as critical or sceptical about the promises of the winning candidate collaborate to reinforce this illusion when they present AMLO's motto of "the poor first of all" as contradictory with the fact that he has formed a team (first of all for his campaign and now for government) with businessmen, made alliances with "conservative" groups or strengthened his links with the most rotten figures in the PRI or PAN, the unions, or is engaging with them to follow their economic or "neo-liberal" orientations. These observations certainly illustrate the pragmatism with which he acts and his systematic recourse to lies and hypocrisy, but they hide the bourgeois nature of MORENA and that of its representative, AMLO. If we take what they say then Lopez Obrador continues to be a representative of the exploited classes, but has turned out to be a "renegade" or a "traitor", whereas, in reality, he has never ceased to be an expression of the same corrupt and exploitative bourgeoisie.

The most incisive critique of AMLO came from the EZLN which, in mid-July, made reference to the change of government teams in these words: "the foremen, the butlers and the team leaders can change but the owner of the building remains the same". With this declaration, the EZLN, tried to distance itself from the other cliques of the bourgeoisie's political apparatus, but this guerrilla group itself was a product and integral part of the system which it pretends to criticise. Just remember that in the middle of the 1990's, the EZLN  gave its support to the candidate for the PRD, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, but it also expressed its "respect" for the Chamber of Deputies (in which it took the floor in 2001) and other bourgeois institutions, and it tried to participate in the latest elections...

Faced with the false promises of AMLO, the proletariat has no other way except to struggle

Whereas a few years ago AMLO pretended to send bourgeois institutions to the devil, now  he confirms his position as a defender of capitalism; and he defends it so much better when he affirms that it's necessary to strengthen democracy and its instruments, because that reinforces the bourgeoisie's tools of exploitation and control. When it talks today of the defence of the national economy, it shows its determination to keep capitalism going and in order to fulfil this task, it again takes up, while shaking the dust off a little, the promises made by the PRI over the years.

Lopez Oprador, with his leftist chatter, promises a "fourth transformation" , an illusion and a false promise which is aimed at concealing his efforts to support and maintain the capitalist system. It’s a smokescreen which produces more confusion among the workers and exploited.

But the confusion spread amongst the proletariat today doesn't mean that their capacity for reflection and their will to fight back has been eliminated. We know that the world economic crisis is going to continue and show that all the speeches and promises of AMLO are pure lies; above all it will push the workers to fight because as long as capitalism exists, whether under governments of the left or right, the exploitation of the proletariat will not only continue but can only get worse .The proletariat has no other way to go forward faced with the new government but to once again take up the road to struggle on its own class ground.

From Revolucion Mundial, press of the ICC in Mexico, 20.7.2018

In August Internationalist Voice posted a position on the ICC's web forum[1] on the wave of protests in the Middle East affecting the countries of Jordan, Iran and Iraq.  It defends fundamental class positions and the proletarian perspective of revolution and, within this, the necessity for the self-organisation of the class against the various traps of the bourgeoisie. The text raises a number of pertinent questions: what is the content of the demonstrations? What is the role and attitude of revolutionaries to these protests? Is there a revolution going on here? What is the role of the bourgeoisie? But on a secondary level there are a number of important ambiguities in the text, particularly on the class nature of these events.

For our part, we do view these protests as expressions of the working class, as part of the class struggle at a certain point of its unfolding. This is not a revolution, but a class that won't fight for its basic conditions of life is not going to make a revolution, and street protests have historically always been part of the class struggle.

The text is fairly dismissive of the protests and strikes in Jordan and underestimates the strengths of both. Like Iran and Iraq, the demands of the protesters in Jordan were clearly demands of a working class struggle: jobs, healthcare, rent, services, against corruption (the latter easily recuperated but in this context part of the indignation of the class). In all three countries, the struggles immediately came up against the trade unions who were ill-equipped to deal with them, including the "new" unions in Jordan set up by the bourgeoisie following the intense wave of struggle a decade ago. Workers actively sought out protesters and were explicit about the unions trying to divide them and keep them away from the protests. For It the protesters here weren't "fully radical", but what does that mean? The protests did seek to join up with workers on strike; and the workers, who refused to be isolated in the factories and places of work by the unions, which can easily become a prison even in the most advanced struggles, joined them on the streets. Indeed we can say that any workers’ struggle that doesn’t seek to come out onto the streets cannot advance towards a wider class unity.

So the demands of the class were there and the proletarian method of struggle was there, and while it wasn't a "fully radical" revolution it showed some important indicators of the class struggle, not least the hostility towards the unions, the rejection of the clerics in all three countries as well as the rejection of "national sacrifice". Moreover, the strength of the movement to some extent pushed back the bourgeoisie and obliged it to pause its attacks.

It's clear that there are enormous problems and potential dangers confronting the working class in these countries, coming from the specific forces in play and the wider dynamics of the major imperialisms. The ICC laid out these potential dangers in a position right at the beginning of this phase of struggle in January, though these related to Iran particularly[2]. But, even given the imperialist cauldron of the Middle East, or partly because of it, the combativity of the class is an important starting point and an example to workers everywhere. It is somewhat contradictory about this: it says that there is no future context for these protests but describes how youth "has provided the necessary social force for street protests" and placed the movement squarely in the crisis of capitalism and its attacks. It says that, along with the class composition of those who participated in them, "the demands and objectives of the protests determine the nature of that movement". That's true, but more generally the nature of the movement can also determine its demands and objectives. It seems to want to "fix" situations whereas the nature of these movements is fluid. And It draws a conclusion that's nowhere verified by the facts: "The fact is that... nationalist slogans overshadow the protests". Without underestimating the dangers of nationalism, especially in countries which have been dominated by bigger imperialist powers for a long time, we can say that nationalist slogans in all three countries were by no means the distinguishing feature of the strikes and protests. And even where nationalist slogans are raised, the only way they can be fought is through resolute action on a class basis, which can only bring the workers into conflict with the national interest.

It's on Iraq that the position of It most clearly goes off the rails. The workers are atomised, it says, but the proletariat in Iraq is in "a better position" and from this "contrary to the anarchist view, the power of labour is not on the street but in the workplace where it disturbs the process of capitalist accumulation" and consequently "... if the Iraqi working class stops oil exports, the regime will collapse and the workers will assert their power as a social class".

It’s true that the power of the working class can indeed be to prevent the factories or oil refineries from functioning, but their real power does not lie in the paralysis of the production and the circulation of goods, but in their unification across all sectors of the economy, not by isolating workers from each other through “besieging” places of production, but by spreading a movement and overcoming any attachment to a specific work place.

Indeed, we've seen from specific struggles of oil workers in France relatively recently that concentrating on one sector, even the oil sector, is the kiss of death for class struggle. The lessons of the isolating function of corporatism, which litter the history of class struggle, apply just as much to Iraq as France and everywhere else - isolation and division are the exact opposites of the needs of the struggle.

The oil industry in Iraq has erected many obstacles to the development of class struggle; various countries of the west and Iran and Russia have their installations guarded by their own militias and special Iraqi units have responded ruthlessly against protest around the oil plants. Indeed, mafia-like, the Iraqi militias have put their own soldiers on the books of the oil companies in exchange for "protection", and the Americans and British in the Green Zone fortress unleashed their "anti-terrorist" forces against the protesters in order to protect their own interests.

To make matters worse, Iraq could be descending into a post-Isis[3] phase of fracture, more and more dominated by centrifugal tendencies which are being expressed by the local gangs and manipulated by the major imperialist powers. There is a danger of Iraq turning into another Libya or something like it. Neither nationalism nor democracy are the main cards being played here – rather we are seeing the remorseless spread of capitalist decomposition. The flourishing of various militias in constant rivalry with each other is a clear expression of this, and this could sideline and overwhelm any class movements. In the meantime the response of the Iraqi state has been lethal gunfire, mass arrests and torture.

For It workers in these protests do not have "a clear horizon or class outlook to their aims". But these attempts of street protests and strikes to complement each other are parts of attempts to push forward the collective struggle and It makes a false division between protest and strike, the street and the workplace. The "unclear goals" of the struggle are certainly weaknesses in the sense that they do not yet pose the question of overturning capitalism, but at the same time  the recent protests and strikes in the Middle East should give us encouragement: the willingness to come out and fight is an absolute necessity for the class struggle, not a weakness.

The workers in the Middle East, beset by imperialist war and ethnic conflict, have a particular difficulty in developing a political perspective which looks towards a communist society, and they will not be able to achieve this in isolation from the central battalions of the working class in the heartlands of capital. But this lack of perspective is a problem which affects the working class everywhere today. Workers in all countries are confronted with growing social decomposition precisely because the important waves of class struggle between 1968 and 1989 remained on an essentially defensive terrain. And yet it remains the case, both in the peripheries and the centres, that the extension and unification of defensive struggles is an indispensable basis for any future evolution from the defensive level to the level of the revolutionary offensive.

Baboon, November 2018

It's been estimated that between 300 and 500 people were massacred by the army on October 2 1968 on Tlatelolco Square. While the exact number, and still less the official list of the victims, is unknown to this day, the bourgeoisie has been able to exploit its own crimes. Some years after the massacre, the Mexican bourgeoisie began to consider this date as the starting point for the advance of democracy, as if the blood spilt had washed away all traces of this crime and consigned authoritarianism and repression to a distant past.

The speeches and commemorations around the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre have been used to re-launch the democratic campaign and, making the link with past elections, they pretend to show that the Mexican state has changed its face because democracy has taken power and even allowed for alternate governments. The bourgeoisie has also resumed its hypocritical wailing, letting its crocodile tears flow in order to try to distance itself from the crimes of 1968 and profit from the memory and from the still-present indignation among the exploited.

The demonstrations led by the students between July and October 1968 were, without any doubt, the expression of a strong social discontent which, even if their claims were limited by a desire for "democratic freedoms"[1] and even if the political scene was occupied by a heterogeneous social mass, had a certain continuity with the combative spirit re-awakened by the strikes of the rail workers in 1958 and the doctors in 1965. This movement didn't succeed in moving onto proletarian ground, or in raising demands belonging to the working class, but it did succeed in deploying and arousing strong forces of solidarity. That's why, 50 years after the events and the massacre, it is necessary to reflect on this by trying to go beyond the lack of conscience displayed by the Mexican state in its "celebration"[2] of the Tlatelolco massacre and the campaign of mystification created by the bourgeoisie through its "intellectuals" and its left political apparatus.

What triggered the demonstration?

In 1968 the Mexican state said that the student mobilisations could be explained as an "imitation" of May 68 in Paris, and that it had been incited by "foreign infiltration". A month before the government of Diaz Ordaz carried out the massacre against the students, the official trade union, CTM, repeated this idea: "Foreigners and bad Mexicans acting as active agents for communism, used the relatively unimportant scuffles of two small groups of students in order to launch a serious attack against the regime and the institutions of the country, adopting tactics similar to those adopted by extremists of these tendencies in other events and very recently in the outbursts in Paris..." (Manifesto to the Nation, September 2, 1968).   Although there really was a global tendency towards social agitation influenced by the Paris demonstrations, it's false to suggest that these demonstrations were developed as no more than a sort of "fashion".

It was the return of the economic crisis onto the world scene which led to the workers' response of May 68[3] and it's the same trigger which opened the perspective for workers' responses in Italy (1969), Poland (1970-71), Argentina (1969) and even in Mexico which, without being a source of workers' mobilisation, aroused wide-scale social discontent.

It was also true that in the framework of the Cold War the dominant and competitive imperialist factions (the US and the USSR) used espionage and conspiracies, but up to now there's been no evidence that the USSR was implicated and still less the Cuban state, which had finalised an agreement with Mexico not to give its support to any opposition group[4]. It was similar for the "Communist Party", the Stalinist PCM which, although it was a pawn of the USSR, hadn't the strength or sufficient presence to lead the demonstrations.

On the other hand, the United States was keeping an eye on its "back-yard" and took an active part in the repression[5] during these years as during the whole of the Cold War.

In order to explain the origins of these demonstrations and the strength that they showed, it's necessary to go beyond the accusations of the government, but also to go deeper than the simplistic arguments about a "generational conflict" or an absence of "democratic liberties".

The students, as a social mass made up of diverse social classes but in which petty-bourgeois ideology dominates, were certainly held back by their illusions in democracy[6]. But another element pushed these students, who were often of proletarian origins, towards politicisation: the growing uncertainty that they felt in the future that awaited them. The promise of "social promotion" that the industrialisation of the 1940's to the 60's offered to the university students more and more clearly appeared as a come-on, given that, although capitalist profits increased, the life of workers got no better and threatened on the contrary to get worse under the pressure of the re-emergence of the world economic crisis which had already begun to make itself felt. But even more than this uncertainty, the repression of the state against the protests of workers claiming higher wages exacerbated the anger. Time and again bullets and prison were the responses of the state against the workers: the miners of Coahuila (1950-51), the rail-workers’ strikes (1948-58), teachers (1958) and doctors (1965). It was evident that even while increasing the rhythm of production, capitalism was not able to offer lasting reforms to a new generation.

In these conditions, the demonstrations were fed by the courage and indignation of the workers who, in the preceding years had also been hit by state repression.

Democratic hopes sterilise the strength of solidarity

From the 1940's to the 70's, the Mexican bourgeoisie unleashed an intense propaganda in order to make it known that industrialisation, the motor of economic growth and the stability of prices, would ameliorate the quality of life of the active population. In this process of industrialisation, the state played a fundamental role in taking responsibility for direct investments and supporting private capital through the sale, often underpriced, of energy resources, but above all through a policy of wage controls combined with subsidies for goods consumed by the workers. With these measures it presented itself as the "welfare state" while reducing the cost of labour for business, thus favouring the growth of capitalist profits. In the process of industrialisation there was a growing need for qualified workers, hence the state’s expansion of enrolment in the universities and the higher education schools. This increased the number of students of proletarian origin, thus making these institutions poles of social tension.

In this sense, the student movement in Mexico 1968, organised within the National Strike Committee (CNH), represented an important force, but structured around oppositional visions which never went beyond the stage of democratic demands it wasn't able to free itself from its links with nationalist ideology. However there was a certain class instinct which had germinated in the heat of the demonstrations and which pushed the young students to aim to meet up with the workers through the continued presence of the "information brigades"[7] in the industrial areas and workers' quarters. They thus succeeded in awakening a force of solidarity among the workers, but this potential social force was contained and cancelled out through the CNH’s lack of political perspectives.

Only the working class has an alternative to capitalism

From the first demonstrations of the student movement at the end of July 68, the granaderos riot police and regular police units acted with great ferocity. Mexican Chief of Police, General Luis Cueto, justified the repression in a press conference, saying that it was: "a subversive movement" which was tending "to create an atmosphere of hostility to our government and country on the eve of the XIX Olympic Games" (El Universal, July 28, 1968).

A period of continued street fighting thus opened up during the course of which the riot police were outnumbered. The army was then called into action and unleashed its repression. From the first days of the protests the army attacked with such savagery that on the night of July 30, it fired a bazooka at a school.

As the police and the army intensified the ferocity of their interventions, solidarity among the workers grew but it didn't take an organised form that could stamp its presence on the social scene.

The sympathy of the workers was demonstrated by their individual presence or in small groups joining the street protests. It was the same workers who, in the previous years, had already suffered repression for giving their support or direct participation to the social movements. Attempts were also made to openly express their solidarity with the students: on August 27, doctors at the General Hospital organised a strike in solidarity. The next day, municipal workers of the capital, forced to participate in an official action aiming to discredit the protesters, spontaneously rejected the government's move, by chanting "we are sheep" making it clear that they were obliged to be there and thus undermining  the wished-for participation in this demonstration; they were then vigorously attacked by the riot police.

The student movement succeeded in arousing sympathy and solidarity and although numerous groups had shouted in the streets and painted on the walls "We don't want the Olympic Games, we want revolution", the truth is that these movements went forward without any real perspective.  This is not because of a "strategic error", but because of the absence of the working class as a class on the social scene. It's not enough to be present individually or expressing solidarity in an isolated way, that is only formally occupying the social ground while leaving one's own political perspectives to one side. In 1968, although great numbers of the students were of proletarian origin and although the workers themselves showed their sympathy towards them, the proletariat did not find itself as an organised and conscious force able to confront capitalism.

The Tlatelolco massacre is a product of capitalism

By September, the response of the state became more and more aggressive. The army occupied the buildings of the UNAM on the 18th, reporting back on the political activity of the IPN[8] and the quarters around them, and the reason for this was that four days later the buildings of the polytechnic school were attacked. There were violent conflicts during this period in which solidarity again developed with a remarkable presence integrating school students and with the strengthened support of the population of the area...The massacre was being prepared.

On October 2nd, at the end of a demonstration on Tlatelolco Square, military and paramilitary squadrons attacked the students, showing in its naked form what the domination of capitalism meant.

The savagery of this response by the state is often presented as "a moment of madness" by the then Secretary of the Interior, Luis Echeverria, feeding the paranoia of the President Diaz Ordaz, but the brutality of this repression was neither accidental, nor the result of one pathological individual, it was part of the essence of capitalism. One of the main supports of the state is its repressive apparatus. To reflect on this properly we shouldn't forget that as long as capitalism exists, massacres like this one of 50 years ago will continue.

State violence is not a problem of the past, it is part of the very essence of capitalism, as Rosa Luxemburg had already analysed: "Violated, dishonoured, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretence to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ Sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form" (The Crisis of Social Democracy, 1916).

Although the bourgeoisie does have a need to ideologically justify its existence as a dominant class and present its system as a perfect expression of democracy, the truth is that it bases this existence on exploitation, which involves the permanent use of violence and terror and which it uses on a daily basis in order to maintain its power and its domination; bloody repression is also a part of its way of life.

Tatlin for Revolucion Mundial, Mexican section of the ICC, September 2018

November 11, 2018: exactly one hundred years after the Great War was ended. The "celebrations" planned and organised by the ruling class have been many and spread widely by the media. At a ceremony in Paris, Trump, Putin and Erdogan, amongst others, paraded themselves in the limelight; kings, queens, generals, bishops and politicians from right to left were all wheeled out to do their bit; ceremonies took place in cities, towns, villages and hamlets supported by various businesses, charities and supermarkets; youth events were organised, including "peace concerts" aiming to indoctrinate the young; marches, events and "silences" were organised way in advance across Europe, particularly Britain, France and Belgium with further commemoration events in Australia, New Zealand, India and Northern Ireland.

This was a deliberate, massive, organised and oppressive campaign, the primary function of which is to take one of the biggest atrocities of capitalism and turn this crime against the main victims of its imperialist wars, the working class, while trying to instil false conclusions from it. Not only does the working class have to suffer the atrocities of capitalist war, it is then forced, shamed, into "celebrating" its anniversaries with such hypocrisies about "sacrifices for freedom, justice and peace" and "the war to end all wars", and "never again". But there is no justice, peace and freedom for the working class: the war to end all wars was just the beginning of a worsening spiral downwards and rather than "never again", imperialist war has not stopped for a hundred years to the point that its ever-developing production of the means of destruction now threatens the very existence of humanity. The whole armistice celebrations have nothing to do with respecting the war dead but on the contrary insults them with lies and crocodile tears about "worthy sacrifice". With fake news we have fake history where words are turned into their opposite: massacres become sacrifice, ruin becomes civilisation and war becomes peace. In short, the whole armistice "remembrance" anniversary is nothing but a generalised attack on the consciousness of the working class, aimed at hiding the necessity for its revolutionary struggle for a peace and freedom that capitalism will fight tooth and nail against.

1. The armistice: a pause in order to prepare for new wars

In November 1918, Europe was plunged into enormous chaos; millions of people had been driven out of their houses and regions and were looking for somewhere to continue and rebuild their lives. Thus millions of Belgium's were refugees in Holland and more than 100,000 returned after the armistice: 300,000 Belgian refugees lived in France and returned in 1918. Further, there were hundreds of thousands of wounded, mutilated and invalided soldiers roaming across Europe looking for their town or village. Because of the chaos of the world war, the massive migrations that accompanied it and the exhaustion of the population, Spanish Flu made terrible ravages and in the final account caused more deaths than the world war itself. The thinkers of the bourgeoisie are in agreement on the fact that the conditions imposed by the Allies through the Treaty of Versailles posed the germs of a new war twenty years later. The "Peace Treaty" aroused the development of sentiments of revenge and retaliation which spread through wide layers of the German population during the 1920’s. The commentator for the Social-Democratic (SDAP) daily paper in Holland 1919 gives a taste of it: "This peace for all is viewed with bitter disillusion; a deception felt as a catastrophe (...) The Peace Treaty sets the status for a Europe in decline, of its retreat to an inferior level of civilisation. Most people on the continent are enchained and condemned to forced labour (...) humiliation and bitterness. Rancour here, sufficiency there, the thirst for power, fear: these are the new ‘civilised traits’ generated by the peace treaty" (Het Volk, 21.06.1919).

The bourgeoisies of various countries was fully aware that this peace was condemned to failure. It wasn't only the policy towards Germany that aggravated the anger but also, "the creation of new states like Poland, Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia led to incessant conflict over the new frontiers of these countries. That particularly concerned Hungary which lost two-thirds of the territory it had before the war (...) In a word, the peace was a failure" (Jay Winter, interview with Le Monde, 12.11.2014).

The November 11 1918 armistice was based on a peace that put an end to any form of peace. The First World War marked the entry of capitalism into its decadence and the era opening up led to a semi-permanent state of war. Some examples of the two decades following the signing of the armistice demonstrate this:

-  After the end of the war, Greece was awarded a zone of occupation within Turkey. During the summer of 1920, the Greeks wanted to enlarge this zone but they came up against strong resistance by the Turks. This was the beginning of the Greek-Turkish war which lasted up to 1922. The war led to atrocities on both sides as, for example, the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Armenians by the Turks. In 1920, the northern Moroccan tribes of the Riff unified and unleashed a war against Spanish domination and during summer, 1921, around 19,000 Spanish soldiers perished. This war against Spain, later supported by France, lasted into 1926 and during it both Spanish and French used asphyxiating gases which caused thousands of deaths. 

-  In 1929, the Chinese occupied the Manchurian railway which led to a conflict with the Soviet Union. When Russian troops crossed the Chinese frontier on November 15, ferocious fighting broke out, causing the deaths of more than 2000 soldiers with ten thousand wounded. The "Moukden incident" (Manchuria), where the railway line was bombed, probably staged by the Japanese, was used as an excuse for the latter to invade and occupy parts of north-eastern China. In 1937, the war spread through an attack on the whole Chinese subcontinent, the greater part of which was occupied by Japan. During this war hundreds of thousands of Chinese, mostly civilians, were killed with Japanese troops responsible for numerous massacres.

-  October 3 1935: Italy unleashed a war against Ethiopia. After seven months of intense fighting it succeeded in conquering the country. In their attacks against the civilian population the Italians used mustard gas on a grand scale. More than 25,000 military personnel were killed in the fighting and the conflict cost the lives of a quarter-of-a-million civilians. In 1936, a number of generals began a war against the Spanish Republic, with the support of Italy, Germany and Portugal. On its side the Republic was supported by the Soviet Union and Mexico. This war, which lasted three years and which ended with a victory for the generals, resulted in more than half-a-million dead. March 12 1938 the Germans returned to Austria and by March 15 they occupied part of Czechoslovakia, while Hungary occupied the other part. These military conquests constituted the first actions which led to the outbreak of the Second World War.

2. The armistice: an attack against the proletarian revolution in reaction to the war

The armistice allowed the bourgeoisie to declare war on the proletariat: (a) by dividing the workers into countries of victors and vanquished and: (b) by turning the armies against the revolution. In Russia the counter-revolution developed with force (cf. "The world bourgeoisie against the October Revolution", International Review no. 160). In Germany as well the bourgeoisie were ready to unleash its counter-revolutionary terror. Eaten up with a fierce hatred of the working class, it prepared to wipe it out with force and exterminate the hotbeds of revolutionary communism.

Divide the working class

The bourgeoisie were conscious of the danger: "all Europe is petrified by the spirit of revolution. There's not only a profound feeling of discontent, but also anger and revolt among the workers (...). All of the existing order, in its political, social and economic aspects, is being called into question by the popular masses from one end of Europe to the other" (Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, in a secret memorandum addressed to the Prime Minister of France, Georges Clemenceau, March 1919). Through the signing of the armistice, the working class in Europe was divided into two parts: on one side the workers who found themselves in the camp of the defeated nations and on the other side those that lived in the victorious capitalist states, who were then submerged by a wave of national chauvinism (above all in France, Britain, Belgium and the USA). In this way the bourgeoisie succeeded in limiting the revolutionary movement of the first group of states (plus Italy).

The situation of Belgium some days after November 11 perfectly illustrates the consequences of this division: German soldiers who were barracked in Brussels and strengthened by detachments of sailors of the Kriegsmarine coming from Ostend, revolted and elected a revolutionary soldier's council. They demonstrated in the streets of Brussels with German, Belgium and red flags and called for the solidarity of the Belgium workers and their organisations. Faced with some fraternisation with members of the Young Socialists, the union organisations rapidly called on workers not to join in, and, under the influence of chauvinist propaganda, the workers in Brussels remained passive and compliantly waited for the triumphal entry of the victorious Belgian army some days later.

The armies aimed against the revolution

"The different national bourgeoisie's tried first of all to grab territories off each other on the battlefields of the imperialist war at a cost of 20 million dead, along with an incalculable number of wounded. But, confronted with a class which fought on its own class ground, they straightaway closed ranks. It confirms, once again, that the dominant class, divided by its own nature, can unite faced with a revolutionary situation in order to confront the working class" ("1918-1919: Seventy years ago - the German revolution", International Review no. 56).

When the soviets took power in October 1917, the reaction of the imperialist forces was immediate. A bourgeoisie, united at the international level, confronted the young soviet republic with armies coming from 21 countries. The counter-revolutionary attack began in 1917 and lasted up to 1922, during which the White Armies unleashed a terrible civil war. The armies of the capitalist states of Europe, the United States and Japan caused an unknown number of casualties in their attacks against the working class in Russia. Among the victims of the civil war there were about one million soldiers of the Red Army killed, and several million people died because of the indirect consequences of the war, such as famine and epidemics. The number of deaths caused by the terror of the White Armies is estimated to be between 300,000 and one million people[1] .

The unfolding of the revolution in Central Europe, Germany, Austria, Hungary, etc., meant that the German army wasn't completely disarmed: "The idea was shared that the German army had to be sufficiently strong in order to maintain domestic order and for preventing a seizure of power by the Bolsheviks" (Lloyd George at war, George H. Hassar). Thus the German High Command, which was demanding 30,000 armed soldiers, was allowed to keep 5,000 machine-gunners.

In Germany the insurrection broke out at the end of 1918. November 10 1918, General Groener, the successor of Ludendorf in charge of the headquarters of the German army, proposed a pact over the telephone to the head of government, the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert. The general proposed loyal collaboration to quickly put an end to "Bolshevism" and to ensure the restitution of "law and order". "It was a pact against the revolution. 'Ebert accepted my proposition of an alliance' wrote Groener. 'From this moment, we discussed every evening through the means of a secret connection between the Chancellery and the High Command the necessary measures to take. The alliance functioned well'"[2].

Because of the influence of the revolution the bourgeoisie could no longer trust large parts of the land army and sailors. In the perspective of the class war, the Social Democrat Gustav Noske, who re-joined the Ebert government in December 1918, got the job of setting-up the Freikorps. These units brought together loyal professional soldiers, conservatives and ultra-nationalists who wanted to defend their country against Bolshevism and who had found themselves on the margins of society at the end of the war. Thus by January 1919, the German state could once again deploy loyal military units of some hundreds of thousands of soldiers, among which were 38 Freikorps units. In the fight against the revolution, the SPD shamelessly used these most reactionary armed forces against the revolution. By affirming that "someone must play the bloodhound" and denouncing the workers and soldiers in revolt as "the hyenas of the revolution", Noske sent his Freikorps against them: the war against the working class had begun. From mid-January the military attack against the insurgents and revolutionary organisations (parties, groups, press, etc.) began. Entire workers' areas of the large towns were attacked one after the other and terrible massacres were perpetrated everywhere (read the articles on the German revolution on this site).

The war against the working class wasn't only undertaken in Germany but also in other countries. One of these was Hungary where the workers' revolt had also brought to power a revolutionary leadership. Here also the revolt was bloodily wiped out after some months by a military invasion of capitalist forces. On August 1 1919, Romania invaded Hungary and overthrew the revolutionary government. Supported by France, Britain and the White Army, Romanian troops entered Budapest and set up a trade unionist government which liquidated the workers' councils. When the unions had finished their dirty work, they transferred power to one Admiral Horty (later a Nazi collaborator) who instituted a regime of terror against the workers, resulting in 8,000 executions and 100,000 deportations, with Jews particularly targeted.

3. Peace cannot exist within capitalism

Capitalism is violence and peace within capitalism is a complete illusion. The history of the twentieth century demonstrates that an "armistice" is only reached in order to start new wars. While the guns were never silent between World Wars One and Two, the tendency to permanent war became even more evident after the Second World War. Thus the Cold War period wasn't, as is often suggested, one of a "simple" armed peace, but one of dozens of intense armed confrontations (Korea, Vietnam, Africa, the Middle East, etc...) taking place over the whole of the planet and resulting in millions of deaths.

Wishful thinking about peace doesn't prevent war even when supported by massive demonstrations. July 25 1914, the SPD called for a mass demonstration against war. The call was heeded by large numbers: on July 29 and 30, 750,000 people participated in protests throughout Germany. That didn't prevent the bourgeoisie from continuing its course towards war[3]. Quite the contrary, this same social democratic SPD decided some days later to betray the working class and support the bourgeoisie in its war fervour.

A mass mobilisation can be a moment in the resistance against war but it must take place within the framework of a generalised workers' revolt and aimed against the bourgeois state, as in 1917 in Russia. And even in Germany 1918, the revolt's only aim in the first instance was the end of the war. And the war was effectively stopped because a real threat of the workers taking power existed. In fact, only a revolutionary overthrow and the seizure of power by a revolutionary class can eventually put an end to all forms of war.

"Either the bourgeois government makes peace, as it makes war, and then imperialism will continue, as after each war, to dominate and war will be followed by a new rearmament, destruction, reaction and barbarism. Or, you must gather your forces for a revolutionary insurrection, fight in order to take political power which will allow you to impose peace both inside and outside the country" ("Spartacus Letters" no. 4, April 1917, Rosa Luxemburg).

Dennis, 10.11.2018

Our comrade Elisabeth has left us at the age of 77. She died from breathing difficulties which provoked a cardiac arrest, on the night of Saturday/Sunday 18 November.

Elisabeth was born during the Second World War, on 19 May 1941, in Bane, a village in the Jura close to Besançon. Her father owned a saw-mill and a mother was a housewife. Elisabeth grew up in a family of nine children in a rural environment. It was a relatively comfortable Catholic family. Her aunt, a school teacher, provided her primary education before she was sent to a Catholic secondary school run by nuns, in Besançon then in Lyon[1].  She then entered the University of Lyon and developed a passionate interest in oceanography. In 1968, aged 27, she moved to Marseille, renting an old house with a small garden and a terrace on the roof, a few steps from the sea. She was employed by the Centre d’Océanologie of the CNRS[2] in Marseille, after spending a year in Canada. She obtained her PhD in 1983, which enabled her to take on a teaching role and to supervise her students’ research.

Elisabeth was part of that generation of young elements seeking for a revolutionary perspective in the wake of the May 68 movement. She began to be politicised when she was still a student, joining the Parti Socialiste Unifié in Lyon[3].

It was in Marseille that she discovered that the working class was the only force in capitalist society capable of transforming the world. At a demonstration she met Robert, a young element who had been politicised before 1968 in the anarchist movement. She took part in the meetings of the group Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières (ICO) along with Robert, who since 1968 had been publishing Les Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils. In this way Elisabeth discovered the workers’ movement, marxism, and the revolutionary perspective of the proletariat. Having received a Catholic education, she broke with religion and became an atheist, while maintaining very close relations with her family.

In 1972 the group Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils fused with the group that was publishing the review Révolution Internationale. The new group kept the name RI. In 1973 Elisabeth became a sympathiser of RI. In 1974, she joined the group, which would become the section of the ICC in France.

Elisabeth was present at the international conference that founded the ICC in 1975 and the first congress of our organisation in 1976. So with her death a founding member of the ICC, a militant of the first generation, has suddenly left us.

Elisabeth took on important responsibilities in the organisation, always with the utmost dedication. She regularly wrote reports on the international class struggle. She travelled a lot within the ICC and learned Italian in order to be able to participate in the organisation’s work in Italy. She also knew English very well and made many translations, without ever seeing this task as something routine and boring. On the contrary, in translating texts for our internal discussion bulletins Elisabeth was often one of the first French-speaking comrades to be acquainted with the positions and contributions of her English-speaking comrades. And above all, Elisabeth helped establish the ICC’s nucleus in Marseille. For 45 years, alongside another comrade, she maintained the ICC’s political presence in the city.

What animated her militant commitment was her revolt against the barbarity of capitalism, her will to fight against this decadent system, her passion for communism and her conviction in the fundamental role of the revolutionary organisation in the emancipation of the proletariat. Her militant activity was at the centre of her life. Elisabeth had a deep attachment not only to the organisation but also to her comrades in the struggle.

Despite her social status as a CNRS researcher, Elisabeth was extremely modest. She accepted political criticism without ever reacting with wounded pride, always trying to understand and to put forward the general interests of the organisation above her own personal interests. Despite her university degrees, her title as doctor, and her considerable general culture, she was not an “academic”, an “intellectual”, marked by what Lenin, in his book One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, an “aristocratic anarchist”, which is so characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie.

Elisabeth never felt her militant engagement in the ICC as a “prison” or a fetter on the blossoming of her personal life. She did make a career in the university milieu, published scientific books and articles in her sphere of competence, because she had a great deal of knowledge and loved her work. But like Marx and other militants, she chose to devote her life to the cause of the proletariat. We could add that, like all the comrades of the ICC, she had the same conception of happiness as he did: to fight![4]

Thus, at the end of her life, far from being burnt out or crushed by militancy, she showed an astonishing dynamism. Despite her breathing difficulties and her fragile health (in particular since she had fractured her collarbone soon after her last birthday), she participated enthusiastically in a recent ICC weekend of study and discussion. At this meeting she intervened in the debate in a very clear and pertinent way. Before leaving her comrades to go back to Marseille, Elisabeth went with some of them, notably comrades from other countries, to visit the Père Lachaise cemetery and showed the comrades the Mur des Fédérés[5]. This was 15 days before her death.

All the militants of the ICC were thus shocked to receive the tragic news of her sudden death. No comrade imagined that she would be leaving us so soon, without any warning, because she wasn’t so old. Despite her 77 years, she had kept the freshness of youth, and had personal friends from the younger generation.

Elisabeth adored children. One of the great regrets of her life as a woman was that she never had any of her own. This, among other reasons, was why she became friends with the children of comrades who she always welcomed into her home with much affection.

Elisabeth was an extremely warm and welcoming person. She had a deep sense of hospitality. Her old house, in which she had been renting for 45 years, was a place of passage for comrades not only of the section in France but from other territorial sections. They were always welcome, along with their families. She opened her door to all militants of the ICC, without exception. Elisabeth hated private property. When she was away from her house, she always left the key for her comrades (sometimes excusing herself for not having had time to tidy up!).

Elisabeth had her faults of course. But they were the faults of her qualities. She had her own character. Sometimes she would have rows with certain comrades (including those who were closest to her). But she knew how to get over it, always looking for reconciliation because she never lost sight of what united the militants of the ICC: a platform of common principles, the combat which they are all waging against capitalism and the pressure of the dominant ideology. Elisabeth had a deep political esteem for the militants of the ICC, including those whose style or character didn’t suit her. In our internal debates, she listed attentively to all the interventions, all the arguments, often taking her own notes in order to deepen her reflection and, as she put it, “out of a need to clarify”.

 Elisabeth was also very sentimental and had a tendency to see the organisation of revolutionaries as a large family or a group of friends. She used to have a certain illusion that the group Révolution Internationale (which she had joined in a period very much stamped by the student movement of May 68) could become a sort of island of communism. What allowed her to overcome this confusion were our days of study and discussion on the circle spirit in the workers’ movement, as well as our internal debates on the difficulties of our section in France, with the aim of moving from “a circle of friends to a political group”[6].

Thanks to her ability to reflect, Elisabeth was able to understand that the organisation of revolutionaries, while being the “beginning of the response” to capitalist social relations, cannot already be the response (to use a term of our comrade MC), a little island of communism within this society. It was her unbreakable commitment to the cause of the working class, her disinterested devotion to the ICC, which allowed Elisabeth to hold on patiently through all the crises the ICC has undergone since its foundation.  Despite her “sentimental” approach to the organisation and the pain she felt when certain of her friends deserted it, Elisabeth was never drawn outside the ICC out of a misplaced loyalty to them. Every time she was confronted with a “conflict of loyalties” Elisabeth always decided in favour of the ICC and its struggle for communism (unlike other militants who left the organisation out of loyalty to their friends and with hostility towards the ICC). She never lost her convictions. To the end she remained faithful and loyal to the ICC.

Up until her last breath, Elisabeth was a real fighter for the proletarian cause. A militant who gave the best of herself to the collective and associated work of the main group of the communist left.

Elisabeth loved reading. She loved the sea, flowers, art: baroque music, literature, painting. But above all she loved the human species. Her love for humanity was the backbone of her passion for communism and her militant commitment within the ICC.

The passing of our comrade leaves us with a big hole. For the ICC, every militant is an irreplaceable link in the chain. Elisabeth can’t be replaced, so the only way to fill the hole, to pay homage to her memory, is to continue our combat, her combat.

Elisabeth gave her body to science. She has left us without wreaths or flowers.

To her brother Pierre and all her family;

To her friends Sara and Fayçal who immediately told us of her death;

To her friends in Marseille, Chantal, Dasha, Josette, Margaux, Marie-Jo, Rémi, Sarah…who helped us arranging her house with the greatest respect for her political activities and her final wishes:

We send all our sympathy and solidarity.

Farewell Elisabeth! You departed on a night in November, on your own, which is also a blow to us. But you were not really alone, for all of us you remain alive in our hearts, in our thoughts, in our consciousness.

In January the ICC will organise a meeting of political homage to our comrade. Our readers, sympathisers, fellow travellers, as well as militants of the groups of the communist left who knew Elisabeth, can write to the ICC if they want to take part in this homage which will take place in Marseille.

Révolution Internationale, ICC section in France, 24.11.18

One of the banes affecting revolutionary organisations of the Communist Left is the fact that many of their militants previously went through parties or groups of the left and extreme-left of capital (Socialist and Communist parties, Trotskyism, Maoism, official anarchism, the so-called "New Left" of Syriza or Podemos). That's inevitable given the simple reason that no militant is born with a complete and immediate clarity. However this stage bequeaths a handicap that's difficult to overcome: it's possible to break with the political positions of these organisations (trade unionism, national defence and nationalism, participation in elections, etc.) but it's much more difficult to rid oneself of attitudes, of ways of thinking, ways of debating, behaviours, conceptions which these organisations introduce you to with some force and which constitutes their way of life.

This heritage, which we are calling the hidden legacy of the left of capital, helps to stir up tensions in revolutionary organisations between comrades, provoking mistrust, rivalries, destructive behaviours, blockage of debate, aberrant theoretical positions, etc., which, combined with the pressure of bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology, can cause these organisation serious damage. The objective of the series we're beginning here is to identify and combat this oppressive weight.

The left of capital: capitalist politics in the name of "socialism".

Since its first congress (1975), the ICC has addressed the problem of organisations that make false claims of "socialism" while practicing capitalist politics. The ICC's Platform, adopted by this congress, put forward in point 13: "All those parties or organisations which today defend, even ‘conditionally’ or ‘critically’, certain states or fractions of the bourgeoisie whether in the name of ‘socialism’, ‘democracy’, ‘anti-fascism’, ‘national independence’, the ‘united front’ or the ‘lesser evil’, which base their politics on the bourgeois electoral game, within the anti-working class activity of trade unionism or in the mystifications of self-management, are agents of capital. In particular, this is true of the Socialist and Communist parties."

Our Platform also concentrates on the problem of groups who put themselves "on the left" of these larger parties, often making "fiery criticisms" of them and adopting more "radical" poses: "All the so-called ‘revolutionary’ currents – such as Maoism which is simply a variant of parties which had definitively gone over to the bourgeoisie, or Trotskyism which, after constituting a proletarian reaction against the betrayal of the Communist Parties was caught up in a similar process of degeneration, or traditional anarchism, which today places itself in the framework of an identical approach by defending a certain number of positions of the SPs and CPs, such as ‘anti-fascist alliances’ – belong to the same camp: the camp of capital. Their lesser influence or their more radical language changes nothing as to the bourgeois basis of their programme, but makes them useful touts or supplements of these parties."

In order to understand the role of the left and extreme left of capital, it's essential to remember that, with the decline of capitalism, the state shows that "the tendency towards state capitalism expresses itself in the increasingly powerful, omnipresent, and systematic control over the whole of social life exerted by the state apparatus, and in particular the executive. On a much greater scale than in the decadence of Rome or feudalism, the state under decadent capitalism has become a monstrous, cold, impersonal machine which has devoured the very substance of civil society"[1]. This nature applies as much to openly dictatorial single party regimes (Stalinism, Nazism, military dictatorships) as to the democratic regimes.

In this framework the political parties are not the representatives of different classes or layers of society but totalitarian instruments of the state whose task is to submit the whole of the population (mainly the working class) to the imperatives of the national capital. They equally become the head of networks of cronyism, pressure groups and spheres of influence which combine political and economic action and become the breeding ground of an inescapable corruption.

In the democratic systems, the political apparatus of the capitalist state is divided into two wings: the right wing linked to the classic factions of the bourgeoisie and responsible for controlling the most backward layers of the population[2], and the left wing (the left with the unions and a series of extreme left organisations) essentially given over to the control and division of the working class and the destruction of its consciousness.

Why did the old workers' parties become the parties of the left of capital?

Organisations of the proletariat are not exempt from degeneration. The pressure of bourgeoisie ideology corrodes from the inside and can lead to an opportunism which, if not fought in time, leads to its betrayal and integration into the capitalist state[3].Opportunism takes this decisive step at the time of crucial historic events in the life of capitalist society: up to now the two key moments have been world imperialist war and proletarian revolution. In the Platform, we try to explain the process which leads to this fatal stage: "This was the case with the Socialist parties when in a period of subjection to the gangrene of opportunism and reformism, most of the main parties were led, at the outbreak of World War I (which marked the death of the 2nd International) to adopt, under the leadership of the social-chauvinist right which from then on was in the camp of the bourgeoisie, the policy of ‘national defence’, and then to oppose openly the post-war revolutionary wave, to the point of playing the role of the proletariat’s executioners, as in Germany 1919. The final integration of each of these parties into their respective bourgeois states took place at different moments in the period which followed the outbreak of World War I, but this process was definitively closed at the beginning of the 1920s, when the last proletarian currents were eliminated from or left their ranks and joined the Communist International.

In the same way, the Communist Parties in their turn passed into the capitalist camp after a similar process of opportunist degeneration. This process, which had already begun during the early 1920s, continued after the death of the Communist International (marked by the adoption in 1928 of the theory of ‘Socialism in one country’), to conclude, despite bitter struggles by the left fractions and after the latter’s exclusion, in these parties’ complete integration into the capitalist state at the beginning of the 1930s with their participation in their respective bourgeoisie’s armament drives and their entry into the ‘popular fronts’. Their active participation in the ‘Resistance’ in World War II, and in the ‘national reconstruction’ that followed it, has confirmed them as faithful agents of national capital and the purest incarnation of the counter-revolution".[4] In the space of 25 years (between 1914 and 1939) the working class first lost the Socialist parties, then, in the 1920's, the Communist parties and finally, from 1939, the groups of the Left Opposition around Trotsky which supported the still more brutal barbarity of the Second World War: "In 1938, the Left Opposition became the Fourth International. It was an opportunist adventure because it wasn't possible to constitute a world party in a situation that was going towards imperialist war and thus a profound defeat of the proletariat. The outcome was disastrous: in 1939-40, the groups of the so-called IV International took a position in favour of world war under the most diverse pretexts: the majority supporting the ‘socialist fatherland’ of Russia, but there was even a minority supporting the France of Petain (itself a satellite of the Nazis).

Against this degeneration of Trotskyist organisations, the last remaining internationalist nuclei reacted: particularly Trotsky's wife and a revolutionary of Spanish origin, Munis. Since then the Trotskyist organisations have become ‘radical’ agents of capital which try to stir up the proletariat with all sorts of ‘revolutionary causes’ which generally correspond to the ‘anti-imperialist’ factions of the bourgeoisie (like the celebrated sergeant Chavez of today). Similarly, they sweep up workers disgusted with the electoral circus by mobilising them to vote in a ‘critical’ fashion for the ‘Socialists’ in order to ’block the way for the right’. Finally they always have great hope of taking over the unions through the means of ‘fighting candidates’".[5]

The working class is capable of generating left fractions within proletarian parties when they begin to be affected by the sickness of opportunism. Thus within the parties of the 2nd International, this role was played by the Bolsheviks, the current of Rosa Luxemburg, Dutch Tribunism, the militants of the Italian abstentionist fraction, etc. The history of the combats undertaken by these fractions is sufficiently well known because their texts and contributions are concretised in the formation of the 3rd International.

And from 1919, the proletarian reaction, faced with difficulties, errors and the subsequent degeneration of the Third International, was expressed by the communist left (Italian, Dutch, German, Russian, etc.) which led (with great difficulties and unfortunately in a very dispersed way) a heroic and determined struggle. Trotsky's Left Opposition appeared later and in a much more incoherent manner. In the 1930's, the gap between the communist left (principally its most coherent group Bilan, representing the Italian Communist Left) and Trotsky's Opposition became more evident. While Bilan saw localised imperialist wars as expressions of a course towards a globalised imperialist war, the Opposition became entangled in ramblings about national liberation and the progressive nature of anti-fascism. While Bilan saw the ideological enrolment for imperialist war and the interests of capital behind the mobilisation of Spanish workers for war between Franco and the Republic, Trotsky saw the 1936 strikes in France and the anti-fascist fight in Spain as the beginning of the revolution... However, what's worse is that even if Bilan wasn't yet clear on the exact nature of the USSR, it was clear to it that it couldn't support it, above all because the USSR was an active agent in preparing for the war. Trotsky on the other hand, with his speculations about the USSR as a "degenerated workers' state", flung the doors wide open for supporting the USSR, which was a means of supporting the second world butchery of 1939-1945.

The role of the extreme left of capital against the resurgence of workers' struggle in 1968

Since 1968, the proletarian struggle took off again across the entire world. May 68 in France, the "Hot Autumn" in Italy, the cordobazo" in Argentina, the Polish October, etc., were among its most significant expressions. This struggle brought up a new generation of revolutionaries. Numerous working class minorities appeared everywhere and all that constituted a fundamental strength for the proletariat.

However, it is important to note the role of groups of the extreme left in the weakening and destruction of these minorities: the Trotskyists whom we have already mentioned, official anarchism[6], and Maoism. Regarding the latter it's important to stress that it's never been a proletarian current. The Maoist groups were born from imperialist conflicts and wars of influence like those between Peking and Moscow which led to the rupture between the two states and the alignment of Peking to American imperialism in 1972.

It's been estimated that towards 1970 there were more than a hundred thousand militants around the world who, although with enormous confusion, pronounced themselves in favour of revolution, against the traditional parties of the left (Socialist and Communist parties), against imperialist war, and looked to advance the proletarian struggle that was breaking out. A striking majority of this important contingent were recuperated by this constellation of groups of the extreme left. The present series of articles will try to demonstrate in some detail all the mechanisms through which they undertake this recuperation. We will talk not only about the capitalist programme printed on their radical and “working class” standards but also their methods of organisation and debate, their mode of functioning and their approach to morality.

What's certain is that their actions have been very important in the destruction of the potential for the working class to build up a wide-scale avant-garde for its struggle. Potential militants have been turned towards activism and immediatism, channelled into sterile combats within the unions, municipalities, electoral campaigns, etc.

The results have been clear:

- The majority have quit the struggle, profoundly frustrated and prone to scepticism towards working class struggle and the possibility of communism; a significant part of this sector fell into drugs, alcohol and the most absolute despair;

- A minority has remained as the core troops of the unions and parties of the left, propagating a sceptical and demoralising vision of the working class;

- Another, more cynical minority, has made careers in the unions and parties of the left and some of these "winners" have become members of parties of the right[7].

Communist militants are a vital asset and it's a central task of the groups of the present communist left, who are the inheritors of Bilan, Internationalisme, etc., to draw all the lessons from this the enormous bloodletting of militant forces that the proletariat has suffered since its historic awakening in 1968.

A false vision of the working class

In order to carry out their dirty work of confinement, division and confusion, the unions, the left and extreme left parties propagate a false vision of the working class. They impregnate communist militants and deform their thoughts, their behaviour and their approach. It is thus vital to indentify and combat this.

1. A sum of individual citizens

For the left and extreme left, the workers do not make up an antagonistic social class within capitalism but are instead a sum of individuals. They are the "lower" part of the "citizenship". As such, all the individual workers can only hope for is a "stable situation", a "fair reward" for their work, "respect for their rights", etc.

This allows the left to hide something that is fundamental: the working class is a class that is indispensable to capitalist society because without its associated labour capitalism couldn't function. But, at the same time, it is a class excluded from society, foreign to all its rules and vital norms; it is thus a class which can only realise itself as such when it abolishes capitalist society from head to toe. Instead of this reality, the left pushes the idea of an "integrated class" which, through reforms and participation in capitalist organisations, can satisfy its interests.

With this overall view the working class is dissolved into an amorphous and inter-classist mass of "citizens" aka "the people". In such a disorder, the worker is assimilated to the petty-bourgeoisie which cons it, to the police which represses it, to the judge who condemns it, to the politicians who lie to it and even to the "progressive bourgeoisie". The idea of social classes and class antagonisms disappears, giving way to notions about the citizens of the nation, to the false "national community".

 Once the idea of class is erased from the mind of the working class, the fundamental notion of a historic class also disappears. The proletariat is a historic class which, beyond the situation of different generations or geographical place, has a revolutionary future within its hands, the establishment of a new society which goes beyond and resolves the contradictions which lead capitalism towards the destruction of humanity.

In sweeping away the vital and scientific ideas of social classes, class antagonisms and historic class, the left and extreme left of capital reduce revolution to a pious wish that should be left in the hands of political "experts" and parties. They introduce the idea of the delegation of power, a concept that is perfectly valid for the bourgeoisie but absolutely destructive for the proletariat. In fact the bourgeoisie, an exploiting class which holds economic power, can entrust the management of its business to a specialised political personnel which makes up a bureaucratic layer that has its own interests within the complex needs of the national capital.

But it's not the same for the proletariat which is both an exploited and revolutionary class which has no economic power but whose sole strength is consciousness, unity and solidarity and its confidence in itself. These are all factors that are rapidly destroyed if it relies on a specialised layer of intellectuals and politicians.

Armed with the idea of delegation, the parties of the left and extreme left defend participation in elections as a way of "blocking the road to the right", that's to say that in the ranks of the workers they undermine the autonomous action of a class to turn it into a mass of voting citizens: an individualist mass, each one locked into their "own interests". In this vision, the unity and self-organisation of the proletariat no longer exists.

Lastly, the parties of the left and extreme left also call for the proletariat to place itself in the hands of the state in order to "reach another society". They thus use the trick of presenting the capitalist hangman, the state, as "the friend of the workers" or "its ally".

2. A vulgar materialism that sees only a mass of losers

The left and the unions propagate a vulgar materialist conception of the working class. According to them, workers are individuals who only think of their families, their comforts, a better car or home. Drowned in consumerism, they have no "ideal" of struggle, preferring to stay at home watching football or in the bar with their pals. In order to complete the loop, they affirm that because workers are up to their necks in debt to pay for their consumerism, they are incapable of undertaking the least struggle[8].

With these lessons in moral hypocrisy they transform the workers' struggle, which is a material necessity, into a matter of ideal will, whereas communism - the ultimate aim of the working class - is a material necessity in response to the insoluble contradictions of capitalism[9]. They separate and oppose the immediate struggle from the revolutionary struggle whereas in reality there's a unity between the two since the struggle of the working class is, as Engels said, at once economic, political and a battle of ideas.

To deprive our class of this unity leads to the idealist vision of an "egotist" and "materialist" struggle for economic needs and a "glorious" and "moral" struggle for the "revolution". Such ideas profoundly demoralise the workers who feel shame and guilt at being concerned for their own needs and that of their nearest and dearest, and are made to feel like servile individuals who only think of themselves. With these false approaches, which follow the cynical and hypocritical line of the Catholic Church, the left and extreme left of capital sap the confidence of the workers in themselves as a class and try to present them as the "lowest" part of society.

This attitude converges with the dominant ideology which presents the working class as losers. The famous "common sense" says that workers are individuals who remain workers because they are not good enough for anything else or they haven't worked hard enough to progress up the social scale. The workers are lazy, have no aspirations, don't want to succeed...

It really is the world turned upside-down! The social class which through its associated labour produces the majority of social riches of society is supposed to be made up of its worst elements. Since the proletariat makes up the majority of society, it seems that it is fundamentally composed of cowards, losers, uncultured individuals without any motivation. The bourgeoisie not only exploits the proletariat, it mocks it as well. The minority which lives off the efforts of millions of human beings has the audacity to consider the workers as lazy, useless, unsuccessful and without hope.

Social reality is radically different: in the associated world-wide labour of the proletariat, it develops cultural, scientific and, at the same time, profoundly human links: solidarity, confidence and a critical spirit. They are the force which silently moves society, the source of the development of the productive forces.

The appearance of the working class is that of an insignificant, passive and anonymous mass. This appearance is the result of the contradiction suffered by the working class as an exploited and revolutionary class. On the one hand it's the class of global associated labour and, as such, it is what makes the wheels of capitalist production function and has in its hands the forces and capacities to radically change society. But on the other hand, competition, the market place, the normal life of a society where division and each against all prevails, crush it into a sum of individuals, each one impotent with feelings of failure and guilt, separated from the others, atomised and forced to fight alone for oneself.

The left and extreme left of capital, in complete continuity with the rest of the bourgeoisie, only want us to see an amorphous mass of atomised individuals. In this way they serve capital and the state in their task of demoralising and excluding the class from any social perspective.

We return here what we said at the beginning: the conception of the working class as a sum of individuals. However, the proletariat is a class and acts as such each time it succeeds in freeing itself from the chains which oppress and atomise it with a consistent and autonomous struggle. Thus we not only see a class in action but we also see each one of its components transform itself into active beings, fighting, taking the initiative and developing creativity. We've see it in the great moments of class struggle, as the revolution in Russia of 1905 and 1917. As Rosa Luxemburg underlined so well in The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions: “But in the storm of the revolutionary period even the proletarian is transformed from a provident pater familas demanding support, into a ‘revolutionary romanticist’, for whom even the highest good, life itself, to say nothing of material well-being, possesses but little in comparison with the ideals of the struggle."[10]

As a class, the individual strength of each worker is set free, gets rid of it shackles and develops its human potential. As a sum of individuals, the capacities of each are annihilated, diluted, wasted for humanity. The function of the left and extreme left of capital is to keep the workers in their chains, that's to say, as a mere sum of individuals.

A class with the clock stopped on the tactics of the nineteenth century

Generally in the ascendant period of capitalism and more particularly during its greatest heights (1870-1914), the working class could fight for improvements and reforms within the framework of capitalism without immediately envisaging its revolutionary destruction. On the one hand that implied the formation of large mass organisations (socialist and labour parties, trade unions, cooperatives, workers' universities, women and youth associations, etc.) and on the other hand tactics that included participation in elections, petitions, strikes planned by the unions, etc.

These methods became more and more inadequate at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the ranks of revolutionaries there was a widespread debate which opposed Kautsky, a partisan of these methods on one side and on the other, Rosa Luxemburg[11] who, drawing the lessons of the 1905 revolution, clearly showed that the working class had to move towards new methods of struggle which corresponded to the opening of a new situation of generalised war and economic crisis – in sum, capitalism's descent into its decadence. The new methods of struggle were based upon the direct action of the masses, on the self-organisation of workers into assemblies and councils, on the abolition of the old division between the Minimum and Maximum programme. These methods come face to face with trade unionism, reforms, electoral participation, and the parliamentary road.

The left and extreme left of capital concentrate their policies on keeping the working class locked into the old methods which today are radically incompatible with the defence of the latter's immediate and historical interests. Interestingly, they have stopped the clock at capitalism's "golden years" of 1890 to 1910 with all their routines aimed at disarming and dispersing the working class with voting in elections, union actions, demonstrations programmed in advance, etc., mechanisms which reduce the workers to "good, worker citizens", passive and atomised, submitting with discipline to all the needs of capital: work hard, vote every four years, march behind the unions, don't call into question the self-proclaimed leaders.

This policy is shamelessly defended by the Socialist and Communist parties while their annexes on the "extreme left" reproduce it with their "critical" touches and "radical" excesses while defending a vision of a working class as a class for capital; a class which has to submit to all its imperatives while waiting for some hypothetical crumbs which, from time to time, fall from the golden table of its banquets.

C. Mir. 18.12.17

In 2008, the financial crisis which hit the United States hard, with several banks failing one after the other, suddenly plunged millions of proletarians into misery. Among the main symbolic characters of the banking sector, Lehman Brothers, one of the great pillars of the American economic system, quickly fell into bankruptcy, provoking panic throughout the entire international banking system of which it was one of the star players.

Behind the sub-prime crisis, the barbarity of capitalism

Thanks to the loans given to the banking establishments by the investment bank of Lehman Brothers, hypothecated (pledged) housing credits at variable rates (sub-primes) were granted to households with weak incomes. The workers in these households, among the poorest in the United States, were conned into thinking that these long-term credits would allow them to buy their homes. In reality, the rates were "interesting" (favourable) as long as the price of houses increased. The new potential buyers could then re-sell their houses at a profit allowing them to pay off their borrowings if they could no longer pay their debt. But at the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, the American housing market collapsed. The variable rates of sub-prime credit increased and the workers couldn't keep up with them. In this situation, the lending banks wanted to take back the hypothecated properties and ruthlessly launched a sordid and massive operation of repossessions. From one day to the next, some seven-and-a-half million workers were brutally expelled from their homes and thrown onto the streets, sometimes in military-type operations with the aid of the police. While these families found themselves without a roof over their heads, some obliged to sleep in shelters or find some other form of accommodation, the majority of the repossessed buildings remained unsold and empty.

It is clear that the workers were quite simply swindled into naively thinking that they would be able to buy these properties thanks to the "interesting" rates of credit that attracted them. Many of them didn't even know what they had signed up to! These families of workers were thus direct victims of the capitalist sharks in the "world of finance", a particularly corrupt and rotten sector of the dominant class.

The American state evidently did nothing to prevent this human catastrophe. On the contrary, it quite deliberately allowed Lehman Brothers to put the key back through the letterbox and walk away. It thus bears the major responsibility for plunging millions of proletarians into the misery and destitution worsened by the explosion of the "housing bubble".

The state comes to the rescue of its financial system

If the US banking system decided to let Lehman Brothers collapse (whereas it had supported other banks on the edge of insolvency) it's because the major world power wanted to make an example out of it and send out a warning to the bourgeoisies of the main industrialised countries to mobilise in order to save the international financial system, raising the spectre of a similar or even worse crash than that of 1929. The main European banks had also invested heavily in sub-primes, thinking they were a judicious investment. After the bankruptcy of Lehman's, the shock was felt immediately in the other major industrialised countries. The threat of other bankruptcies and the announcement of a "domino effect" immediately accompanied the bursting of the housing bubble. In order to prevent the risk of a succession of insolvencies, the states and their central banks, in Europe as the United States, were obliged to put urgent rescue plans in place. In Britain, the government immediately nationalised some banks, notably Northern Rock. In France and Germany, the state decided to inject a colossal amount of liquidity into the coffers of the big banks in order to avoid bankruptcies and the collapse of the world's financial system. But these rescue measures increased state deficits even more, aggravating unemployment and precarious working. The cures of austerity deployed by the ruling class in order to lessen somewhat the state's deficits made themselves rapidly felt in the most vulnerable countries, namely Greece, Portugal, Ireland and, progressively, in every developed country on the planet.

An intense propaganda...

Today, when the threat of new financial storm appears again on the horizon, the media have a launched a devious propaganda around the ten-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. In the name of the "rescue" of the world economy, the states have put the responsibility for this crisis on the "world of finance", embodied in "rogue traders" and "crooked bosses". All this is aimed at absolving the capitalist system as a whole.

By efficiently exploiting nationalism and the role of the central banks in the bailout of those funds threatened by bankruptcy, the bourgeoisie have waged an ideological offensive which presents the state as the regulator of "excesses" of the financial sector and the protector of the small saver. And it's really thanks to the role of the state as "the saviour of the world economy" that governments of all kinds have been partly able to justify the necessity to keep wages down so as to increase the competitiveness of their economies on the world market and reduce their respective national debts.

Contrary to the lies which fed and still feed the official lines of the bourgeoisie, it is not the financial crisis of 2008 which initiated the train of "reforms" which have severely degraded the proletariat's living conditions and undermined so many of its so-called social benefits. If these great "reforms" and the massive attacks against the proletariat's living and working conditions have worsened throughout the world after the dramatic events of 2008, they had already been going on for decades. These attacks were orchestrated by states and governments of the right and left, without of course succeeding in resolving the crisis[1].

This better explains the ideological propaganda unleashed in 2008. It had the aim of giving a fraudulent explanation that tried to pass off the symptoms of the financial crisis for the sickness; that of the historic crisis of the capitalist economy. Since the return of the open crisis of capitalism at the end of the 1960's, more and more profound recessions have punctuated social life. And every time the bourgeoisie has come up with justifications and scapegoats. In 1973, it was put down to the "oil price shock". At the time the troublemakers were the Gulf countries and their princes rolling in money. In 1987, 1998, 2001, and 2008, it was the turn of finance and the banks to be blamed. But never have these ideological attacks been as intense as in 2008. Thus all sorts of fallacious speeches were made on the necessity to cleanse the banking system, to "moralise" the banks by sanctioning shady speculators and "irresponsible" bankers, such as the CEO of Lehman's, who was presented in the media as "the most detested man in America".

... to hide the bankruptcy of capitalism

In the very words of all the bourgeois leaders, of all the economic "specialists", the crisis of 2008 is the most serious that the capitalist system has known since the great depression that began in 1929. However, the explanations that they give do not allow any clear understanding of the real significance of these convulsions and the future that they announce for the whole of society and notably for the working class.

What is obscured today by all these economic specialists is the system’s crisis of the overproduction, its fundamental incapacity to sell the mass of the goods that it produces. Of course there is no overproduction in relation to the needs of humanity (which capitalism is incapable of satisfying), but overproduction in relation to solvent markets, to the buying power of the masses. The official lines of the bourgeoisie focus on the financial crisis, on the weaknesses of the banks alone but the reality of what these bourgeois sycophants call "the real economy" (as opposed to the "fictitious economy") is illustrated by the fact that factory closures, massive job losses and bankrupt businesses are being announced every day.

At the time of the 2008 crisis, the fall of world trade revealed the incapacity of businesses to find buyers to keep their production going. Thus, it wasn't the "financial crisis" (and still less the bankruptcy of Lehman's) which was at the origin of the 2008 open recession; quite the contrary. This financial crisis showed clearly that the amassing of debt as a remedy to overproduction could not be continued indefinitely. Sooner or later the "real economy" has its revenge, i.e., that which is at the basis of the contradictions of capitalism (the impossibility of businesses being able to sell the totality of the goods they produce), comes back to the forefront. The crisis of overproduction is not the simple consequence of a "financial" crisis, as the majority of bourgeois specialists would have us think. It comes from the very inner workings of the capitalist economy as marxism showed a century-and-a-half ago.

As Marx and Engels said in the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" of 1848, society has become too "rich"! Capitalism produces too many goods whereas solvent markets become more and more restricted, as we can see with the bitter commercial war between the United States and Europe, which moreover must confront the competitiveness of Chinese goods.

Capitalism today is being suffocated by the staggering weight of its debt. At the same time it can only keep itself going, artificially, thanks to credit. The only "solution" that capital can come up with is a new advance into a vicious spiral of debt. With the development of speculation, this mode of production which is based on the pursuit of profit, seems more and more like a casino economy. The remedy, which consists of injecting financial liquidity into the coffers of the banks and other major financial institutions, can only, in the real world, make the sickness worse, notably by increasing the sovereign debt of the banks.

Ten years after the seismic events of 2008, despite the urgent rescue plans for the financial system and despite a certain, very fragile "recovery" in the growth rate of 2012-2013, the bourgeoisie is once again becoming restless. Ten years of the austerity cure have changed nothing fundamental. States remain overburdened with debt and the central banks have been force-fed with dubious assets. World growth has again slowed down and all the players are taking more and more risks. Since the middle of 2018, the media and bourgeois economists have sounded the alarm, fearful of a similar or worse situation than that of 2008. By developing these alarmist statements and campaigns around the excesses of the financial world, the bourgeoisie tries to terrorise and paralyse the working class behind the defence of the "saviour state". In order not to obstruct its (illusory) rescue plans for the financial system, proletarians are called upon to tighten their belts even more and accept new sacrifices, new inroads into their incomes.

Faced with this capitalist barbarity, notably shown in 2008 by the scandalous eviction of millions of workers from their houses in the richest country in the world, the proletariat has no other choice but to once again take up the fight for the defence of its living conditions and against the social order of its exploiters. It must understand that far from being a "neutral protector", regulating the speculative excesses of financial traders, the bourgeois state is first and foremost an organisation of repression charged with the maintenance of all the wrongs of capitalism. Insolvent banks and businesses only expose the weakness of the capitalist mode of production which has no future to offer humanity. The only solution to the crisis is the overthrow of this system and the destruction of the state by the class which produces all the riches of society: the international proletariat.

Sonia, November 17 2018

October 10, two truck drivers from Seine-et-Marne launched an appeal on Facebook for November 17, entitled: "National blockage against the rise in fuel prices". Their message spread very quickly on social media, attracting up to 20,000 "interested" people while initiatives and appeals multiplied. Without trade unions or political parties a whole series of actions, rallies and blockades were spontaneously organised.

The result: November 17, according to the government, 287,710 people spread over 2,034 places, paralysed crossroads, roundabouts, autoroutes, toll-booths, supermarket car parks... These official figures issued by the Interior Ministry (given with admirable precision!) are largely and deliberately underestimated. On the other hand the "gilets jaunes" say that it's twice that number. In the following days some blockades were maintained, others took place here and there, mobilising thousands of people each day. A dozen Total oil refineries were disrupted by a simultaneous action of the CGT and the "gilets jaunes".

A new great day of action was launched for November 24, called: "Act II, all of France to Paris". The objective was to block prestigious networks and the running of the capital: the Champs-Elysées, the Place de la Concorde, the Senate and above all, the Elysée. "We have to deal a decisive blow and make our way to Paris by all means possible (car-pooling, train, bus, etc.). Paris because it's here that the government sits! We await all, lorries, buses, taxis, tractors, tourist vehicles, etc. Everyone!"  said truck driver Eric Drouet from Melun, the co-initiator of the movement and figurehead of the mobilisation. But this great unitary gathering didn't take place, with a number of "gilets jaunes" preferring to demonstrate locally, often because of the cost of transport. Above all the mobilisation was lower in numbers. Only 8,000 protesters appeared in Paris, 106, 301 in all of France and 1600 events. Even if these government figures greatly underestimate the reality of the mobilisation, the tendency is clearly on the decrease. However, many in the movement are claiming a victory. Most important for the "gilets jaunes" are the images of the Champs-Elysées "occupied and held for the whole day" thus showing "the strength of the people against the powerful"[1]. Then, in the evening, an appeal was launched via Facebook for a third day of action for Saturday December 1: "Act III; Macron resign!" and putting forward two claims: "Increase buying power and cancel the fuel taxes".

Journalists, politicians and other "sociologists" warned of the unknown nature of the movement: spontaneous, outside of union and political frameworks, adaptable, organised essentially through social networks, relatively massive, globally disciplined, generally avoiding destruction and confrontations, etc.  On the TV and in newspaper columns the movement is qualified as a "sociological UFO".

Anger against the government's attacks

Initiated by the truck drivers and as written by one of them, Eric Drouet, the movement mobilised "trucks, bus, taxis, tractors and tourist vehicles", but not only them. Numerous small entrepreneurs "devastated by taxes" are equally present. Salaried and precarious workers, unemployed and retired, wear the "gilet jaune" and make up its most important contingent. "The 'gilets jaunes', is rather a France of employees, supermarket cashiers, technicians, infant school assistants who intend to defend the life that they have chosen: live a life apart, peaceful, with neighbours who look like them, with a garden, etc., and the increase in fuel taxes, because of their cars, calls into question their private space", is the analysis of Vincent Tiberi. According to this Professor of Sciences, the "gilets jaunes" "doesn't only represent peripheral France, the forgotten of France. They represent what the sociologist Olivier Schwartz called the people of average means. They work, pay their taxes and earn too much for subsidies "[2].

In reality, the breadth of this movement is above all witness to the immense anger which eats away in the entrails of society, and notably within the working class, faced with the austerity of the Macron government. Officially, according to the Observatoire français des conjonctures economiques, the annual household disposable income (i.e., what's left after taxes and costs) has been reduced between 2008 and 2016 by 440 euros at least. This is only a small part of the attacks suffered by the working class. Because to this general increase in all kinds of taxes can be added the growth in unemployment, the systemisation of precarious jobs, including in the public sector, inflation particularly hitting essential goods, the unaffordable price of housing, etc. Pauperisation is rising inexorably and with it, the fear of the future. But even more, what feeds this immense anger according to the "gilet jaunes" is "the feeling of being neglected"[3].

It is this dominant feeling of being "neglected", ignored by governments, the hope of being listened to and recognised by "those on high" to use the terminology of the "gilets jaunes", which explains the means of action chosen: wearing the hi-viz yellow fluorescent jackets, blocking roads, going to the Senate or to the Elysée underneath the windows of the grand bourgeoisie, by occupying "the most beautiful avenue in the world".[4]

The media and the government have put the emphasis on violence in order to make it known that any struggle against the high cost of living and the degradation of the life of the exploited can only lead to chaos and anarchy with vandalism and blind acts of violence. Under the reins of the bourgeoisie the media, specialists in making amalgams, want us to think that the "gilets jaunes" are "extremists" who also want "a fight with the police"[5]. Before anyone else, it's the forces of repression which are aggressive and provocative! November 24 in Paris, tear-gas grenades were incessant, as were the charges of the CRS on groups of men and women marching peacefully along the Champs-Elysées. Moreover there were very few windows broken[6], contrary to events around the football World Cup in the same area four months earlier. Even if some excited masked "gilets jaunes" wanted a fight with the forces of order ("black-blocs" or ultra-right thugs), the great majority wasn't interested in fighting or destruction. They didn't want to be "wreckers" but only "citizens", respected and listened to. That's why the appeal to "Act III" stated "this must be done properly. No fighting and 5 million French in the street". And even: "In order to securitise our next meeting, we propose setting up "gilets rouges" who will have the responsibility of throwing the wreckers from our ranks. Above all we don't want the population on our backs. Pay attention to our image friends".

An inter-classist movement of "citizens"

The movement of the "gilets jaunes" has, on the other hand, a common point with the celebration of the world championship French football team: the presence of the tricolore everywhere along with regional flags, regular singing of the national anthem, fierce pride in the "la peuple français", which, united is capable of moving the powerful. The reference in many heads is the French Revolution of 1789 or even the Resistance of 1939-1945[7] .

The inflamed nationalism, the references to "the people", the beseeching pleas addressed to the powerful, reveals the real nature of the movement. The great majority of the "gilet jaunes" are active, retired or pauperised workers, but they appear here as citizens of the "French people" and not as members of the working class. They are acting in an inter-classist movement or are mixed-up in the classes and layers of the non-exploited of society (active, retired, precarious, unemployed) with the petty-bourgeoisie (liberal professionals, artisans, small entrepreneurs, farmers and smallholders). A part of the working class is tagging along with the initiators of the movement (small business people, self-employed drivers of lorries, taxis, ambulances). Despite the legitimate anger of the "gilets jaunes", among who are numerous proletarians who cannot make ends meet, this movement is not a movement of the working class. It is a movement which has been launched by small business people who are angry about the increase in fuel prices. As witnessed by the words of the truck driver who initiated the movement: "We are waiting for everyone, lorries, buses, taxis, tourist vehicles, tractors, etc. Everyone!" That is "Everyone" and all "the French people" behind the self-employed drivers, taxi drivers, farmers, etc. The workers are thus diluted into the "people", atomised and separated one from the other as individual citizens, mixed-up with small businessmen and women (many of whom were part of the electorate of the Rassemblement National - ex-FN - of Marine Le Pen).

The rotten terrain on which a great number of proletarians, including the most pauperised, have situated themselves is not that of the working class! In this "apolitical" and "anti-union" movement, there is no call to strike and for its extension to all sectors! No appeal for sovereign general assemblies in enterprises in order to discuss and reflect together on the actions to be taken to develop and unify the struggle against the attacks of the government! This movement of "citizens' "revolt is a trap to drown the working class in the "people of France" where bourgeois cliques are found as "supporters of the movement". From Marine Le Pen to Olivier Besancenot, with Mélenchon and Laurent Wauqiez, "everyone" is there from the extreme right to the extreme left of capital, supporting an inter-classist movement, with their nationalist poison.

…with the support of all kinds of bourgeois cliques

It's the inter-classist nature of the "gilets jaunes" which explains why Marine Le Pen salutes it as a "legitimate movement" of "the French people"; it's why Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, President of  Debout la France (Stand-up for France), supports this movement: "We should block the whole of France (...) the population should say to the government: enough is enough!"; it's why Laurent Wauquiez,  President of Les Républicains qualifies the "gilets jaunes" as "worthy, determined people who rightly demand that the difficulties of the France that works is listened to"; it's why the Deputy Jean Lassalle, at the head of Résistons, is one of the figureheads of the movement and wears his yellow hi-viz jacket in the National Assembly as well as in the street. The right and extreme right clearly recognise in the "gilets jaunes" a movement which in no way puts the capitalist system in any danger. Above all they see it as a very efficient means of weakening their main opponents in the next elections, i.e., the Macron clique, whose authority and capacity to manage social peace has been severely dented.

As to the left and extreme left, they denounce the recuperation by the right and extreme right, rejecting the "fashos who are polluting the movement" while supporting it more or less openly. After being cold to it at first, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the head of La France insoumise (Rebellious France) can't find words enough to salute it: "The revolutionary movement in yellow", a "popular" and "mass" movement. He's taken to it like a duck to water and him and his rebellious France, his red-white-and-blue flags, his tricolour scarf worn on every occasion and his will to "unite people against the oligarchy" through the ballot box.

The support from all over the bourgeois political chessboard[8], and above all the right and extreme-right, shows that the "gilets jaunes" movement has no proletarian nature and has nothing to do with the class struggle! If all parts of the political apparatus of the French bourgeoisie are using the "gilets jaunes" in the hope of weakening Macron and gaining some electoral success from it, they know that this movement does nothing to strengthen the struggle of the proletariat against its exploitation and oppression[9]

In this type of inter-classist movement, the proletariat has nothing to gain because it's always the petty-bourgeoisie which gives it its weight (yellow is moreover the colour of strike-breakers!). And among the eight speakers designated for November 26, there's a large majority of small bosses and entrepreneurs.

Thus, these are the objectives of the petty-bourgeoisie: its slogans, its methods of struggle are imposed upon everyone. In appearance, this social layer shows a great deal of radicalism. Because it is crushed, de-classed by capitalism, its anger can explode violently. It can denounce the injustice and even the barbarity of the grand bourgeoisie and its state. But at root, it aspires to be "recognised" and not be "neglected" by the elites and "those on high" or, even better for some of its members, to be raised up into the superior ranks of the bourgeoisie and for that their businesses need to be flourishing. This is what explains its demands through the "gilets jaunes" movement: cheaper fuel, less taxes so that their businesses function and develop, blocking roads dressed in yellow so as to be seen and respected, a focalisation on the person of Macron ("Macron resign") symbolising the hope of being the leader in the place of the leader and a preoccupation with the "most beautiful avenue in the world", a real window on luxury capitalism.

This movement of the "gilets jaunes" is also partially infiltrated by the ideology of populism. An "original", "adaptable" movement which says it's against the political parties, denouncing the inertia of the unions and... supported from the beginning by Marine Le Pen! It was not an unfortunate coincidence or the action of a small group of individuals against the flow of the movement, when, on November 22, some "gilets jaunes", on discovering some migrants hidden in a lorry, denounced them to the gendarmes. Some demonstrators wanted to save these migrants who were at risk of their lives; but other remarks by some "gilets jaunes" filmed at the time were nauseating: "What a fucking smile", "What a load of fuckers", "This is where our taxes are going", etc.

The breadth of the inter-classist movement is explained by the difficulty of the working class in expressing its combativity as a result of all the union manoeuvres sabotaging these struggles (as we've recently seen with the long strike at SNCF). It's for that reason that the discontent with the unions that exists within the working class has been recuperated by those that launched this movement. What many supporters of the "gilets jaunes" want to happen is that the methods of workers' struggles (strikes, sovereign general assemblies, massive demonstrations, strike committees...) lead to nothing. Thus it's necessary to have confidence in the small bosses (who protest against the increases of taxes and costs) in order to find other methods against the high cost of living and come together as the "people of France"!

Many workers in "gilets jaunes" reproach the unions for not "doing their job". And now we are seeing the CGT trying to catch up by calling for a new "day of action" for December 1. You can be sure that the CGT and the other unions will indeed "do their job" of keeping the workers under control in order to prevent any spontaneous movement taking place on a class terrain.

The proletariat must defend its class autonomy and count only on itself!

Numerous workers have been mobilised against poverty, incessant economic attacks, unemployment, and the precariousness of work... But in joining up with the "gilets jaunes" these workers are being momentarily misled and taken in tow by a movement that only leads to an impasse.

The working class has to defend its living conditions on its own grounds, as an autonomous class, against the national unity of all the "anti-Macron" forces manipulating the anger of the "gilets jaunes" in order to corral them into the polling booths. They mustn't delegate or entrust their struggle, neither to reactionary social layers, nor to the parties which pretend to support it, nor to the unions which are its false friends. This entire bunch, each one with their own creed, occupies and carves up the social terrain in order to prevent the autonomous struggle of the proletariat from affirming itself.

When the working class affirms itself as an autonomous class by developing its massive struggle on its own class grounds, it brings behind it a larger and larger part of society, behind its own methods of struggle and its unitary slogans, and finally it own revolutionary project for the transformation of society. In 1980 in Poland, an immense mass movement started from the naval dockyards of Gdansk following increases in prices of basic necessities. In order to confront the government and make it retreat, the workers regrouped themselves, they were organised as a class faced with the red bourgeoisie and its Stalinist state[10]. Other layers of the population largely came behind this massive struggle of the exploited class.

When the proletariat develops its struggle, it's the sovereign, massive general assemblies open to "everyone", which are at the heart of the movement, places where the proletariat can come together and organise, reflect on unifying slogans and watchwords for the future. There's no place here for nationalism, on the contrary the drive here is for international solidarity because "The workers have no country"[11]. The workers must refuse to sing the national anthem and wave the tricolore, the flag of the Versaillais who killed 30,000 workers at the time of the Paris Commune in 1871!

Today the exploited class has difficulty in recognising itself as a class and as the only force in society capable of developing a rapport de force in its favour faced with the bourgeoisie. The working class is the only class able to offer a future for humanity and it can only do this by developing its own struggles on its own grounds beyond all corporate, sectoral and national divisions. Today, proletarians boil over with rage but they don't know how to struggle to defend their living conditions faced with the growing attacks of the bourgeoisie. They have forgotten their own experiences of struggle, their capacity to unite and organise themselves without awaiting the orders of the trade unions.

Despite the difficulties of the proletariat in recovering its class identity, the future still belongs to the class struggle. All those conscious of the necessity for proletarian struggle must try to regroup, discuss, draw the lessons of the latest social movements, rely on the history of the workers' movement and not be lured by the apparently radical sirens of "citizens", "popular" and inter-classist mobilisations of the petty-bourgeoisie!

"The autonomy of the proletariat faced with all other classes and layers of society is the first condition of the spread of its struggle towards a revolutionary aim. All alliances, particularly those with fractions of the bourgeoisie, can only end up with it being disarmed in front of its enemy leading it to abandon the sole terrain where it can solidify its forces: its class terrain" (Platform of the ICC[12]).

Révolution Internationale, ICC section in France, November 25, 2018

Edited on December 17, 2018, for a more precise translation of the original French article.