In September and October relations between Britain and Iran grew increasingly hostile. In late September Britain supported calls for Iran to be reported to the UN Security Council over its determination to restart its nuclear programme; for several years beforehand, Britain had opposed this. In early October it accused Iran of complicity in the killing of British soldiers in Iraq by supplying the insurgents with arms, explosives and training. Iran responded by accusing Britain of involvement in a bombing in Tehran that killed several people and wounded about 100. At the end of the month Tony Blair attacked the call by the Iranian president for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and seemed to hint at military action (Guardian, 28/10/05). The latest action has seen the recall of a number of ‘moderate’ diplomats by Tehran, including the ambassador to Britain.
In Britain this has been portrayed as the result of the new hard line taken by Iran following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. In reality these developments are a consequence of the growing instability in the region. This instability has existed for some time but has been sharply accelerated by the invasion of Iraq and the bloody chaos that has resulted.
Britain, for its part, is neither the USA’s loyal ally in the fight against terrorism, as the right would have it, nor the pawn of the US, as the left would have us believe. Britain’s interest in Iran, as with its involvement in Iraq, is motivated by its own imperialist interests rather than subservience to those of the US. Contrary to what the left says, Britain has pursued its own policy since the collapse of the cold war blocs in 1989. It is true that at times this has seen it going in the same direction as the US, but its destination was never the same. Throughout the last 16 years Britain has sought to pursue an independent foreign policy, steering a course between the forces of America and those of the European powers, particularly Germany. However this has become an increasingly hard course to follow as the gradual worsening of the global situation has increased the pressure from both sides, with the result that Britain is increasingly caught between a rock and a hard place. The bombing of the Twin Towers in 2001 made this dilemma even worse and led to an apparent shift towards America. In reality, this was not the abandonment of the independent policy, but its adaptation to the new situation, dominated by the US offensive under the smokescreen of the ‘war on terror’.
The strategic importance
of the Middle East
The Middle East has been an arena for imperialist struggle for close to two centuries. It remains so today. The US has recognised its strategic importance for decades; since the collapse of the blocs it has assumed an even greater importance, and today domination of this region is an important part of the USA’s global strategy. Through a succession of spectacular military interventions in the region, the USA has attempted to reinforce its status as the world’s only superpower; but from the first Gulf war of 1991 to the current mess in Iraq, the result each time has been to create new rivals and new enemies for every one it subdues.
Britain has sought to pursue its own path in the Middle East, marked by a tendency to try to win influence amongst Arab states more than with Israel. This has been a difficult and largely unsuccessful effort – diplomatic efforts have been rebuffed, sometimes publicly, as when Robin Cook visited Syria some years ago. There have been diplomatic overtures towards Iran on several occasions. In 2003, Britain sided with Europe to oppose the US call to refer Iran to the UN: “this is the first time that the Americans and the Europeans – with Britain for once in the European camp – have been so severely at odds” (Guardian, 21/11/03). Britain has continued this more recently as part of the EU Troika (with France and Germany). This initiative seemed to have some success earlier in the year when the US softened its rhetoric, having previously hinted that Iran might be the next country to benefit from liberation, US style. Iran has made itself into a serious obstacle to US domination of the area, and is consequently on the receiving end of a growing barrage of threats.
Iran’s regional ambitions
That said, Iran is also an imperialist state, and has had aspirations to be a regional power for many decades. Iraq has been its main rival in the region and this rivalry was one of the causes of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The imposition of a fundamentalist theocracy following the Iranian ‘revolution’ of 1979 was an expression of an irrational trend within the life of the bourgeoisie, an early sign of the decomposition of capitalist society. But this did not prevent Iran from playing its own hand in the imperialist game. The religious rhetoric in which it framed its imperialist ambitions was a precursor of that employed today by Al Qaida and echoed by the London bombers of 7th July. The changes in the global imperialist configuration following 1989 and 9/11 required Iran to adapt its strategy, just as every country has had to. In particular, it has sought to strengthen its situation through diplomatic means: “Since the early 1990s Iran has accelerated the normalisation of relations with its neighbours (in particular Saudi Arabia), and, as a number of experts have pointed out, has strengthened political, economic and commercial ties with the European Union, Russia, China and India.” (Le Monde Diplomatique, English Language Edition, January 2005). In the Middle East it retains close links with Lebanon and Syria and with Hizbollah and Palestinian armed groups; it also has influence within the forces of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Despite the ritual anti-US rhetoric, Iran backed the US invasion of Afghanistan and accepted the subsequent invasion of Iraq, doubtlessly hoping to benefit from its rival’s misfortune. This seemed to be mirrored by internal changes under the supposedly more moderate leadership of the former president Mohammed Khatami. The evolution of the situation, in particular the fact that America is getting bogged down by the chaos and that this chaos is threatening to break Iraq apart, is not merely encouraging Iran to be more bold; it is actually requiring it to be so if it is to have any chance of advancing its interests in the present climate. This is what lies behind its resumption of nuclear activity and its growing involvement in the violence in Iraq. The victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is fundamentally a symptom of the situation in the region rather than a cause.
British policy adapts to
the spread of chaos
British strategy towards Iran has also changed as a result of the development of the situation in Iraq and its consequences for power relationships in the Middle East and beyond. In the past Britain has sought to maintain the territorial integrity of Iraq, readily going along with the decision of the US to leave Saddam Hussein in place after the first Gulf war and even to allow him to brutally crush the uprisings in the north and south of the country in the immediate aftermath of the war. Support for Iran was a counterbalance to this: participation in the Troika provided a convenient means to offer this support and, more importantly, to apply some pressure on the US. Today, however, the possible splintering of Iraq into separate Kurdish, Shia and Sunni parts, implies that Iraq can no longer be relied on a counter-weight to Iran. For British diplomacy, this requires an equally weakened Iran. At the same time Iranian backing for insurgents in Iraq has led to the death and injury of a number of British soldiers.
Britain now wants to see Iran reined in. This is what lies behind the hard line now being taken by Britain over the nuclear issue and its open attack on Iran for harbouring and training terrorists. It may also explain why the SAS soldiers caught in Basra were carrying bombs and dressed as members of Moqtada Al Sadr’s Mehdi Army, a Shia militia with links to Iran: they may have been planning a ‘false flag’ operation to discredit Iran.
Britain’s convergence with US strategy over Iran is more apparent than real: while the US wants to impose its order in the region in order to maintain its position as the sole superpower, Britain wants to play one against another in order to enhance its influence. Essentially, the change in policy is an adaptation to the spread of chaos, an attempt by British imperialism to ride on the rising wave of barbarism. However, such a strategy can only have one outcome: the fuelling of still more imperialist confrontation and the acceleration of the spread of chaos.
North, 3/11/05
Everything the government led by citizen K (1) says about the ‘fantastic revival of the Argentine economy’ after the debacle of 2001 is just lies. The reality facing the workers and the immense majority of the population is more and more disturbing. A few figures illustrate this: those on incomes below the poverty level, which was 5% of the population in 1976, reached 50% in 2004. 11 million people live on $150 a month, with the poverty level standing at $389(2). Famine, previously limited to the northern provinces (Tucumain or Salta, for example, where 80% of infants suffer from chronic malnutrition) is beginning to reach the poorest areas of the terrible slum belt around the south of Buenos Aires.
Workers have begun to revolt against this unbearable situation. Between June and August, the country has seen the biggest wave of strikes for 15 years (3). The most important struggles were those at the hospitals in Quilmes and Moreno, at enterprises like the Coto supermarkets, Parmalat, Tango Meat , Lapsa, the Buenos Aires subway (the Subte), the municipal workers of Avellaneda, Rosarion and the main towns of the central province of Santa Cruz; sailors and fishermen at national level, judicial employees throughout the country, teachers from five provinces, doctors employed by the city of Buenos Aires, university teachers in Buenos Aires and Cordoba. Among all these struggles, a particular mention should be made of the struggle at the children’s hospital of Garrahan in Buenos Aires because of its militant spirit of unity and solidarity. In Cordoba, one of the main industrial centres of the country, there were for a month and a half more struggles than have been seen for two decades, in automobiles, gas, teaching and the public sector.
At the time of writing the wave of strikes is receding. The social situation in Argentina is now focused on the widely publicised confrontation between the piquetero organisations and the government (4), as well as the spectacle of politicians preparing for the coming legislative elections. The struggles here and there won some ephemeral wage increases – above all in the public sector – but, faced with a capitalist system stuck in a crisis with no way out, the main gain of the struggles is not on the economic level but on the political level, in the lessons drawn from these struggles. These lessons will serve to prepare the new struggles which will inevitably break out: the need for unity, the understanding of who are our real friends and our enemies…
In 2001 there was a spectacular social revolt in Argentina, saluted by the ‘alternative world’ groups as well as by at least one group of the proletarian milieu (the IBRP) as representing a ‘revolutionary’ situation. But this mobilisation took place on an inter-class basis, and was geared towards nationalist preoccupations and ‘reforms’ of Argentine society which could only serve to strengthen the capitalist state. In an article that we published in International Review 109, we pointed out that “the proletariat in Argentina has been drowned and diluted in a movement of inter-classist revolt, a movement of popular protest which has expressed not the proletariat’s strength, but its weakness. The class has been unable to assert either its political autonomy or its self-organisation”.
As we said in the same article, “the proletariat has no need to console itself or to clutch at illusions. What it does need, is to rediscover the path of its own revolutionary perspective, to assert itself on the social stage as the sole class able to offer humanity a future, and in doing so to draw behind itself the other non-exploiting strata of society”. We also said that the combative capacities of the Argentine proletariat have not been exhausted, and they will develop once again, above all if it draws a clear lesson from the events of 2001: “inter-classist revolts do not weaken the power of the bourgeoisie but of the proletariat itself”.
Four years later, the wave of strikes in Argentina has revealed a combative proletariat fighting on its own class terrain, and beginning to recognise itself, if only in a timid way, as a class with its own identity. We are not the only ones to say this: the publication Lucha de Clases: Revista marxista de Teoria y Politica in July 2005, edited by left wing intellectuals, recognised that “one of the most remarkable facts of this year has been the return of the employed workers to the centre of the Argentine political scene, after years of retreat. We are facing a long cycle of demand struggles, where the workers fight for the improvement of their wages and against deteriorating working conditions and try to re-appropriate gains lost in previous decades”, adding that “at a time when the workers of industry and the services begin to find their voice, others are staying silent: those who had decreed ‘the end of the proletariat’”.
This militant upsurge of the proletariat is not a local phenomenon resulting from particular Argentine circumstances. Without for a moment denying the influence of specific factors, particularly the rapid and violent fall in the living standards of huge parts of the population, in turn the result of an accelerating economic decline since the collapse of 2001, it remains the case that this wave of strikes is part of the international revival of class struggle that we have been pointing to since 2003.
In a text published recently (5), we showed the general characteristics of this revival: slow and difficult, not yet taking the form of spectacular movements, advancing not through a succession of victorious struggles but through defeats from which workers draw lessons that will bear fruit in future struggles. The conducting wire which contributes to their slow maturation is “the feeling, still very confused but which can only develop in the coming period, that there is no solution to the contradictions of capitalism today, whether at the level of its economy or other expressions of its historic crisis, whose irresistible character is shown up more clearly by each passing day, such as the unending military confrontations, the growth of chaos and barbarism”.
During this wave of strikes we have seen, as in other struggles around the world (Heathrow in Britain, Mercedes and Opel in Germany) a fundamental weapon of the proletarian struggle: the search for class solidarity.
In the Subte, all the workers stopped work spontaneously after the death of two maintenance workers as a result of the total lack of protection against accidents. The workers of the hospitals in the federal capital carried out a number of solidarity actions with their comrades at Garrahan. In the south, in the Santa Cruz province, the municipal employee’s strike in the main towns won the sympathy of wide layers of the population. This was concretised in the massive participation at demonstrations in the town centres. At Caleta Olivia, oil workers, judicial workers, teachers, the unemployed, joined in with the demonstrations of the municipal workers. The oil workers came out on strike for the same demands as the municipal workers as well as their own demands. The same was done by the workers at the Barillari company, in the fishing sector. At Neuquen, the health workers spontaneously joined the demonstration of striking primary school teachers which was marching towards the seat of the provincial government. Violently attacked by the police, the marchers managed to regroup and were joined by passers-by who were extremely critical of the police, the latter retiring to a more prudent distance. A work stoppage in the all the country’s schools was called in support of the Neuquen teachers.
We should also draw attention to the unitary manner in which the workers at Garrahan raised their wage demands: instead of demanding proportional increases which would only sharpen divisions between workers of different categories, they fought for an equal increase for everyone, which reduced the differences and favoured the less well paid sectors.
During the last 15 years, the news have been dominated by the most violent consequences of the degeneration of capitalism: wars, economic convulsions, catastrophes of all kinds, terrorism, mass murder, unbridled barbarism…The only thing which seems to go in an opposite direction are the protests led by capitalist organisations disguised as ‘anti-capitalists’, whose programme is now being carried out by their colleague Lula in Brazil, or else desperate and impotent inter-class revolts. The picture is now beginning to change. Slowly, painfully, the proletariat is rediscovering its own class terrain, raising the real banner of struggle against capitalist barbarism, a banner which can be taken up by all the exploited and oppressed of the world.
It would be stupid to think that the ruling class is going to stand with folded arms in the face of its mortal enemy. It responded rapidly by deploying not only the weapons of repression, but also a more deadly one: political and trade union manoeuvres.
The federal government and the provincial governments used the police against the strikers: arrests, courts, administrative sanctions were directed at many workers, But the real focus of the bourgeoisie’s reply was a political manoeuvre aimed at isolating the most combative sectors, at leading the different centres of struggle towards a demoralising dead-end with the message that ‘struggle doesn’t pay’, that mobilising brings you nothing, that those who want to improve things have only one alternative:
- ‘action from below’: violent operations by minority groups like the piqueteros, or activities supposedly aimed at reducing poverty, such as the work of self-managed enterprises, barter networks, soup kitchens, etc;
- action from above, by the union leaders and the politicians.
In other words, the proletariat has no choice but to run from one false alternative to the other - a situation where the capitalist state remains firmly in control.
The main focus for this manoeuvre was the struggle at Garrahan hospital. There was a deafening campaign about workers being ‘terrorists’, putting their own interests above those of the children being looked after at the hospital. With nauseating cynicism, the government, which allows thousands of children to die of hunger, made a whole song and dance about the threat to the children by these abominable strikers. The government of citizen K, supported unfailingly by the main unions (CGT and CTE, with the latter’s health unions being firmly opposed to the strike) took an attitude of brutal intransigence. The Garrahan workers were deliberately excluded from the state employees’ wage negotiations. At the same time, the government bureaucrats agreed to receive representatives of other sectors on strike (for example the university teachers), but refused any contact with the Garrahan workers.
All this was obviously a provocation to isolate the Garrahan workers, crowned by the absurd accusation that they were being manipulated by a so-called anti-progressive conspiracy formed by Menem, Duhalde and Maccri (7)
But what weakened the struggle of the Garrahan workers the most was the ‘help’ it received from the piquetero organisations. These groups swarmed like flies around the Garrahan struggle, just as they did with the Tango Meat workers, in the name of ‘solidarity’. The Garrahan workers were linked to the methods of ‘struggle’ favoured by the piqueteros, minority commando actions which, instead of really hitting capital and the state, cause problems for other workers. For example the piquetero organisations blocked the Pueyrredon bridge, a vital link in the capital city, at rush hour, resulting in monster traffic jams which mainly affected the workers of the southern suburbs of Buenos Aires. At Canadon Seco, in the south, about 40 people cut off access to the Repsol-YPF refineries without the slightest prior consultations with the workers of that plant.
Little by little attention was focused on the struggle at Garrahan and on another highly publicised confrontation between the piqueteros and the government, culminating in a spectacular deployment of the police around the Pueyrredon bridge.
The final blow was provided by the organisation of false solidarity with the Garrahan workers, They were invaded by an avalanche of rank and file union groups, piqueteros, groups of the extreme left, social organisations of all kinds, all offering wonderful speeches about support and solidarity. This gave an illusion of solidarity when in fact the workers were being isolated, encircled and led towards utter demoralisation.
This was possible because the struggle at Garrahan, despite its militancy and its desire for unity, was tightly controlled from the start by a ‘Red List’ belonging to the ATE union, opposed to the ‘Green List’ which runs the union from the top. Given the workers’ growing disaffection from the unions, these ‘Red Lists’ are taking up the slack, especially in moments of struggle, to make sure that workers remain under union control. This was concretised in the organisation of a false solidarity through the setting up of ‘coordinations’ with other rank and file organisations. The leader of the Red List at Garrahan said that “you can’t say today that the ATE is really struggling, it’s us, the rank and file, who are on strike. The idea is to coordinate with all those we can; we have to try to do at the base what the leaders won’t do at the top…the unemployed organisations, the piqueteros, our patients – they’re the ones who are in solidarity with us”. Solidarity is thus limited to “support groups” and to the “patients”, in other words, it’s not a question of a general class struggle, but a private affair between workers and patients.
Real solidarity can only develop outside and against the union prison, through a common struggle which integrates new sectors of workers, where there are mass delegations, demonstrations, unified assemblies, where the workers can fight, discuss and decide together, and where other oppressed and exploited layers can join in with them. In such a movement, the divisions between the workers begin to disappear because they can see concretely that they belong to the same class, because they can become aware of their strength and their unity.
This direct, active, massive solidarity, the only kind that can take the proletarian struggle forward, was replaced by a ‘solidarity’ organised by intermediaries, passive, limited to a minority, generating a false euphoria about being supported by the ‘masses’ who are supposedly behind these organisations. The end result is isolation and division.
“The worst thing for the working class is not a clear defeat but rather the sense of victory after a defeat that is masked (but real): it is this sense of “victory” (against fascism and in defence of the “socialist fatherland”) which has been the most efficient poison to plunge and maintain the proletariat in the counter-revolution during four decades of the 20th century” (‘A turning point in the class struggle’ IR 119).
ICC 16.9.05
(1) A popular term for Kirschner, the president of Argentina
(2) Figures supplied by the newspaper Clarin 30.8.05
(3) “June saw the highest number of conflicts in the past year: 127 movements, 80% affecting the public sector, 13% the services and the remaining 7% from different industrial branches, This has surpassed the number of conflicts for the month of June in any year since 1980” (Colectivo Nuevo Proyecto Historico, a group that has recently appeared in Argentina in its text ‘Sindicato y necessidas radicales’)
(4) On the piqueteros, read ‘Popular revolts in Argentina: only the affirmation of the proletariat on its class terrain can make the bourgeoisie retreat’ in International Review 109. ‘Popular revolts in Latin America: the class autonomy of the proletariat is indispensable’ International Review 117; ‘Argentina: the mystification of the piqueteros’ in IR 119
(5) IR 119 ‘Resolution on the class struggle’
(6) Ibid
(7) Menem and Duhalde are former Argentine presidents of dubious memory.
Mass poverty within present day society is not accidental: capitalism creates poverty as an inevitable byproduct of its system of exploitation of the working class. The extraction of surplus value leads to the grotesque polarisation of wealth and want at two opposite poles of society. It also leads to economic crisis and imperialist war. The movement ‘make poverty history’ and other similar campaigns – for fair trade, debt relief etc - that are presently protesting the obvious evils of capitalism are sowing the illusion that poverty can be abolished within capitalism without overthrowing it. These movements divert anger into dead ends. Capitalism must be replaced by communism and only the revolutionary working class can do so. To do this the working class, which today is a sleeping giant, will have to pass onto the offensive and create an international party.
Such, in broad outlines, was the theme of the presentation of the public meeting held by the Communist Workers’ Organisation on 15th October in London. The CWO is the British wing of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) and like the ICC claims the tradition of the communist left. Despite the serious differences that exist between our organisations (see World Revolution 288), the ICC in Britain welcomed the holding of the meeting (particularly as it has been several years since the last CWO public meeting in London) as a forum for the discussion and development of left communist politics.
Indeed the ICC helped impulse the discussion with several questions and interventions about the CWO’s analysis. Their presentation spent a long time (some 45 minutes) elaborating on the almost obvious fact that capitalism produces poverty as an inevitable result of its system of exploitation and that therefore a socialist system is at least desirable. But it failed to say whether the overthrow of capitalism by a communist revolution is historically necessary. The idea that capitalism since 1914 has been a decadent mode of production that is historically obsolete has always been the bedrock of the programmatic positions of the communist left. But in the CWO presentation this basic concept was missing. Indeed, in recent publications of the IBRP this fundamental marxist concept of the decadence of capitalism has been questioned. So we asked if the CWO thought that the present crises and wars and mass pauperisation signify that capitalism is a decadent mode of production and therefore objectively obsolete? Their reply was ambiguous. The CWO said that capitalism was in a decadent phase but they preferred to use the word ‘imperialist’ to describe it because the word ‘decadence’ implies, according to them, a fatalist view of the revolutionary process. However we don’t think the absence of the word ‘decadence’ from the lips of the CWO was a question of words but of substance. The presentation claimed that “wars now play a prominent economic role to permit a new period of accumulation”, an idea that implies that war is a beneficial economic weapon that still allows capitalism to perpetuate itself indefinitely rather than contributing to its growing collapse. Instead of seeing a period of growing military chaos, of unbridled imperialism characteristic of the final phase of capitalist decadence - the period of social decomposition - the CWO sees the prospect of the re-stabilisation of imperialism where the imperialist blocs will be ‘reconstituted’.
The CWO was even quite optimistic about the present health and economic prospects of capitalism, judging by their claim that ‘globalisation’ was laying the basis for a wider unity of the working class because of rapid industrialization and the creation of millions of new workers in China and elsewhere on the peripheries of the system. This apparently would lead to the massive development of class consciousness. The material conditions for communism are better today than in 1917, they said.
The ICC, in answer to this unwarranted optimism about capitalism’s fortunes, tried to make clear that wars in capitalism have had a very different nature since 1914 than before. In the 19th century wars were broadly a spur to economic development. In the decadent period of the system the massive scale and duration of wars bring the resources of the whole of the national capital into play. The economy has come to serve war. War has become the way of life of capitalism. But it is not an economic weapon; it’s a leech that bleeds the economy white. War is not a rejuvenating elixir but accompanies and accelerates the convulsions of a dying system.
The economic expansion going on in China or India, rather than a harbinger of prosperity in the peripheries, is a temporary and artificial interruption in the descent of capitalism into the abyss. As the ICC and its sympathisers pointed out Chinese capitalism, rather than massively expanding the working class is massively expanding unemployment. The development of class consciousness is not the automatic product of industrialisation as the CWO suggested but depends on historical factors. And these factors place the main responsibility for the development of consciousness on the shoulders of the working class in Western Europe.
The CWO’s theories are therefore coming into more and more conflict with reality, particularly as it has chosen the culminating period of capitalism’s decline to reject the theory of its decadence upon which the entirety of left communist politics depend.
But the CWO’s theories are also coming into conflict with each other as well as reality. During the meeting they tied themselves up in knots on the connection between war and economic development.
The CWO in reply to a question from the floor at the beginning of the discussion, said that the recent war and occupation of Iraq was a means for the United States to make its capitalist rivals pay for the crisis through the US control of oil production and exchange in the Middle East. Indeed this view that the present growth of US militarism since the collapse of the Eastern imperialist bloc in 1989 is determined by the search for economic benefit and protection of raw materials has been extensively developed in the IBRP press and in the advertising for the present meeting.
However the CWO later flatly contradicted this analysis after it was pointed out that the Iraq war and occupation has been an immense drain on the US economy. Henceforth the CWO then claimed that the Iraq war was only a ‘skirmish’ that didn’t help the US economy. Localised wars like the one in Iraq were of little use to capitalist accumulation, they said.
The conclusion to the meeting therefore had to modify the initial presentation considerably. Now wars in general could not open up a new period of accumulation, as the presentation had it, but only world wars. But this change in analysis – on the fly – only landed the CWO in more self-contradiction with its previous theory that the real reasons for the US recent wars in the Middle East is to control oil production and distribution in order to maintain its economic supremacy. If these wars are then proved to be an economic disaster why does the US still pursue them so assiduously? How does the CWO now explain the economic logic of US imperialism? Does the US want to make itself even more bankrupt than ever?
In reality the main reason for the recent wars led by US imperialism is geo-strategic. They are conducted at the expense of the economy. They exemplify the growing economic irrationality of war today; something the CWO’s vulgar materialism – that wants to explain history by ‘economic mechanisms’ alone – is incapable of understanding. In its confusion it is not competent to explain either unfolding events or the seriousness of the long term stakes facing the working class.
The CWO was even more incoherent on the other main theme of the meeting, revolutionary organisation. This theme focused on how revolutionary groups behave towards each other. Towards the end of the meeting the ICC asked why the IBRP had republished on its website last year (in several languages) some very serious slanders against the ICC from an Argentine ‘group’ called the ‘Circle of Internationalist Communists’. These slanders could be found in a document entitled ‘Declaration against the nauseating methods of the ICC’ which said, for example, that the ICC uses “practices which don’t belong to the legacy of the Communist Left, but rather to the very method of the bourgeois left and of Stalinism”1. What would have the CWO’s reaction have been had the ICC published such slanders on its website? Would the CWO not have demanded a public retraction of such scandalous and totally unfounded accusations? A year later, however, the IBRP have yet to retract the slanders they published about the ICC, maintaining a deliberate silence on the question.
The CWO chair, in continuity with this policy, tried to rule the ICC question out of order and simply refused to answer it, even though at the public forum of World Revolution in September the CWO suggested that ‘they had made mistakes’ about this episode (see WR 288). Now they only wanted to discuss ‘programmatic’ questions, not supposedly sectarian disputes between groups, as though lies and slanders are not important! Instead of replying to the legitimate ICC question, they proceeded to throw more mud at our organization - no doubt in the interests of non-sectarianism. The CWO accused the ICC of creating pretend disagreements, and of not sticking to the subject of the meeting. More: the ICC was apparently guilty of attacking the CWO for the last twenty five years; reducing every meeting to a ‘ping-pong’ match. In other words the CWO presented themselves as the victims of the trouble-making ICC and not the perpetrators of slanders against the ICC! All this noise was designed to hide their silence on the real question on the table2.
The ICC and its sympathisers tried to make it clear at the meeting that our question was perfectly valid and required an answer. It was artificial to separate ‘programmatic’ from organisational problems; they are inevitably connected to each other. Indeed, the problem of creating the party was raised by the presentation to the meeting, so the ICC could hardly be accused of talking off the subject. Our question about the Argentine episode directly relates to this problem of the party. It is about the behaviour of groups who want to create this party: do they try to advance their own separate cause at the expense of other groups, in this case by helping to slander them? Or do they abide by certain minimum rules of mutual solidarity and respect? Without the latter there can be no talk of a class party.
Superficially the CWO’s attempted silence on a vital question of organisation seemed to be justified by the intervention at the meeting by someone new to politics who had hoped to hear about communism and complained they had had to listen to an argument between two small organisations. Those coming to a political meeting for the first time may well be disappointed with the apparent discrepancy between the enormity of the revolutionary project and the intractability of the disagreements between groups espousing it. However it is up to those with more knowledge of the marxist movement to explain that the communist project is a long term prosaic struggle, requiring an enduring passion and commitment to political research and debate. Revolutionary politics and discussion cannot be conducted like the empty spectacle of leftist meetings where the only contribution of the audience is to listen and applaud rousing but empty speeches.
In this regard an ICC contact quite rightly emphasized the importance of ‘ping pong’ matches both to maintain contact between revolutionary organizations and to eventually clarify vital political questions in preparation for the future when the arms of criticism give way to criticism by arms3.
It’s the job of more experienced militants to refer newcomers to the real nature of the marxist movement that has always been an extreme minority outside of revolutionary periods (Trotsky noted at Zimmerwald in 1915 that all the revolutionaries in the world could fit into two taxis). It has also always been marked by its passion for political argument and debate. In the Second International the Bolsheviks were derided by the opportunists and centrists for their constant polemics. Yet it was the glacial unanimity of the German Party that collapsed in front of the test of 1914, while political combat and polemic tempered the Bolshevik Party for its success in 1917.
The failure of the CWO to answer on this point, its encouragement of the illusions of those looking to the revolutionary movement for guidance, which it used to justify its policy of ‘non-reply’, could not be more irresponsible.
Not only did the CWO try to justify a policy of non-discussion of difficult organisational questions, the way the meeting itself was run by the CWO seemed to show they were in two minds about whether they wanted a discussion with other revolutionaries. In the first place they insisted on a period during the short amount of time after the presentation for ‘questions only’. This made it very difficult to develop interventions that could help enrich the debate and was a break with the tradition of previous left communist public meetings where other internationalist organisations are allowed a decent period in which to express their position. The format of the CWO meeting was at least a misreading of the nature of the audience which was almost entirely made up of people to whom the positions of the CWO were well known: there was no need have a period of questions about them. The ‘question only’ format is a typical feature of leftist meetings designed to prevent the elaboration of opposing political positions and thus real debate. And this was the effect at the CWO meeting. On top of this the CWO praesidium, rather than encouraging discussion, constantly interrupted ICC speakers, sniggered amongst themselves while the latter were speaking, with the result that the elaboration of opposing ideas was discouraged. When ICC militants complained of this, they were invited, on two occasions, to leave the meeting.
This CWO public meeting confirmed that the IBRP is in sorry state. It is unable to recognize let alone explain the full seriousness of the current conditions facing the working class, and contradicts its own positions about the nature of the current wars.
Its opportunist policy towards other groups and refusal to justify or correct its behaviour shows that the CWO is unable to put forward the minimum conditions for the construction of the revolutionary organisation. Most worrying is its growing distaste for discussion with other revolutionary groups. In other words, as we say in our ‘Open letter to the IBRP’, the CWO is putting its own ‘right to exist’ as a revolutionary organisation into question.
Como
Notes
1 See ‘Open letter to the militants of the IBRP’ on the ICC website: en.internationalism.org. This letter shows that the ‘Circle’ was a complete sham pretending to replace a real Argentine group called the Nucleus of Internationalist Communists.
2 Nevertheless the CWO couldn’t resist compounding the original slanders of the Argentine ‘Circle’: they said that the ICC had itself written the declaration of the Nucleus of Internationalist Communists exposing the myth of the ‘Circle’. In other words the CWO suggested the NCI didn’t really exist. The CWO is cordially invited to the next ICC public meeting in Buenos Aires to test their allegations.
3 If we had had more opportunity to intervene the ICC would also have reminded comrades that alongside our commitment to debate between revolutionaries, we have always insisted on the adoption of common positions on events of fundamental importance by other organisations of the left communist camp. But from the invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 to the war in Iraq in 2003, the ICC’s appeals to the IBRP in this regard have always been refused.
Since the London bombings in July the ruling class have put a lot of energy into the discussion of counter-terrorism legislation. Immediately after the bombings the leaders of the three main parties got together to discuss proposed new powers – even though they had actually been planned beforehand. A new Terrorism Bill is currently going through Parliament which prohibits not just incitement to terrorism, but also its glorification; it outlaws acts preparatory to terrorism or even owning something that could be used for it; there will be all premises search warrants and increased stop and search powers. Most publicity has been given to the proposal to extend detention without charge to 90 days. For asylum seekers there is the further threat to return them to countries that regularly use torture, and alongside this the Law Lords have discussed the use of evidence gained by torture. Clearly there is a concerted effort to beef up the state’s powers of repression.
However, we need to be very clear that the state already has considerable powers of repression. Justice, a legal pressure group, in a letter to Charles Clarke (27/7/5) “consider that many of the proposed measures are unnecessary on the basis that they seek merely to replicate existing law”. For instance, it is already a criminal offence to refuse to disclose a key, password or code for access to electronic data, or information which may prevent an act of terrorism under the Terrorism Act, 2000.
The well publicised arrest of 82 year old Walter Wolfgang at the Labour Party Conference took place under previous terrorism legislation, and this is far from an isolated case. “Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows the police to stop and search people in designated areas. This power, according to Liberty, has been used to stop people going to anti-war demonstrations. Protests outside of RAF Fairford, during the Iraq war, were broken up though the use of anti-terrorist laws. This included an eleven year old girl being issued with an anti-terrorism order” (World Revolution 284). Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 suspects can be denied access to a solicitor if the police believe it will lead to interference with evidence.
Jean Charles de Menezes was shot without any new legislation being introduced. The state has already equipped its security forces with the power to use bugging, surveillance, tailing and agent provocateurs, even murder.
The new powers proposed include the extension of the powers to outlaw “encouragement” of terrorism beyond the present law against “incitement”. Similarly it broadens the law to outlaw training. This has led to criticism that the law will not pass the “Mandela test”, or allow journalists and others to support ‘good armed struggle’ (‘freedom fighters’, ‘resistance’) when it involves precisely the same use of bombs against civilians as terrorism! Lord Carlile’s report on the Terrorism Bill makes it clear that the legislation only applied to those terrorists the British Government does not support: “However, it is important that there should be the clearest understanding that this clause and clause 8 would not be misused. I question whether it is the role of our law, or even enforceable, to make it a criminal offence triable in our country to fight in a revolution the aims of which we support” (our emphasis). The law has always been made to support Britain’s imperialist policy, for instance with internment in 1939 “if the Secretary of State has reasonable cause to believe” it necessary.
The extension of detention without charge well beyond the current 14 days, even if the state settles on less than the 90 days proposed in the Terrorism Bill, is also a significant new proposal. With or without Lord Carlile’s proposal for this to be reviewed by judges with special security clearance every week, this remains a severe punishment designed to cause long term disruption to family and ability to work. Some of those bringing it in cut their political teeth in the 1960s and 1970s denouncing 90 day detention and pass laws as the mark of the lack of democracy in Apartheid South Africa, and now have the gall to bring in those very measures as the defence of democracy in Britain today.
In the new Terrorism Bill the government is introducing many measures that can make no contribution to fighting terrorism, either because they duplicate existing legislation, or because, in the words of the Newton Committee of Privy Councillors, 2001 “it has not been represented to us that it has been impossible to prosecute a terrorist suspect because of a lack of available offences”. Yet the Bill, and the propaganda about it, is necessary for a further development in repression. On the one hand, it attempts to rally the population, and above all the working class, around the state which pretends to be the only protection from random terrorist violence. At the same time publicising the various measures can both intimidate and get the working class used to an increase in the level of repression. The ‘debate’ about the balance between ‘human rights’, ‘civil liberties’ and ‘security’ is a vital part of this.
Today we are 3 decades into the crisis, and specifically coming to the end of the ‘Brownian miracle’, added to which, as the Gate Gourmet strike and the solidarity strike at BA showed, the working class is not demoralised. The introduction of repressive measures, even when aimed at an ‘external’ threat such as terrorism, requires a cover or spin – to be precise, mystification.
The mystification that supports the counter-terrorism legislation is the idea that democracy is not just the best form for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie but allows the ‘public’, ‘communities’ and individuals – regardless of class – a real voice in society. The debate surrounding the legislation is, in the words of Lord Carlile’s report for the government, “a good thing especially in relation to laws potentially affecting on the one hand the liberties of the subject, and on the other seeking to protect the lives of the majority from the horrific prospect of being blown apart whilst going about their everyday lawful business.” In the media it is never posed as a question of the bourgeois state using its full force to defend its imperialist interests, as in Iraq, while silencing or rendering harmless opposition at home, nor of getting the working class used to the repression that will be used against it in the future as in the past. From left and right, from Justice and Liberty as much as the government, it is always posed as a question of balancing civil liberties against protection from terrorism.
The debates in Parliament have been typical of a government bringing in repressive policies ‘in the national interest’ and the opposition questioning it, with all the melodrama of close-won votes. We know very well that exactly the same would have happened if the Tories had been in power and Labour in opposition. And if the 90 day detention has been temporarily withdrawn for further discussion, government and opposition are both agreed to extend the period well beyond 14 days.
One new aspect of the present campaign is the emphasis on judges ‘standing up for human rights’. Traditionally judges have backed all sorts of repressive measures without question – internment, in the war and in Northern Ireland, laws against secondary picketing etc. Traditional liberties only exist if they suit the ruling class: “habeas corpus can be an effective remedy to control the exercise of the discretionary power, but policy considerations may often make the courts reluctant to act” (R.J.Sharpe quoted in The politics of the judiciary, Griffith). Today ‘policy considerations’ require them to emphasise international law, human rights and individual liberty – which does nothing to prevent the increase in state repression, but does provide a cover for it.
As we said after the legal murder of Jean Charles de Menezes “the capitalist state, in Britain as in all the ‘democratic’ countries, has always used terrorist attacks like those of 7th and 21st July in London as an excuse to strengthen its repressive apparatus, to put in place measures that are generally considered the preserve of “totalitarian” regimes, and above all to get the population used to their existence” (‘Execution at Stockwell: today’s “shoot to kill” prepares tomorrow’s death squads’ WR 287). All repressive measures will, when necessary, be used against the working class, the real threat to the bourgeoisie, as we have seen, for example, in the 80s with the miners’ strike and more recently when Gate Gourmet strikers were chased away from Heathrow by armed police. But repression alone cannot defeat the struggle of the working class without “illusions in the democratic process, which is in reality a cover for the dictatorship of capital. The working class will only strengthen this dictatorship if it demands that the state respect its rights” (‘The state arms itself against future class battles’ WR 284). Groups like Liberty may point out the facts of increasing repression, but their protests only add to the democratic debate that the state needs to legitimise it.
Alex 5.11.05
In the first part of this article [7] (in WR 287) we showed the evolution of the economic crisis of capitalism since the end of the 1960s following the period of reconstruction after World War II. In the second part we are going to try to show that the capitalist world is sinking into a new world recession and the bourgeoisie will be obliged to make the working class pay still more heavily.
World capitalism confronts a new acceleration of its crisis
Faced with the decline of the capitalist economy, the bourgeoisie, at the beginning of 2000, wanted to make us again think that we were in for a new phase of economic expansion, mainly through the United States but also through China and India. We will return in more detail to the brazen propaganda of the bourgeoisie about India and China in the near future. As far as the United States is concerned, it is not difficult to show the hollowness of the bourgeoisie’s lies! Without a public deficit whose breadth and rate of increase frightens the bourgeoisie itself, the American economy would doubtless already be in recession.
But what are the other factors in this American ‘recovery’?
The first is the massive support the US administration has given to household consumption. This policy is due to a spectacular lowering of taxes on the well-off and middle classes, at the price of growing cuts in the federal budget.
In the second place, the lowering of interest rates, from 6.5% at the beginning of 2001 to 1% at the beginning of 2004; this has further increased household debt.
Finally, an ever growing drain on savings, the latter shrinking from more than 12% in 1980 to a tiny 2% at the beginning of the year 2000.
The spectacular lowering of interest rates and the phenomenal drain on savings have produced massive debt for households across the US.
The American state has totally and artificially supported the property and automobile markets. The American bourgeoisie has pushed innumerable households, sometimes by lending at zero interest, to buy their own houses; this has been the source of record borrowings. Since 1977, mortgage debt in the United States has increased 94% to reach 7.4 billion dollars. Since 1977 banking credit intended for property acquisition has increased 200%. Since 1988 the cost of property has more than doubled. On average, in the United States, mortgage debt for a family of four corresponds to an average debt of $120,000. The accelerated rate of increase in the cost of property is also shown in the frantic speculation in this sector.
As long as interest rates remain low, close to zero, household debt can be bearable. But with the increase in interest rates getting underway, the resulting increase in debt leads to the ruin, pure and simple, of a very large number of American households.
Finally, the United States, thanks to this policy of extremely low interest rates, has shamelessly carried out a policy of competitive devaluation of the dollar. This has allowed the US to push the most dramatic effects of the worsening of the economic crisis onto the rest of the world. This in turn has driven every national bourgeoisie to launch itself into a merciless trade war.
The proletariat in Europe has already had bitter experience of the crisis, with the development of redundancies and the dismantling of the ‘welfare state’ (cuts in health care, pensions, etc…). But what is still more significant is that despite the extent and the unprecedented nature of the measures adopted, any resulting recovery will have been extremely brief. The new recession and the return of inflation leave the bourgeoisie no respite. The French Groupe Financier Banque TD, which above all aims to reassure, announces a slow down of world growth: “Real world GDP will probably slow down from 4.8% in 2004 to 4.2% in 2005 and to 3.9% in 2006… In fact American growth must slow down from 4.4% in 2004 to 3.8% in 2005, then to 3.2% in 2006, while in China one can see that the rate of growth will oscillate between 8% and 8.5%… in relation to a rate of 9% and more in 2004.”
Even though these forecasts seem to underestimate reality, the bourgeois experts are still predicting dark days ahead for the capitalist economy, openly contradicting the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie.
Last 22 February, important new troubles appeared in the financial markets, indicating once again the disastrous conditions in which the international financial system finds itself. The main editorial in the New York Times (24/2/5) said: “The liquidation of the dollar on Tuesday has not provoked a collapse. But it has without a doubt given a foretaste of it (…) Tuesday’s episode has its origins in America’s structural imbalance…” For its part the Washington Post, during the course of the same month, wrote: “The clock continues to tick towards a meeting with disaster. A broken down financial superstructure is jolted by a new energy crisis, the movements of the dollar and out of control American finances”. The dollar was being exchanged at $1.32 against the euro. The perspective of a lowering of the dollar seemed to be on the cards. However, the crisis also hit the eurozone, momentarily upsetting the currency. On June 3 the euro reached its lowest levels for 8 months, in line with a sudden run on the dollar.
The bourgeoisie is finding itself confronted with more and more serious monetary turbulence, cutting off any medium term vision. To that it must be added that, in recent years, the dollar has mainly been supported by Japan, Saudi Arabia and China. We know that, for two years, the Saudis have diverted their investments away from the United States, towards other regions of the world. Today, China shows that it too has reached a point where it can no longer go on supporting the US economy. The Japanese and Chinese central banks, inundated with dollar credits, with some banks on the edge of bankruptcy, can no longer absorb any more. The largest acknowledged holders of American debts are the central banks of Asia and the Pacific region. Japan and China alone hold American state obligations of more than a billion dollars.
China disposes of a great part of its production through the US domestic market. It is paid in dollars that it uses in part to buy bonds from the US Treasury, thus financing the colossal deficit of the United States. In return this policy allows Beijing to open up more and more new factories, which, with the approval of the United States, produce goods to be sold on the American market. However, the Chinese economy is subsidised by the budget and state deficit. As in the United States this swollen mass of debt has reached a danger point. It was little more than a 100 billion yuans in 1987 and today it is close to 500 billion. This is a deficit that is essentially financed by the Chinese banking system, which is drowning in highly dubious credit. The growing instability of the dollar today represents a major risk to the international financial system.
For the majority of countries, holding dollars makes no sense other than it being the principal money of world commerce. This function is really put in danger by the threat of its collapse. Despite the present recovery of the dollar faced with the weakening of the euro, the fantastic level of debt of the US economy can, in the period to come, only push the level of the dollar to fall. Faced with this reality, the danger comes from the necessity for numerous countries to diversify their credits into strong currencies. The rocketing prices of raw materials, which on March 8 - according to the CRB index (Commodity Research Bureau) which covers 17 of the most important raw materials - reached their highest levels for 24 years. It is not only the cost of oil that is climbing, even if a barrel that was $10 six years ago has now risen to more than $55. Speculation is ever present, including a building bubble that is now quite close to implosion; and the catastrophic state of the international money system has pushed up the price of gold to a historic level of $440 an ounce. A few days ago the former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, declared: “It is necessary to prepare ourselves for a catastrophic crash of the dollar and an explosion of panic”.
Despite the pressure to lower prices through a policy of declining wages, generalised indebtedness brings about, along with the recession, the spectre of inflation. The excessively strong pressure to lower the mass amount of wages, in turn bringing about a tendency to the lowering of prices, is not enough to put a brake on the longer-term inflationary tendencies. All the industrial countries of Europe, Asia and America are again undergoing inflationary tensions. The reduction of the monetary mass that ineluctably flows from this will be an additional active factor in the recession that is taking shape. The bourgeoisie itself is thus obliged to take measures that will slow down the economy while the recession is already happening. With a debt equivalent to 58% of GDP and 60% of the rate of growth attributable to military expenses (2003 figures), the coming American recession gives the tone for the whole of the world economy. The weakening of economic cohesion that is now hitting Europe, particularly with the management of finances, will also tend to speed up the descent into recession. The upheavals that the international financial system is going to suffer will have a major impact effect on the entire capitalist economy.
A more profound recession than previous ones
Since the very short economic recovery at the beginning of 2000 was accompanied by a massive acceleration of unemployment and the pauperisation of the working class, we can just imagine the breadth of the attacks that capitalism will have to inflict on the proletariat when the recession really gets going. One of the symbols of the recovery coming to an end is perhaps the virtual bankruptcy of the two greatest builders of automobiles: General Motors and Ford. Faced with such a deterioration of the capitalist economy, and the development of the exploitation of workers, the proletariat more than ever must not mistake its enemy. It is not neo-liberalism or free enterprise, or the individual boss, or what’s called ‘globalisation’. It is capitalism that is today bankrupt, its state and the bourgeois class which alone are the real enemies of the working class and all of humanity. Here and now we can affirm that the new recession will be much more profound than all of those since the end of the post-war reconstruction. The proletariat must not be discouraged by this perspective. If the economic crisis is accelerating and with it the attacks on the working class, the proletariat can respond to the attacks by develop its struggle, its self-confidence, its solidarity and its class consciousness. This situation is rich and full of potential for the proletariat.
T
In the last few years, there seems to have been one natural disaster after another, and the human consequences of these gigantic dramas have been growing bigger and bigger each time.
After each hurricane, earthquake, drought or famine, we have heard all kinds of laments from the ruling class and its governments, and all kinds of promises about help for the victims. The real attitude of the bourgeoisie can be judged by the fact that each catastrophe has been exploited to further the imperialist interests of this or that national capitalism.
In December last year, the Tsunami ravaged southern Asia. It left more than 500,000 dead in Indonesia, Sumatra, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India. The bourgeois media everywhere shed crocodile tears and talked about a massive mobilisation of aid. But the real concerns of the capitalist states were elsewhere. In a region of powerful tensions between different nations, in particular between India and Pakistan, all the great powers tried to use their respective ‘Non-Governmental Organisations’ to get the best position for themselves. Seeing the total ineffectiveness of humanitarian aid, even the journalists were forced to admit, “the climate of competition in which the NGOs and the UN agencies are operating requires explanation. Four recent studies arrived independently at the same conclusions: the financial manna of international humanitarian aid led to a rather undignified rush for the resources of the donors, often to the detriment of the populations affected by the catastrophes and emergencies, and of the integrity of the NGOs. The latter were often guided more by the priorities of the donors, who give out funds in a manner aimed at favouring their national interests” (Le Monde Diplomatique, 17 October, our emphasis). Even worse, “the absence of coordination and the multiplication of initiatives by the NGOs have led to rivalries and duplication or inappropriate forms of aid” (Liberation 20 October). The reality could hardly be more cynically expressed. This inter-imperialist competition, which the NGOs have spearheaded, has resulted in a waste or a sterilisation of a good part of the already miserly aid doled out by governments, or given by ordinary people out of real sympathy for so much human suffering.
Capitalism’s real interest in human life, the real motives behind its humanitarian mask, can be seen all the more clearly when catastrophes hit geographical zones which have no great strategic interest. Just a few months before the Tsunami struck south east Asia, terrible earthquakes devastated Haiti and Dominica. There were thousands of deaths and there was virtually no aid, precious little publicity and no huge media campaign of ‘solidarity’ with the suffering population. The same can be said about the Amazon, which for the last four years has been experiencing the most terrible drought in its history: the population there has simply been abandoned to its fate. Or again, in September when hurricane Stan directly hit Guatemala, as well as El Salvador, Nicaragua and south east Mexico, and left thousands dead and tens of thousands injured or made homeless. To give another example of what we mean; on October 9th the TV devoted just a few seconds to a mudslide that wiped out a Guatemalan village, leaving 1400 dead. Men, women and children, the whole village, perished under a tidal wave of mud.
In response to the tragedy, Washington promised to send six helicopters to help with evacuations. Most of the NGOs, and the main imperialist powers of the world, expressed a total lack of interest in this tragedy, leaving this part of the world to fall into indifference, misery, and epidemics.
When hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the south east coast of the USA, the attitude of the various bourgeoisies was very different. Indifference was replaced by massive media coverage. On TV, in the papers, every moment of the day was filled with images of a poverty-stricken population, trapped, without food and shelter, surrounded by US soldiers armed to the teeth. None of this was innocent. There was a concerted effort by the USA’s main rivals to show the inhumanity, the indifference and the incompetence of the USA and its inability to protect its own population in contrast to the massive mobilisation by this same USA to bomb the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The French and German bourgeoisies were at the forefront of this anti-American campaign, rubbing salt into the wound by offering help to the US. The response from Bush was immediate and animated. “In an interview on ABC, Bush said at first ‘we appreciate help, but we are going to deal with this ourselves’. Then the US president made his position even clearer: ‘we haven’t asked anyone to help us’”. Condoleeza Rice had to repair a few bridges after that.
The cynical use made of this catastrophe by the USA’s main imperialist rivals bore some fruit because the world was made well aware of the USA’s inability to deal with the distress of its own population.
In October, a new earthquake hit the region of Kashmir between India and Pakistan. The death toll has already gone well above 70,000. As with the Tsunami, the NGOs have rushed in to offer their aid; and behind them, the great powers have been advertising their desire to help. With what result?
“I don’t think many people can survive in this cold…In the last few days we have seen cases of diarrhoea, fever, respiratory infections” (Doctor Bilal, cited by Courrier Internationale 16 October).
As winter approaches in the mountains of Kashmir, the stench of death is everywhere and survivors are still looking for shelter, food and medicine.
Several weeks after this huge disaster, the aid given to this region has been minimal. This is a region of considerable geo-strategic importance, a cardinal point between Europe, Asia and Russia. For years it has been a theatre of conflict between India and Pakistan. There is a striking contrast between the military resources deployed in this region and the extreme misery of its population. With the exception of a few symbolic acts, these military resources cannot be adapted for use in dealing with the emergency. “The nearest source of supply of helicopters is India, but relations between the two countries is tense as both dispute control over Kashmir”. The Pakistani president Parvez Musharraf said that “he would accept Indian helicopters, on condition that they arrive without equipment” (Liberation 22 October). But even more clear and more inhuman was his statement that “there are military defence plans, there are military deployments up there, as there are on the Indian side. We don’t want any of their soldiers to go there, not at all”. If Musharraf was responding in this manner, it is because he knows very well that India’s humanitarian gestures hide its military intentions. But the imperialist rivalry between India and Pakistan also directly involves all the great powers: USA, China, Germany, Britain…no great power is uninterested in this part of the world. Proof of this is the following: “NATO decided to send 500-1000 men to the north of Pakistan, but will not be able to respond to the UN’s appeal for the creation of a vast air bridge to break the isolation of the hundreds of thousands of victims threatened by hunger and cold” (Liberation 22 October). If international bodies like NATO and the UN are incapable of coordinating the smallest relief effort, it’s quite simply because their role has nothing to do with humanitarianism. They are nothing but arenas for conflict between the imperialist powers.
The damage caused by so-called natural catastrophes in the 90s was three times greater than during the previous decade and 15 times greater than during the 1950s. If more and more geographical zones and populations are being destroyed by the consequences of these catastrophes, it must be clear to the proletariat that this problem is only of interest to the bourgeoisie if it can exploit it for the defence of its national and imperialist interests. In the zones which are not abandoned to their fate because of their geo-strategic importance; ‘humanitarian intervention’ is used to aggravate the situation, resulting in further disorder and mayhem.
Capitalism’s descent into imperialist chaos is an integral part of the terrible barbarism that results from these disasters. The working class is the only class capable of overthrowing capitalism and bringing an end to this suicidal logic by creating a society that is no longer founded on exploitation and profit. Tino
There has been a continuous revolutionary trend within the working class in Britain from the Chartist movement in the early 19th century through the First World War, the revolutionary wave that followed and, to a lesser extent, the Second World War and after. A new book, The British Communist Left, published by the ICC, makes a major contribution to the history of the revolutionary movement in Britain in the 20th century. As it says in the introduction “there is a deep tradition within the British proletariat of principled opposition to parliamentarism and reformism, and an understanding of the need for a workers’ revolution against the bourgeois democratic state” (p.2). It is the latest in a series of books published by the ICC on the history of the communist left – the others being on the Italian, Dutch and German, and Russian communist lefts. Although written by a close sympathiser of the ICC, rather than the ICC itself, we fundamentally agree with its broad arguments and conclusions.
The common struggle
The greatest strength of the book is its recognition that the struggle of the proletariat in Britain is part of the international struggle of the whole proletariat. Time and again it shows that over and above the particular details of the national context the working class and its revolutionary minorities face the same challenges and respond in the same way.
The outbreak of war in 1914 saw betrayal and confusion throughout the workers’ movement but also principled, class-based opposition. In Britain, the Labour Party and unions rallied to the flag of the exploiters but a minority not only declared their opposition to the war but also intervened to defend the interests of the working class and to rouse it against the bourgeoisie. Following Lenin, the British Communist Left identifies three trends in the workers movement: “…the Labour Party and the trade union leaders, together with the Fabians and Hyndmanite leadership of the BSP [British Socialist Party], easily fell into the social chauvinist category. Of the centre or ‘swamp’, the Independent Labour Party was a classic example…Into the swamp also fell the majority of the opposition in the BSP” (p.13). The Socialist Labour Party and the SPGB are also placed in the centre although individual militants of the former participated actively in anti-war activity. The internationalist tendency was best expressed by the Vanguard group, a regroupment of the left within the BSP, centred in Scotland and animated by John Maclean. In September 1914 Vanguard declared “Our first business is to hate the British capitalist system that, with ‘business as usual’, means the continued robbery of the workers…It is our business as socialists to develop ‘class patriotism’, refusing to murder one another for a sordid world capitalism” (p.9).
The Russian revolution drew a response from workers around the world, but the British Communist Left shows that the British working class didn’t just support the revolution but was animated by the same need to oppose the barbarism of capitalism as its comrades in Russia. In 1915 and 1916 workers in all parts of the country went on strike in defiance of the law, the state and their own unions, culminating in strikes in England in March 1917 involving 200,000 workers. Revolutionaries in the SLP and the Vanguard group saw themselves as part of the revolutionary movement whose future was prefigured by the struggles in Russia and Germany: “This is the class war on an international basis, a class war that must and will be fought out to the logical conclusion – the extinction of capitalism everywhere. The question for us in Britain is how we must act in playing our part in this world conflict” (p19).
The left in Britain was also marked by its support for October 1917 and defence of the Bolsheviks. The Workers Socialist Federation that had evolved, under the leadership of Sylvia Pankhurst, from an organisation focused on gaining the vote for women to be part of the revolutionary left, declared in the Workers Dreadnought that “Their opponents strive to make it appear that Lenin and his party are a handful of people which has imposed its domination upon the unwilling Russian people; but it is the workers’ and soldiers’ council which has now deposed Kerensky and the provisional government, and itself becoming the government has chosen Lenin to be its prime minister” (p.22).
The creation of the Communist Party in Britain was an essential step in developing the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. By going beyond its formation as a coming together of particular groups and focussing on the programmatic questions that underlay it, the British Communist Left is able to show that the Communist Party, far from being an imposition of the Bolsheviks, arose from the situation in Britain itself. It considers a number of questions that animated debate in the workers movement in Britain and that contributed to the formation of the Communist Party. The question of affiliation to the Labour Party was one such question, where the experience of the imperialist war and the role played by Labour made it clear to the revolutionary left that Labour had betrayed the working class. Militants of the BSP denounced the Labour leaders as “recruiting sergeants and labour lieutenants of the capitalist class” while Maclean denounced the whole party as “bound up at present with capitalism and fighting socialism”. This experience was to make opposition to affiliation to Labour one of the foundations of the communist left in Britain, even in the face of pressure from the Third International and Lenin himself.
Faced with the isolation of the revolution and the degeneration of the Third International the left communists in Britain took up the struggle alongside their comrades internationally: “…linked by a web of political, organisational and personal connections to the Russian Bolsheviks, the German Spartacists, the Dutch Tribunists and the Italian Abstentionists… The British left participated alongside the Russian, German, Dutch and Italian lefts in the same political struggles…” (p.38). The Workers Dreadnought very rapidly became the focal point for left communists within the Communist Party in their struggle to defend the Third International. It published extracts from Lenin’s Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder but also the manifesto of the German KAPD and Gorter’s reply to Lenin. It called for open debate and warned against the imposition of formal discipline to stifle such debate.
Opportunism and sectarianism
The conclusion to the British Communist Left recognises that “The communist left’s struggle for an intransigent class party in Britain in the early 1920s ended in failure” and asks “why did it fail?…what lessons can we draw for today?” (p.93). It recognises that the key factor was international: the defeat of the global revolutionary struggle and the change in the historical situation: “…the question of whether revolution was on the agenda in Britain was determined primarily by the international balance of class forces rather than any national specificities, and this balance of forces was dynamic rather than static” (p.93). However, this recognition poses the question of the capacity of the revolutionary movement in Britain to contribute to the dynamic rather than just respond to it, leading to the important and absolutely correct conclusion that “The real lesson…is not that the formation of a communist party in Britain was premature but that it was too late”. Revolutionaries have to have the capacity to respond without hesitation to the historical moment when it arrives; such capacity has to be fought for in the hard and patient struggles in the years and decades before. It is here that the real weakness of the revolutionary movement in Britain lies. From the latter part of the 19th century, when the revolutionary movement re-emerged after the defeat of Chartism and the decades of work building the unions, it had to fight against the twin dangers of opportunism and sectarianism.
The British Communist Left is clear about the danger of opportunism: “The struggle of the left for a class party was above all a struggle against the ever present influence of bourgeois ideology within the working class; a struggle principally against opportunism, which expressed the enormous weight of the past on the class…This opportunism expressed itself not only in open political positions but also in attitudes towards organisation: fear of centralised control; support for ‘local autonomy’, for ‘freedom of opinion’ in the name of ‘unity’…” (p.98). However, it has less to say about the opposite side of the coin: sectarianism.
The Social Democratic Federation, founded in the 1880s was marked by both its sectarianism and its opportunism. The opposition that developed within it gave rise to two organisations in the first years of the 20th century: the Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Known as ‘impossibilists’ they were animated by opposition to the opportunism of the SDF. However, while opposing the SDF’s opportunism they kept its sectarianism. The SLP left the SDF prematurely, undermining the efforts of the left to combat the right-wing leadership and isolating other revolutionaries, including those who were to form the SPGB. Both organisations showed a dangerous lack of understanding of the importance of struggling to defend the organisations created by the working class, not only denouncing other parts of the workers’ movement in Britain but also the Second International itself.
The same weaknesses became evident during the struggle to form the Communist Party. The British Communist Left shows the strength of this effort, such as the break by parts of the SLP from its previous sectarianism in order to fight for a party of the revolutionary left. However, the difficulties encountered in this struggle, in particular over the participation of the BSP, prompted the WSF to form a party ahead of the pace of negotiations. The creation of the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) “was a voluntarist attempt to create a class party which avoided the difficult but necessary confrontation of positions” (p.52). The fact was that the revolutionary movement in Britain lacked the tradition and the experience of organisational struggle to be able to maintain the effort needed. It is telling that in the struggles in the BSP it was the émigrés who had participated in organisational struggles elsewhere who were the most determined in their struggle against the right. Similarly, it was her experience at the second congress of the CI that led Pankhurst to reverse her position on the CP (BSTI) and to support the formation of a united Communist Party.
The intelligence of the British ruling class
Another important factor in the failure of the revolutionary movement in Britain to form a class party was the strategy of the ruling class. At the time of the Russian revolution the British ruling class had had well over a century of experience of combating the working class. Like its counterparts elsewhere, it had tried violent repression, such as at the Peterloo massacre in 1819, and had learnt that this only strengthened the determination and revolutionary temper of the working class. A strategy of concessions and manoeuvres, such as granting limited reforms and winning over leading figures was far more effective. The aftermath of the war and the revolutionary wave saw the ruling class take this to a new height through the use of the Labour Party, which had adopted a more radical programme after the war, to absorb the anger in the working class. This was joined with the selective use of force at key moments. In 1919 a demonstration by 30,000 workers in Glasgow was attacked by the police in order to provoke the working class into premature action. In 1918 the arrest of John Maclean, who was sentenced to five years for sedition, “robbed the revolutionary movement in Britain of its most able and determined leader at a moment when the threat of revolution at home seemed most imminent” (p.24) In September 1919 Sylvia Pankhurst’s arrest “removed from the scene the most prominent left-wing communist and advocate of further communist unity” (p.64).
The experience of the British Communist Left shows that in order to create a strong revolutionary organisation revolutionaries need to build on the revolutionary reflexes of the working class in a conscious, planned and long-term manner. Despite its size and its isolation from the mass of the working class it is the struggles of revolutionaries today that will determine the capacity of the working class to form the world communist party of tomorrow. Understanding the history of our predecessors is a vital part of this work.
North, 26/09/05.
For the past 15 years all the propaganda of the ruling class has been trying to tell us that the working class is dead, a thing of the past. But reality is showing that the proletariat is very much alive and that all over the world it has no choice but to develop its struggle.
Over the summer we saw a clear expression of working class solidarity in the Heathrow strike (see WR 288 or our website). Fear of a wider movement within the working class has also obliged the Blair government to withdraw part of its plans to force public sector workers to carry on working until they are 65 instead of 60 as it its today. Even so, according to the agreement reached with the unions, from 2006 onwards new recruits in the health, education, and other sectors will still be subjected to this attack. After the national strike on 4 October in France, which saw the unions call over a million workers on the streets in order to siphon off growing social discontent, the ‘Socialist’ FGTB union in Belgium brought large segments of the economy to a halt. Again the aim was to keep the lid on mounting protest against the government, which is launching a new attack on social security and raising the pensionable age from 58 to 60. On 28 October both the big union federations of the country organised a second general mobilisation, the first time they have acted together this way for 12 years.
In the USA, the strike by 18,500 engineering workers at Boeing, called after an 86% vote in favour by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers lasted from 2 to 29 September (the previous strike by Boeing workers in 1995 dragged on for 69 days before ending in a heavy defeat). The workers have once again rejected the contract offered by the bosses, which includes an attempt to lower pensions at a time when contributions for social benefits have tripled since 1995, and when the bosses are avoiding giving any guarantees about job security. The workers’ anger was all the stronger given that the firm’s profits have also tripled over the last 3 years. The enterprise also wants to get a cut in payment of medical costs, in particular by getting rid of any medical cover for retired workers. The workers rejected this whole manoeuvre of division between ‘new’ and ‘old’ workers. They also opposed another attempt by the management to set workers against each other by introducing different measures for workers between the three production factories (the one in Wichita in Kansas was to be put in a less favourable position than the ones in Seattle Washington or Portland Oregon). The workers demanded the same conditions for all the firm’s engineering workers. In the end, the bosses agreed to give exceptional bonuses and for the moment to keep their hands off medical cover and pensions, but, on the other hand, the workers will still see a reduction in wage increases and increased welfare contributions. However the most striking fact about all this has been the almost total blackout surrounding this strike, notably in Europe. The aim of this is to prevent the working class recognising that there is an exploited working class in the USA and that there too it is fighting to defend its interests.
Again, the strikes which swept through Argentina between June and August have had no publicity in Europe, in contrast to the noise made about the social revolt of 2001, which was dominated by inter-classism (see International Review 109, 117 and 119). The struggles of last summer are the most important wave of strikes there for 15 years, especially in the industrial region of Cordoba. On page 4 of this issue we have an in-depth article that shows workers’ search for solidarity, the brutal reaction of the bourgeoisie, the denigrations by the media and the attempts by the leftist piqueteros to drag workers into commando actions. Faced with all these manoeuvres and the preparations for the coming electoral circus, the strike wave retreated. But it has confirmed that the everywhere the proletariat is raising its head and affirming itself as a class in struggle. In the last issue of this paper we pointed as well to the strikes of the Honda workers in India. There is also the example of China, whose economic ‘success story’ is the subject of a gigantic campaign of deception and lies. An NGO in Hong Kong has counted no less than 57,000 labour conflicts in 2004, involving 3 million wage workers, involving the private sector as well as the state factories.
Despite all the limits of these struggles, despite all the union manoeuvres against them, these are not movements that belong to a forgotten past. The working class is not dead! It has no choice but to fight for its interests and to take its struggles forward. More than ever the working class carries within its struggle the only future for humanity. ICC 28/10/5
In the next round of the Conservative Party leadership election the party membership takes the final decision. The press suggests that they will follow the MPs and opt for David Cameron. At one stage the media was hounding Cameron about youthful drug taking. But he faced down the challenge and refused to answer. The issue has now gone down the agenda. That small triumph showed him as a serious contender for the party leadership.
On the other hand, the whims of the Tory party faithful are not easily predictable, and David Davis has been doing his best to appeal to basic right-wing concerns. So, even if the hierarchy of the party seems to have established that Cameron would be a good new leader, the outcome of the party vote is not absolutely certain. Some senior members of the Tory party do not like the current system of electing a leader for precisely that reason.
This is not the first Tory leadership election since they went into opposition, but it is the most important. As long as the party remained in opposition the leadership was less important since the leader was not Prime Minister. Michael Howard, the current leader, was chosen to give more political weight to the leadership and the party in the run up to the last election, even though the ruling class had no intention of replacing Labour as government. While the Tory party is not being prepared for an immediate return to government, we are entering a period in which the capitalist class will want to have an ‘alternative’ in waiting. It is well aware of the deterioration in the economy - what can be summed up as the end of the ‘Brownian miracle’ - and there is a definite unease in the bourgeoisie about the situation. The following is a good example: decisions over retirement age and paternity leave “have fuelled concern about the government’s future direction, particularly after Tony Blair steps down as prime minister. ‘We’ve had high-level discussions [with government] to make sure we understand each other’s positions. That’s been helpful but it hasn’t bridged the differences,’ John Cridland, deputy director general of the CBI employers’ group, told the Financial Times. ‘These are the first two major decisions by the Department of Trade and Industry affecting business since the election and they haven’t made the right judgement calls from a business point of view.’
David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said the BCC had thought that the government had understood what business needed. But after the deal on public sector pensions, ‘our view now is – does the government understand at all?’” (Financial Times, 31/10/5)
Such remarks are not definitive, but, when we know that the acceleration of the crisis is focussing the minds of the bourgeoisie, it still means something. The ruling class is broadly happy with Labour’s imperialist policy apart from Blair’s tendency to not maintain the most rigorous independence from the US. Also, at the moment, there is not an immediate need to modify the government team because of the need to confront workers’ struggles. But the economic factor can undermine any government.
At the same time, if the Tories are to appear as an ‘alternative’ they have to distinguish themselves from Labour. Cameron’s political line is that Blair does indeed have the right policies on many issues, but he is hampered by his own party in introducing the necessary reforms in the public services. The bourgeoisie’s political commentators seem to think that this is exactly how things are going to play out in Blair’s last term as Prime Minister.
A bad week for Blair, like when David Blunkett resigned for a second time, does not mean that Labour is about to lose office. But potentially it provides grist for Cameron’s mill if he is elected Tory leader. If Blair ends up fighting his own party over reforms in the public services that he wants to push through, then Labour opponents can look like they have consciences and compassion, and the Tory party will begin to look more like a serious contender for office. The deterioration in the economic situation will, in addition, make the Labour Party look less competent in the management of the economy.
The worsening state of the economy will compel any government to try and make the working class pay for the crisis of the capitalist system. In a situation of growing social discontent workers need to be aware of all the political manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie, not because they can benefit from any of the alternatives but because of the basic need to know your enemy. Hardin 4/11/5
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/argentina
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/public-meetings
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-workers-organisation
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/287_economic_crisis.html
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/hurricane-katrina
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/british-communist-left