All over the planet, the living standards of the working class are under attack. Whether it’s through redundancies, speed-ups and flexibility at work, the imposition of precarious job contracts, attempts to reduce pensions or put off the retirement age, cuts in funding for health and education, there is no let up. No sector of the working class is spared: young or old, public or private employee, in work or out of work, full time or casual, native or immigrant. And it makes no difference whether the country you live in openly admits some of its economic difficulties (as in much of western Europe), claims that its economy is in good health (as in Britain) or is ‘booming’ (as in China). Whatever the media and politicians tell us, these attacks are the inevitable response of the ruling class to the crisis of its system. They are proof of the bankruptcy of the capitalist social order, its growing inability to provide its slaves with the necessities of life.

The dead-end reached by the present form of economy is also the root cause of all the other ills raining on humanity: the drive to compete over a glutted world market forces the bourgeoisie to cut safety standards, resulting in a mounting list of disasters at sea, in the air, on the railways. It accelerates the destruction of the natural environment in the interests of profit. And it increasingly turns the whole globe into a series of armed camps: militarism and war have become capitalism’s ‘answer’ to its economic contradictions.

But the increasingly severe economic attacks can also have another effect: they can serve to unmask all the lies we are sold about the bright future capitalism can bring us, as long as it made more efficient, more democratic, more environmentally conscious, more global or else more local. And they can push the working class to fight back as a class, to respond to the massive attacks with no less massive struggles. Indeed, after years of being told that the class struggle was over, that the working class no longer existed, the last few months have seen growing signs that the class struggle is once again on the rise. In the summer we saw the solidarity actions at Heathrow and a huge wave of strikes in Argentina. At Christmas we saw the strike in the New York transit system and a spontaneous strike by the SEAT car workers in Spain (see articles in this issue). In the last week we saw unofficial strikes by postal workers in Belfast. These are only a few of many other examples going back to the strike movements in France and Germany in 2003 and 2004. And although the majority of these movements have been short-lived and far from massive, they are nonetheless significant. In all the ones mentioned here, the theme of solidarity has been very strong: solidarity with sacked comrades at Heathrow and SEAT; solidarity with colleagues on strike in Belfast; even solidarity with future generations of workers in the New York strike where pensions was a key issue. This rediscovery of class solidarity is absolutely vital if the working class is to widen and unify its struggles and impose itself as a real social force opposed to capital.

Of no less significance is the number of struggles in which workers have acted spontaneously, outside of the directives of the trade unions and their numbing official procedures. Again, in nearly all cases the unions have regained control of the situation, often by talking tough and posing as the true friends of the workers. But these skirmishes between workers and unions contain the seeds of the future autonomous self-organisation of the working class.

Above all, the reappearance of the class struggle in numerous countries serves as a reminder that the working class is an international class, which everywhere faces the same problems and everywhere has the same interests against the demands of the exploiting minority. Faced with a world of sharpening imperialist conflict, of increasingly bloody national, racial and religious divisions, the development of the class struggle offers an alternative: the unification of the exploited across all divisions, and the perspective of a world human community.
WR, 4.2.06

Whose side should we take?

The western newspapers who have published crass cartoons of Mohammed, the sole aim of which was to provoke and insult a minority group under the pretext of ‘free speech’?

Or the Islamic demonstrators who parade the streets calling for a repeat of the 9/11 and 7/7 massacres against ‘Britain’ or ‘Europe’?

Which set of values and traditions should we identify with? Modern western democracy, or Islam? Which ‘civilisation’ has the better morals, the better answer to humanity’s problems?

For us – communists, internationalists, partisans of the class struggle – the answer is neither. The ‘clash of civilisations’ is a clash inside one single civilisation: capitalism. And this civilisation is everywhere in its decadent stage.

The ‘defenders of free speech’ pose as the standard bearers of progress and enlightenment against mediaeval superstition and religious censorship. But capitalism, including in its democratic form, has long ceased to represent progress for humanity. The current sermonising of the bourgeoisie in favour of secularism and freedom has nothing in common with its former heroics, with its revolutionary struggles against feudal obscurantism. It has become no more than a pretext for sordid racist campaigns against ethnic minorities or for imperialist adventures abroad.

On the other hand, there is no worldwide ‘Muslim community’ which offers an alternative to the ‘decadent West’. The ‘East’ too is decadent. The domination of religion in so many ‘underdeveloped’ countries is the ideological expression of a system which has subjected the whole world to its laws but can never truly unite it and develop it. If millions are turning so desperately to religion today, it’s because the present world order offers them no future beyond poverty and war.

The ‘Muslim lands’ are capitalist nations too, even if they are mostly weak and uncompetitive ones. This wouldn’t change even if the present Muslim regimes were transformed into one fundamentalist Caliphate.  Far from transcending class divisions, Islam, like all religions, is used throughout the world as a way of yoking the exploited to the ambitions of their exploiters. 

The working class has the historic mission of freeing humanity from all illusions and mystifications. Islam and Christianity are still powerful mythologies used to perpetuate the existing system. But democracy is perhaps the most powerful mythology of all, precisely because it pretends not to be one. To choose one against the other can only serve the interests of our rulers and prevent us from developing our own world outlook, which is the real standpoint of humanity: communism.
Amos, 4.2.06   

After the election of New Labour in 1997, the first major act of the British state, via the Labour Government and specifically through Gordon Brown’s Treasury, was to ‘lift’ five billion pounds from workers’ pension funds. Not just for one year, but year on year ever since. Given the rate of inflation, this amounts to a substantial part of the current pension fund deficit, estimated to be between sixty-five and over one hundred billion pounds.

That capitalism robs the workers, that capital cheats labour, is of course no great surprise. The very system of capitalism is based on the theft, robbery and exploitation of the working class. Capitalism can never give back to the producing class the value of its labour power and is driven to constantly attack and reduce its wages and conditions, particularly now as the economic crisis becomes more acute. The attack on pensions and retirement ages also robs us of our dignity, inasmuch as the small hope of workers retiring with a modicum of comfort and self-respect is being dashed. To add insult to injury, the state tells us that we are ‘living too long’, its whole campaign piling on more grief, pressure and worry about the future for the whole of the working class. The Government talks the language of  ‘brutal honesty’ while lying to us through its back teeth. With cuts in the health service and care, with wage cuts and freezes and ‘flexibility’, with rising unemployment, the attack over pensions is part of a death by a thousand cuts.

But it isn’t just the Government that is carrying out this attack on pensions; the trade unions, as institutions of the British state, are facilitating the attack by fragmenting responses to it from angry workers, by dividing up different sectors and by directly proposing, agreeing to and implementing cuts in pensions and increases in the retirement age. They have done nothing to stop the gradual but real decline in state pensions over decades; and they’ve also done nothing to stop the increase in the retirement age of women by five years to sixty-five: ‘equal rights’ = equal pauperisation. What a victory that was for the feminists and their leftist supporters; what a victory for the trade union’s equal pay campaign: equal suffering.

Many companies have moved from defined benefit final salary schemes (already paid for out of workers’ wages) to inferior defined contribution schemes [1] [3], many of these with union agreement and passed by union officials on pension boards. This has resulted in workers doing identical jobs, side by side, on different wages and conditions. At the end of last year Rentokil announced the end of its final salary scheme for all workers, and other companies will follow. Arcadia, the Co-op and BA, amongst others, have announced massive changes in their workers’ pension arrangements, involving working more years, higher worker contributions and lower benefits – in many cases, all three. The state is orchestrating this attack with its various reports (Turner for example, calling for the retirement age to be raised to 68) and the appointment of a Pension Regulator in overall control of the direction of the attack.

Unions play their role for capitalism

As the crisis of capitalism is world-wide, so workers’ pensions and conditions everywhere are under attack: France has seen massive demonstrations against pension ‘reform’ (carved up by the French unions); Canada, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and Germany all have pension funds with massive deficits that will require extra years work, extra contributions and pension cuts from the workers. Japan’s pension funds have less than half the funds they need [2] [4]. In the USA recently, Verizon, Lockheed-Martin and Motorola have all ended their final salary schemes. Most significantly, at the beginning of January, IBM, the model ‘good employer’ of US capital, ended its final salary scheme, prompting a respected New York Times journalist to call it “the end of the American Dream” (New York Times, 6.1.6 – see also the article in this issue on the NY transit strike).

In Britain, as everywhere, the unions never talk about the working class. It’s this sector, or that sector, or sectors within sectors, everything to reinforce divisions within the working class as a whole. Some present the state sector as better, as ‘protectors’ of the workers. As if the state hadn’t been making massive redundancies and cuts in wages. And it is the state itself that is leading the attack on the retirement age and pensions of all workers, private or public, whatever branch of industry or service.

Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary, said on 5.1.6, “Unions have a proud record defending and extending pension rights” when the opposite is clearly the case (Barber went on to say that this applied to “those (companies) that can afford to fund deficits”). In order to make out that they are fighting pension cuts, the unions talk about ‘going to court’, about wanting ‘consultation’ and threatening to ballot for pointless, isolated one day strikes. This is their idea of the ‘defence of pensions’. In the Co-op, the GMB and T&G unions carve the workers up with their individual, pointless threats, while Amicus accepts the new, inferior pension scheme. Their leader, Simpson, says, “We’re disappointed… in lesser pensions… Nevertheless, the Company are at least retaining a pension scheme”, so this union is “recommending” it.

With friends like these…

In the public sector, the Unison website boasts about how, in relation to pensions, it is “saving taxpayer’s money” with its low pensions payments to local government workers. These average £3,800 per annum and given higher grade pensions at the top end of the scale, means that many workers are getting a lot less than thirty-eight hundred a year. Again the website boasts about how “manual workers die before the actuaries expect them to” again “saving the taxpayer money”  [3] [5].  The Health, Civil Service and Education agreement between Government and unions over pensions last year, to be implemented this June, was called “a major breakthrough” by Barber. It is. A major breakthrough in the attack on the working class with a two-tier wage structure, different benefits for the same workers, increased contributions “encouraged” and increased “flexibility”.  The PCS union says that there are some details “to be hammered out”. The only hammering being done is by the unions on the heads of workers.

This is what the unions do – they fulfil a vital role for the capitalist state in not only facilitating and implementing attacks, but, despite all their talk about unity and solidarity, divide up any possible response to them.

The working class will have no choice but to fight. The future of capitalism is looking bleaker and bleaker for the working class as the state no longer attempts to offer us ‘a better tomorrow’. Indeed, for the working class, ‘tomorrow’ itself is increasingly called into question by the crisis and decay of the system. The threat is increasing there for all workers to see. It is the job of the unions and their leftist supporters to blind and divert us away from the necessity of collective action.
Ed 16/1/06.

The crisis in the NHS is getting worse. It’s forecast to be in deficit by between £600 million and over a billion. A survey of NHS acute Trust chief executives by the Health Service Journal found that; 75% had frozen recruitment, 25% had made staff redundant, 63% had closed wards and 37% were in deficit. The survey also showed that Trusts were using very dubious methods to protect their finances: 26% were withholding National Insurance payments, 21% were deliberately slow in paying suppliers. The crisis affecting the NHS has reached such a point that the East Suffolk Primary Care Trust, for example, does not have the money to pay March 2006 wages.

The impact of crisis on health workers is very hard. The freezing of jobs is the same as cutting jobs, because effectively that post is no longer there. The impact of such a freeze can be clearly seen in the 50,000 nurses that left the NHS in 2004 a number that certainly did not decrease in 2005. This leaves the remaining health workers to try and maintain some form of service with thousands fewer workers and increasing demands. It is no surprise that 78% of the members of the Royal College of Nurses surveyed in 2005 (Nursing Times 11.10.2005) felt they were working under too much pressure and 49% of those who had left nursing in the previous year had done so because of the workload.

These attacks follow the complete restructuring of pay for health workers. Jobs have been ‘restructured and assessed’ which means that for thousands of workers their jobs are no longer consider to be worth as much as they were, and, once a period of pay protection ends, wage levels go down. To this needs to be added the ‘restructuring’ of pay for unsocial hours worked from April 2006. Instead of being paid by the hour, there will be a complex scaled set of payments based on the proportion of unsocial hours worked over 13 weeks: in other words, a substantial reduction in pay, given the number of such hours worked by health workers.

Also, as with many workers in both the public and private sector, health workers are faced with the loss of the final salary pension scheme.

According to the government the cause of the crisis is bad financial management by the NHS Trusts. For the Tories it is the government’s fault for not being rigorous enough in its ‘reforms’. For the leftists, it is Blair and New Labour’s love affair with private capital that is to blame. What none of them say is that the cause of this crisis is the crisis of capitalism. These attacks are part of a long-term strategy to reduce the burden of the NHS on British state capital that has been underway since the 1980s.

The Labour government has continued the policies set in motion under the Tories…

The constant stream of NHS ‘reforms’, which have increased the use of private capital to fund hospital building, the implementation of strict and draconian targets for health services, the meeting of which determine funding, the introduction of set payments for different operations or other medical procedures, and the most recent proposals to transfer many services now in hospitals into ‘the community’ - a community where private capital, charities and others will be able to bid to run services - are not the aberration of Blair and New Labour. They are the more systematic and brutal continuation of a process of NHS restructuring that started under the Tories in the 80s. It is a strategy based on the state introducing ever greater competition and financial rigor into the NHS. It aims to increase rates of exploitation for health workers and hold down costs.

Health workers do not produce surplus value, through the production of commodities, but they do treat workers whose labour power is the basis for all value creation in capitalist society. Health workers cannot produce more commodities in less time and for less money, but they can be forced to work harder, longer and for less pay, as the NHS tries to save money and increase output.

To this end we have seen a careful acceleration of attacks on health workers and services.

In the 1980s health workers faced a two pronged attack. On the one hand, ancillary services, cleaning etc, were put out to tender which meant tens of thousands of workers saw their wages and conditions reduced. On the other hand, the introduction of local NHS trusts allowed the introduction of new and constantly altered terms and conditions for workers.

In the 1990s this process accelerated with the introduction of different pay scales within trusts. Efforts were made to pitch worker against worker with the introduction of competition between Trusts for the gaining of contracts from the NHS. The tendency for ‘private’ capital to be introduced into the funding of the building of hospitals began under the Tories and was continued and strengthened by Labour. The Private Finance Initiative means that companies pay for building hospitals and directly employ all but clinical workers. This means that clinical and ancillary staff are on different contracts with different employers. It also means that the costs for the state can be spread over 30 to 50 years, which is the usual period of debt repayment to companies involved.

Under Labour this process has been accelerated. Labour has extolled the virtues of ‘local autonomy’ and ‘community’ control of health services, while introducing the most brutal financial and clinical controls. Every level of the health service has been placed under the most harsh regime of payment by results. There are 700 targets an acute hospital has to meet in order to get its full funding. Labour has introduced the direct financial incentives for senior managers to attack workers’ working conditions and pay, because chief executives’ pay is dependent upon the meeting of targets. This means that at every level of management there is the utmost pressure to meet targets, that is, to make workers work even harder.

…Along with its own innovations

The recent proposal to put all community health services out to tender so that businesses, charities etc can run these services, means that tens of thousands of nurses and other health workers are faced with a whole new series of attacks on their pay and conditions if they want to keep their jobs - either with the present employer or a new one.

The proposal to put more funds into community care, and to force many services out of general hospitals, is going to mean even greater attacks as acute Trusts will lose funding at the same time as they have to maintain services for the very ill patients that cost the most to care for. In the case of new hospitals, they will have to service the debt to the companies that built the hospital in the first place, but with less patients and therefore less money. This can only mean more job losses, recruitment freezes, ward closures and calls for workers to accept worse conditions and to work harder in order to attract work to the hospitals.

This strategy has not been confined to British state capitalism: all the major capitalist countries have been carrying out similar ‘reforms’ since the 1980s, as a report by the International Labour Organisation in the late 1990s made clear: “The need to contain expenditure has dominated health policy debate in European countries, despite the very different patterns of expenditure between countries. This has led to major restructuring and privatization initiatives which, as health services are highly labour intensive, impact directly on workers within the health sector. Reforms to the structure and financing of health services, frequently with a competitive element, have placed new pressures on workers”.

The growing attacks expose the reality that hospitals and other health services are basically factories where as many patients are ‘processed’ as quickly and cheaply as possible. The patient is nothing but a sum of money, an illness is a set price and an operation another. If there is not the money to meet the price then the ‘job’ is not done. This logic has always underpinned the NHS but now it is becoming increasingly obvious.

The attacks on NHS workers are going to worsen substantially as the weight of health spending becomes increasingly intolerable with the deepening of the economic crisis. Faced with this, health workers cannot fall for the lies of the unions and the Left that these attacks are the fault of Blair and privatisation. These attacks are the result of the crisis of the whole capitalist system. British capitalism cannot do anything else but seek to reduce spending on health and attack health workers’ working conditions and pay.
Phil 4/2/6

The following article was written by a sympathiser of the ICC who has been actively contributing to the discussions on the libcom discussion forum to defend the positions of the communist left.

Many anarchists were genuine militants of the working class fighting alongside and with the proletariat in its many struggles over the last centuries. Today there are elements amongst anarchism seeking clarification and a move towards a clearer working class perspective. However, there are numerous disparate elements that call themselves anarchists who, from their very incoherence, have a role in tail ending and supporting the campaigns of the ruling class. Two particular threads on the libcom.org discussion forums entitled “1939 and all that” [1] [11] and “How do you explain the Nazi obsession with the Jews?” demonstrate how, mainly through the ideological mystification of anti-fascism, these anarchist elements are led to defend democracy, Stalinism and imperialism and thus take up a position against the working class. When the ICC, in the tradition of the communist left, denounces both sides in the second imperialist world war, there are many accusations about the ICC “passing judgement from on high”, being “abstract”, “looking back with hindsight”, as if it was forbidden for revolutionaries to take a clear, intransigent position, to look at the global analysis and to look and learn from the history of the class struggle. And this from incoherent individuals with their anti-fascist fantasies about supporting the “lesser evil”, living in the present with no continuity. As if it wasn’t the task of revolutionaries to look back, not to judge from on high, but to look at what revolutionaries said at the time, revolutionaries with whom the ICC claims heritage and continuity  [2] [12].

There is a minority of attempts from individuals on these threads to analyse what Nazism meant. But they are generally divorced from the class struggle and in some cases blame the workers in Germany – the first victims of the Nazis who were subsequently regimented by its terror and massacred by the million – for the rise of the Third Reich. What does unite the majority – while they can each ignore the excesses and absurdities of their fellow anarchist individuals - is the implicit and, in some cases, explicit support given to democracy and Stalinism, usually by way of anti-fascist ideology.

Nazi Germany – not an aberration from, but a full expression of, the decadence of capitalism

The anti-fascist campaign of the bourgeoisie has run for two generations now. Massive resources are given over to its dissemination every day of the week, year in year out: books, newspapers, cinema, theatre, television and schools. Nazism is put forward as an ‘aberration’ from capitalism, as an expression of pure evil alien to capitalism, and the Jewish genocide is put forward as a unique expression of this evil. This lie is taken up by many individuals on these threads: it was a choice between “capitalism and fascism”, “a war against fascism” rather than “for capitalism”, “glad capitalism won the day”, “not a fight for [capitalism] but against fascism”, “don’t give a fuck if it means siding with imperialism” (to fight the Nazis), “anti-fascism [can be] against fascism and capitalism”, “Nazism not capitalism because it was irrational”, “Hitler needed removing [that’s not] endorsing capitalism”, “Fight a real anti-fascist war”, and so it goes on. According to the majority of the posts Nazism was an aberration and the democratic capitalist state and its anti-fascist front is our only line of defence.  The support for democracy and Stalinism in fighting what they see as something much worse – Nazism –  couldn’t be clearer.

Nazi Germany and the totality of WWII was a full expression of capitalism’s decadence and the position of the communist left was to maintain its cornerstone internationalist position and the refusal to support either of the two imperialist camps even, or especially, in this period of counter-revolution. This is the position the ICC defends today. But the posts from the anarchists on these threads, far from seeing the Second World War as the culmination of an ideological and then physical crushing of the working class, instead see it as a ‘progressive’ episode where one side, one imperialist bloc had to be supported against the ‘evil’ Nazis, ie. the Stalinists and the democracies through anti-fascism.

The major democracies, especially Britain, were involved in the build up of the Nazis and Hitler in the early 1930s through diplomacy, the direct provision of arms, trade, credit and political support. Britain and America wanted Germany, weakened by the defeat of WWI and struggling to survive in the face of deepening economic crisis, built up to act as their policeman in Europe. Nazism was fully expressive of capitalism’s tendency to greater state control and the Nazi regime was backed by the major capitalist concerns in Germany such as, Krupp, Heinkel, Messerschmidt, IG Farben, as well as the major German banks. Despite its specificities, the roots of the Third Reich are firmly implanted in the soil of state capitalism and are in no way ‘unique’ or expressive of an aberration, arising only on the back of the defeat of the working class and the machinations of the major imperialist countries.

It is very useful for all capitalist states to maintain the myth of the “evil” of Hitler and the Nazis, particularly as this covers up and deflects their own role in fomenting wars and the war crimes they have perpetrated over the 20th century. No revolutionary denies the genocide of the Jews; but this cannot allow us to make out there is a common interest with our democratic and Stalinist exploiters and oppressors, which is precisely the role of the anti-fascist mystification peddled on these two threads. And the Allies, certainly by 1942 and probably earlier, knew very well about the unfolding Jewish genocide and didn’t lift a finger to prevent it. As for genocide and massacres, the Nazis could never match the crimes of Stalinism and democracy. Stalin’s regime was responsible for at least 20 million deaths of its own people and racial minorities prior to WWII. Britain invented concentration camps and the gas bombardment of civilians. Hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, to name just three, by constant aerial bombardment by chemical and explosive weapons. Not forgetting the atomic bombs dropped on a defeated Japan and aimed at civilians. Then came the deaths of Germans through starvation and disease between 1945-49, estimated from 9 to 13 million (while Nazi torturers, ‘experimenters’ and rocket scientists were given a comfortable welcome in the countries of the Allies). The crimes of democracy and Stalinism, the number of innocents killed, up to, during and since World War II in various inter-imperialist conflicts, would take too long to detail.

Nazism was no ‘aberration’ from all this, only inasmuch as capitalism itself has become an aberration for the whole of humanity. The destructive dynamic of capitalism expressed by all sides in and since WWII takes on a more irrational force which even acts contrary to its profit motive – a sure sign of a system in decadence. That imperialist war no longer makes any economic sense is shown by the war in Iraq, where US oil requirements could have been secured for a small fraction of the cost of the war so far [3] [13]. It is the decadence of the capitalist system that drives imperialism, from WWII to the current war in Iraq. It is absolutely essential to strip these wars of their phoney humanitarianism, and the ‘progressive nature’ which is their ideological justification, and see them for what they are: not progressive or fighting a greater evil as our anarchist anti-fascists would have us think, but wars between gangsters to carve up a place in an increasingly aberrant system.

Anti-fascist and empty anarchist moralism supports imperialism

It was the disappearance of the working class as a fighting force, as a threat to the bourgeoisie, that led to the major democracies building up German militarism under Hitler. Fascism’s victory in Germany and Italy was the end product, not the cause of the proletariat’s defeat. Anti-fascism equals national unity and was an ideology particularly used by Russian Stalinism and its vassals abroad; it’s an ideology in which the working class must identify with its exploiters and butchers. The fascist bogeyman was thus used by the French CP (with the anarchists playing the pacifist card). In imperialism’s run up to WWII the CP in Spain broke strikes and shot down workers with the anarchist CNT mobilising the workers for defeat by participating in the Spanish state before Franco finished off their dirty work. The British CP, strong in the trade unions, participated fully in mobilising the workers for war and identified the German workers as enemies. Though it’s been well used by both, the ideology of the British and American bourgeoisies was not so much anti-fascism as the defence of “freedom and democracy” (much the same as in Iraq today); as such, it was the other arm of the anti-fascist front. WWII was not a war against ‘evil’ – a number of alliances were possible between France, Britain, the USA and Germany from the mid 1930s to the early 40s, but a war of competing imperialist interests. These same ideologies have been used by states and their leftist and anarchist apologists for campaigns ‘at home’ and wars abroad ever since.

One of the recurring themes from the anarchists on these two threads is that at least anti-fascism – often in the form of the Resistance – “did something” to save lives during WWII (unlike the ICC, they add). Support for the Resistance is useful for the anarchists because it gives them the illusion that they are not supporting the major imperialisms. Their view that the Resistance “did something to save lives” is nothing but a phoney moralism – the moralism of the bourgeoisie. They go further and say that the Resistance movements were somehow an expression of the working class. Nothing could be further from reality. The very weak Resistance movement early on in the war was mainly supported by the Free French exiles in Britain and the Stalinists in France for the “Liberation”, ie, the coming capitalist carve up. But workers were later sucked into it by the Stalinists, left and leftists on the basis of the “Victory of Stalingrad”. The Resistance [4] [14] was just another pawn on the imperialist chessboard aimed at either supporting the war effort of this or that faction or demobilising any real resistance of the working class to the coming capitalist ‘peace’. Prior to the Stalingrad “turning point” the workers had remained hostile to the terrorism – and the Nazi terror it provoked – of the largely petty-bourgeois Resistance movement. This sentimental moralism of the anarchist posts about “saving lives” has nothing to with the solidarity, struggle and sacrifice on a wider and deeper scale that belongs to a revolutionary class. In fact the actions of the Resistance probably cost more lives than it saved and if it saved any, they would count for nothing in the face of the dozens of millions slaughtered by the Nazis, and by the anti-fascist democrats and Stalinists alike.

A keynote of the majority of the anarchist posts on these threads is that anything is better than Nazism, “we are better off here in Britain”, “we have free speech and a certain amount of freedom”. This is thinly veiled (and sometimes not so thinly veiled) nationalism and patriotism. The refusal to confront the crimes of Stalinism – and particularly democracy – and instead denounce the ICC when the latter points these out, can only result in support for the bourgeoisie and its rotting system.
Baboon, December 2005.

The surprise success of Hamas in the Palestinian elections – getting 76 out of 132 seats and putting Fatah in the shade – is another demonstration that the great imperialist powers are having more and more difficulty in controlling the growing chaos in the international situation. Despite having to stand as the Change and Reform movement, having been banned as a terrorist organisation, denounced for its killing of more than 400 Israelis in some 60 suicide bombings, and threatened by the US and the EU, as well as Israel, Hamas is now the dominant force in the Palestine Authority (PA) with the prospects of its armed wing being integrated into the Palestinian forces.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Israel’s foreign minister said that “The elections were meant to give power and strength to dismantle the terrorist organisations and not create a situation where these organisations sit in the parliament and then become part of the executive authority” (Guardian 26/2/6). Yet now the talk is of how Hamas can be transformed into a respectable political party, like other Israeli and Palestinian parties that had their roots in terrorist groups.

Although the victory of Hamas was a shock, political commentators soon acquired the wisdom of hindsight to explain what had happened. Opinion polls showed that there was an overwhelming concern about corruption in Fatah, the PLO and the PA. Fatah was divided and discredited, seen as responsible for years of economic disaster, particularly with widespread unemployment and the PLO was known for the reality of its repression. In contrast, Hamas had always focussed on Fatah corruption, had sustained a year-long cease-fire, put forward policies of reform in health and education, and could point to their already existing councils where they had a reputation for improving roads and similar municipal reforms. They even employed a conventional spin doctor at great expense to advise on the best public image to present.

No liberation, no independence, no gains at all

Hamas didn’t only succeed at the ballot box. They had enthusiastic leftist and nationalist cheerleaders throughout the world. In Britain for example the Socialist Workers Party declared that “the Palestinian people gave Bush and Rice a sharp slap in the face last week when they voted for Hamas” (Socialist Worker 4/2/6). They reported that “Hamas militants are seen as immune to corruption” and that the movement, after success in local elections, “gained a reputation for its work in health education and welfare. Hamas controlled municipalities were held up as models of efficiency.” As for suicide bombings, they are just details in a “fierce resistance”.

It’s true that US imperialism is taking time to work out the best response to the success of Hamas, but that’s not a slap in the face. But, for the population of Gaza and the West Bank to have exchanged its illusions in the corrupt old guard of Fatah, for the principled, efficient forces of Hamas, still labouring under the spell of nationalism, is no gain for the exploited and oppressed. The SWP point out that the US “was pumping money into the Palestinian Authority in a desperate and doomed effort to save Fatah”. Yet with the defeat of Fatah the US started “urging Arab states to continue funding a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, even though Washington is threatening to cut its own aid…The US plea to the Arab world is because it does not want the West Bank and Gaza to descend into chaos as a result of choking off aid” (Guardian 31/1/6). So, for all the condemnation of Hamas, the US actually sees a vital role for the terrorists, as a force that can impose capitalist order in the areas where it has influence.

This also puts into focus any claims by Hamas to be a force for liberation. On the same day that the US was reported as urging Arab states to fund the PA, the head of the political bureau of Hamas wrote a “message to the Muslim and Arab nations … We expect you to step in and compensate the Palestinian people for any loss of aid” (Guardian 31/1/6). No difference of opinion here between a very big power and one that’s only just emerging. Of course Hamas make the same claims as any other bourgeois forces, that they are “immune to bribery, intimidation and blackmail” and that their activity is just the same as other capitalist projects that have employed the lies of national liberation. “We have seen how other nations, including the peoples of Vietnam and South Africa, persisted in their struggle until their quest for freedom and justice was accomplished. We are no different.”

The examples are instructive. In Vietnam the North was backed by Russian imperialism, the South by the US. More than two million people died. The North won because the US withdrew its support from the South, as China’s move from Russian to American bloc was a far bigger prize than anything Vietnam had to offer. Gains for the people of Vietnam? None. And things got even worse after the collapse of the Russian bloc. As for South Africa, the archaic faction of the ruling class that was still attached to apartheid was removed from its dominant position and the South African capitalist state started operating with some changes of personnel in its political apparatus . This has brought no benefits for he poor and exploited. So Hamas replaces Fatah. There’ll be no improvements in the lives of those who voted for a change of faces in the Palestinian parliament.

Growing chaos

The SWP say that “what will happen as a result of Hamas’s victory is anybody’s guess”. They think it’s a positive step, but have no idea where it’s leading. Other voices suggest other scenarios.

For example, a letter written to the Guardian (30/1/6) asks “Do you think Israeli leaders are regretting helping out Hamas in its early days? This initial Israeli support for Hamas in the 1980s was to weaken the PLO and Fatah. It may have taken 20 years but it certainly has worked now.” This is because “With a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, an Israeli government is relieved of all pressures and will continue to act as it pleases”. The letter’s author is from the Council for Arab-British Understanding, but that doesn’t entirely invalidate his point. It’s useful to remind people of Israel’s role in the formation of Hamas, and right to emphasise the way it undermined the PLO. However, while the Israeli government will insist it can’t talk to terrorists or those who don’t recognise Israel’s right to exist, the Palestinian Authority will still have a role to play. Without it there would be direct conflict between the Israeli state and the Palestinian population.

Pressures in the Middle East will not be ‘relieved.’ They are actually intensifying. The war in Iraq shows every sign of continuing for years. The threats to Iran from the US are growing. The succession to Sharon is unclear. Syria retains its interests in everything that happens in Israel/Palestine. The one thing that is clear about Hamas’s advance is that it will further add to the instability in the area. Whether it becomes a more conventional party or uses its new position as a springboard for further military confrontation, it can only exacerbate the underlying conflicts in the area. These should not be attributed to the inability of Israeli and Palestinian, Jew and Arab to get on together, but to the persistent intervention of all the great powers in the area. The names might change but capitalism’s drive to imperialist conflict only worsens.
Car, 4.2.06

The first few weeks of the new year have seen renewed tensions over Iran, leading to a decision to send the issue to the UN security council.

On 5th January Tehran announced plans to resume research into nuclear fuel after a freeze of 30 months. It broke off further talks with the European powers that had been negotiating with it and refused to meet the International Atomic Energy Authority. When the threat of a referral to the UN was first made, Iran countered by threatening to block IAEA inspections of its facilities. It also raised the prospect of restricting its oil production, taunting its critics that “You need us more than we need you” (Iranian president Ahmadinejad quoted in The Observer 17/1/06), leading to speculation of oil prices of $100 a barrel. At the same time an intelligence briefing, drawing on the agencies of several European countries, was published as evidence of plans to develop nuclear weapons. During the same period the Iranian president also made a number of provocative statements denouncing the holocaust as a myth and suggesting that Israel be re-established in Europe or Canada.

This prompted a chorus of disapproval from around the world, including from China and Russia, who have traditionally been supportive of the country, and resulted in the unanimous decision to report Iran to the UN security council. However, this apparent unity of the great powers is no more real today than at any time over recent years.

Behind the false unity

The response of the major powers to the events in Iran is a consequence of the global situation of increasing tensions rather than a consequence of any moral outrage. In this, it is similar to the attitude towards Iraq before the start of the war there. In the run up to that war the situation was dominated by the offensive of US imperialism. Today it is dominated by America’s difficulties, and above all by the quagmire in Iraq where the losses continue to mount, the attempts to stage manage the return of democracy unravel as quickly as they are put together and daily life remains harsh. The unilateral assertion of US power that followed 9/11 and led into Iraq stands in contrast to its current efforts to construct a multilateral approach to Iran.

All of this presents the US’s rivals, great and small, with an opportunity. For its major rivals there is little need to do anything much beyond watch the US suffer. Indeed it is even possible to indulge in mild, hypocritical support for the US.

This does not mean there is any real unity among the various powers involved. On the contrary each is fighting for its own advantage against all the rest. At one end stands Britain, apparently the most supportive of Washington’s allies but actually, as we showed in the last article on this question in WR 289, resolutely pursuing its own interests. While Britain has been at the forefront of attacks on Iran’s nuclear aspirations and led the way in calling for a referral to the UN, it has openly opposed the possible use of force and has repeatedly stressed that UN action does not have to take the form of sanctions.

At the other end, China and Russia have been the most open supporters of Iran; until the last week they opposed involving the UN and called for more negotiations. China’s position has been ascribed to its need for Iranian oil, which is true in part, but it also has its own imperialist ambitions and has developed relations with countries such as Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Sudan, as well as Iran, all of which are seen as anti-US. Russia for its part continues to propose a solution whereby it would process uranium for Iran on its territory. Russia and China met Iran on February 2nd to continue their efforts to find a compromise. The price of the unanimous decision to report Iran to the UN was the agreement that this would be delayed for a month and that Iran would only be ‘reported’ to the UN rather than ‘referred’, since the latter implies that the UN actually has to do something.

In between stand Germany and France, the former with very significant trade with Iran. Both have condemned Iran’s actions and worked with Britain at talks in London on 18th January to draft the resolution to put before the International Atomic Energy Authority’s meeting on 1st February, calling for it to refer Iran to the UN. While this has given a platform for plenty of rhetoric – the French Foreign Minister stated recently that “Iran has challenged the entire international community. The international community has to respond to that challenge with firmness and efficiency” (Guardian 31/1/06) - practically it means the issue has been put into the labyrinth of international diplomacy.

None of this means that the US is going to just stand by. All that has happened since the end of the cold war, and after the attack on the Twin Towers especially, shows that the US remains determined and capable of responding to a changing situation, indifferent to the slaughter and suffering caused along the way. Thus the threat of military action against Iran, although confined to the occasional isolated senator, is a real one. The fact that Washington has seemed to wait for the EU Three to call for a referral should not be taken at face value. It called for such a referral earlier and has gone further in outlining the possible consequences. On January 7th, two days after Iran’s declaration that it would resume nuclear fuel research, Condoleeza Rice, US Secretary of State, declared “When it’s clear that negotiations are exhausted, we have the votes…There is a resolution sitting here for referral. We’ll vote it. That’s not sabre rattling, that’s diplomacy…and diplomacy includes what you do in the Security Council” (Guardian 8/1/06) Two weeks later president Bush reaffirmed America’s commitment to defend Israel, while Israel in turn has raised the prospect of attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities without any reprimand from the US. In the recent State of the Union address Bush declared that “the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons”.

Iran’s ambitions

In the previous article we noted that “this chaos [of the situation in Iraq]…is not merely encouraging Iran to be more bold; it is actually requiring it to be so if it is actually to have any chance of advancing its interests…The victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is fundamentally a symptom of the situation in the region rather than a cause”. This strategy has been continued and, with the recent threats to world oil prices, has become more daring. There is a logic to all of its actions: the attacks against Israel and the Jews, the declarations about the Holocaust, allow it to position itself at the radical edge of Islam and to present itself as the champion of the dispossessed Shia in Iraq and the oppressed Shia minorities in other parts of the Middle East. Thus, even while the tendency towards irrationality that emerged with the revolution of 1979 in Iran continues, expressing the weight of social decomposition, Iran’s strategy is also wholly within the imperialist logic of decadent capitalism. The radical language it addresses to the masses under the sway of Islam is fuelled by the same spread of chaos that pushes Iran towards greater defiance and greater radicalism in its strategy and tactics. The return to the language of the 1979 ‘revolution’ in Iran reflects this as does the recent election victory of Hamas in the Palestinian statelet. There is in all of this a coming together of factors that have a common root in the generalised chaos within capitalism as a whole and in the Middle East specifically.

However, the fact that Iran’s actions are not a simple outpouring of irrational rage can be seen in the control exercised over the radicalism, in the proposals for new talks that follow the denunciation of the West as being still in the dark ages, and in the claim that a compromise can still be reached after the threats of destruction against its enemies. It is evident too in the maintenance of diplomatic relations with neighbouring Arab countries, as well as with supposedly Communist China and corrupt, gangster-ridden Russia. It can be seen in the level of unity shown by the Iranian ruling class over the nuclear issue, with even moderates such as the former president giving support to the government’s strategy.

Of course, it goes without saying that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons, that it has bought plans and materials on the black market and is using nuclear power as a cover for its real aim. This is the goal of every aspiring international player.

Britain’s position

In the last article we reiterated the position that Britain has pursued its own imperialist strategy so that while “at times this has seen it going in the same direction as the US...its destination was never the same”. This remains the case. It has been at the forefront of condemning Iran, and when Blair supported a referral to the UN Security Council he raised the prospect of unspecified action: “Obviously we don’t rule out any measures at all. It’s important Iran recognises how seriously the international community treats it.” (Guardian Unlimited, 13/1/06). A day later, however, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw was more circumspect: “There are many issues which go on the agenda of the Security Council and which are actively discussed and where you then get action without sanctions. Everybody knows the range of measures available to the Security Council. The first decision for us to make is whether it goes on the agenda” (Guardian Unlimited, 14/01/06). A few days later, as we have seen, Britain joined France and Germany in drafting a resolution for the IAEA and was subsequently reported to be engaged alongside them in “an intensive round of worldwide lobbying…to try to maximise a vote on Iran” (Guardian 20/1/06). More recently, in response to the US’ position that keeping the military option open gave them ‘leverage’, Straw declared bluntly “I understand that’s the American position. Our position is different…There isn’t a military option and no one is talking about it” (Observer, 29/01/06).

Towards more death and destruction

The drawn-out crisis over Iran stands in continuity with US strategy since 9/11, but also shows the extent to which that offensive has slowed under the weight of events and has been unbalanced, delayed and diverted by the opposition of its rivals.

Are we then witnessing an unravelling of US strategy? The answer seems to be no; both because the US has vast untapped resources at its disposal and also because it has no real alternative. However, this does not mean that there might not be changes in tactics or tensions within the American ruling class as a consequence. Nor are we seeing the rise of any direct challenge to the US. All of its rivals have to speak the language of the ‘war on terror’, despite the fact that they frequently try to use the US’s words against it. All know that they lack the power to directly challenge the US, despite all the talk about the rise of China and the predictions that its military spending will outstrip that of the US over the next decades. However, the rational balancing of interests and resources exists alongside the more irrational pressures coming from the decomposition of capitalism and the drive to look after number one at all costs.

Will there be military action against Iran? At this point that cannot be answered. It fits into the logic of recent developments but it would also be a major escalation with profound and very widespread consequences. Iran is not Iraq. Its army is larger and better armed and it has stronger regional ties. This is one of the factors that allows it to act so defiantly.

What we can say is that whether there is war this time or not, the dynamic of violence, destruction and disorder throughout the region and beyond remains dominant.
North, 4/2/06

The ICC organises meetings, wherever it can, open to all those who sincerely want to change the world. Our public meetings and open meetings aim to be the place for fraternal debate where participants can pose questions and put arguments and analyses to the test.

So, during October and November the ICC section in France held meetings on the theme ‘Proletarian revolution is the sole perspective for the future of humanity’ in Tours, Marseille, Nantes, Toulouse, Paris and Lyons. Inevitably the burning question of the riots was the central preoccupation: how should we view the desperate violence of the young in the suburbs?

The discussion in Toulouse was particularly significant in showing the questioning going on in the working class on the riots. There was both a feeling of solidarity for the distress of its own children, as well as anger at seeing aggression among neighbours; at cars and neighbourhood schools being destroyed.

At the public meeting in Toulouse we opened the debate, as usual, with a short presentation. This showed how the working class is the only force in society that can change the world by overthrowing capitalism internationally. We integrated the question of the riots into the presentation, strongly underlining the despair expressed in these explosions of violence.

Burning cars, schools, buses, gyms… all this is completely self-destructive. No perspective, no hope, can come from these actions. Not knowing how to struggle, these young people attacked their parents and neighbours… The children of workers, unintentionally, took their anger out on their own class.

The rioters are the children of workers

There was immediately an animated discussion. Several participants criticised our position on the internet [1] [26] which inspired the presentation.

In the first intervention a comrade expressed his profound disagreement: “The ICC leaflet [2] [27] poses me a problem. The riots are shown as a revolt in itself. The leaflet struggles to put forward the stake of the class struggle. The ICC position is not sufficiently militant. There is also something lacking, solidarity for the living conditions of these young people. It is necessary to show the absurdity of capitalism and not to talk of youth in deprived areas. They are part of the working class … The leaflet has left out the question of class identity. As the PCI/Le Proletaire [3] [28] says in its leaflet, conscious or not, these young people belong to the working class. Similarly, in relation to the revolt of youth, where is the proletariat at this time? Faced with the social curfew, it is necessary to link the struggle of these young people to the proletariat.” A young contact, a member of the discussion circle in the town, followed up this intervention in these terms: “… I lived in a suburb and for me the young in the suburb certainly have no class consciousness nor even a notion of class, but these violent actions are against capitalism. It’s a revolt against the system …”. Lastly, a third participant concluded the first round of discussion in the same spirit: “in Mirail nearly 50% of proletarians are unemployed. The young can’t find work or only very little short term … It is necessary to put forward, not the weaknesses, but the proletarian perspective ….”

This reaction was not at all surprising. Quite the contrary. The suffering experienced by the children of our class, and the cynical use the bourgeoisie makes of it, explains in part this strong tendency in the meeting express feelings of solidarity towards society’s ‘rejects’. The spectacular explosion of urban violence brought to light the totally unbearable living conditions of a large part of working class youth. Besides, contrary to the criticism of our position, according to which it lacks “solidarity for the living conditions of these young people”, we affirmed unambiguously that: “If the young in the suburbs are rebelling today … it’s because they are sunk in a profound despair … It’s this feeling of ‘No Future’ which hundreds of thousands of young people are feeling today in France, as in many other countries. They feel it in their guts, every day, because of unemployment, because of the discrimination and disdain with which they are treated.”

These riots are foreign to the working class struggle

For all that, can we go so far as to say, as these comrades did, that “these violent actions are against capitalism” and that “it’s a revolt against the system”? What would that say to workers? Should we remain silent on the total absurdity of destruction for the sake of destruction? Ignore who are the main victims of these actions?

Evidently not. Workers also feel the effects of the riots in their guts. As one of the participants put it very clearly: “… As for the destruction of cars, some comrades have downplayed this in their interventions. Well, I tell them clearly that I hope that my car will not be burned, for, like other workers, I need it to travel.” The support for the rioters, or at least the underestimation of the nihilist aspect of the events, produced a reaction. Comrades present replied in a dynamic debate. “I disagree with what comrades said on the riots. It’s certainly a revolt against the bourgeois state, but it has no future. We cannot solidarise with those who destroy their neighbours’ cars, workers’ cars. We can understand it, since they are society’s rejects; capitalist society has nothing to offer them. There is anger. But we cannot agree with this violence. They have been going through unemployment and poverty for a number of years. It is a part of the class which is heavily attacked. That’s true. But these actions do not make us feel close to them. This has nothing to do with the class struggle.”

This sort of explosion of violence is, in fact, against the interests of the working class. It distils fear, withdrawal and division within its ranks. The bourgeoisie understands all this very well. It has orchestrated its propaganda of fear in order to justify the strengthening of its repressive arsenal. The riots have not increased proletarian consciousness. On the contrary, they are a favourable terrain for bourgeois ideology. The ruling class has used the desperate marginalised young to justify emergency security measures and so increase the policing of workers’ areas. Above all, it has momentarily been able to mask the bankruptcy of its system, calling the rioters “scum” and accusing immigrants of being the cause of all evil.

Consequently, we completely support the first comrade to intervene when he said “conscious or not, these young people belong to the working class”, but we can no longer follow him when he says: “it is necessary to link the struggle of these young people to the proletariat.” In reality the section of youth involved in the riots tends to be distanced from the proletarian struggle. And it is precisely because they are the children of workers that their destructive behaviour weighs so heavily against the working class. Here is a part of our class that has mistaken the road and the struggle. In this sense, if the proletariat has solidarity with victims of capitalism, and so with these desperate young, at the same time that does not mean to say that we must welcome this sort of revolt, because it is opposed to the proletariat’s needs. These riots do not belong to the struggle of the working class in any way.

Only the working class can offer a perspective for the future of humanity

We do not want to encourage such acts of violence, as the PCI/Le Proletaire have done in an ambiguous and erroneous way! In fact, their leaflet has the inflammatory title: ‘The suburban revolts indicate the resurgence in revolutionary proletarian struggle’. And the support for such revolts is clearer still at the end of the text: “long live the revolt against poverty, racism and oppression, of the young proletarians in the suburbs”!!!

How can we believe that these acts of violence directed against workers “indicate the resurgence of the revolutionary proletarian struggle”? The group has quite simply allowed itself to be deceived by the spectacular nature of the revolts and lost sight of what the class struggle is, in both its form and content. The proletariat tends towards unity in its struggle and so develops solidarity. These riots, on the contrary, are the product of individual resentment and have no perspective but destruction and self-destruction.

The PCI/Le Proletaire have turned everything upside down. They claim that the young rioters are injecting a dynamic into the whole working class, which is at present listless. This is the exact opposite of the truth. The proletariat has already started to take up the path of struggle again. Since the strikes in spring 2003 in France, the working class is reaffirming itself everywhere, in an embryonic way certainly, but with both its militancy and natural tendency to solidarity developing. The riots are not an accelerator but on the contrary a brake on this development of class struggle.

Of course the young rioters are victims of the capitalist system. Of course they are a part of the working class that is suffering particularly badly. But how do we express our solidarity with these workers’ children? Certainly not by spreading illusions or following them in their cry of distress. The working class must not follow the young towards self-destruction; on the contrary, it must draw them in behind it. It has the capacity and the responsibility to show the perspective for the future. As we say in our position on the internet: “It’s because, up till now, the working class has not had the strength to affirm this perspective through the development and extension of its struggles, that so many of its children are plunging into despair, expressing their revolt in absurd ways or taking refuge in the mirages of religion, which promises them a paradise after they are dead. The only real solution to the ‘crisis of the disinherited neighbourhoods’ is the development of the proletarian struggle towards the revolution. It is this struggle alone which can give a meaning and a perspective to the whole revolt of the younger generation”!!!

A fraternal debate

Traditionally we end our meetings by allowing everyone who wishes to give their impressions on the conduct and quality of the meeting, to reaffirm agreement or state any remaining disagreement or pose any questions which have not been taken up but need to be debated.

Generally the participants felt a certain satisfaction and showed real interest in this public meeting.

The comrades who had raised their disagreements also welcomed the debate. However, two comrades regretted that the ICC had not intervened in these neighbourhoods, and in the rest of the working class, with a leaflet. This showed that the differences, although limited, still remained at the end of the meeting.

In any case, ICC meetings are not intended to give an exhaustive explanation closing all debate. On the contrary, the richness and the dynamic of the discussion raised many more questions than answers. For example, we only touched on the fundamental difference between the destructive violence of these riots and the creative violence used by the working class, violence necessarily used in its overthrow of capitalist order. The subject is far from exhausted.

We conclude with an extract from a letter from a young contact, who had come to an ICC public meeting for the first time, showing the fraternal spirit which animated the debate:

“What I particularly appreciated in the conduct of the debate (and which I have rarely experienced in any other situation whether personal or professional), was the fact that it was possible to really listen to what everyone was saying, to follow closely and respond to the preoccupations raised by those present, without losing sight of the question posed and the necessity to contribute and respond … These events (the urban violence) seem absurd, because of their lack of objective and the means they use, which do not seem to be part of the logic of the class struggle, but they raised lots of questions for those in the meeting and it seems necessary to give them a lot of attention, and the ICC has done this. These events are not part of a revolutionary logic (and even in terms of revolt they are hard to understand, taking account of the targets of the violence). But it seemed necessary to analyse them in order to define and characterise the events and the rioters, in order to be able to look at the growing signs of proletarian activity, and to examine the question of proletarian organisation in a perspective of revolution…”.
Pawel  15.12.05

On 23 December, in the SEAT car factory in Barcelona, the workers on the morning and afternoon shifts spontaneously went on strike, in solidarity with 660 comrades who the day before had received dismissal letters from management.

It was the beginning of a response to a criminal attack on their living conditions. An attack planned well in advance and treacherously carried out by the infernal triangle of bosses, the ‘Generalidad’ (Catalan regional government), and the unions. An attack which went well beyond the 660 lay-offs, since there was also the disciplinary sacking of workers who had taken part in actions at the beginning of December, 296 ‘voluntary’ redundancies, and plans for the intensification of exploitation without any increase in wages…This was a brutal attack which will open the door to further attacks. It was no accident that the company’s president provocatively announced that “the measures contained in the accord will not reabsorb the entirety of the excess in the workforce”.

Like the comrades at SEAT and like all workers, we have to fight back. But to fight back with strength, we have to quickly draw the lessons from the strategy of manipulation and demobilisation pursued by bosses, government and unions.

A strategy calculated to demobilise the workers

From the moment in mid-August that the company announced the “necessity” for a reduction in personnel, as well as a 10% cut in wages, the representatives of the company, as well as those who are supposed to represent the workers, i.e. the unions and the ‘left wing’ regional government, have shared out the roles to prevent a real workers’ struggle from blocking their plans.

For more than two months, from August to the beginning of December, the union representatives devoted themselves to anaesthetising the workers’ anxiety about the question of redundancies, saying that they weren’t justified because the company was making a profit: the crisis at SEAT was only temporary or was simply the result of poor trade policies. With such lies – which we attacked in our leaflet ‘SEAT, Saving the company means lay-offs and dead-end contracts. The only response is the workers’ struggle’ – they got the workers to lower their guard, making them believe that all this was just bravado by the greedy bosses, which would soon be put in its place by the economic studies carried out by the unions or by pressure from the ‘progressive’ regional government. The bosses also played their part in this mystification, playing hide and seek for weeks until on 7 November they announced the ERE (Procedure for the Regulation of Employment) for 1346 workers.  

The unions had proposed a partial strike for that day, but the workers’ demonstrations went beyond this; in two industrial zones in the Barcelona suburbs, they mounted road blocks. Faced with this situation, the United Platform (in which the main union organisations, UGT, CCOO and CGT, participate [1] [34]) called for a one day strike on 10 November, and a demonstration to ‘demand’ that the regional government “gets involved in the conflict on the side of the workers”(!). With this action the three unions intended, as we put it, “to entrust our fate to our executioners, to the masters of fine words and the knife in the back. The state is not the representative of the people but the unconditional defender of the interests of the national capital. All the authorities – from the president of the government to the least local mayor – are there to guard those interests”.

After this masquerade, the three unions washed their hand of the problem and no longer called for the slightest action until 1 December! That’s three weeks during which the workers were kept passively waiting around, while the unions engaged in interminable ‘negotiations’ followed by the ‘mediation’ of the regional labour relations chief, Senior Rane. As we said in the leaflet, “this tactic of ‘pressure’ and ‘petitions’ dupes the workers and makes them passive”.

The United Platform attempted to get back in the saddle after the holiday week of 5-10 December. But this was just another lie! Using as a pretext the legal limits imposed by the ERE, and the pressure from the regional government which was wielding the threat of ‘arbitration’, they ‘forgot’ the mobilisation and, on 15 December, the CCOO and UGT (the CGT having withdrawn on the 13th) signed the agreement for the 660 redundancies.

But the worst was yet to come: they stayed quiet for a whole week about who the victims were to be. It wasn’t until the last day before the holidays that the disclosed the main part of the dismissal notices; and they scaled the heights of cynicism and humiliation by treating the workers concerned like criminals. This vile manoeuvre unmasked them (hadn’t they said that they had signed the “best deal possible”?) and showed that they are afraid of the workers, because if they had felt sure of themselves, they would have announced the redundancies right away, and wouldn’t have employed extra security agents to guard the offices of the UGT and the CCOO.

The struggle must be run by workers’ assemblies

The CGT played the role of the ‘good trade union’, which stays with the workers. It’s true that 145 of its members were among those laid off. But the sufferings of those comrades and the need for solidarity with them can’t hide the fact that the CGT is no alternative to the UGT-CCOO and that it is every bit their equal. Why did it participate in the farce of negotiations and the ‘struggle’ of the United Platform, which it only left very late, on 13 December? Why, when the UGT and the CCOO signed the deal, was the only ‘mobilisation’ it called a rally outside the factory, with very few workers being told about it, and which only drew in 200 workers? Why on the morning of the 23rd, before the spontaneous strike, did “The CGT decide to limit the protest to a few hours only” (cf the internet site Kaosenlared, 24.12.05), at the very time when there was a real push from the workers, as shown by the fact that afternoon shift held an assembly and decided to stay out for the whole day? Why did any alternative suggested by the CGT reduce itself to “reviewing each lay-off on a case by case basis and if necessary taking the matter to the courts”?

Up until the 23rd, the workers were the victims of a demobilisation, of a strategy to prevent any response. The unions aren’t just playing with us when they sign redundancy deals; they also play with us when they organise their ‘Struggle Plans’. Their action against the workers has three interlinked aspects:

-            their pacts and agreements with the bosses and the government,

-            their plans for ‘struggle’ which are in fact strategies against the struggle,

-            their unconditional defence of the interests of the company and the national economy, which they claim coincide with the interests of the workers, when in fact they are diametrically opposed.

This is why the main lesson of the struggle at SEAT, which the workers themselves are beginning to draw in practice through the spontaneous strikes and assemblies of the 23rd, is that we cannot entrust the struggle to the unions.

On the 23rd, the laid-off workers, instead of going home and sitting alone anguishing about the prospect of unemployment, turned towards their comrades; and the latter, instead of consoling themselves with the thought that “it’s not happening to me”, or behind the individualist response of “every one should do what they can”, demonstrated their solidarity in the struggle. This kind of solidarity, this common response by those who are being made redundant with those who still have their jobs, between employed and unemployed, between those with ‘precarious’ contracts and those with long term contracts, is the basis for an effective reply to the inhuman plans of the capitalists.

The year 2006 has begun with the drama of the 660 lay-offs at SEAT, but who can believe that these will be the last? We know that they won’t be. We know that the blows of redundancies, the crime of industrial accidents, the anguish caused by a lack of affordable housing, the threats to pensions, the endless ‘reforms’ being concocted by the infernal trio of government, bosses and unions, will be the source of new suffering. That in the automobile sector, as in all other sectors, as in all countries, the attacks on the living conditions of the workers will continue; that the horrors of war, poverty and hunger, which go with capitalism like vultures go with death, will continue.

This is why we have to struggle. But for the struggle to be effective and powerful, the development of class solidarity is vital, and it must be organised and controlled by the workers themselves.  

The need for class solidarity

The problem at SEAT can’t be reduced to the 660 redundancies; the problem involves the whole workforce. It’s not just the problem of the SEAT workers but of all workers, both state employees who have a ‘guaranteed job’ (until when?) and workers in private enterprises, workers with or without legal status in the country. We are all in the same situation as the SEAT workers!

Our strength is class solidarity, unity in the struggle. A struggle limited to SEAT and closed in at SEAT will be a defeated struggle.

But what do we mean by solidarity? Does it mean boycotting this or that brand? Does it mean declarations of ‘support’ from the ‘critical wing’ of the CCOO or the EUA? [2] [35] Does it mean ‘citizens’ actions’ in the neighbourhoods?

This kind of solidarity is just as false as the ‘Struggle Plans’ of the United Platform. The only real solidarity is to unite in the struggle. It means workers from different sectors, different areas joining in the same struggle, breaking through the barriers which weaken us: company, sector, nationality, race, coming together in assemblies, delegations and demonstrations.

The necessity for sovereign workers’ assemblies

The experience at SEAT is clear: we already know what happens when we leave our fate in the hands of the unions.

The direction of the struggle has to be in the hands of the workers from start to finish. It’s the workers who have to evaluate the forces they can count on, the demands to put forward, the possibilities of extending the struggle. Their response can’t be influenced by the provocations of the bosses, or the ‘Struggle Plans’ of their accomplices the unions, but by the collective decision of the workers organised in assemblies and in elected and revocable committees. Negotiations with bosses or the government must be carried out in full view of everyone, as was the case at Vitoria in 1976 or in Poland in 1980. It was the assemblies themselves who took charge of looking for solidarity by organising delegations and demonstrations.

The time for resignation, passivity and disorientation must come to an end. The margin of manoeuvre that this situation has offered capital for years is getting slimmer. It’s time to fight back. The voice of the working class must be heard with increasing volume.

Leaflet distributed by Accion Proletaria, ICC section in Spain, December 2005