The dominant fraction of the U.S. ruling class has utilized the November election as a means to adjust the implementation of imperialist policy, to force a recalcitrant Bush administration to make a much needed midcourse correction in Iraq. By last winter a consensus had emerged within the dominant fraction that the situation in Iraq was an absolute mess, a quagmire that jeopardized the long range, global interests of American imperialism. The U.S. military was clearly stretched so thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that it was incapable of responding to threats in other parts of the world. This was an intolerable situation because the exercise of military might abroad is an absolute necessity for American imperialism in a period in which its hegemony is under increasing challenge. To make matters worse, the Bush administration’s bungling of the war in Iraq had completely squandered the ideological gains the U.S. ruling class had made in manipulating popular acceptance of its overseas imperialist adventures in the aftermath of 9/11. 

The emergence of this consensus led last March to creation of a bipartisan commission, the Iraq Study Group, led by James A. Baker, III, close adviser and friend to the elder George Bush. Baker had served as treasury secretary in the Reagan administration and as secretary of state under Bush senior during the first U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991. Former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, was named co-chair of the study group. Comprised overwhelmingly of prominent officials from the Reagan, Bush senior, and Clinton administrations, the commission in essence represented the continuity of the permanent state capitalist apparatus, which saw the need to force the ruling team to alter course.

The initial work of this commission was conducted secretly and in confidence, but in the course of the electoral campaign, its members, both Democrats and Republicans increasingly spoke out in public, critiquing specifically the administration’s often repeated “stay the course” refrain. They derided the administration’s polarizing political rhetoric, pitting “stay the course” vs. “cut and run,” as incapable of advancing national imperialist interests. The administration’s tendency to put in doubt the patriotism of its bourgeois critics was clearly unacceptable. Indeed the media conveyed the message, emanating from the commission, that this simplistic policy dichotomy reflected an untenable position that implied a loss of touch with reality. So strong was this pressure, which by early September the President actually stopped using the “stay the course” slogan.  Of course, Bush still stubbornly certainly seemed to cling to this view, as he still continued to denounce the Democrats as the party of “cut and run”, and the content of his own message still stressed the need to fight on in Iraq until victory was achieved. However the Study Group had effectively laid the basis for a change in policy even before the election.  

In Internationalism 140 we predicted that the impending Democratic victory:  “would increase pressure for extra-electoral adjustments in the administration, including perhaps the forced resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld”.

Confirmation of this prediction came almost immediately with the announcement of the forced resignation of defense secretary Rumsfeld and the designation of a successor by 1pm the day after the election. If bourgeois media reports can be believed, as early as the weekend before the election, Bush had already asked Rumsfeld to step down and decided to replace him with Robert Gates, a veteran national security agent, who served as CIA director under the elder George Bush. Demonstrating even more graphically the role of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group as the mechanism for reasserting control by the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie over a badly misled and misdirected ruling political team, it must be noted that Gates was in fact a member of the Iraq Study Group (he stepped down only after his nomination as defense secretary). Gates generally subscribes to Baker’s cautious approach to imperialist policy and criticisms of the current administration’s approach. The “extra-electoral adjustments in the administration” involve not simply a change in personalities but the imposition of a policy change. The transference of key decision-making roles to people who can be relied upon to implement the bipartisan perspectives of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie on imperialist policy are essential in this regard.

The reinvigoration of the democratic mystification accomplished by the November election is important for the bourgeoisie because a belief that the system works is a precondition for popular acquiescence in what is to come. Despite the popular revulsion against the war, particularly in the working class, the election is of course not a victory for peace, but rather a victory for the bourgeoisie’s effort to prepare for the next war, by repairing the damage done to the U.S. military, intelligence and foreign policy apparatus by the Bush administration’s mistakes.

Developing a more effective imperialist strategy

The real debate within the bourgeoisie over Iraq does not pit hawks against doves, but hawks against hawks on how best to extricate themselves from the quagmire and prepare for the next overseas military adventure. As the “dovish” New York Times wrote in its editorial two days after the election, “Mr. Gates’ most urgent task, assuming he is confirmed, must be to reopen those necessary channels of communication with military, intelligence and foreign service professionals on the ground. After hearing what they have to say, he needs to recommend a realistic new strategy to Mr. Bush in place of the one that is now demonstrably failing…He will have to rebuild a badly overstretched Army, refocus military transformation by trading in unneeded cold war weapons for new technologies more relevant to current needs, and nurture a more constructive relationship with Congressional oversight committees”.

Since the election, the general chiefs of staff moved quickly to assert their independence of the discredited Rumsfeld. The chiefs have undertaken a reassessment of the military situation in Iraq, searching for their own policy alternatives even before Gates is confirmed and before the Iraq Study Group issues its recommendations in mid-December. The Army has already released a new training manual that reverses one of Rumsfeld’s more controversial policies regarding minimal troop levels for occupation and reconstruction operations following military invasions, a policy that has been disastrous in Iraq.

Freed from an obligation to toe the line set forth previously by the lame duck Rumsfeld, General Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, testified before Senate and House committees in mid-November and openly criticized and contradicted Rumsfeld’s and Bush’s past decisions and policies in Iraq. For instance, regarding the long-simmering dispute between the armed services and Rumsfeld over necessary troop levels in Iraq, Abizaid testified that General Eric Shinseki  - who was fired by Rumsfeld in 2003 for criticizing Rumsfeld’s doctrine of sparse occupation force deployments and insisting that up to 300,000 troops might be necessary - had been correct in his assessment of the situation.

Abizaid also contradicted the administration’s long-standing propaganda line by insisting that the greatest threat in Iraq came not from Al Qaeda but from sectarian militias that were on the brink of civil war. Abizaid opposed both a phased troop withdrawal, as advocated by some Democrats, and a deployment of thousands more troops, as advocated by Republican Senator John McCain. Instead he called for a policy change that would shift deployment of significant numbers of American troops from patrol and combat assignments to training Iraqi security forces.

Despite popular disenchantment with the war and widespread support for withdrawal, there will in fact be no quick military withdrawal from Iraq. In all likelihood, despite some stubborn resistance from certain neo-cons still remaining in the administration, there will be the implementation in large measure of whatever the bipartisan proposal that comes from Iraq Study Group in December. This will likely involve stepped up pressure on the Iraqi bourgeoisie to reach compromises within itself, some kind of timetable for phased withdrawal, and a reversal of the Bush administration’s refusal to talk to Syria and Iran. Baker has already said publicly that it is important to talk to your “enemies” and believes that the involvement of regional powers is essential in stabilizing Iraq and preventing the spread of chaos throughout the Middle East. Indeed it increasingly appears that the Baker commission may lean towards some sort of accommodation with Iran as a key element in the new orientation. The Study Group has leaked rumors about possibly convening a regional conference in the Middle East on the future of Iraq (similar to the Dayton negotiations on Kosovo). The Bush administration has already started moving in this direction by opening regional discussions with friendly nations like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt. While the administration may drag its feet on Iranian and Syrian involvement, it is inevitable that that orientation will eventually prevail. It is the only option available that would allow the U.S. to extricate itself from the Iraq quagmire, maintain a presence in the region, and counter European overtures toward Iran and Syria.

Adjustment of the situation in the Middle East will lay the basis for the American imperialism to more effectively orient itself towards challenges in the Far East and Latin America.

The reassertion of political discipline within the bourgeoisie, the rekindling of the democratic mystification, the realignment of the ruling political team, and the adjustment of its imperialist policies are important achievements for the American ruling class. However, these accomplishments cannot mitigate the impact of the deepening global economic crisis, the growing challenges to American imperialist hegemony, and increasing chaos on the international level. As we have written many times, in the world today, the U.S. confronts a crisis of American imperialism, not a crisis of George Bush. While perhaps this crisis has been aggravated by the miscues of the Bush administration in implementing U.S. policy, it is a crisis of the system, not one attributable to an individual. It is a central characteristic of the current period that whatever actions the U.S. takes to defend its challenged imperialist hegemony, in the end they accomplish the opposite of their intended goal – only aggravating, not correcting, the challenges to U.S. imperialism. For the moment the bourgeoisie can relish the current post-election political euphoria, but it cannot last for long. J. Grevin, 2/12/06.

‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is a film about the impending disaster facing planet Earth because of global warming and the dreadful consequences for humanity if nothing is done to reverse the current course. Global warming results from the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, like coal and gasoline/petrol. Global average temperatures are predicted to rise by anything from 1.4 °C to 5.8 °C over the period 1990 to 2100.

The evidence

The film tells us that of the 21 hottest years ever recorded, 20 have come in the last 25 years and the hottest of all was 2005. We see photographs of various mountains and mountain ranges from all around the world and see how the extensive snows and glaciers that previously covered their peaks have drastically diminished. In the Himalayas, for example, this means reduced irrigation for those who inhabit the lower plains with a serious threat to their livelihoods. We then see pictures of the polar ice caps and are told how the ice functions in reflecting the sun’s heat, but as the ice caps reduce in size and more ocean becomes visible, it absorbs heat and this accelerates the melting process (the ice cover on the Artic Ocean is melting away at 9% per year).

And as the ice caps melt, the more the oceans are rising and more places become submerged by water. Some populations on Indian Ocean islands are already having to evacuate. And we were told that in the not too distant future, assuming nothing is done, cities like San Francisco and Shanghai, regions like Florida and southern India and countries like Holland and Bangladesh, because they lie close to sea level, could be under water.

The film also refers to how the warmer atmosphere has been the key factor in extreme weather, of which there are numerous examples in recent years.  (There have been many more unnatural rainfalls and freak floods across China, India and Central Europe). One of the worse examples was the floods in Mumbai in 2005 which saw 37 inches  of rain in 24 hours, killing 1000 people.

There have been extremes of hot and cold, like the extremely hot summer across Europe in 2003 that killed thousands of elderly people. In 2005 fires burned out of control in Portugal and Spain due to the exceptionally dry conditions. There has been an exceptionally cold winter across Russia.

Then there have been many highly destructive hurricanes and tornados in the Caribbean region, and typhoons in the Far East (Hurricane Mitch wreaked destruction on Guatemala City in 1998). 12 months ago Hurricane Katrina devastated Florida but instead of burning itself out as it moved off shore, it entered the Caribbean and sucked in the rising heat, re-charging its power before it set of in the direction of New Orleans.

The film also shows global warming’s effects in central Africa. Lake Chad, that sits between two war-torn places, Niger and Darfur, has shrivelled up to about a fifth of its previous size, which can only further worsen the wretched living conditions of those who depended on its waters.

The animal kingdom is suffering too with more species disappearing as their habitats come under attack or disappear. We were also told of the damaging affect of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide on the oceans and their creatures living there (carbon dioxide dissolves in the sea to form carbonic acid). We were shown pictures of the devastating effects this is having on the coral reefs.

The warmer temperatures are also leading to an increase in tropical diseases, as disease carriers like mosquitoes are surviving more easily in the warmer conditions. And certain parasitic insects that winter frosts would have previously wiped out are destroying forested areas.

And to make the scenario even more frightening still, the film explains that global warming could affect the movement of the oceans, and the important circulation of heat and cold carried by the ocean currents to and fro across the globe. For example, a massive release of water from the melting of the Artic ice-cap could seriously interfere with Gulf Stream that brings the heat from the equatorial belt to the northern hemisphere. This could eventually lead to parts of Europe and America freezing over.

And we are told that despite the fact that some people claim there is dispute among scientists about the scientific evidence, this is untrue. There is broadly a 100% acceptance among scientists about these statistics and these predictions.

The presenter

Al Gore spent two terms as US Vice-President and, after narrowly failing to win the presidency, has transformed himself into an eco-warrior. The format of the film has him lecturing students somewhere in the US with a large screen on which he projects his photographs, graphics and computer animations to illustrate his prognosis.  However, the film has a parallel theme. This is the story of Al Gore, the Man. We see him growing up, are told of how a serious car accident nearly killed his young son and made him see how precious life is. We are told of how he was instrumental in raising environmental issues inside the Clinton Administration, and are encouraged to believe that if he had won the presidency over that nasty warmonger, George W, we would all be able to rest more comfortably in our beds.

He tells us the US is the number one polluter and has refused to implement the Kyoto agreement on reducing /trading carbon emissions (though some north eastern states and California have now unilaterally agreed to implement Kyoto).

The Bushes are hand in glove with the oil industry and the Bush Administration even had an official in charge of environmental issues who doctored reports until he was forced to resign (Gore’s  ‘Inconvenient Truth’ refers to these distortions of the facts by the Bush Administration and the oil industry).

Considering he was at the heart of the US government in the latter half of the 1990s, when the issue was neglected just as much by the US government as it is now[1] [3], it’s not surprising that Al Gore doesn’t make a big issue of the need for state intervention to deal with the problem. In fact, we see a lot of him travelling around the lecture theatres of the world spreading the news, and quite pathetically he declares that the only way he knows of getting this message across is by going

“from city to city, from person to person, from family to family” as if the salvation of the planet is can only be solved at the individual level. Logically, the film ends with a farcical shopping list of things to do to make our lives more eco-friendly.

Like the rest of the Environmental lobby, like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, all this film does is use the horrors of global warming in order to increase our feeling of impotence in the face of impending disaster and to make us believe there is an alternative under capitalism.  The real message from the Green Lobby is that we can spread the propaganda and pressure the governments and parliaments into taking a rational course of action, in other words, “trust in bourgeois democracy”.

Can state intervention solve the problem?

Contrary to the view of Jonathan Porritt that capitalism can solve the crisis of global warming, the reality is quite the opposite.

The Kyoto Agreement set emission targets for each country but they have been largely been ignored. Meanwhile “The G8 communiqué on climate change at the end of the Gleneagles Summit… was a significant and long-awaited expression of political agreement… of the consequent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions… (but) the conclusions were based on the false assumptions that the necessary cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from human activity in affluent countries around the world can largely be achieved through the more efficient use of fossil fuels and increased research, development and investment in technology, particularly in renewable energy. In practice, this cannot be sufficient either on scale or in the timescale required.. The only action now open to government is to slow the pace of damaging change. Yet the scale of preventative action it is actually taking is pathetically inadequate”(‘Your planet and how to save it’ in The Independent 19/9/05).

Capitalism may have various global institutions within which the competitor nation states participate, but it is an illusion to believe they express a capacity for cooperation and rational decision-making at the international level. In fact, their decisions only replicate the power relations between the participants. The fundamental relations of capitalism are those of competition and the market and with the permanent economic crisis and imperialist wars, there can be no accommodation reached for offsetting environmental destruction.   In the ravenous search for profits, the irrational flood of goods and services and people around the globe, and the competition between nation states in the search to squeeze out profits, means the degradation of the environment will only continue.  Capitalism only produces for maximum profit and the ferocious competition between companies and nation states demands that each one expands to the maximum or goes under, gobbling up whatever natural resources feed the hunt for profit. The solution of the environmental crisis lies in the abolition of production for profit and the introduction of production for need, but this cannot happen without the global overthrow of the capitalist system.

Capitalism is clearly the problem, not the solution. The scientific and technical tools are there to enable us to develop a precise understanding of the present predicament of global warming and its causes.  Marxism provides us with the framework for understanding where the problem lies at the social level.  But the practical implications of the marxist method can only be realised by them taking root inside the working class. Workers can have no illusions in capitalism being able to find a way out from its current course. It’s only by becoming conscious of capitalism’s total bankruptcy and of its own capacity to free humanity from this nightmare that there can be hope for the future.

Duffy, 2/12/06.

Presentation to the ICC Public Forums, Winter 2006

What is communism and how do we get there?

Communism is not a ‘nice idea’; it’s a material necessity. Not a nice idea? Actually, for most of the past century we have been told that it’s a very bad idea, because it means a totalitarian state, poverty wages, superpower politics, labour camps, etc. But despite the vast lie that communism=Stalinism, the idea still persisted that Stalinism wasn’t really communism at all, certainly not the communism envisaged by Marx. But there’s another line of defence: what happened in Russia proves it’s no more than a ‘nice idea’, unworkable in practice because of human nature or the complexities of the modern world. In fact, the very attempt to put it into practice is bound to end in something horrible. So better put up with what we’ve got…

Our point of departure – that of Marxism – is that communism isn’t a ‘nice idea’ because it’s not some scheme invented by well-meaning reformers, but corresponds to a necessity and a possibility provided by the dynamic of history. It’s a necessity because the present organisation of human society – capitalism – has reached a point where it is the system that can’t work for humanity. It has developed man’s powers of production to an unprecedented degree, but in such a manner that these very powers are turning against mankind and threatening to overwhelm him. This is evident when we look at the way technology and science are being used not to free mankind from useless toil and satisfy the basic material needs of the human species, but to create vast arsenals of extermination, to despoil the natural environment, and to serve the needs of a tiny exploiting minority. The very continuation of capitalism, in fact, has become a danger to humanity’s survival, whether through war, ecological collapse, or a combination of both. So getting rid of the present system is not just a nice idea, it’s a historic necessity that is imposed on mankind. It’s possible because the system has set in motion forces that can overcome it: the productive capacity to create abundance and thus end exploitation, and a social class which has a material interest in making a revolution against capitalism, in abolishing capitalist social relations. But note that necessity does not equal inevitability: communism is possible, but so too is the other alternative: the collapse into total barbarism.

When we answer the question ‘what is communism’, it is often necessary to begin with negatives. Certainly by saying ‘it’s not the USSR, China or Cuba’. But more generally by showing what features of the present system have to be got rid of. We could, for example, say:

a) Communism is a society without classes. It’s a basic axiom of the dominant ideology that society always has one bunch of people at the top and the rest at the bottom, with a few in the middle. In other words, that class divisions have always existed and will always exist. In fact, class society is quite a recent invention historically speaking. For tens of thousands of years human beings lived in a ‘primitive’ form of communism, also imposed by necessity. Class divisions emerged over a long period but finally gave rise to the first ‘civilisations’. So communism does set itself a pretty ambitious task is saying it’s going to get rid of thousands of years of class exploitation, which took various forms before capitalism arrived on the scene (despotism, slavery, serfdom…). But at the same time the existence of primitive communism disproves the argument that there’s something ‘natural’ about class divisions. They arose at a certain stage of history because of the old egalitarian social relations became a barrier to the development of the productive forces; but the present social relations have themselves become a barrier to further progress; what is now needed is to get rid of class divisions and private property and create a true community, where all wealth is controlled by the community for its own needs, not for the needs of a privileged minority;

b) Because it’s a society without classes, it’s a society without a state. The state has not been there for all time but arose as society split into contending classes, with the function of preserving social cohesion in the interests of the dominant class. Get rid of class divisions and you get rid of the state. This is already an answer to all those who argue that the more the state controls the economy, the closer we get to socialism or communism;

c) Communism is a society without money. In other words: unlike in capitalism where everything is produced for sale and to make a profit, in communism the motive of production is to meet human needs. Money will become unnecessary because production and consumption are no longer mediated by exchange. Again, this is possible because it has finally become feasible to produce enough for everybody’s needs, so goods can be freely distributed, even if, as with the problem of the state, this can’t be solved overnight. And it’s a necessity because producing for profit is the source of all the contradictions of the capitalist economy – the tendency towards the fall in the rate of profit and the crisis of overproduction. These contradictions once spurred capitalism to become a world wide system, and in this sense laid the foundations for communism, but at a certain point they became the source of growing catastrophes which demand a fundamental reorganisation of the whole system of production;

d) Communism is also a society without national frontiers. Capitalism developed the nation state as its ‘highest’ form of unity, but again, the very form of the nation state has become a fundamental obstacle, a danger for humanity, because capitalist competition has essentially become economic and military warfare between armed powers for the control of the globe. But despite this ‘war of each against all’, the system still functions as whole and it is impossible to escape its laws inside one region or country. The revolution has to be worldwide, and the new social organisation has to use all the earth’s resources in common. This is evident, for example, when it comes to dealing with the ecological crisis.

These are all negative definitions. Which doesn’t mean that communism is just negation. Marxists have always avoided ‘recipes’ but from the young Marx onwards there have been attempts to describe in positive terms what communism, especially in its more advanced phases, will be like: labour as a source of pleasure not torture; the fusion of work, science and art; man’s harmony with nature ‘without and within’ and thus the overcoming of the conflict between consciousness and instinct…. 

For us, these attempts by Marxists to describe the distant communist future are not ‘utopian’ because they are based on real human capacities: as Trotsky put it, the average human being will one day be as creative as Goethe or Shakespeare, but Goethe and Shakespeare are also only human, products of real human life. But they are also not utopian because communism is, as Marx put it, is “the real movement that abolishes the present state of affairs”. In one sense, this movement is the movement of all the exploited and oppressed classes in history, but more specifically, it is the movement of the proletariat, the working class. From the beginning Marx based his understanding of communism on the recognition that there was a class in society whose struggle had an implicitly communist dynamic - a class which could only emancipate itself by emancipating the whole of society from thousands of years of exploitation.

The proletarian struggle contains a dynamic towards communism because this is a class that can only defend itself in an associated manner, through the widest possible solidarity – and the society of the future is a society founded on solidarity. It contains a dynamic towards communism because communism is the first society in history where mankind will have a conscious mastery of its own productive powers – and the class struggle of the proletariat cannot advance without becoming increasingly conscious of its methods and its goals. From the beginning therefore, these fundamental needs of the class movement, the need for solidarity and the need to become conscious of its goals, gave rise to organised forms – trade unions, mutual aid societies, cooperatives on the one hand; and political organisations or parties on the other. Constantly subject to the pressure of the dominant class and its ideology, these forms often disappeared or were captured by the enemy class, but the class struggle constantly gave rise to new forms more suited to its own evolution.

Thus, as capitalism reached the end of its ascendant course, as it entered its epoch of decline, the proletarian movement was no longer simply confronted with the need to define and defend itself within the existing order, but to turn defence into attack and mount a challenge to the very foundations of that order. Marx had deduced that the class struggle would lead to revolution from the first defensive skirmishes of proletarians hardly evolved from their artisan roots. But even in his lifetime the capacity of the working class to storm the heavens was demonstrated in practice by the Paris Commune, the first “workingman’s government”, the first indication of the capacity of the working class to overturn the existing state power and set up its own form of power. The capacity of the proletariat to organise itself as a force antagonistic to capital was further demonstrated by the mass strikes in Russia in 1905, and on an even higher level by the revolutionary wave that arose in response to the First World War, the highest point of all being the seizure of power by the soviets or workers’ councils in Russia. The workers’ councils, as Lenin observed, were the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. A form which allowed the whole working class to regroup, to control its struggles through mass assemblies and revocable delegates, to fuse the economic and the political dimension of the struggle, to arm itself and destroy the bourgeois state. A form, finally, which allowed the consciousness of the working class to progress by leaps and bounds, influenced decisively by the intervention of the most advanced fraction of the class, the communist party.

The revolutionary wave that followed the war was defeated. In Russia, where the working class for the first time took power at the level of an entire country, the revolution was strangled by isolation and the very instruments that had served it at one stage turned against it at another. But from this tragic experience, vital lessons were learned, in particular: the necessity for the workers’ councils to maintain their autonomy from all other political institutions that may arise after the destruction of the old apparatus of power; the impossibility of the communist party taking on tasks that belong to the class as a whole, above all the exercising of political power; the understanding that the nationalisation of the economy does not mean a break with capitalist social relations.

Despite the historic defeat suffered by the working class at that time, despite all the horrors that followed in its wake - Stalinist and Nazi terror, a second imperialist world war – we do not therefore conclude that the communist revolution is an impossible dream, but remain determined to preserve and develop these lessons so that they can feed into the revolution of the future. WR, 23/11/06.   

Five years ago the world experienced a terrible turning point, representing at once change and continuity: the attacks against the World Trade Center in the world metropolis New York. The attacks that killed thousands of innocent people, marked a new stage in capitalism’s capacity to kill.

With the downfall of the Eastern bloc in 1989, with state leaders proclaiming a new era of peace, the old Western concept of the communist enemy had to be replaced. However, ever since 9/11 the ruling class has been successful in creating a new concept of an enemy that appears to correspond to the capitalist reality of war since 1989: the war against terror. This is a very hazy term and has the advantage that it can be used in theory against any imperialist enemy. This ideology echoes the fact that today each imperialist goes it alone – no matter whether they are big or small imperialists.

Is a terrorist act of violence such as 9/11 to be justified? Can you justify war on terror? Is there such a thing as a just war?

For some time now humanity has been looking for answers. This struggle for understanding is particularly vital for the working class to be able to consciously change the world and shape the future. In our search for answers we can also gain insights and help from art and literature.

The attacks of 9/11 also shook the young New Yorker author Jonathan Safran Foer. His novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close tries to digest the incomprehensible artistically – and does much more.

The novel takes us into the world of Oskar Schell, a 9 year old boy from New York. For him, 9/11 is “the worst day”. It is the day his dad died in one of the Twin Towers. At first he is in a state of numbness. This traumatic experience makes it impossible for him to communicate his feelings with the living. His senses are fixed on the world of the dead, the world that is now that of his dad. The day Oskar finds a key in a vase, belonging to his father, with the name “Black” on it, marks the starting point of an 8 month odyssey across New York to solve the mystery of the key. The key is a metaphor for his now ongoing confrontation with his war trauma. The search for the mystery behind the key is in fact the pursuit of the path back into life. The search through New York puts Oskar in touch with numerous people and he begins to realise how many lonely human beings there are. He develops a feeling of responsibility and solidarity towards them. The conversations with these somehow familiar strangers begin to constitute a bridge leading him, but not only him, back to the living. He is thus able to cope with this terrible loss. In the end he and his mum come closer again.

The story has numerous parallels that are by no means accidental. It is not just about the military attack of 9/11 but also about the night the German city of Dresden was bombed to rubble. Oskar’s grandparents, still in their teens in 1945, are war victims from Dresden. That night they lost everything: love, their families, their homes and even their attachment to life. They belong to the lost generation of the Second World War. To the very end they are unable to deal with their traumatic experiences of war. While the grandmother keeps thinking that she’s blind, the grandfather becomes mute. They let the dust pile up on their shoulders and cannot find a way back into a life and the future.

It is interesting to note that the Jewish author Foer writes about the German Schell family as war victims (the grandmother’s father hid a Jew from the Nazis in Dresden). This fact alone conveys an important message. The story makes clear that all such wars are dreadful and not justifiable, and that the normal people are always the ones who suffer most. As the grandfather says: “The end of the suffering does not justify the suffering.” Through placing itself unconditionally on the side of the victims of imperialist war, the novel unmistakably puts into question the story about the ‘just’ and ‘benevolent’ wars constantly put forward by the capitalist powers. In particular, the justification of World War II by the anti-fascist allies is questioned. During a TV interview, Foer spoke about his indignation in relation to the way in which Islamic terrorism justifies the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians in the World Trade Center by referring to the crimes of the American State. Pondering on this question, he suddenly realised that the US state used exactly the same inhuman logic in order to justify the butchering of the civilian population in Dresden and Hiroshima. Through taking sides for the cause of humanity, Foer, who is no politician, comes into contradiction with the logic of capitalism and its anti-fascist ideology. In an article devoted to his novel, the celebrated New York Review of Books accused him of putting the victims of fascism on the same level as the victims of ant-fascism during the Second World War. As if the unconditional solidarity with the victims would be the crime here, and not the massacres committed by all the capitalist powers! This novel is not about being guilty or not guilty. Instead, it is a fervent plea for the human dignity which is trampled on by every imperialist war.

While Oskar is still searching for an explanation for the inexplicable, he shows his shocked fellow pupils and his teacher an interview with a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima in 1945 by the US-army. The survivor remembers how his daughter died in his arms crying: “I don’t want to die.” Her father: “That is what death is like. It doesn’t matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn’t matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have any war anymore.”

Although the novel rightly draws various parallels between the generations, there is a significant distinction made between them. While the generation of the grandparents senses that it is a lost generation, little Oskar is a representative of a new, undefeated generation. His grandparents, who grew up when the proletarian revolution had been crushed – as in Germany – thus opening the path to world war and to fascism - are unable to free themselves from the war trauma of the past. Today’s new generation, as opposed to the past, is firstly not defeated and secondly ready to learn from the older generations. It is significant that Oskar can only overcome his sorrow with the help of his grandparents and an elderly neighbour. He is able to assume his role as a son and to carry forward the positive things which his father represented. Oskar is able to approach them and finally speak about his innermost feelings and fears. Here we find on the literary level an ability which we recently saw at its best on the social level during the protests of the students in France: the insight and the capacity to learn from the experience of the older generations (unlike the generation of 1968).

Oskar thus solves the mystery of the key. Even though the key does not directly have anything to do with his dad, this search reveals that one can only develop enough energy and joy for life in a collective manner including all generations. Only through love of life, solidarity and humanity can the proletariat develop a communist perspective for the whole of humanity- a society without terrible war crimes such as 9/11 or the bombings of Dresden! Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a plea for humanity which in reality can only be defended against the logic of capitalism and through the revolutionary proletariat.  

Lizzy 9/11/6 (from Weltrevolution 138 [7])

The conflicts following the elections in Mexico - promoted and financed by fractions of the bourgeoisie - have given rise to a flurry of speculation. Here we will deal with the one peddled with gusto by radical leftism (the many Trotskyist groups), which wants to convince us that there is a revolutionary situation in Mexico, with soviets, a state of dual-power characteristic of a proletarian revolution, on the brink of the workers taking power. It is lamentable that this is NOT the case, but by affirming these illusions they are making the situation even more confusing and pushing the workers to have hope in actions that are beyond their control: actions which are really controlled by the bourgeoisie.

Let us begin with a quote from a Trotskyist publication, The Militant [1]: "The unprecedented collapse of the state apparatus is one of the clearest symptoms that we are at the door of a openly revolutionary process. The most important element is the combativity of the masses and the will to take this fight to the end. All that is missing is the determination to channel this fight towards the seizure of power by the workers and the total destruction of the apparatus of the bourgeois state. It is for this reason that the program, strategy and tactics of the National Democratic Convention (CND in Spanish) will determinate for the future of the movement." 

It is necessary to clarify that the development of an enormous struggle, with great combativity or will, does not necessarily mean that it is has a clear awareness of what it is doing or where it is going. Combativity and consciousness are not necessarily united in the development of struggles, which is why many such struggles can end in a mess with little perspective. The unity between combativity and consciousness is a function of the degree to which the worldwide revolutionary situation begins to appear on the horizon. The revolution will be first of all a conscious effort. But in addition, it is necessary to see how the "will to fight" is put under the direction of a fraction of the bourgeoisie, because the CND is a defender of democracy, the State, which - of course - does not question the dictatorship of capital.

The workers and the non-exploiting masses are caught up in the enormous illusions of the electoral circus and thus have great difficulties in finding the course to take, to decide where to go. For this reason when The Militant affirms that "we are at the door of a revolutionary process" they are seeking to create a false spirit amongst the workers in order to disarm them, to hand control over them to the fraction of the bourgeoisie which 'represents' the workers: the PRD and the CND.

A similar situation of confusion also surrounds the events that have happened in Oaxaca. The demand to re-zone the area occupied by the teachers of Oaxaca was buried after the 14th of June 2006 under the pretext that the central enemy was the governor. Nevertheless, the demand for the removal of governor Ulises Ruiz - which unites social sectors like the natives, retailers and the petty-bourgeoisie - only dilutes the demands for the defence of the living conditions of the workers. Furthermore, it fosters the vain hope that a change of personnel or civil servants can change their miserable living conditions. Without a doubt, the workers present in the APPO[2] - in spite of being pre-occupied with the desperate actions of the middle classes that have congregated under its umbrella - have shown a sincere mood and determination to fight. However, this force is turned aside and weakened.

Another Trotskyist group - the Workers' League for Socialism-Counter Current (LIT-CC) - in its periodical Workers' Strategy nº 53 (16-09-2006) also plays its tune of confusion. While it firmly denounces the PRD it ends up pouring water on the bourgeoisie's mill: "...the combination of a strong crisis at the heights of power, the existence of a democratic movement of the masses and the commune of Oaxaca, opens a pre-revolutionary situation, which can be the beginning of the second Mexican revolution, workers' and socialist."

Let us leave for another occasion the denunciation of the "Mexican revolution". Here, our central concern is to demonstrate that the famous premise of Lenin that characterises a revolutionary situation, as being when "those above can no longer govern" has absolutely nothing to do with the situation in Oaxaca. Indeed, there is here a process of radicalisation taking place, but one that is marked by desperate actions, whose only objective is the removal of Ulises Ruiz from office. In this sense, to refer to the "Commune of Oaxaca" sounds like a demagogic phrase that has two objectives. First, it confuses the workers because it is totally outside reality: the manifestations are dominated by a mass in which the proletariat is submerged as much in the objectives as the decisions made. Second, because the Paris Commune bequeathed a great lesson to the workers' movement that marxism has always defended: the state machine is not to be "conquered" but to be destroyed from top to bottom. To demand the removal of Ulises Ruiz is very far from considering the "destruction" of the state. For these reasons, to say that Oaxaca has a "Commune" is not simple a historical imprecision: it is a treacherous means to give a proletarian colour to a movement that is completely outside the terrain of the working class.

For another Trotskyist group - Germinal (in Spain) - the APPO is "possibly the embryo of a workers' state[3], the most developed organism of a soviet nature seen for many decades on the whole planet" (document of the 13-09-06). This affirmation is not only exaggerated but false. It is not an error made 'in ignorance', but a bad-intentioned deformation so that the workers think they are seeing a soviet where there is really an inter-classist front. A soviet or a workers' council is an organisation that develops in a pre-revolutionary or directly revolutionary period. In them all workers participate. Its assemblies are the life and soul of the insurrection. Their delegates are elected and revocable. In the APPO the well-known 'leaders' are close to the existing structures of power, such as Rogelio Pensamiento, known for his relations with the PRI; the ex-deputy of PRD, Flavio Sosa; or the SNTE unionist, Wheel Pacheco, who himself received "economic support" for a long time from the same government of Ulises Ruiz. But in addition, if we look at the composition of the "soviet" we can see that, as the first act of the APPO stated, it is made up of 79 social organisations, 5 unions and 10 representatives of schools and parents. Such an amalgam allows the expression of everything except the independence and autonomy of the proletariat.

This "soviet" or "commune" of which the Trotskyists speak, which doesn't, in its practice or decisions, worry about the good march of capitalist business, is applauded by this same Germinal group because: "its own municipal police has been created", and which, "on the 3rd of September approved to summon the construction of popular assemblies in all the states of Mexico. It decided: (...) to contemplate decrees for the reactivation of the economy, citizen security, cleaning and improvement of the city, for urban and suburban transport, to attract tourism and promote harmonic co-existence." These are the facts that they put forward to affirm that this body is "the most developed organism of a soviet nature seen for many decades on the whole planet". That is to say, the pure and simple defence of a better economic, political and social operation of capitalism!

The discontent in Oaxaca is real. The teachers are in misery like millions of their class brothers in the rest of the country and the world, but this discontent has been turned aside and put under, for that reason the APPO does not show what should be done, but rather what should not be imitated. The autonomy of the proletariat continues to be a problem in search of a solution.

Marsan. 10-10-06.

(Translated from Revolución Mundial nº 95, Noviembre-Diciembre 2006)

https://es.internationalism.org/rm/2006/95_siturev [9]

See also: 'Oaxaca, Mexico: Unions Derail Teachers' Strike [10]'.

In Spanish, ‘Oaxaca: La lucha en defensa de la democracia o por el cambio de funcionarios, un camino falso para los trabajadores’

https://es.internationalism.org/rm/2006/94_oaxaca [11]

 

In mid September an article by ‘Jack Ray’ was posted on the libcom website: ‘A short history of the Andartiko - the Greek Resistance partisans who fought against Italian and German fascist occupation [13]’.

The author says that nowhere in Europe during the Second World War was the resistance as simple a question as “good guys in the hills with rusty rifles, and bad guys wearing swastikas and burning villages”. Yet, to be honest, that’s the impression you get. We hear about the “radical, democratic working class spirit” of the movement, that there were “guerrilla fighters who wanted to create” a ‘peoples’ democracy’, but that the potential for ‘revolution’ was betrayed. It brings to mind the view of leading SWP member, Chris Harman, in ‘popularising Trotskyist’ mode: “Resistance movements had emerged which seemed to be a foretaste of revolutionary change in much of Europe” (A People’s History of the World).

Not like in the movies

Books and films have done a lot to glamourise the various resistance movements over the years, distinguishing the military actions of the guerrillas from the manoeuvres of the official armies. In Ray’s account, we read about the theft of a German flag from the Acropolis, the daubing of graffiti, and the patriotic singing of the national anthem at the funeral of a nationalist poet that was “an opportunity to voice opposition”. But he also tries to give us a picture of the organisation of the resistance.

For example, the Greek Stalinist party (KKE) played “a key role in the resistance movement” and was one of the main forces behind the formation of the National Liberation Front (EAM) in September 1941. “The EAM became a whirlwind of activity, establishing sections for civil servants, workers, women, students, school kids, as well as town and village committees. All this was hesitantly working toward April 1942 and the founding of the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) and physical force resistance”. Ray makes claims for the “relatively autonomous” action of individual groups, but admits that they were “generally sympathetic to the KKE”.

The areas that came to be dominated by the EAM are described as ‘liberated’. “Liberated zones started governing themselves as autonomous communities, run by elected village committees, whose work was to be overseen by monthly mass meetings of all the villagers.” This was in tune with the needs of the resistance, and the “EAM sought to export the local self-government model” across the country. The reason for using this “emerging 'people's democracy'” was, in Ray’s words, because it was “vital in a country with poor communications and scarce supplies that an effective form of administration could keep the war effort going.”

Following Italy’s surrender to the Allies in September 1943, EAM/ELAS controlled most of the country by the end of the year. In March 1944 it announced the formation of a provisional government. In October 1944 the German army started a rapid withdrawal because of the continuing advance of the Russian Army into the Balkans. “The ELAS quickly lost contact with the German rear guard, and merely filled in the vacuum they left” (Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War). Ray admits that “the EAM set out to restore order rather than seize power”, but seems here to have forgotten that, to “keep the war effort going” you need “an effective form of administration”.

In late 1943 EAM/ELAS “administered two-thirds to four-fifths of Greece” (Kolko op cit). They “administered most of the villages, collected taxes, supplied schools and relief, endorsed private property, and even the churches to the extent of gaining much clerical support” (ibid). What this means is that “EAM/ELAS set the base in the creation of something that the governments of Greece had neglected: an organised State in the Greek mountains” (CM Woodhouse, Apple of Discord). Ray’s text does mention the establishment by the EAM of “a secret police force and andartes courts”, but you’ll have to look elsewhere for an understanding of the functioning of the state for the war effort.

Class antagonisms in times of war

Agis Stinas was a part of the Trotskyist movement in Greece from the early 1930s until his final break with the Fourth International in 1947. In International Review 72 we published some extracts from his Memoirs [14] translated from French. There are also extracts translated by Antagonism on their website. The significance of Stinas and his comrades lies in their defence of an internationalist standpoint, in continuity with the revolutionary position established in the First World War, against the participation of the working class in imperialist war.

In a report from the Stinas group in July 1946 they characterised support for the Greek resistance as ‘social patriotic’ – meaning to use socialist language in the defence of a patriotic position. “The social-patriotic character of support for the resistance movement is brought into particularly sharp relief in the regions that EAM completely controls. It has both the space and the geographic borders of a ‘country’, with parliament, government, courts, concentration camps, prisons, police and tax collectors, in a word, a state, which conducts an official war against the Germans. In what way, in its class nature, can this state differ from any other bourgeois state? What do the workers and poor peasants have to defend in this war, and in what way does it differ from that conducted by the government of Metaxas?” There is no ambiguity in this, it insists, “a territory where EAM was the state, in every sense of the word used by Engels, existed in occupied Greece”.

The resistance is seen here in the context of a global conflict. Not taken in by talk of ‘socialism’ or ‘liberation’, Stinas recognised it is as “A nationalist movement in the service of imperialist war.” “The ‘resistance movement’, that is to say the struggle against the Germans in all its forms, from sabotage to guerrilla warfare, in the occupied countries, cannot be considered outside the context of imperialist war, of which it is an integral part”. The framework for this understanding: “The defence of the nation and the fatherland are in our era nothing other than the defence of imperialism, of the social system which provokes wars, which cannot live without war and which leads humanity to chaos and barbarism. This is as true for the big imperialist powers as it is for the little nations, whose ruling classes can only be accomplices and associates of the great powers.” So to “participate in the resistance movement, under whatever slogans and justifications, means to participate in the war.” At the social level “The growth of the ‘resistance movement’ … destroys class consciousness, reinforces nationalist illusions and hatred, disperses and atomises the proletariat … into the anonymous mass of the nation, submits it even more to its national bourgeoisie, bringing to the surface and to the leadership the most ferociously nationalist elements.”

Specifically, in Greece, “this movement, because of the war which it conducts in the conditions of the second imperialist massacre, is an organ and appendage of the Allied imperialist camp”.

In the service of Allied imperialism

In an introduction to Stinas’ Memoirs, the leading Trotskyist, Michel Pablo, rejects “the argument that it was simply a question of a nationalist movement in the service of imperialism” because of the attacks on EAM/ELAS by British imperialism and right-wing factions of the Greek ruling class from the time of the departure of the German forces. Far from refuting the argument, this confirms the imperialist framework. In October 1944, Churchill and Stalin had agreed, in the carve-up of Eastern Europe, that Greece would be in the British zone of influence. However, although Stalin provided negligible assistance to the KKE, Churchill was not going to leave anything to chance, and so, as the Russian bloc emerged, EAM/ELAS were the targets of a Greek state backed first by British and then US imperialism. More people died in Greece in the Civil War that lasted until 1949 than did in the World War. In the same way that the Civil War can’t be detached from the early days of the Cold War, the Greek resistance can’t be separated from the World War.

The population of Greece not only suffered from the brutality of the German occupation, and the complete destruction of nearly 900 villages, there were also widespread famine conditions which resulted in death by starvation and related diseases for up to 500,000 in a population of seven million. A sustained British naval blockade was a more important factor in the food crisis than German exports of supplies to North Africa. Against these conditions there was a will to fight, a fight for life. However, EAM/ELAS were a force for both social order and channelling the will to fight into the nationalist anti-fascist struggle that served Allied imperialism, not the interests of the workers and peasants of Greece.

On the libcom site you can read articles about the role of anarchists in the resistance in Italy, Hungary etc. The anarchist heritage certainly includes examples of genuine internationalist opposition to imperialist war, but it also contains many examples of this participation in nationalist movements in the service of imperialism. The revolutionary marxist heritage, by contrast, includes Stinas and the group that reconstituted itself in Athens in 1943, having escaped from various camps and prisons. Within days they were producing leaflets and daubing slogans on walls: “It is capitalism in its entirety which is responsible for the carnage, devastation and chaos, and not just one of the two sides!”; “Fraternisation of Greek workers and Italian and German soldiers in the common struggle for socialism!”; “National unity is nothing but the submission of the workers to their exploiters!”; “Only the overthrow of capitalism will save world peace!; “Long live the world socialist revolution!” This is the real working class spirit in action.   Car 17/10/06.

The following account was sent to us by a sympathiser who works in a privatised ‘public utility’. It was inspired by a similar article which appeared in our French paper, Revolution Internationale, describing the situation faced by teachers at the beginning of the new school year. The article provides a clear analysis of the combined dirty work of the bosses and unions, but it does so with real anger and indignation. We encourage other readers of our press to write directly about their daily living and working conditions as well as about any struggles that they have been involved in. 

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There is no doubt in my mind and the minds of my fellow workers that ‘things’ are going from bad to worse, and that the perspective is for our situation – and for workers everywhere - to get even worse.

I am an industrial worker in one of the industries privatised by the Conservative government in the early 1990s. ‘Privatisation’, we can now see, was clearly a means for greater state control over all the utilities. Now our wages, working conditions, manning levels and precise methods of exploitation are determined, not by any bosses but by high level committees and functionaries of the state down to the finest details, with the bosses and trade unions implementing them on the ground.

After initially kicking the unions out, the bosses have welcomed them back with a vengeance. In our industry there are several unions claiming to represent different departments and sometimes the same departments where workers work side by side. Any incipient movement from the workers themselves is quickly carved up and, in many and important cases, it is the union officials who speak the ‘language of realism’ and make threats, to the extent that they use language that the bosses do not dare to use. For the most part the union stewards are lickspittles and creeps, either motivated by ambition to join the lower layers of management (with whom they are indistinguishable in reality) or are just after the ‘extras’ that their position and management provide them with – or both. You find these arseholes on every committee that’s going - so-called ‘health and safety’, productivity, consultative, disciplinary. Aside from these are some genuine, fighting militants of the working class desperately trying to improve working conditions and wages, but these are for the most part ground down, and within the framework of union co-operation with the management, uselessly banging their heads against a wall. Both the unions and bosses soon jump on anyone who tries to step outside of this framework.

From ‘risk management’ (ie, greater risks to workers all round) to ‘flexibility’, the attacks on the workers are falling thick and fast. The bosses want us to account for every minute of the working day. They want us to take on more and more responsibility for no extra money – as if we didn’t have enough to do - and to this end, and over and above the union creeps and lower management looking over our shoulders, we are electronically tracked and overseen in ever more innovative and costly ways. One worker was recently disciplined for booking a quarter of an hour’s overtime too much after he was called out (and averted a disaster) in the early hours of the morning. It was a matter of sixty seconds. This, like other recent cases, was publicised in order to serve as an example to everyone else. Marx, in Capital, is right on the button: “… that within the capitalist system all the methods for increasing the social productivity of labour are carried out at the cost of the individual worker: that all the means for developing production are transformed into means of domination over and exploitation of the producer; that they mutilate the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrade him to become a mere appurtenance of the machine, make his work such a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed; estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in very proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power; that they distort the conditions under which he works, subjecting him, during the labour process, to a despotism which is all the more hateful because of its pettiness; that they transform his whole life into working time, and drag his wife and children beneath the Juggernaut wheels of capital’s car.” (Chapter 23, ‘General Law Of Capitalist Accumulation’). We are terrorised and treated with contempt, we are nothing but pieces of shit and they make it quite clear that if we don’t like it there are plenty of other pieces of shit who will take our place.

The attacks on wages are relentless too. Pension contributions have been increased while pension benefits have been cut and many workers are worried about their pensions. Job losses are taking place through non-replacement and the unions are presenting this as a victory. Wage rises ‘negotiated’ and imposed by the unions are year on year wage cuts given that we face rising energy, tax and cost of living prices. The only way to earn any extra is by overtime and unsociable hours. And we are supposed to be the lucky ones with jobs!

A recent report from the London School of Economics said that there are now a million people on Incapacity Benefit because of mental illness. I’m not surprised. What with the daily grind, the immediate responsibility for families and the wider ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie, as well as the obvious decomposition of the system into war and chaos, the misery of the working class is compounded. Again, with Marx, it is essential not to see only misery in misery. This is a generalising condition of the working class and we have had enough evidence recently from all across the world that the working class as a whole is perfectly capable of fighting back. First to ward off the attacks raining down on it, and from this towards a wider assault on the system that engenders this misery – capitalism.   E, 11/09/06.

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“The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature.” Marx, The Holy Family, ‘Proudhon: 2nd Critical Comment’.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm#4.4 [16]

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We have recently published on our website an article on the intervention of the GCI (Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, Internationalist Communist Group) towards the struggles of the students in France. The GCI is a group which many see as being part of the left communist tradition, but as our article showed, this is a complete fraud. Under its falsely radical flag, the GCI’s leaflet advocated methods of struggle which are quite compatible with trade unionism, while at the same time expressing utter contempt for the efforts of the young proletarians of France to organise themselves outside of the unions, calling on them to “smash the democretinism of the ‘sovereign and massive’ general assemblies, spit on the ‘permanently elected and revocable delegates’”.

In the same way, when it comes to the imperialist massacres spreading around the world, the GCI, which advertises itself as the enemy of all nationalism, now spits openly on authentic proletarian internationalism. 

We have already shown this in another article ‘What is the GCI good for [18]’ in International Review 124. Here we pointed out that for the GCI, which has long had a fascination with the methods of terrorism and guerrilla struggle, the majority of armed actions attributed to the ‘Resistance’ in Iraq are in fact expressions of the proletarian class struggle. We cited this passage in particular:

“The whole apparatus of the World State, its services, its representatives on the spot, are systematically targeted. These acts of armed resistance are far from being blind, they have a logic if only we are prepared to abandon the stereotypes and the ideological brainwashing that the bourgeoisie offers us as the only explanation for what is happening in Iraq. Behind the targets, and the daily guerrilla war against the occupying forces, we can discern the contours of a proletariat which is trying to struggle, to organise itself against all the bourgeois fractions which have decided to bring capitalist order and security to the region, even if it is still extremely difficult to judge our class’ autonomy from the bourgeois forces which are trying to control our class’ rage and anger against every kind of representative of the World State. The acts of sabotage, bomb attacks, demonstrations, occupations, strikes... are not the work of Islamists or pan-Arab nationalists, this would be too easy and would only be a concession to the ruling class’ view which wants to limit our understanding to a struggle between ‘good and evil’, between the ‘good guys and the bad guys’, a bit like in a Western, in order to evacuate once again capitalism’s deadly contradiction: the proletariat" (‘De quelques considérations sur les évènements qui secouent actuellement l’Irak’, in Communisme n°55, February 2004).

In fact, according to the GCI, the level of class struggle and class consciousness in Iraq is so high that the principal aim of the invasion of Iraq was to repress the class movement there – the invasion was first and foremost a ‘police action’ by what they called the ‘World State’ against a particularly combative fraction of the proletariat. And in the chaos and slaughter that has followed the invasion, the GCI continue to see a movement of the class so advanced that it has already reached the level of armed struggle.

It would seem that this delirious distortion of the true nightmare gripping Iraq has produced some reactions even among the GCI’s sympathisers. The current issue of their review Communisme, arch 200, no. 58, in fact takes what for them is the unprecedented step of publishing the debate between the GCI and its sympathisers. They begin with a letter which expresses severe reservations about the GCI’s claims about the armed actions and bombings in Iraq:

“Your article about Iraq which appeared in the last Comunismo, despite its attempt to situate itself within a class perspective…..falls into the amalgam and homogenisation typical of the bourgeois analyses of the situation in Iraq, which identify everything going on there with the bloody and indiscriminate attacks that have nothing to do with the proletarian struggle (which is indeed underway there). You fall into the same error when you enumerate certain attacks, undoubtedly perpetrated by bourgeois fractions (the CIA, the Saddamists, Syria, Iran…) such as those at Al Hakim, the UN or the Jordanian embassy during the summer of 2003, as expressions of the proletarian struggle”.

This is then followed by a longer text – whether from the same source or a different one is not clear, but apparently the work of a group – which again expresses doubts about some aspects of the GCI’s assertions about the advanced level of the class struggle in Iraq. It questions the GCI’s argument that the wave of lootings which swept the country in the wake of the invasion could in general be qualified as a proletarian movement, pointing out for example that not only government offices and Saddam’s palaces were looted, but also many hospitals, which were stripped of vital supplies. They also list a number of actions which are more clearly on a class terrain, such as demonstrations by the unemployed or by workers demanding back pay. And while they still appear to agree with the GCI that the “armed actions are for the most part rooted in the working class in Iraq”, they nevertheless say that it is a tremendous error to fall into the same homogenisation that the bourgeois media applauds so gleefully: 

“It matters little to us whether these attacks are the work of Saddam partisans, of Syria or Iran, who aim to cover the US in Iraq with mud, of Islamists or the CIA (when they are not the same thing); what does seem clear is that they are seeking to terrorise and divide the Iraqi proletariat, and in our eyes it is a terrible error to fall into the amalgam which is the speciality of the bourgeois media which applauds these attacks, as  the GCI does in its article on Iraq which, although starting from a class perspective, contains a good dose of homogenisation and confusion; this is also what the comrades of Arde[1] [19] do when , right away, and  with little argumentation, they presented these attacks on the UN or the sabotages as expressions of the proletarian advance”.

The GCI, faced with this criticism, doesn’t back down; on the contrary, it states its horrible amalgam even more shamelessly. For example, faced with the reservations about the bombing of the UN HQ being described as an expression of the proletarian combat, it replies: 

 “The ‘attack on the UN’ which you so lightly count as bourgeois, using the insufficient criteria that civilians died (in history there have been many violent acts by the proletariat that have produced civilian victims!). It was precisely this attack that was most denounced by all the bourgeois opposition factions in Iraq, in particular those that claim to be directing ‘the armed struggle of the resistance in Iraq’”

In fact, in all probability this was the work of the Zarquawi group, many of whose actions have also been condemned by a host of other ‘resistance’ organisations. But in any case, the GCI is quite ready to applaud such attacks on the ‘World State’, even when the proletarians who carry them out have been “captured by bourgeois forces” – in other words, when they are openly carried out by al Qaida or other bourgeois terrorist gangs. In fact, they justify their delight in seeing the destruction of the Twin Towers with the very same argument: 

“In Communisme no 48, ‘Capitalism=terrorism against humanity; against war and capitalist repression’, we commented on the incidents of September 11. At the same time that we showed that the proletariat has an interest in the destruction of the objectives that represent and realise the terrorism of world capital; instead of crying for the civilian victims, as all the accomplices of democratic dictatorship did, we made it clear that this did not imply saying that the attack was accomplished by the proletariat as a class. Moreover, we clearly explained that, even when these attacks are carried out by proletarians in the sociological sense of the term, although they destroy centres of repression and world commerce and although we ourselves, along with  revolutionaries all over the world, feel great sympathy for these acts, we are not in support of the organisations that carried out these actions. And so we do not deny that that such actions are carried out by Islamist organisations, which we define as centrist, ie the extremist organisations of social democracy, which constitutes the last and most implacable rampart against the revolution”.

Thus while revolutionaries all across the world denounced the massacre of September 11 as an act of imperialist war (and one in all probability that was ‘allowed to happen’ by the American state to justify its war plans); while we expressed our solidarity with the thousand of proletarians immolated in this barbaric crime, the GCI could only feel its “great sympathy” for the actions of Bin Laden and Co, who are bizarrely defined as “centrists” (which traditionally defines a confused or indecisive fraction of the proletarian political movement…), and who in any case were carrying out an action – the destruction of centres of repression and world commerce – that was “in the interest” of the proletariat.  

 “To consider that an attack is correct, or as you say to applaud it, because it damages the bourgeois state internationally, this does not imply, for us that we support the organisation that brought it about”. The logic is typically Trotskyist. Just as the Trotskyists use it to support nationalist proto-states like the PLO or Hizbollah or the Kosovan Liberation Army, so the GCI has used it in the past to justify its support for the actions of the Shining Path in Peru or the Popular Revolutionary Bloc in El Salvador.     

And indeed for the GCI, for whom the acme of proletarian action is the work of small, secretive, violent groupings, there is no distinction to be made between the methods of the proletariat and the methods of bourgeois terrorism. No wonder the GCI’s critical supporters are confused. They want to be able to see which acts of sabotage, which bomb attacks on coalition forces are carried out by Islamist reactionaries or shadowy state forces, and which ones are carried out by ‘groups of associated proletarians’. What they can’t see is that armed ‘initiatives’ by minorities which have no connection to a class struggling for its own demands and with its own forms of organisation can only be recuperated by the bourgeoisie and turned against the interests of the working class, even if these actions are initially the work of groups acting more or less spontaneously.

Alongside the GCI’s amalgam between class violence and terrorism, their support for the Resistance in Iraq is justified by a hideous distortion of proletarian internationalism. Peppered throughout their reply are quotes from the Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magon. Magon was certainly a militant of the proletariat during the 1900s until he was essentially assassinated by the US state in 1921. But some of the Magon quotes used by the ICG about the First World War show a deep confusion which sets him apart from the clearest internationalists of that time. We are thus told by Magon in 1914:

“When our own die, we should weep; when the imbeciles who fight to strengthen their own butchers die, we should laugh – it leaves fewer obstacles to our struggle for the destruction of the present system. They are not our brothers, those who are dying in their thousands in the battle fields of Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania. They are our enemies; they are those who want this system to last; they are the lackeys of capital, the church and authority” Regeneracion 202, November 14 1914.

Just to make it clear that the GCI indeed agrees with this appalling passage, they repeat: “Ricardo Flores Magon had no problem delighting in the thousands of soldiers destroyed in the imperialist war of 1914-19… because he knew that they died as forces of the World State of capital, because those being destroyed were not our comrades but our enemies, ie those obedient soldiers who assented to die and kill on the battle fronts as agents of the their ‘own’ bourgeoisie”. 

It was never the attitude of revolutionaries like Lenin or Luxemburg to treat the soldiers who were marched off to the front as stupid slaves, enemies of the proletariat. On the contrary: Luxemburg refers to the fine flower of the European proletariat being cut down on the battlefronts. These proletarians, even though they were “falling on the field of dishonour, of fratricide, of self-destruction” (Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet [20]), remained our class brothers, and that was the basis upon which revolutionary organisations called for fraternisation, mutinies, for ‘turning the imperialist war into a civil war’. Revolutionaries denounced the slaughter on both sides; they did not rub their hands with the sure knowledge that this would lead to the revolution. On the contrary, the longer the slaughter went on, the greater the danger that the working class would not be able to make the socialist revolution and would be engulfed in barbarism.

The GCI takes this attitude towards the soldiers of ‘our’ camp as a model for their version of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ – one which resembles like two drops of water the attitude of the Trotskyists for whom ‘defeatism’ is invariably applied to one side only in an imperialist war.  Although they argue that Magon did not make the mistake of counting the opposing armies in the imperialist war of 1914 as his allies, this is more than implicit in the GCI’s attitude when they say: “our position is revolutionary defeatism, and every blow that accelerates the defeat of our own state, which is today the same state doing the work of repression in Iraq, is welcome, although very often the blow is delivered by proletarians recuperated by bourgeois forces”. This is the classic logic of anti-imperialism: we support anything that weakens our own imperialist power. What it ignores is that, on this terrain, the weakening of one imperialist power is the strengthening of the other. Thus the GCI makes itself a direct accomplice of the imperialist war in Iraq.  

The GCI has duped many elements searching for communist position with its ultra-radical phrases and violent imagery, particularly those influenced by anarchism. We on the other hand have long maintained that the GCI is a clear expression of political parasitism (see the Theses on Parasitism [21] in International Review 94, or on our website), a grouping whose real raison d’etre is to play out a destructive role towards authentic revolutionary organisations – in the case of the GCI, to the point of advocating violent and even murderous attacks on them [22]. The GCI’s position on the movement in France and the war on Iraq should lead some of the elements influenced by it to reflect about the real nature of this group. For us there can be no doubt that it is more and more openly doing the work of the bourgeoisie, whether or not is directly manipulated by its state forces.

In France, the proletarians take a big step forward in organising assemblies, and here comes an ‘internationalist’. ‘communist’ group to tell them to abandon the assemblies, spit on the principle of elected and revocable delegates, and revert to trade unionist, commando type actions. What could be better calculated to block any real coming together between the communist minority and the mass movement? 

In Iraq, this ‘internationalist’, ‘communist’ group sings the praises of the endless shootings, bombings and acts of sabotage, which far from expressing the class movement of the proletariat are a manifestation of imperialist war in a phase of growing chaos and decomposition; they are the work of bourgeois gangsters that are more and more orientated not towards fighting the occupation forces but towards indiscriminate sectarian massacre. What’s more, in making this repulsive amalgam, the GCI establishes a very clear link in the records of the state’s security forces between those who refer to themselves as internationalist communists and those who identify with international terrorism. What better excuse for carrying out surveillance, searches and other repressive attacks on revolutionary groups?

If we add to this the GCI’s record of threatening violence against proletarian organisations, then it should be abundantly clear that this group, whatever its real motives, needs to be recognised as a real danger to the revolutionary movement. Those who want to discuss class politics and proletarian internationalism should break all links with it as soon as possible.    

Amos

In early July we held the London public forum on the war in Spain 70 years ago. We started with a short presentation of the ICC’s position. Spain in the 1930s had a militant working class and a backward economy, so much so that some saw the departure of the king and proclamation of the republic in 1931 as a belated bourgeois revolution. The republic became well known for its brutal repression of the working class, for example in Asturias in 1934. In response to Franco’s coup on 19 July 1936 the working class fought on its own terrain, but it took place in very difficult conditions. This was the period in which, as Bilan (the publication of the Italian Left) showed, the revolutionary wave that began with the Russian revolution in 1917, had been defeated. Following July workers were not crushed directly but derailed into fighting on the military front between Franco and the Popular Front government, where the workers were slaughtered. The anarchist CNT was integrated into the state at all levels in the Popular Front government; it was supported by left-wing groups such as the POUM.

Much of the discussion centred on questions raised by J, one of the contributors to the libcom internet discussion forum. On the role of the CNT, he thought it was unfair to regard them as the ‘kingmakers’ of the republic when they never actually called for a vote. However, the CNT-FAI did more than neglect to put out their habitual call to abstain from voting, as Garcia Oliver explained in no uncertain terms: “Naturally, Spain’s working class, which has for many years been advised by the CNT not to vote, place upon our propaganda the construction we wanted, which is to say, that it should vote, in that it would be easier to stand up to the fascist right, if the latter revolted, once they were defeated and out of government” (quoted in Agustin Guillamon, The Friends of Durruti Group:1937-39, AK Press). This is similar to leftists today, who claim they don’t support the Labour Party in elections, but call on workers to keep the Tories out, or to vote Labour ‘with no illusions’ etc.

J pointed out that there was a lot of criticism inside the CNT for participating in the government at ministerial level, and not just from the Friends of Durruti group, but also their youth organisation. However, the participation in the state was not limited to a few leaders in the government - the organisation as a whole was involved at all levels. This was the end of a process of betrayal in which a working class organisation had gone over to the bourgeoisie, so it is natural there should be a proletarian reaction against it. Once an organisation has betrayed it is lost to the working class for ever, the CNT cannot come back any more than the Labour Party or the social democratic or Stalinist parties can.

The same is not true of individuals. The Friends of Durruti were all CNT members, which was a condition of being in the group. “For this reason the CNT and the bourgeoisie in general, try to present this group as an example of the revolutionary flame that still burnt in the CNT, even during the worst moments of 1936-37. However this idea is completely false. What marked the revolutionary approach of the Friends of Durruti was precisely its struggle against the positions of the CNT and its reliance on the strength of the proletariat, of which it was a leading part” (‘The Friends of Durruti: lessons of an incomplete break with anarchism’ IR 102). It expressed a healthy proletarian reaction against the CNT’s integration into the bourgeois state. Their membership of it did not stop them, very accurately, accusing the CNT of “treason” in the manifesto distributed at the time of the barricades in May 1937, even if they did withdraw this later.

The Friends of Durruti group was a political expression of the class movement of 19 July 1936, when workers struck and came out on the streets massively, and of the movement in Barcelona in 1937. Although coming from anarchism, this pushed them to converge with the positions of the Bolshevik Leninists around Munis, and to understand that revolution is an authoritarian act, “to replace the theory of libertarian communism with that of the ‘revolutionary junta’ (soviet) as the embodiment of proletarian power” (Munis, quoted by Guillamon). They were even accused of being marxist. But the force of the movement was not sufficient to push them to make a complete break with anarchism, and so they remained confused and fell back into anarchism when no longer sustained by the strength of the class struggle.

The problem of anarcho-syndicalism, according to J, is that it is an attempt at a mass organisation of workers, who are not necessarily revolutionary, that is also trying to be a revolutionary organisation aiming for the end to capitalism. This creates problems in that it will not necessarily elect a revolutionary leadership. In fact, as the ICC pointed out, in Spain the rank and file of the CNT was more radical than the leadership, who integrated themselves into the bourgeois state and “held that Companys should stay on as head of the Generalitat…” (Garcia Oliver, quoted by Guillamon). The problem for the working class in this period is that it cannot have mass organisations outside of revolution or temporarily during important class movements. In a period of retreat or defeat of the class struggle, like the 1930s, proletarian organisations are necessarily very small or tiny, as was the case for the Friends of Durruti and the Bolshevik Leninists.

1936: the drive to war. 2006: the class struggle

For the ICC the events in Spain were an important preparation for World War 2, defining both the ideology and the Allied and Axis imperialist camps that would fight it out. J pointed out that France and Britain were essentially non-interventionist, so despite the intervention of Germany and Italy behind Franco and Russia behind the republic it was not quite the WW2 line-up. And, of course, the USA did not even begin to involve itself till much later. This did not stop the various powers from using the war in Spain to consolidate their imperialist alliances, nor from testing out weaponry that was to cause such slaughter and destruction a few years later.

Anti-fascism was one of the ideologies used in mobilising the working class for war in Spain that was also used in WW2. The ruling class needed to crush the last remaining undefeated section of the proletariat before launching another world war, something they had learned from the First World War, which ended with revolutions in Russia, Germany and Hungary and massive waves of struggle on every continent. By the mid 1930s the revolutionary wave had been defeated, most importantly with the proletariat in Germany crushed first by social democracy and then Nazism and the Russian proletariat crushed by Stalinism. At this time, there were still many very militant struggles, to the point that when Trotsky saw the strikes in France he thought they had the potential to develop into new revolutionary struggles. In fact the workers were diverted into support for the Popular Front, waving the tricolour and accepting the attacks on their working conditions necessary for the war economy. Similarly in the USA very large strikes were diverted into unionisation, developing the very institutions that played an essential part in recruiting workers for slaughter.

The working class in Spain remained undefeated in 1936 and was therefore able to react on its own terrain on 19 July. But it was diverted onto the military terrain and support for the democratic bourgeois state and slaughtered on the battlefield. Its defeat was therefore both ideological, persuading workers that defence of the capitalist state was necessary to their interests as a class, and physical, in the slaughter and in the repression meted out by both sides and particularly the Stalinists. The use of antifascism to mobilise workers behind the democratic state for imperialist war was generalised beyond the Iberian Peninsula with the call for workers to join the International Brigades and make collections to support the republic, instead of struggling on their own terrain for their own needs wherever their interests come in conflict with the bourgeoisie – which is the real way to show solidarity.

The contributors from libcom had to leave before the end of the meeting. Their presence had been an important first step in overcoming the widespread resistance in the ‘libertarian’ milieu to discussing directly with left communist organisations, and we hope it will be repeated in future forums. The discussion then moved on to the question of the relevance this discussion has for today. It is, of course, an important experience for the working class, and the issues are still very much alive.

Anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism have become particularly influential following the bourgeoisie’s campaigns about the ‘death of communism’ following the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc and the USSR itself. There is growing interest in the CNT and IWW. Spain, and particularly the Spanish ‘civil war’, show anarchism having an important influence in the working class and in historic events.

The role of anti-fascism, which was essential to mobilising and disciplining the working class for war in Spain, remains an important ideological weapon today. For instance, it has been used in campaigns to persuade us to vote – for anybody – to keep out the BNP in Britain, or Le Pen in France.

The issue of how the working class shows solidarity to workers in other countries – not by collecting money for the ‘resistance’ in Iraq, or in going as a ‘human shield’ to Palestine, but in fighting the class struggle against our exploiters with the defence of our interests against theirs – remains just as vital today as it was at the time of the International Brigades.

Lastly, the force of the class struggle, which pushed the Friends of Durruti to start to question anarchist theories and develop the idea of the ‘revolutionary junta’, soviets, is also at work today. It can be seen in the efforts of tiny minorities of the working class to clarify, on discussion forums, in discussion circles, in groups like the EKS in Turkey (see WR 295). But today the proletariat is undefeated, and we have a new generation of workers entering the struggle, which gives much better conditions for that effort to bear fruit.

Lex 17/7/06.

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Readers may also be interested in this article published in the July '06 issue of World Revolution: July ‘36: How the Popular Front turned civil war into imperialist war [26]

 

 

On the site of the GCI [1] [28], under the heading “What’s new ”, dated March 21 2006, there is a leaflet, in French and English, on the anti-CPE movement in France. In this leaflet, the GCI, which often, pretentiously, boasts of developing analyses on the forces present in such and such a country, not only doesn’t say a word on how these events in France unfolded, but, further, it lies about these struggles, it attacks and denounces what has been the strength of the movement: the capacity to organise itself in general assemblies (GAs). All this enveloped in an ultra-radical language of denunciation of the CPE and the unions; but when it’s a question of making propositions in order to develop the struggle, the only thing that is said in the leaflet is the “general strike” and “violent actions to block the circulation of goods” (that’s to say road blocks, railway blockades, etc.)… Here, pure and simple, are trade union methods. Faced with the dynamic of the strike that animated the struggle against the CPE, the GCI proposes the union dynamic of struggle! And it has the cheek, lying about it, to criticise the students because they “march behind the unions”!

The GCI tries to put the students and workers struggling against the CPE in the dock

Straightaway, the leaflet deliberately mixes up the attempts of the bourgeoisie to confront the struggles with the initiatives decided during the struggle, attributing to the students the union appeals or the appeals to trust in electoral promises and even to let themselves be trapped in sterile confrontations with the police:

“And against all that (the CPE) how did they react?:

-          By following like sheep those who break our struggles, negotiate our misery with our exploiters and send us back to work and school: THE UNIONS!…

-          By swallowing the promises all kinds of politicians sell us about the miracle of change in order to bury our struggles in the ballot boxes.

-          By falling into the trap of sterile confrontations where the forces of bourgeois order await and are thus stronger” (GCI leaflet).                

This movement of struggle took the bourgeoisie by surprise. The government of Villepin hadn’t foreseen the impact that the attack of the CPE would have on the young generations of proletarians. It didn’t take the time to prepare this attack politically by putting in place a union and “leftist” strategy to accompany it [2] [29]. It’s for this reason that the different forces of the bourgeois state, the unions at their head, had to react on the hop, which left open a margin of manoeuvre to the students. Thus, it is necessary to clearly say that it wasn’t the students who followed the unions, but the latter who had to put themselves forward in order to try to outflank the struggle.

Practically, up to the demonstrations of the 18th March, the unions were not yet present and hadn’t imposed themselves on the movement. On March 7, in Paris, when the students of Censier met up to go to a massive demonstration, the CGT tried to put themselves at the head of the march with its troops and placards; the students stopped the unions from taking the head of the demonstration, themselves took the lead and put forward unifying slogans. The following day, the leader of the CGT, Bernard Thibault, declared on the television: “we are facing unknown acts”, and several journalists of the bourgeois media affirmed that “the CGT have been humiliated”. Thus, it wasn’t the students following behind the unions, but the latter who were obliged to follow behind the students. Even the following week, March 14, the main demonstration in Paris was spontaneous and followed no union appeal.

But it’s not only in the calls to demonstrations that this confrontation with the unions was expressed. In the universities themselves, there was a combat to take control of the GAs and the direction of the movement. The student union, l’UNEF, alongside militants of the leftists organisations (above all, Trotskyists), tried to take over the presidency of the GAs and monopolise the commissions which came from it; but in an important part of the universities, it was the elected presidency, controlled and mandated by the GA each day, which ended up imposing itself, always with the idea of dislodging the professional trade unionists.

Also on the question of the extension of the struggle there was a confrontation with the unions. Some GAs of the universities sent delegation to the industrial zones, but the unions at different places of work did everything to avoid any direct contact between these delegations and the workers, themselves taking charge of the reception of the students in order to try to fool them. Being wise to this manoeuvre, in some of the most combative universities, they didn’t renounce direct discussions with the workers and pickets were sent to the metro and bus stations where workers were on their way to work.

One could say similar things about the GCI’s affirmation that the movement put its confidence in the electoral promises of the politicians (“ swallowing the electoral promise…”). In fact the struggle itself is already a striking contradiction of the idea that the students believed in the electoral promises of the bourgeoisie. It wasn’t by voting that the youth imposed the withdrawal of the CPE, but by struggle. Throughout the movement, up to the imposed withdrawal, no political force of the bourgeoisie could flatter itself with having got to the head of a movement, which remained on a class terrain. It was only at the time of the actual demobilisation that the bourgeoisie tried to recuperate the lost ground, launching an ideological campaign in order to avoid the lessons being drawn: autonomous struggle, on a class terrain, pays. Thus it deployed its electoral and democratic circus, in trying to lead the young, well ordered and isolated, to vote for the left of capital in the next elections. It is evident that it’s quite possible that a good number of youth let themselves be led onto this terrain and that the left of the French bourgeoisie managed to channel a part of them to vote for it. But what is fundamental, what has taken on a historic significance, what comes out of these combats, are these lessons: how to struggle, how to organise the general assemblies and demonstrations, how to discuss, why and how we must look for solidarity, etc. This is what the new generation of workers has won. In this sense of the incorporation of a new generation into the struggle, the experience of the anti-CPE movement is, from all points of view, comparable to what the struggles of May 68 in France, 69 in Italy, or those of the 70s in Spain, for example, meant for the generations of that time [3] [30].

But the height of cynicism is reached by the GCI when it accuses these struggles of letting themselves be “trapped in sterile confrontations where the forces of order await us”. This group itself is constantly dazzled by “sterile confrontations” in Bolivia, Argentina or Iraq, where the working class is led into inter-classist movements and sometimes, in the worst cases, into inter-imperialist confrontations[4] [31]. In fact, the media has not stopped insisting since the beginning of March on the violence in the demos, repeating images of confrontations with the police, etc. The sole objective of this campaign has been to discourage the undecided from going to the demonstration or the assemblies.

From the beginning of the movement, the terrain of violence has been the terrain of the bourgeoisie. It’s the bourgeoisie that organised the provocation and assault on the Sorbonne. It is the ruling class, with the collaboration of the unions (by using their official stewards), which organised the confrontations at the end of the demonstrations, which organised and allowed attacks against the demonstrators by more or less uncontrollable gangs, but no doubt well followed by the police services. But it is false to say that the students let themselves be led onto this terrain. On the contrary, one of the aspects which expressed the consciousness of the movement, its will to unification, its maturity and its proletarian character, is the way in which it responded to this manoeuvre of the bourgeoisie, how it confronted this question of violence.

The night of the 10th and 11th of March, at the time of the police assault on the Sorbonnne, the most advanced students of Paris, who went to this faculty in order to bring solidarity and food to the besieged comrades, denounced the fact that they were about to fall into a trap. And its for this reason that they addressed the CRS, trying by all means to prevent repression and sterile confrontation; they succeeded in part, up to the moment where the provocateurs acted, which was the signal to begin the assault on the Sorbonne.

The movement also gave a response to the confrontations provoked by gangs manipulated by the police. Certain GAs in different places sent delegations to the suburbs in order to affirm that their struggle was also a struggle for the defence of conditions of life of the inhabitants of the estates, who plunged into massive unemployment and exclusion.

“…In fact, even if it is still very far from posing the question of the revolution, and thus to reflect on the problem of class violence of the proletariat in its struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, the movement has been implicitly confronted with this problem and has been able to respond in the sense of the struggle and being of the proletariat. This latter has been confronted since the beginning of the extreme violence of the exploiting class, the repression when it tries to defend its interests, imperialist war, but also the daily violence of exploitation. Contrary to exploiting classes, the class bearer of communism doesn’t carry violence within itself, and even if it can’t be spared the use of it, it never identifies itself with it. In particular, the violence it must use in order to overthrow capitalism, and which it will have to use with determination, is necessarily a conscious and organised violence and must be preceded by a whole process of the development of its consciousness and it organisation through different struggles against exploitation. The present mobilisation of the students, notably from the fact of its capacity to organise itself and to thoughtfully reflect on the problems posed to it, including that of violence, is from this fact much closer to the revolution, the violent overthrow of bourgeois order, than the barricades of May 68 could ever be”[5] [32].

The GCI attacks the general assemblies, the lungs of the movement

But where the intervention of the GCI is totally abject is in its attack against the GAs. Without the least explanation, without any sort of argument, its leaflet says this: “BREAK the democrocretinism of the ‘sovereign and massive’ GAs, spit on the ‘elected and revocable delegates’”.

And yet it is precisely the GAs which confirm the class nature of this movement, its opening towards the whole of the working class, their search for extension, their development of discussion and consciousness. It’s these that prove that this movement of struggles in placed within the development of the mass strike that leads in the long term to decisive confrontations between the bourgeoisie and proletariat.

In the GAs, which have nothing to do with the parodies of assemblies that the unions convoke (even if that was the case at certain universities and, above all, at the beginning of the movement), the former took the struggle in hand by taking the responsibility for decisions and mobilisations, by discussing on all questions. In some GAs, this practice of looking for the unity of the working class was confirmed. They tried to bring together in one GA separate assemblies (workers, teachers, students…). Better still, these GAs were equally open to the intervention of some parents and grandparents who were thus able to transmit the experience of struggles they had lived through in 1960s and 70s. There were even some pensioners who were able to participate in the student’s GAs, thus showing, in practice, the unity of different generations of the working class and the transmission of experience.

In some GAs, you couldn’t help but be aware of the working class nature of this movement.  Thus some questions were formulated in order to organise discussions on the history of the workers’ movement, asking the “oldies” to give their experience in the organisation of struggles.

In many GAs, the problem was posed of looking for the extension of the movement, and, to do so, some decisions were taken to organise demonstrations and delegations to go to the workers’ districts and the industrial areas.

And, above all, the GAs permitted the participation, the implication of the greatest number in the movement, in the struggles, intervening in discussions, making propositions, participating in strike pickets and delegations… With all their limitations, the GAs were a political experience of the first order for a new generation of proletarians who had just gone into struggle for the first time.

Despite all that, the sole thing the GCI remembers, the sole argument that it points to in order to justify what it calls the “weakness of assemblyism”, is that “The GA of Dijon met for 17 HOURS to decide on 2 days of mobilisation”.

We don’t know exactly what happened in the GA of Dijon, which cannot be considered as the epicentre of the movement; but whatever, the time taken in one GA can’t be an argument against it. In fact, in a movement of struggle, the sole manner of taking charge is that the GA is permanent, through which the workers can take charge of the responsibility for the struggle. Moreover, it is hardly a killer criticism to say that this GA has decided two, three or any days of mobilisation.

It remains thus to pose the question: what has the GCI got against general assemblies?

We know already, through other preceding positions, that this group “prefers” minority organisations which prepare struggles, such as… the Mothers of May Square!, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, “real expressions of workers’ associationism” as it says (4). And the leaflet in question now expresses a frontal opposition towards the GAs and their elected and revocable delegates as expressions of the workers’ struggle.

And yet, the tendency of workers’ struggles in the 20th century has always been to develop its general assemblies, with elected and revocable delegates, beginning with the mass strikes in Russia 1902, 1903, or 1905 and 1917 in Russia. The workers’ councils are nothing other than the unification and politicisation of the GAs in a revolutionary situation and at a much higher level. And that was the case later in the century, in Poland 1976 or in 1980, in Spain – Vitoria, in 1976 – just to give a few examples. And, negatively, at the moment of great workers’ struggles as those of May 68 in France, the unions did everything to nip in the bud any attempt to generalise the formation of GAs, in most cases by themselves taking control and leading the struggles into dead-ends. The mass strike, with the GAs and their elected and revocable delegates, is the form that workers’ struggles take in the period of the decadence of capitalism, it is the form that guarantees the direct, massive and unified participation of the working class in its struggles. This is what revolutionaries have to put forward.

The conjuring trick of the GCI consists of passing off the mass strike, the general assemblies, the elected and revocable delegates who carry the germ of dual power against the bourgeoisie, who bear in germ the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, as vulgar expressions of democratic cretinism.

What alternative does the GCI propose after having rejected the mass strike, the Gas, the direct participation of the masses in the unfolding of history and, in the long term, the dictatorship of the proletariat?

The trade union alternative of the GCI

After a broadside of lies and insults against the movement of struggle in France, the GCI puts three “positive” propositions for, as the leaflet says, “to come onto the streets in a different way” in order “to be really victorious”:

-          “strangle the dictatorship of the economy as our class brothers recently did, like Bolivia, Algeria, Argentina, Iraq, etc”;

-          “…general strike outside and against the union’s masquerade”;

-          “organise flying pickets, block traffic, goods, at crossroads, stations, airports”.

Let’s leave to one side this lying alternative, which has nothing to do with proletarian struggle (“strangle the dictatorship of the economy as (…) in Bolivia, Algeria, Argentina, Iraq”, on which we’ve already taken a position recently (4).

First of all it’s necessary to examine what the proposition of the leaflet means: we should come down into the street in a different manner to that which developed in this struggle against the CPE. And this “different way” is what? The “general strike”… Whereas the struggle against the CPE arose spontaneously, that it progressively affirmed its extension and its enlargement towards other students and towards workers. Progressively it became conscious of itself and its objectives, with the intervention of workers of different generations and revolutionaries. The general strike, by contrast, is convoked for a given day, without the engagement, without the implication and consciousness of the workers. But this latter serves the manoeuvres and orders of any political leadership, of a minority. Whereas during the struggles in France, the minorities were part of the movement or they joined up with the whole of the workers as part of a unity, at the time of a “general strike”, the minorities are separated from their class.

In fact we heard some “calls for the general strike” from leftists and anarchist of all types. Some appeals were pressing the unions so that they, in their turn, would call the general strike. These appeals had two tonalities: firstly those who put the future of the movement into the hands of the sole forces capable, for them, of making the government retreat and, on the other hand, those who, with their critique, wanted to force the unions into a corner. Whatever the intention, whatever the “good faith” of those who called for the general strike, one thing is certain: in the background, there is always the idea that it is the unions who must and can take charge. In fact the unions will not “decree” the general strike, but a type of  “inter-professional” strike as they say, keeping all their cards in their hands in order to prevent the movement extending. Or else, as in May 68, to try to prevent the growth of the mass strike that started up after May 13, in order to “jump on the moving train” and thus try to derail it. The general strike is, in the best of cases, a confusion of terms or a well-maintained myth. Never has a general strike, ordained by the unions, made the state retreat, above all since the unions have fully become the servants of the state. And it is to play on words and on the credulity of the workers to pretend that the unions can be “forced into a corner”. Thus to better sell this adulterated merchandise of the general strike decreed by the unions (there exists no other), the GCI adopts a phraseology that is still more radical than the leftists’,  calling for a “general strike outside and against the union masquerade”. In other words, struggle against the grip of the unions by utilising the arm that they alone master. To compensate for its political void, the GCI gets into a temper and hurls out all the insulting words in its miserable dictionary (weakness/democretinism…) in order to denigrate the GAs, that is the SOLE means to allow the movement to go forward, towards the extension of strikes, towards the first stage of the mass strike. It is not a question of terminology, but of knowing what is the strength, what is the sense of a movement.

The delegations and pickets of the movement against the CPE came from the GAs and were responsible in front of them. They were supported by them and expressed the force of the whole movement. On the contrary, the pickets to block roads and stations proposed by the GCI in its leaflet only appeal to minorities who prefer acting on their own initiative. Here again, under its “radical” grandiloquence, the GCI only achieves a radical form of trade unionism.

In short, “the form” of the struggle against the CPE in France is borne of the dynamic of the mass strike whereas “the form” proposed by the GCI is only that of the trade unions. To see that, it’s sufficient to return to the experience of the workers’ struggle of the last twenty or thirty years in order to understand who gains from the different general strikes convoked and decided on by the unions. As to “flying pickets, the blockage of goods at crossroads, stations, airports..” that goes no further than minority/commando type actions, advertising the acrid fumes of burning tyres across carriageways as the height of radicalism. Here the unions have the workers at their mercy and use such action to avoid the key question - going out to other places of work to call for real solidarity.

The importance of the movement in France has been to allow new generations of proletarians to gain experience about how to organise themselves and take charge of their own struggles, about what proletarian struggle means in the present period. And it is precisely this that the GCI attacks.

ICC, June ’06.

Introduction by World Revolution

The death of 41 people and serious injuring of 40 more on the 3rd July due to a metro accident in Valencia Spain will not be well known to many reading this. In Britain, on the day it happened, this terrible disaster did not receive headline attention on news programmes on the TV or radio on the day. If it was mentioned it was the 3rd or 4th item, in some cases coming after items about a horse racing betting scandal. On the next day it was not front page news in any national newspaper. Such incredible disregard for the loss of human life is what we are used to from the ‘humanitarian’ and ‘democratic' press when it comes to the 3rd world, but when it comes to Europe or the US such a disaster is usually given headline coverage. For example, the flooding of the Danube in the spring was given prominent coverage, as was the collapse of the roof of a skating ring in Germany in the winter. So why this frankly incredible decision to relegate this disaster to the inside pages and give it lesser importance on the TV news?

Such a disaster on a relatively new (18 year old) metro system highlights the level of degradation of the mass transport systems. It can only serve to remind those who have to endure the London underground and its archaic infrastructure of the daily danger they are in.

It also happened in the same week as the first anniversary of the London bombings. The lack of any expression of concern by Blair or his ministers faced with such a disaster in a fellow EU country is certainly linked to the degradation of human relations in this rotting society, particularly as a result of deepening imperialist tensions. The Spanish state’s withdrawal of troops from Iraq and its moves towards Berlin and Paris left Blair and the British bourgeois looking weak. Thus the dead and wounded in Valencia are of no interest given that they offer no means for influencing Spanish imperialist policy.

This cold indifference to suffering expresses the real moral priorities of the ruling class. The England team gets knocked out of the world cup and it is headline news; a major disaster happens and it is of secondary importance. The nationalistic carnival that has accompanied the World Cup is more important than basic human solidarity.

WR, 6.7.06

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The tragedy in Valencia

On the 3rd of July, the worst metro accident in the history of Spain and one of the most serious in Europe claimed the lives of 41 people in Valencia and left more than 40 seriously injured.

The strength of solidarity

 

A spontaneous solidarity rapidly developed in response to this catastrophe: instead of stampeding in order “to save themselves”, the victims helped each other; workers and those living nearby came to help, there was a magnificent mobilisation by fire fighters, health workers gave their help freely, there were massive donations of blood...This solidarity which expressed a profound concern for others is in stark contrast to the individualism and the dog eat dog attitude that oozes from every pore of the present society.  A solidarity that roundly refutes the image peddled by the media, politicians and ideologues, that we are a horde of egotists who are only out for ourselves and who are only concerned with selfish and irresponsible consumerism.

This human, social solidarity is the first thing we want to express to the victims and their families. A solidarity marked by pain and indignation.

Pain, because once again -as has already happen with the accident on the London Underground 3 years ago or as happened with the Atocha bomb attack in Madrid – its is the workers who were the victims of this catastrophe. They were the majority of the victims at Torrente, a dormitory town near Valencia.

Indignation due to the shameless lies about the causes of the accident. All politicians -from the PP to the ‘Socialist’ PSOE- along with the media, have said it was due to the train going too fast, throwing the blame on the driver, who was killed in the accident.

The message is clear: the cause was HUMAN ERROR, the irresponsibility and guilt of the worker. How bad and irresponsible human are! This is not the first time this has happened: the investigation of the railway accident at Almansa three years ago, where there was serious evidence of deficiencies in the infra-structure, signalling and security systems, ended up throwing all the blame on a rail worker, who was jailed for three years.

By means of this policy, capitalism and its state washes its hands, claiming that it has absolutely no responsibility for what happened, and spreading the idea within the population that it is the workers who are guilty.

It is clear that the train was going at 80 kilometres an hour, which is double the speed at this point. This has been shown by the train's black box. However, this has been presented as a truth by the media, pushing to one side a whole series of very important considerations whose analysis will allow us to understand that there is ANOTHER TRUTH about the causes of the accident.

A tragic consequence of the crisis of capitalism

 

First of all there has been silence about that fact that the driver had a temporary contract; he had not been hired as a driver but as a station worker and had received no training: “His work contract with FGV was organised through an external business which has a new form of contracted known as temporary appointment. However, Jorge Álvarez, from the independent railway union, reported that the driver had worked as a train driver since May although he did not have a permanent job. His job was as a station worker and had an adjusted temporary employment contract as a train driver. ’They told him that he needed 14 days training, when previously he would have had at least a year as an assistant driver’’” (El Mundo 4-7-06).

A temporary worker, without training, is put in charge of driving a train all day. This was a very heavy responsibility, a source of undoubted tensions, stress and suffering. But, at the same time, it meant every day putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of travellers in danger.

It has been said that it is possible that the driver may have fainted. This leads us to the second serious irresponsibility of the authorities who boast so much about their “solidarity”. For years, as a consequence of the policy of massive lay-offs and reduction in personnel, trains are now only driven by one driver. There is no longer a duo -a driver and assistant. If something happens to the driver and the situation cannot be controlled, the passengers are abandoned to their fate.

These 41 deaths are the result of two policies carried out by all governments and businesses: CASUALISATION AND MASSIVE LAY-OFFS

The abandoning and decomposition of the infrastructure

 

Another very important element of the problem is the disastrous state of Line 1, where this accident took place. A year ago there was an accident on the same line due to problems of insecurity, material deterioration, the lack of maintenance, about which absolutely nothing was done! Concretely, “The section in which the accident happened is a bend in very bad condition. It is very narrow and at the entrance to it there is a small pothole, what is called a garrotte where the track moves and which causes a small zigzag” (Testimony of trade unionist reported in Levante 4-7-06)

But “this bend, already bad, has had nothing done to it to modify its track, because it would have meant the temporary closure of a transport route which is vital for the daily running of the system of a large city. Line 1 is the main prop of great success of the metro in Valencia, which in a year has more than 60 million journeys” (Levante 4-7-06). The Valencia metro is public property, managed as much by the PSOE (until 1995) as by the PP; and according to the sacrosanct laws of capitalist profitability they had not corrected a very serious problem, putting the lives of hundreds of thousands people at risk daily.

In order to swell profitability, in order to impose the policy of the permanent reduction of costs because of the crisis, the infrastructure is increasingly abandoned. This lack of renovation and investment in maintenance lays the conditions that led to disasters such at the one in Valencia. Both in the industrialised and the peripheral countries, these conditions are going to produce more such tragedies: in aviation, boats, trains, or through floods, storms and other effects of climate change.

Capitalism is a permanent catastrophe

 

This abandoning of the infrastructure, which is accompanied by the deterioration of working class neighbourhoods, and even the middle class ones, is in stark contrast to the multi-million investments in emblematic building and complexes, or in prestige events like the Olympics and the World Cup. In the case of Valencia, it was the visit of the Pope, and in 2007 it will be the Americas Cup.

 The press of the “left” upbraid the regional government of the PP for its waste and propose “spending more on public services”. But this suicidal policy of pompous, pharaoh-like constructions, of mad housing speculation, is the only one that capital can have in order to try and maintain its economic machine afloat, faced with the increasing storms of the global crisis. The reality is that this type of thing is being practised just as much by the central government of Mr Zapatero, who has promised to put an end to housing speculation when in reality it has been even more rampant than under his predecessor.  It is practised too by Zapatero’s municipal barons (Zaragoza and Barcelona, governed by the “Socialists”, without forgetting the incredible waste of the Seville Expo, the mirror in which the PP in Valencia is looking). We see the same policy in places such as London, Dubai, Shanghai or Athens, with governments of the most varied ideological colouration.

The tragedy in Valencia is part of a long list of catastrophes. On the one hand the more spectacular: massive floods, train bombings, blocks of flats and other buildings collapsing; and on the other hand, the daily suffering caused by millions of silent and invisible tragedies – the effects of casualisation, of poverty, unemployment, work accidents. At the same time, there is the deterioration of social and human relations that pours forth from all the pores of this social system, which is  condemned  by history and whose survival is the root cause of this terrible situation.

The only answer is to rebel, to struggle. The international working class has begun to understand that this is the only road it can follow, as demonstrated by the movements of the students in France in March, the metal workers of Vigo in May, the textile workers of Bangladesh in June. Only the development of this struggle, which is going to cost much effort and will have to overcome enormous obstacles, can eradicate the causes of such catastrophes, barbarity and suffering.

International Communist Current 4-7-06

 

When Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez was invited to visit London by Ken Livingstone it was inevitable that it would be used by both Left and Right in capitalism’s political circus. The Right accused him of authoritarianism, sponsoring terrorism, anti-Semitism, repressing and intimidating the media, supporting Iran’s bid for nuclear weapons and, in the words of a Daily Mail (15/5/6) article (headlined “Hugo Chavez helps drug barons, backs the Taliban, jails his enemies . . . and hates the middle class…”) of having “personal control of the executive, the judiciary, armed forces, education and the oil industry”. Meanwhile the Left listed the reforms in healthcare, education and literacy, praised Chávez as ‘inspiring’, ‘good news’ etc, cited Venezuela as an example for all those who support, in Livingstone’s words, “progress, justice and democracy” and reminded us of US sympathy for the 2002 attempted coup against Chávez.

In reality, Chávez’s “socialism for the 21st century” is a form of state capitalism appropriate for capitalism in its current stage of decay. The experience for the working class in Venezuela is the same grind of exploitation that the working class suffers everywhere, except its president says “we are participating in a revolution”. This year Chávez has increased defence spending by 31%, buying military helicopters, boats, fighter planes, while importing 100,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles by the end of 2006. Anywhere else this would be heavily criticised by the Left, but say it’s for defence against the US and there’s silence.

Away from Venezuela the rhetoric of Chávez is used to feed the false debate between Right and Left. When the Telegraph, Mail, and Express warn of a ‘revolutionary firebrand’ and the leftists welcome a breath of fresh air, the trap is set. For those who promote the idea that a ‘heroic leader’ might, in John Pilger’s words, be “using oil revenues to liberate the poor”, the role of the working class is just as an army of extras behind a faction of the ruling class.

Lies and misrepresentation are widespread on both Right and Left. But while the Right tends to be fairly crude (Donald Rumsfeld likening Chávez to Hitler, although, to be fair, Chávez has called Bush a donkey, dumbass, drunk and, er, like Hitler) the Left uses language to draw in people who are beginning to question the nature of capitalist society. In Workers Power (March 2006) you can read of “a situation with elements of dual power in Venezuela, where the local bourgeoisie does not hold undivided power, and the masses are mobilised and partially armed.” At present this corresponds to no sort of reality.

The ‘local bourgeoisie’, with Chávez at its heart, dominates Venezuelan society and the ‘masses’ are currently only ‘mobilised’ behind their exploiters. Workers Power has to create its fiction to justify its support for the current regime. Interestingly the Mail’s assertion that “Chavez himself is actually more like Juan and Eva Peron of Argentina in his populism” has more of an element of truth in it. There is a long tradition of strong figures from both Right and Left dominating the politics of various Latin American countries. Chávez is just the latest in line: he has a master’s degree in military science, he served in a counter-insurgency battalion reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel, he taught at the Military Academy and organised a failed military coup in 1992. He combines a traditional background with left-wing rhetoric.

In London Chávez said at one point “We have to take up what Rosa Luxemburg said – the choice is socialism or barbarism”. He and his leftist groupies are clearly on the side of barbarism, standing against the working class that is the only possible force for socialism.

Car 31/5/6

This spring hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers, most of them “illegal aliens,” as the bourgeoisie calls them, predominantly from Latin American countries, took to the streets in major American cities across the country, from Los Angeles, to Dallas, to Chicago, to Washington DC, and New York City, protesting a threatened crackdown proposed in legislation advocated by the rightwing of the Republican party. The movement seemed to erupt overnight, coming from nowhere. What is the meaning of these events and what is the class nature of this movement?

The anti-immigrant legislation that won approval in the House of Representatives and provoked the demonstrations would criminalize illegal immigration, making it a felony for the first time. Currently being an illegal immigrant is a civil violation, not a criminal offense. Illegal immigrants would be arrested, tried, convicted, deported, and would forfeit any possibility to ever legally return to the US in the future. State laws which forbid local agencies, from police to schools to social services from reporting illegal aliens to immigration officials would be nullified, and employers who hired illegal aliens would suffer legal penalties as well. Under this legislation, upwards of 12 million immigrants would face deportation. This extreme legislation does not have the support of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie, as it does not correspond to the global interests of American state capitalism, which clearly needs immigrant workers to fill low paid jobs, to serve as a reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers to depress wages for the entire working class, and considers the idea of mass deportation of 12 million people to be an absurdity. Opposed to this proposed crackdown is the Bush administration, the official Republican leadership in the Senate, the Democrats, big city mayors, state governors, major corporate employers who need to exploit a plentiful supply of immigrant workers (in the retail, restaurant, meat packing, agribusiness, construction and home care industries), and the trade unions who dream of extracting membership dues from these destitute workers. This motley crew of bourgeois “champions” of immigrant workers favors more moderate legislation, which would tighten up the border, slash the numbers of new immigrants, allow illegal immigrants who have been here for a number of years to become legalized, and force those who have been here for less than two years to leave the country, but with the possibility to return legally in the future. Some form of “guest” worker program would be set up to allow foreign workers to find temporary work in the US on a legal basis and maintain the supply of needed cheap labor. 

It was in this social and political context that the immigrant worker demonstrations erupted. Coming on the heels of the unemployed immigrant youth riots in France last autumn, the student revolt triggered in France this spring against the government’s attack on job security, and the transit strike in New York in December, the immigrant demonstrations were hailed by leftists of all stripes, and many libertarian, anarchist groups as well. It is certainly true that the immigrants threatened by the legislation are a sector of the working class that confronts a particularly harsh and brutal exploitation, suffers a harrowing existence, denied access to social services and medical treatment, and that their situation demands the solidarity and support of the working class as a whole. This solidarity is all the more necessary because in classical fashion the bourgeoisie uses the debate over legal and illegal status of the immigrants as a means to stir up racism and hatred, to divide the proletariat against itself, all the while that it profits from the exploitation of the immigrant workers. This could indeed have been a struggle on the proletarian terrain, but there is a big difference between what could be and what actually happens in any given movement.

Wishful thinking should not blind us to the actual class nature of the recent demonstrations, which were in large measure a bourgeois manipulation. Yes, there have been workers in the streets, but they are there totally on the terrain of the bourgeoisie, which provoked it, manipulated it, controlled it, and openly led it. It is true that there have been some instances, such as the spontaneous walkouts by Mexican immigrant high school students in California – the sons and daughters of the working class – that implied certain similarities to the situation in France, but this movement was not organized on the proletarian terrain or controlled by immigrant workers themselves. The demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets were orchestrated and mobilized by the Spanish-language mass media, that is to say by the Spanish-speaking bourgeoisie, with the support of large corporations and establishment politicians.

Nationalism has poisoned the movement, whether it was Latino nationalism, which was cropped up in the opening moments of the demonstrations, or the sickening rush to affirm Americanism that followed more recently, or the nationalist, racist-based opposition to the immigrants fomented by rightwing talk show broadcasters on the radio and rightwing Republicans. When there were complaints in the mass media that too many immigrant demonstrators carried Mexican flags in California and that this showed they were more loyal to their home country than their adopted home, movement organizers supplied thousands of American flags to be waved in the demonstrations that followed in other cities to affirm the loyalty and Americanism of the protests. By the end of April a Spanish language version of the national anthem recorded by leading Hispanic pop stars was released and broadcast on the radio. Of course the rightwing nationalist opponents of the immigrants jumped on the Spanish-language version of the national anthem as affront to national dignity. The demand for citizenship, which is a totally bourgeois legalism, is another example of the non-proletarian terrain of the struggle. This putrid nationalist ideology is designed to completely short circuit any possibility for immigrants and American-born workers to recognize their essential unity.

Nowhere was the capitalist nature of the movement more evident than the mass demonstration in New York City in April, when 300,000 immigrants rallied outside City Hall, where they had the support of the city’s mayor, Republican Michael Bloomberg, and Democratic Senators Charles Schumer and Hilary Clinton, who spoke to the crowd and praised their struggle as example of Americanism and patriotism.

It’s been 20 years since the last major immigration reform effort undertaken by the Reagan administration, which granted amnesty to illegal immigrants. But that amnesty did nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigration that has continued unabated for two decades, because American capitalism needs a constant supply of cheap labor and because the effects of the social decomposition of capitalism in underdeveloped countries has so degraded living conditions as to impel growing numbers of workers to seek refuge in the relatively more stable and prosperous capitalist metropoles.

For the bourgeoisie the time has come to stabilize the situation once again, as it has become more difficult to absorb an increasing flood of immigrants and more and more difficult to tolerate a situation where millions of workers are not officially integrated into the economy or society, who don’t pay taxes, are not documented, after nearly 20 years of illegal status. On the one hand this has led to Bush administration resort to clumsy efforts to restrict new immigration at the border, for example by militarizing the border with Mexico, literally constructing a Berlin Wall to make it difficult for immigrants to cross into the US. On the other hand it has also led the administration to favor legalization for workers who have been here more than two years. Because the U.S. economy is such that it needs a constant flow of cheap labor in a big sector of the economy, it is highly unlikely that the several million workers who have been in the U.S. under two years and will be legally required to leave the country, will actually do so. Most likely they will remain here illegally, and will become the base of the future illegal workforce that will continue to be necessary for the capitalist economy, both to provide cheap labor and put pressure on wages for the rest of the working class.

The recalcitrance of the rightwing to accept this reality reflects the increasing political irrationality created by social decomposition, which has previously manifested itself in the ruling class’ difficulty in achieving its desired results in the presidential election. It’s hard to believe that the extreme right cannot see the impossibility of mass deportations of 12 million people, and the need to stabilize the situation. It’s only a matter of time before the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie imposes its solution to the problem and the mass demonstrations recede, as the bourgeoisie moves to integrate the newly legalized population into the mainstream political process.

Internationalism, April 2006
 

The BNP’s gains in the recent council elections showed the relationship between the neo-Nazis and their more mainstream political buddies.

The BNP said in some of its local literature that it was just like "the Labour Party your grandfathers voted for" and that it was "people just like you making a difference". It even had a "totally assimilated Greek-Armenian" as one of its candidates.

But while presenting itself as a respectable organisation it insisted that it was the “foremost patriotic political party” that is “daring to break the stranglehold of the old parties on our dying democracy”. Accordingly the other parties return the compliment. Tory leader David Cameron said that "I would rather people voted for any party other than the BNP." Weyman Bennett, joint secretary of Unite Against Fascism, said that “There is a great danger that the BNP's election gains give a veneer of respectability to racist ideas, and could pull mainstream politics into the gutter."

In reality all bourgeois politicians are in the gutter and none of them are looking at the stars. While the BNP say provocatively that they’re prepared to be thrown out of the council chamber in their patriotic crusade, their ‘opponents’ talk up the ‘fascist threat’. In a notorious interview Margaret Hodge claimed that many white working class people might vote BNP because "They can't get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry". Looking at her own constituency she said that “When I arrived in 1994, it was a predominantly white, working class area. Now, go through the middle of Barking and you could be in Camden or Brixton.”

This is obviously shocking to Hodge, the rich, privately educated wife of a High Court Judge who once employed Cherie Blair. Her argument is simple, the BNP is responding to genuine concerns and the other parties must confront them. This ‘confrontation’ takes place through the ballot box and in the whole process of capitalist democracy. The BNP defends democracy; all the rest of them defend democracy; and whatever their differences they all know it means the dictatorship of a minority exploiting class.

Hodge, leader of Islington Council for ten years, once had a bust of Lenin installed in the town hall and still claims Rosa Luxemburg as a political role model. Yet the Lenin who wrote State and Revolution showed that the state exists when there are irreconcilable class interests. The Luxemburg who wrote The Mass Strike showed all the different creative forces within the working class in struggle. Hodge stands for the same capitalist state as the Tories and the BNP. They compliment each other perfectly. The BNP makes some electoral gains. The fascist menace is made to seem a little more tangible. People must no longer be ‘apathetic’, they must take up their civic responsibilities, they must vote for anyone but the BNP.

It is in this process the ruling class tries to persuade workers to forget their own class interests and fall in behind the parties of their exploiters. The democratic lie is that we have something in common with the class that dominates every aspect of our lives, above all with the state that invades every corner of social life in its defence of rotting capitalism.   Car 6/5/6

 

 

 

 

This leaflet was written by Enternasyonalist Kömunist Sol (Internationalist Communist Left) a new proletarian group in Turkey. We very much welcome the appearance of this group and in a future publication we will look at their statement of basic principles, which we have received recently.

The EKS gave out the leaflet at the May Day demonstration in Ankara. In London the ICC took charge of producing it and distributing it at the May Day demonstration. It was also given out by some participants in the libcom.org internet forum. 

Despite some secondary differences with formulations used in the leaflet, the ICC fully associates itself with the internationalist outlook it defends. The leaflet is correct in denouncing the way that the left wing of capital has turned May Day into a meaningless ritual, a position already reached by the Communist Left of France after World War 2. But we think that it is also correct to affirm the perspective that a new generation of the working class will one day be able to reclaim May Day and other symbols of its international unity against capitalism.
 

 It is available in PDF for download and distribution here:

files/en/May_Day_eng+turk_A4.pdf [48]

MAY DAY IS THE DAY OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS

For too long May Day has been a ritual with no meaning for the working class. May Day was originally meant to be a day of international workers solidarity, but today on the May Day demonstrations all we see is leftists of various colours calling on the working class to back different nationalist groups. Whether it be the Turkish nationalist left calling for an ‘independent Turkey’, and screaming against the imperialists while at the same time ignoring the fact that Turkey is a member of NATO, or those who disgusted by the state’s barbarity in the South East side with the Kurdish nationalists, and their hideous mirror image of Turkish nationalism, or even the anti Americanism of the left loudly shouting “Yankee go home”. What for? Then we can have our own ‘nice’ Turkish capitalist bosses. All of this disgusts us. It saddens us that it is left to a small group of internationalists to defend the principles of international working class solidarity.

                When we look to America, we see not only Bush, but also the 100,000 workers that marched against racist immigration laws on March 10th in Chicago .

                We see not only the imperialist war machine, but also the over 6,000 American soldiers who have deserted, and crossed the Canadian border rather than go to fight for ‘their’ country in Iraq.

                When we look at Britain, we see not only Blair, but also the 1,000,000 people who marched on the streets of London against the Iraq war.

                We see not only the British Government’s obedience to America, but also Malcolm Kendall-Smith, the RAF officer who was sent to prison on April the 14th for refusing to go to Iraq.

                Similarly, when we look to Iraq, it is not only nationalist, and Islamic resistance that we see, but also the thousands of workers who demonstrated in Kirkuk to protest against the high cost of living and lack of electricity and fuel.

                When we look to Iran, it is not only President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the states drive to obtain nuclear weapons that we see, but also the massive strike wave all across Iran, which has included bus drivers, textile workers, miners, and car workers.

                Workers, look to the recent strikes in France: thousands of students demonstrating alongside striking workers to defeat a law making it easier to sack young workers. Look to Britain, where over 1,000,000 workers struck in the biggest strike for eighty years to defend their pension rights. Look to the workers of Iran struggling valiantly against capitalism, and the state despite the oppression from the regime. Look to the working class not nationalists of whatever shade.

 

THE WORKERS HAVE NO COUNTRY

FOR INTERNATIONALISM AND WORKERS’ STRUGGLE

 

Enternasyonalist Kömunist Sol

1 MAYIS İŞÇİ SINIFININ

ENTERNASYONAL MÜCADELE GÜNÜDÜR

 1 Mayıs uzun bir süredir işçi sınıfı için hiçbir şey ifade etmeyen anlamsız bir gösteriye dönüştürülmüş durumda. Köken olarak 1 Mayıs işçi sınıfının gerçek uluslararası  dayanışmasının günü olmasına rağmen, bugün 1 Mayıs eylemlerinde gördüğümüz tek şey çeşitli renklerden sol grupların işçi sınıfını o veya bu ulusalcılıkları desteklemeye çağırmasından ibaret. Bu gösteride bir yanda Türkiye’nin NATO üyesi bir ülke olduğu gerçeğini görmezden gelerek “bağımsız bir Türkiye” den ve üstelik “emperyalistlere” karşı mücadeleden bahseden Türk ulusalcı solu duruyor. Diğer yanda ise Devletin güneydoğuda uyguladığı barbarca şiddete karşı, sanki onlar Türk milliyetçiliğinin aynı ölçüde vahşi bir yansıması değilmiş gibi Kürt milliyetçiliği yanında saf tutanlar konumlanmış durumda. Bütün bu maskeli baloya Ortadoğu emekçilerinin kanı üzerinden yükselen ve İslami-kapitalist diktatörlüklerin yanında saf tutan kaypak bir anti-amerikancılığa tutunmuş her türden İslamcı, milliyetçi ve sol akım da katılıyor. Peki bütün bunlar ne için? Kendi “özbeöz”  Türk veya Kürt patronlarımıza sahip olabilmemiz için. Biz bütün bu gösteriden nefret ediyoruz Fakat, işçi sınıfının enternasyonalist dayanışma ilkelerinin bugün için yalnızca küçük bir azınlık tarafından savunuluyor olması, sınıflar arasındaki  mücadelenin bu temel niteliğini değiştirmiyor.

                Biz, ABD’ye baktığımızda sadece Bush’u değil, aynı zamanda, ırkçı, göçmen düşmanı yasaya karşı 10 Mart günü Şikago’da yürüyen 100.000 işçiyi de görüyoruz.

                Sadece savaşa yürüyen dev bir emperyalist yıkım makinesini değil, “kendi ülkelerinin çıkarları” için Irak’ta savaşmayı reddedip Kanada sınırından kaçarak ulusal ordularını terk eden 6000’i aşkın amerikan askerini de görüyoruz.

                İngiltere’ye baktığımızda sadece Blair’i değil, Londra sokaklarında savaşa karşı yürüyen 1.000.000 insanı da görüyoruz.

Biz sadece İngiliz hükümetinin Amerika’ya itaatini değil, 14 şubat’ta Irak’a gitmeyi reddettiği için hapse atılan İngiliz kraliyet hava gücü subayı Malcolm Kendall’ı da görüyoruz.

                Benzer şekilde Irak’a baktığımızda gördüğümüz sadece milliyetçi ve İslamcı direniş değil, Kerkük’te ağır yaşam koşulları ve yüksek elektrik ve benzin fiyatlarına karşı ayaklanan binlerce işçidir de.

                İran’a baktığımızda sadece başkan Mahmut Ahmedinecat ve devletin “emperyalizme karşı” nükleer silahlanma hamlesini değil, İran’ı boydan boya saran ve otobüs şoförleri, tekstil işçileri, madenciler ve otomobil sanayi işçilerinin katıldığı grev dalgasını da görüyoruz..

                Emekçiler, Fransa’daki son grevlere, genç işçilerin işten atılmasını kolaylaştırmaya çalışan yasaya karşı mücadele eden grevci işçilere ve eylem yapan öğrencilere bakın. Britanya’da 80 yıldan beri gerçekleşen en büyük greve, 1.000.000’un üzerinde işçinin emeklilik hakları için yürüttüğü mücadeleye bakın. İran’a, rejimin baskılarına rağmen devlete ve sermayeye karşı mücadele eden işçilere bakın. Baktığınızda göreceğiniz şey şu veya bu ulusalcı, milliyetçi hareket değil kendi ulusal sermaye sahiplerine, kendi patronlarına ve kendi ordularına karşı savaşan işçilerden başka bir şey olmayacaktır. İşçi sınıfı mücadelesinin tek gerçekliği uluslarüstüdür, enternasyonaldir. Çünkü;

İŞÇI SINIFININ VATANI YOKTUR

YAŞASIN ENTERNASYONALİZM VE EMEKÇİLERİN MÜCADELESİ

 

Enternasyonalist Kömunist Sol

 

 

The walkout by up to 3,000 Vauxhall car workers at the Ellesmere plant on the 11th May only lasted a day, but it expressed something very important: the refusal to passively accept being thrown onto the unemployment scrap-heap. Upon hearing that 1,000 jobs may go, the morning shift walked out. They were joined by the afternoon shift. “Strike action spread through the plant after workers took the comments to mean that GM had already decided to cut the posts” (Guardian 12/5/06). By the end of the day all three thousand workers had joined in this struggle. The management and the unions rapidly make it clear that there had been no decision on the numbers to be thrown on the street. The unions got the workers to go back with the promise that they would negotiate with the management.

This spontaneous rejection of the threat of lay-offs has to be seen in a wider context. It came within days of the announcement of up to 2,000 lay offs at Orange mobile phones, another 500 health workers being laid off - this time by Gloucestershire's three Primary Care Trusts with the closure of community hospitals - and the dismissal of 6,000 telecommunications workers at NTL. It also came after the decision of the French carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroen to close its central England plant next year, eliminating 2,300 jobs, and the closing of Rover last year. Thus, the evident determination of the Vauxhall workers not to passively accept unemployment was an example to the rest of the working class.

The Vauxhall workers’ action also needs to be seen against the background of a resurgence of struggles. The strike of over a million council workers on the 28th March in defence of pensions, the postal workers’ unofficial strike in Belfast, the massive student movement in France this spring, the strike by council workers in Germany at the same time, the transport workers’ strike in New York in December – all these movements provide proof that there is new mood developing in the international working class, a growing determination to defend its interests against attacks, especially on the issue of jobs and pensions.

The struggle at Vauxhall was right from the beginning a response to international conditions. The ignition-key for the struggle were comments by GM Europe's chief executive, Carl-Peter Forster “We know, thank God, that the English labour market is more capable of absorption than, let's say, the German or the Belgian markets". (BBC News on-line 12/5/06). Whether this was a provocation or simply an unguarded comment is hard to tell, but one thing is for certain: the unions and bosses used them as an excuse for playing the nationalist card.  It is not only in Britain that Vauxhall workers are under threat but throughout Europe and world wide, as are other car workers at Ford, GM and elsewhere. In order to try and stop any international solidarity against these attacks,  the unions used Forster's comments to try and set up a barrier between the Ellesmere workers and their comrades in the rest of Europe. Both the TGWU and Amicus played the nationalist card: "British car workers are among the best in Europe, but they're the easiest to sack", said TGWU General Secretary Tony Woodley  (BBC on-line 12/5/06). Whilst according to the BBC, “Amicus said it wanted cuts to be spread throughout Europe's Astra plants in Belgium and Germany.” (www.bbc.co.uk/news [53] 12/5/06).

The unions may have played the nationalist card to divert the workers' discontent, but they have shown real international solidarity with Vauxhall’s bosses: for weeks before and during the struggle the both had been planning “ways of spreading any job losses across Europe, and talks between the two sides will continue today” (The Guardian 12/5/06).

Forster's comments also contained the very poisonous idea that even if workers are laid-off, there are jobs in Britain to go around. This is the lie pushed by the government as well. The economy is working well over here, so if you are unemployed it is your own fault. This idea seeks to reduce the unemployed to isolated individuals. The fact that there are officially over one and half million unemployed is simply brushed aside. However workers are increasingly not willing to accept the capitalist logic of accepting one’s fate. The fact that this struggle was reported on the main BBC evening news, albeit with the unions pushing the nationalist message of the defence of British jobs, showed that discontent is growing in the class.

This increasing militancy is in its initial stages but there is a growing determination within the working class to defend jobs. As with Ellesmere, workers have gone through years of accepting attacks on working conditions, on wages and job security in order to at least maintain some level of employment where they work. Today however increasing numbers of workers are no longer willing to make these endless sacrifices. There is a growing realisation that all workers are under attack, as night after night there are reports of lay-offs in plants, in hospitals, or in offices.

Fighting unemployment is not easy: often bosses will try to use strikes as a pretext for pushing through the plant-closures they want anyway. But it is far easier to do this when the workers’ resistance remains isolated to one factory or company. On the other hand, the threat or reality of struggles extending across union, sectional and other divisions – in short, the threat of the mass strike – can oblige the ruling class to back down, as it did over the CPE in France.

Such retreats by the bourgeoisie can only be temporary. The remorseless deepening of the economic crisis will force it to return to the offensive and make even more desperate attacks on living and working conditions. In the final analysis, massive unemployment is a sure sign of the bankruptcy of capitalist society. For the working class, they must become a stimulus for struggling not only against the effects of exploitation, but against exploitation itself.

ICC 16.5.06.

The strengthening of the state is a characteristic of all decadent societies and this is particularly true of decomposing capitalism. What Tony Blair calls the new situation of ‘modernity’ is in fact senility and decay. It is no longer a question of the state intervening in this or that aspect of the economy and society here and there, but of an overall increase in state control in order to shore up a tottering system. This is a permanent and deepening characteristic of the decadence of capitalism that can only become more accentuated as capitalist society rots on its feet. The reinforcement, to absurd levels, of restrictive laws, of the apparatus and tools of coercion, the integration and control of the whole of social life, is the job of the state, whatever political party is in government. And these laws, these repressive measures, can only protect the interests of the ruling class against the exploited and oppressed majority.

The development of restrictive legislation has been fast and furious these last few years; the Civil Contingencies Bill, 2001; Anti-Terrorism Act; Crime and Securities Act; Crime and Disorder Act; Anti-Social Behaviour Act; Police Act, 2005; Criminal Justice Act, 2003 and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, largely increasing the unscrutinised powers of the executive almost without limit.

All these overlap each other, and on top of previous legislation, limit, even eliminate, the right of movement, expression, assembly, protest, publication, intent and even, potentially, thought.

Add to these the collation of fingerprints, facial recognition and DNA databases, including 24,000 innocent children, ubiquitous CCTV surveillance, proposed ID cards, government agencies actively encouraging informers and spies, increases in phone taps and mail interception, the extension of MI5 and MI6, the increases in surveillance, spying and ‘tracking’ at work, and we are now living in a world that makes Orwell’s 1984 look childishly archaic.

In this atmosphere of increased repression based on the decay of the system, the police have unashamedly set up and used their own death squads. Innocent people have been executed for being in the wrong place at wrong time, carrying chair legs in carrier bags, having Scottish accents, being the wrong colour, mentally ill, or being taken into custody. Add to this can be the increasing number of innocents run down and maimed or killed because they weren’t quick enough to get out of the way of souped-up police cars racing around the streets with impunity.

For Tony Blair and the ruling class the development of an ever-more repressive apparatus is all about the “modern world”. In an article in the Observer of February 26 (where, incidentally, he also boasted of the “true record” of him having “introduced transparency into political funding and restricted the Prime Minister’s right to nominate to the House of Lords”!) he talked about “modern crime” being “really ugly”, the “modernity” of global terrorism (opposed to good, old-fashioned IRA bombs presumably) and the “modern world … different from” the world of inadequate court processes.

This massive increase in repressive laws would seem unnecessary when one thinks that during the miner’s strike of 1984 parts of Britain and the whole of the media were under virtual martial law without a single new law being necessary. But it is important to see that the present increase in the repressive nature of the state underlines its essential weakness and the fact that the economic infrastructure is in a state of advanced decay. The bourgeoisie is preparing its weapons for class struggle.

Behind the whole range of repressive measures being proposed, enacted and updated by the Labour government lies the whole of the ruling class, cohering in the face of the collapse and decay of the economy and the upheavals that will flow from it. The laws against Blair’s “modern criminals” and the “modernity” of terrorism will come into their full force when aimed against the working class as it is forced to fight for its life against the decay of capitalism. Terrorism, “modern” or otherwise is just an excuse. We know from its experiences in Ireland that the British state has used double agents, criminals, murderers and bombers in its domestic and international campaigns. And while the ‘old-fashioned’ terrorists of the IRA and the paramilitaries of Loyalism take tea and biscuits in Downing Street, the British state has been active in setting up and using Islamic fundamentalism in pursuing its imperialist aims around the globe. Reference its role in the setting up of the madrassas in Pakistan, the use of the Islamic GIA and FIS against French imperialism in Algeria, the safe haven for terrorists that earned the British capital the name of “Londonistan”. A cursory reading of the recent trial of Abu “the Finsbury Park Hook” Hamza, showed that he was working for British intelligence and was only taken in when the US threatened to interrogate him.

Thus the myriad of repressive laws currently proposed or enacted by the British state is not designed to punish criminals, the biggest of which can easily buy their way through the legal processes. Nor is it designed to counter terrorism, because the same state sets up and actively uses this terrorism – and this when it is not indirectly spreading terrorism through its imperialist wars (Iraq, Afghanistan), the brunt of which is murderously felt by innocent civilians.

“Faced with this state of (economic) crisis, in which the ruling class is unable to ensure its political power in the same way as before, the apparatus of order, the State, the ultimate crystallisation of the interests of the old society, tends to become strengthened and extend its jurisdiction to all areas of social life” (ICC pamphlet, The Decadence of Capitalism).

Fear, police, law, repression, surveillance and spies, this is the “modernity” of a decaying and decomposing system that has no answer to its increasingly deepening economic crisis, unemployment, uncertain and shaky future.

In an economically healthy society there is no need for ever-increasing, all pervasive law, surveillance and repression. But as a society enters into crisis legislation proliferates, but this time from the necessity to strengthen police work, and all the other forms of repression. This comes from the necessity of the ruling class to shore up its historically obsolete system. All the multiplicity of measures are aspects of the growth of its unproductive expenditure and typical of the symptoms of a bloated, gangrened and decaying state capitalism.   Eddie, 25.3.6

While the great struggle of the proletarian youth in France against the CPE was winning the sympathy and even the active support of the rest of the working class in that country, the coverage of the bourgeois media about the social situation in neighbouring Germany sounded like a report from another planet. With the petering out of the strikes of the garbage collectors and other employees of the public sector, of the nation wide doctors strike, and of initial token strikes and protests of the engineering workers, the propagandists of the ruling class were “regretting” the “end of solidarity” and the “look after number one” spirit supposedly reigning among the workers in Germany. They point out that whereas the public sector strikes aimed at maintaining the 38,5 working week, the doctors have walked out, not in order to shorten working hours of 60 and more, but to get them paid. And whereas, as far as the public sector is concerned, the only question seems to be, by how much incomes will be reduced, the engineering workers are demanding 5%, the doctors even 30% wage increases.

Thus, the present social situation in France and in Germany is being analysed by these commentators as follows: whereas the combativeness and solidarity west of the Rhine is identified as a relic of a long outmoded “revolutionary romanticism” specific to a French nation which has not yet arrived in the modern world, corporatist egoism is supposed to be the main feature of the situation in Germany, typical of both the present and the future.

The class struggle on the rise world wide

What is the reality of this description, which, superficially, appears to account for a number of well known facts? It is a fact that the class struggle generally develops more explosively and with a more openly political character in France than in Germany. It is true that this difference has something to do with history, whereby the élan of combat in France is less a product of the great bourgeois revolution of 1789 than of the mass struggles of the French proletariat – from the insurrections of June 1848 and the Paris Commune 1871 to the mass strike of May/June 1948. It is also true that the immediate potential for the extension of the workers struggle in Germany today is very slight in comparison with what it has been in France. Whereas in Germany the public sector, the doctors and the engineering workers have all kept to themselves in the framework of the traditional and regular wage negotiation rounds, carefully controlled and kept apart by the trade unions, the recent struggle of the proletarian youth in the schools and universities of France quickly took on the character of a mass movement. Whereas this youth tried for weeks to extend its struggle to the workers in the plants and offices, in Germany, even in workplaces where different sectors are involved in disputes at the same time (like the doctors and nurses of the university hospitals) there hasn’t even been a hint of a common struggle. And whereas in France the movement, especially at the beginning, was self organised, nowhere do we find in Germany at the moment mass assemblies organised  by the strikers themselves.

Those are the facts – or rather, some of the facts. But what are the determining facts? The determining facts are the increasingly evident bankruptcy of capitalism, the sharpening of the attacks against the working class of all countries, and the international resurgence of the class struggle. Once this is understood, what the social situations in France and Germany have in common becomes clear. Since the workers’ struggles of today are accompanied by a subterranean maturation in consciousness which occasionally appears on the surface, and is more and more being carried forward by a new generation, they are contributing to a process announcing and preparing the mass strikes of the future. The “secret” of the present situation both in France and in Germany lies in the – still embryonic – ripening of conditions for the mass strike as the typical proletarian form of struggle in the decadent phase of capitalism. The preparation of this development is recognisable in France via the mass nature of the university and school students’ struggles and their urge to extend the movement to the rest of the class. The same preparation manifests itself in Germany through the simultaneity of struggles in different sectors,  the drawing of new sectors into the struggle, such as the doctors, and in the leading role which the industrial proletariat in Germany is still playing in these struggles. But most important of all today is the simultaneity of struggles between these two central battalions of the European continental proletariat in the framework of a world wide recovery of workers’ struggles. At the same time as the struggles on both sides of the Rhine, over a million municipal employees have been taking action against pension cuts in Britain, Catholic and Protestant postal workers have been demonstrating together in Belfast, hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers have been demonstrating in the USA against their illegal status. Only last year there was the big strike movement in Argentina, the spectacular walk out in the metro in New York and Stockholm, and at London’s Heathrow Airport. At the turn of the year there were the protests against mass redundancies at AEG in Nuremberg and SEAT in Barcelona etc. The same kind of situation arose at the beginning of the 20th century (centred on Russia in 1905), at the end of World War I, and in the years from 1968 onwards with the end of the Stalinist counter-revolution: the mass strike is not only always an international phenomenon, it is also always prepared world wide through a series of more or less significant skirmishes. As opposed to the general strike propagated sometimes by the trade unions and above all the Anarchists, where one fine day everybody downs tools at the same time, the mass strike develops over a whole period, and is concerned not only with the paralysis of the capitalist economy and the political apparatus of power, but at the same time with the maintenance of all the services necessary for the well being of the population or the conducting of the struggle.

The public sector strike

After almost nine weeks of strike it appears that, with the Baden-Württemberg municipal wage bargaining agreement, the longest post war strike in the public sector is coming to an end. As a result, from the beginning of May on, 220,000 municipal employees in the South West will have to work a 39 instead of 38,5 hours week. But at the moment of writing an agreement at the level of the provinces (the Länder) has still not been reached. While the unions are trying to play down this result, or even present it as a victory for the strikers, it is clear that as far as official working hours are concerned, capital has broken a dam. From now on the exploiters will be busy trying to further lengthen working hours, and to extend those already introduced to the working class as a whole.

Apart from that, the most significant aspect of this strike has been how little the call to strike of the Ver.di trade union has been followed by the workers. In the first weeks of the strike the garbage collectors were the spearhead of the movement. But when, after five weeks on strike, there was still no sign of any success, the workers, who are very experienced in struggle, began to go back to work all along the line. Many of them expressed the feeling that they were being lead straight into a defeat, and that to continue would only lead to a still heavier defeat. Since then, this strike has assumed something of a virtual character. The clearer it has become, that in most of the workplaces allegedly on strike business is going on as usual, the more strike posters the trade unions have been sticking up. It is as if Ver.di is trying to cover up with paper the extent of its incapacity to mobilise the workers.

If the world was not such a complicated place, one would feel entitled to assume that the lack of strike enthusiasm of the proletarians must be an advantage for capital. But that depends very much on the reason why the wage slaves hesitate to enter the struggle. In this case it is clear that it is because Ver.di put the question of the length of the working week at centre stage. But not out of concern to limit the duration of exploitation. No, what it had at heart was the maintenance of the reformist illusion within the class that it is possible within capitalism to reduce mass unemployment through the shortening of the working day. Whereas the trade union bureaucrats are upholding this reformism with something akin to fanaticism, it soon turned out that hardly any worker was prepared to go on strike for such an illusion. No wonder! The last reduction in the working week in the public sector was accompanied by the elimination of over a million jobs!

To make matters worse, one of the main goals of the bourgeoisie with this strike was to increase massively the presence of the trade unions in this sector. Whereas in the engineering industry, it is not uncommon for over 80% of the work force to be union members, the level of union membership in the public sector is, from the point of the bourgeoisie, frighteningly low. It is true that Ver.di has been able to establish itself in individual sectors, such as among the garbage collectors, by presenting itself as an effective protection against privatisation (an illusion which will soon melt). But precisely in those workplaces where the young generation is in a clear majority, such as among the nurses in the hospitals, the trade union agitators are looked at with amazement and also suspicion. Here, we can see a clear parallel with the development in France, where the young generation, because of its lack of experience, does not yet recognise the anti-proletarian character of the unions, but has already begun to sense that they are something outdated, like the dinosaurs.

A worried German bourgeoisie has already begun to draw consequences from this failure of Ver.di. The possibility of separate, purely corporatist unions for each profession, along the lines of the recently established Vereinigung Cockpit of the Pilots or the union of the railway locomotive drivers, is being publicly discussed. The ruling class knows from experience how often in history sectors of the working class who declined to follow a trade union call to struggle, later on has been more than prepared to enter the combat for its own cause.

The doctors’ strike

This strike gives us an example of how a narrowly professional union – in this case the Marburger Bund – can sometimes be very effective, here in controlling the situation in the hospitals. Here, the strike has not only been reduced to the medical world, but is strongly directed towards reformist illusions. It is being claimed, for instance, that this strike is in the best interests of the national capital, being the only way to prevent German doctors from emigrating to countries where they will get better pay.

What’s for sure is that the situation of the doctors disproves the bourgeois propaganda according to which their radical wage demands prove the drifting apart of wage levels and the decline in any solidarity amongst employees. The opposite is the case. The recent attacks against the doctors have been so brutal that not even a 30% wage rise would be able to compensate them. Most of the medical assistants have to do so much unpaid overtime that their wage per hour is often even lower than that of the nurses.

Apart from the fact that, in Germany, this sector has entered the struggle for the first time ever, the significance of this strike lies in the way it has brought up the question of solidarity. Although this strike has caused considerable chaos and increased work loads, neither among the patients nor the rest of the hospital workers has anyone said anything negative about the doctors’ struggle. Some of the nurses have begun to say that they would be prepared to go on strike for the same demands as the doctors – 30% more wages – and to struggle alongside them. In reality, the most pressing problem of the nurses is at present not the length of the working day, but the banning of overtime, as a result of which incomes have fallen by anything up to 25%.

The allegation of Ver.di that the medical profession’s readiness to continue working extremely long hours, fighting instead to have them paid for, is a knife in the back of those hospital workers defending the 38,5 hour week, is a despicable lie. These doctors work longer hours, because they have to take care of their patients and at the same time commit themselves to research and scientific studies. Their demand to have the long hours they work paid for, is a proletarian demand. The sympathy of the general population with this demand is unmistakable. The generous heart of the working class senses that the medical assistants in particular are fighting not only for their own cause, but also for the health of the population at large. Here too, we find the seed of future revolutionary struggles: the realisation that the struggle of the productive class of contemporary society is a struggle for the interests of the whole of humanity.

Against this, the reaction is already  trying to stir up resentment. Thus, we can read in the 25th issue of the strike paper of Ver.di for the employees of the university hospital in Cologne, addressed to the doctors: “We partly support your demands, but you know – as we know – that in the hospitals there is only one cake to share, so that you cannot go and take half of the cake for yourself.”

The engineering workers’ strikes

It is still too early to say whether or not thee will be a major strike in this key concentration of the German and European working class. What is clear is that the engineering workers too have suffered heavy losses of income in recent years, and are not prepared to put up with this much longer. What is above all clear is that the militancy of the engineering workers is already a significant factor in the social situation. In Baden-Württemberg alone, which is both the main centre of the German engineering industry and the vanguard of the struggling German working class in recent years, there are still over a million, for the most part highly qualified engineering workers. Baden-Württemberg borders directly on France, so that there it has been particularly difficult for the bourgeoisie to black out the mass movement on the other side of the Rhine. In view of the gigantic potential of the German proletariat, it comes as no surprise that one of the results of the struggle in France has been that an attack on the employment protection of youth very similar to the French CPE was dropped by the German government even before its French equivalent was withdrawn.

Already in the Kohl era, when the bourgeoisie attacked sick pay, the big plants of the engineering industry, led by the Mercedes workers in Stuttgart, demonstrated their readiness to struggle explicitly in the interests of all workers. This idea reappeared in summer 2004 during the Mercedes strike in Stuttgart and Bremen.

And indeed, while the present strike in the health sector has again shown that it is not possible to completely shut down a hospital without putting in danger the health of the population at large, this need not restrict the capacity of the workers there to defend themselves, as soon as the class struggles as a unity. This idea is also a component of the mass strike.

The elements of the future struggles of the working class as a united body are resent today only in a very embryonic form. It is nevertheless one of the most important tasks of the day to recognise and nurture these precious seeds.

Weltrevolution 2006-04-11.

University and high-school students, future unemployed, future part-time or temporary workers: All together in the struggle against capitalism!

Since early February, despite being dispersed by the school holidays, university and high-school students have mobilised in most of France’s major cities to express their anger at the government and the bosses’ economic attacks, and against the CPE (Contrat Première Embauche).[1] [56] And this is happening despite the blackout by the media  (especially by the television), which have preferred instead to focus their attention on the sinister exploits of the "Barbarian gang".[2] [57]

The university and high-school students are right to be angry! 

The educational system (colleges of further education, high-schools, universities...) has become a factory for turning out unemployed workers, to fill a reservoir of cheap labour. It is because they have understood this that mass meetings of students, like the one in Caen, have sent delegations to meet the workers in neighbouring factories and the unemployed youth in the council estates to call them to join the struggle. The CPE is nothing less than organised precarity. But this precarity does not only concern the young. Every generation is affected by unemployment, precarity, and poverty.

This is also why in some universities, like Paris III Censier, the teachers and maintenance workers have also gone on strike in solidarity with the students.

The CPE is an expression of capitalism’s bankruptcy!

The ruling class and its government restored order in the face of the riots that exploded in the suburbs in November, by imposing the curfew and deporting young immigrants who had failed to show respect for their "new country". Today, our rulers want to continue "power cleanse" the children of the working class and no slogan is too cynical for them: they intend to impose the CPE  with its precarity and low wages in the name of... "equality of opportunity". With the CPE, those who are lucky enough to get a job at the end of their studies will find themselves at the mercy of the bosses without any hope of finding a home, of starting a family, or of bringing up their children decently. They will go to work every day with the fear of receiving the recorded delivery letter that pronounces the sinister sentence of REDUNDANCY! This is what wage slavery means! This is what capitalism means!

The only "equality" offered by the CPE is the equality of poverty, of being heaped up in sink estates living from hand to mouth from one temporary job to another, living on unemployment benefit or the RMI.[3] [58] This is the "bright future" that the ruling class and its "democratic" state are offering the children of the working class!

These children’s parents are the ones who mobilised in 2003 against the reform of the pensions system. And it was Prime Minister Villepin’s predecessor Raffarin who had the gall to tell them "It’s not the street that rules!".

After the hammering handed out to the "old" workers and future pensioners, now it is the "youth" and future unemployed who are the target! With the CPE, capitalism is showing its true face: that of a decadent system with nothing to offer the new generations. A system gangrened by an insoluble economic crisis. A system which, ever since World War II, has been spending gigantic sums on the production of ever more sophisticated and deadly weapons. A system which has not stopped spreading blood across the planet ever since the Gulf War of 1991. It is the same bankrupt system, the same desperate capitalist class which here condemns millions to unemployment and poverty, and which is killing in Iraq, in the Middle East, and in the Ivory Coast![4] [59]

Day after day, the capitalist system that rules the world demonstrates that it must be overthrown. And it is because they are beginning to understand just that, that a students’ mass meeting at Paris Tolbiac supported a motion declaring that "It’s time to put an end to capitalism"! This is why, at Paris Censier on 3rd March, the students invited a theatre company to come and sing revolutionary songs.  The red flag flew, and several hundred students, teachers, and maintenance workers joined in singing the Internationale. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is being distributed. In the grounds of the university, the word REVOLUTION is heard and repeated. Discussions begin on the class struggle, we hear talk of the Russian revolution of 1917 and of those great figures of the workers’ movement like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, murdered at the hands of killers directed by the socialist party in power.

If they are to confront the "Barbarian gang" in suits that rules over us, then the young generations must remember the experience of their elders. And in particular, they should remember what happened in May 1968.

The mass strike of May 1968 shows us the way forward

In the wake of the movements that had swept the universities of most of the developed countries, the United States and Germany in particular, French university students mobilised massively in May 1968. But their mobilisation took on a wholly new dimension when the whole working class joined the struggle with 9 million workers on strike! Then, the most militant and conscious students went beyond their specific demands to proclaim that their struggle was the same as that of the working class. They called on the workers to come to the occupied universities to discuss the situation and its perspectives. Everywhere, revolution and the need to overthrow capitalism was the subject of debate.

May 1968 did not lead to revolution. It could not, for capitalism was still only at the beginning of its crisis. But the bourgeois had the fright of their lives. And if the government managed to get control of the situation, it was only thanks to the unions, which did everything they could to send the strikers back to work; it was thanks to the left-wing parties, the very ones who pretend to defend the workers’ interests, who called for participation in the elections called by De Gaulle.[5] [60]

May 1968 showed that the revolution is not some dusty museum exhibit, an idea belonging to the distant past, but the only possible future for society. Moreover, this huge workers’ movement showed the ruling class that it could no longer enroll society’s exploited behind the banners of nationalism, that it did not have its hands free to unleash a third world war, as it had already done in 1914 and 1939. If the economic crisis did not lead to world wide slaughter, as it had in the 1930s, then this was thanks to the struggles of the working class.

The future is in the hands of the young generations

The movement of the youth against the CPE shows that the seeds of a new society are germinating in the bowels of moribund capitalism. The future is in the hands of this new generation. The university and high school students are beginning to realise that, as future unemployed or precarious workers, the vast majority of them belong to the working class. An exploited class that capitalism is more and more excluding from the productive process. A class which will have no choice but to develop its struggle, to defend its living conditions and the future of its children. A class which has no choice but to overthrow capitalism to put an end to exploitation, poverty, unemployment and barbarism. The only class which can build a new world based no longer on competition, exploitation, and the search for profit, but on the satisfaction of all the mankind’s needs.

In 1914 the children of the working class – the vast majority no more than adolescents – were sent to the trenches as cannon-fodder. Wallowing in blood, capitalism mowed down the young generations that Rosa Luxemburg called "the fine flower of the proletariat".

In this 21st century, this "fine flower of the proletariat" will have the responsibility of destroying the decadent capitalism which massacred the children of the working class, sent to the front in 1914 and again in 1939. It will do so by developing its struggle alongside all the generations of the whole working class.

At the university of Vitoria da Conquista in Brazil, the students recently showed their desire to debate the history of the workers’ movement.[6] [61] They had understood that it is by learning from the experience of past generations that they will be able to take up the torch of the struggle waged by their parents, their grandparents, and their great-grandparents. These students wanted to listen to those who could transmit this past to them, a past that they must make their own and on whose foundation the young generations will build the future. They have discovered that the history of the class struggle, living history, is learned not only in books but in the fire of action. They dared to talk, to question, to disagree, and to confront their arguments.

In the universities of France, it is time to open the lecture halls and the mass meetings to all those – workers, unemployed, and revolutionaries – who want to put an end to capitalism.

There is only one way forward: unity and solidarity of the whole exploited class! 

For several months, across the planet, the world of labour has been shaken by strikes in the state the and private sectors, in Germany, Spain, the United States, India, and Latin America. Against unemployment and redundancies, everywhere the strikers have put forward the need for solidarity between the generations, between the unemployed and those still in jobs.

Students! Your anger over the CPE will be no more than a 9-days wonder if you let yourselves be isolated behind the walls of the universities and schools! You are shut out of the productive process and have no means of putting pressure on the ruling class by paralysing the capitalist economy.

Workers, unemployed, and pensioners! It’s time to mobilise, it is your children who are under attack! You are the ones who have produced and still produce all society’s wealth. You are the driving force of the class struggle against capitalism!

Unemployed youth of the suburbs! You are not the only ones to be "excluded"! Today, the capitalists are calling you "rabble": in 1968, your parents who revolted against capitalist exploitation were called "wreckers".

The only hope for the future lies, not in blind violence and burning cars, but in the united struggle and the solidarity of the whole working class, of every generation! It is in the strikes, the mass meetings, in the discussions in the workplace and the schools and colleges, in street demonstrations that we must UNITE TOGETHER to express our anger against unemployment, insecure jobs, and poverty!

Down with the CPE! Down with capitalism! The working class has nothing to lose but its chains. It has a world to win. 

International Communist Current, 6th March 2006

Thursday’s demonstrations throughout France brought some 500,000 students into the streets, and the movement has continued to increase in size; the big question of last week – whether or not the masses of wage workers would join the demonstrations planned for Saturday 18th March – has been answered in concretely: in France as a whole, there were something like 1,000,000 people in the streets.[1] [69] Even towns which have barely seen a demonstration in living memory have been affected: 15,000 demonstrated in Pau; there was even a demonstration in Chalons sur Saône in the heart of rural France.

For those militants and sympathisers of the ICC who have taken part in the movement during the last few weeks, especially since the demonstrations of 7th March, these have been remarkable, exciting days. We don’t intend here to go into a detailed account of events (we don’t have the time!) but rather to highlight what seem to us to be some of the most significant aspects of the movement. 

Some might ask why a communist organisation should involve itself so wholeheartedly – as the ICC has done – in a student movement. The students, after all, are not a class as such, nor even, as such, a part of the working class. In fact, there are two reasons:

• Firstly, you need to understand the distinction that exists in France between what are called the “Grandes écoles” and the universities. The former are essentially reserved for the children of the ruling class[2] [70] and their graduates – the “ingénieurs” – are virtually guaranteed well-paid jobs in France’s civil service and major companies; indeed the whole system bears a remarkable resemblance to the “Nomenklatura” whereby the Stalinist ruling class of the ex-USSR ensured its continuity. The universities, on the other hand, supply the skilled and labour force for today’s high-tech industries and services. The minimum requirement for joining the army of low-paid technicians manning the factories, laboratories, and offices of the French economy is nowadays the “bac+3” (ie three years of university education after leaving school), or even “bac+5”. In this sense, the vast majority of university students are both the children and future members of the French proletariat. This is a major difference with the situation in May 1968, when only 7% of the youth attended university (and also with other European countries where much smaller proportions of young people go to college).
• Secondly, the objective of the student movement – to force the government to withdraw the “Contrat de Première Embauche” (CPE) whose main provision (a two-year trial period during which an employee can be fired without notice or reason on the boss’s part) – is clearly a demand that concerns the whole working class, including the masses of unemployed youth in the sink estates whose rage and despair exploded into last autumn’s rioting. And the students are well aware of this, and have consistently resisted efforts to divert the struggle onto the terrain of “university reform” (in particular of the European standard LMD diploma), insisting that theirs is not just a students’ affair but something that concerns all the wage earners.

Unity of the generations

For those of us of the “old generation” who took part in the struggles sparked off throughout the industrialised world by the events of May 68, one of the most remarkable features of the movement today is the disappearance of the “generation gap” that the media used to talk so much about. The parents of the new generation of the working class which launched the movement in the 1960s-70s had experienced the terrible defeat of the counter-revolution, the suffering of the 1930s, and the horrors of World War II (and all the illusions in the great victory of “democracy” after the war). The youth had grown up in a different world, and were often infected with a deep mistrust of their elders (the most extreme example was certainly Germany, where the slogan “don’t trust anyone over 30” reflected the youth’s disgust with what they saw as the legacy of Nazism in the generation that had been through the war). We have found none of this today. Quite the reverse: the ICC’s older militants, who were first awakened to politics in the movement of 68, have been deeply moved to find youngsters who could be their children (in some cases indeed, who are their children), coming to them for advice, wanting to learn from the history of their struggles. Militants in their 50s or 60s have been able to speak to mass meetings of youngsters, and to find themselves listened to and even applauded (in fact, all the interventions of ICC militants have been applauded, at times with great enthusiasm). In Toulouse, one of our comrades who teaches at the university and is known as a member of our organisation was applauded by a mass meeting of more than 1,000 students, who then asked him to prepare an “alternative course” on the history of the revolutionary movement. In Grenoble, another comrade was welcomed to a mass meeting by several youngsters who declared “we’re counting on you to speak against the union” – which of course he duly did to the best of his ability!

The importance of this unity of the generations, where the elder can contribute what they have learned to the dynamism of the younger, is profoundly significant of a new situation world wide and throughout the working class. Today, two generations of undefeated workers are confronting capital: the older generation is battered by the struggles of the 1980s and the terrible reflux of the 1990s – but it is still unbowed and the memories of its youth are not those of war, but of struggle.

An extraordinary degree of organisation

The movement is organised by mass meetings (known as “assemblées générales” or AG) which vote the strike from one meeting to the next. Obviously the degree and coherence of organisation varies considerably from one university to another. In many cases, the AG finds itself being run by a self-proclaimed presidium set up by the students’ union (usually the UNEF), which tends to dominate the proceedings and to discourage the participation of the non-unionised. But elsewhere – and notably at Paris III Censier which is clearly at the forefront of the movement, the degree of organisation and the maturity of the students is truly remarkable. Witness how each meeting begins: with the presentation of the proposed presidium of three, each of whom gives his or her name, year, and course of study, and adds whether or not he is in a union or a political organisation (the non-unionised and non-political generally dominate); the presidium changes every day, and no business is done until it has been accepted by the AG; the day then begins with reports (starting with reports from the various working commissions – “Reflection and Action”, Press, “Exterior Contact”, etc. – then going on to reports from the delegates who have been mandated to attend the national or regional Coordinations (set up to coordinate the different universities). And this is not the only remarkable feature of the AG: everyone can speak – even those from outside the university; speakers are limited to three minutes each (it turns out to be possible to say a remarkable number of things in three minutes!); propositions are made and noted on the blackboard behind the presidium, for all to see. At the end of the meeting, votes are taken on all the proposals that have been put to the meeting; in some cases the presidium calls for someone to speak “for” and “against” a proposal, if it does not seem to have been properly understood.

It should be emphasised that the efficacy of the meeting is not merely down to the presidium, but to the astonishing maturity of all the participants: every speaker is listened to, the speakers themselves respect the time limits they are given. They have even borrowed from the sign-language of the deaf a gesture of silent approval when agreeing with a speaker, in order to avoid interrupting the flow of the meeting with cheers or applause. In Nantes, the presidium brought instant quiet to an enthusiastic assembly with the words: “We’re not on the telly here!”.

It is fair to say that, in their way and in a more limited movement, the French youth of today are the heirs not only of May 1968 but of the Polish workers who faced down the Stalinist state in 1980.

A healthy instinct

Despite the fact that the AG are often run by a union-dominated presidium, there is nonetheless a general and healthy distrust of any suggestion to remove the power of decision from the AG itself. At Paris III Censier, we witnessed debates on two issues that illustrated this particularly well: on the nature of the mandate given by the AG to its delegates at the regional Coordination of Île de France; and on the proposal to create a “coordination bureau” which would supposedly be a kind of “information distributor” designated by the regional Coordination.

The debate on the mandate initially opposed the supporters of “free” and “imperative” mandates: the former would allow delegates essentially to take their own initiatives at the Coordination, even if this was in contradiction with the mandate from the AG; the latter would bind the delegates to voting solely according to the decisions and discussions of the AG itself. As was quickly pointed out, one of the main drawbacks of the “imperative mandate” is that the delegate can say nothing about any new proposition that has not been previously discussed by the AG. It took no more than ten minutes for the presidium to present clearly and comprehensibly, and to take a vote on a hybrid solution: the semi-imperative mandate, binding when it involves decisions taken by the AG, but leaving room for the delegates’ initiative whenever it is a matter that the AG has not yet discussed.

The proposal to create a “coordination bureau” was rejected out of hand in five minutes flat, on the grounds that no useful purpose was served by introducing yet another level of centralisation independent of the AG.

It comes as no surprise at all, that in both cases the proposals that tended to remove the power of decision from the AG came from the Trotskyists of the LCR (Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire): this is a consistent policy of the Trotskyists and unionists – the creation of extra layers of “coordination”, of extra “bureaux” where information and decision-making are concentrated, and where their own militants can get their hands on the levers of information and power. As far as we are concerned – and although, as a general principle, we are opposed to the “imperative mandate” – the AG’s refusal of these measures which would have removed the power of decision from its hands represents a healthy instinct of distrust for the would-be professional bureaucrats and politicians.

The union question

One idea that has emerged more or less clearly from the movement is that the demand for the withdrawal of the CPE is not just a student demand, and that the movement must seek the active support of the wage workers. Needless to say, going on strike is a different matter for wage workers and for students: while it is true that for the many students who have to work their way through college, and who cannot afford to miss a year’s studies, the strike is a serious business, this cannot compare with the problem faced by wage workers who have to pay the rent, repay credits, feed their families, and who moreover cannot legally strike unless called out by a trades union. The students generally (despite a few hotheads’ calls for a “general strike” which in today’s situation is a meaningless slogan) have been aware of this: for example, it has been a frequent proposal (embodied in the upcoming demonstration of 18th March) to demonstrate on the weekends so that wage workers can join in. The real question is: how to bring the wage workers into the movement?

The obvious answer, is to ask the unions. And indeed there have been repeated proposals in this respect, whether it be to go to the unions at the local or at the national level. The problem is that the unions themselves have shown no desire whatever to have the wage workers join the movement. There was absolutely no publicity on the unions’ part, for example, for the demonstration on Thursday 16th March, and it was only on Friday 17th that they started publicising the demonstration on the morrow, the first to be called on a Saturday with the explicit intention, on the students’ part, of opening it up to the wage workers. If we did not know the unions for what they are – the bosses’ best friends, when push comes to shove – then we would call this scandalous, downright shameful in fact.

What is to be done then? If the students cannot trust the unions to call out the wage workers – which they clearly cannot – then they will have to do it themselves, by distributing leaflets at major concentrations of workers (in Paris, this principally means in the suburban railway stations where tens of thousands of people pass every day on their way to and from work). Militants of the ICC have strongly supported – and been enthusiastically cheered for doing so – motions presented and adopted at the AG in this sense.

Violence and the role of the media

One of the most striking features of the movement is the way in which it has been reported in the media both in France and abroad, and especially by the TV which is of course the main source of information for most workers. Until very recently – essentially and with a very few exceptions until the demonstration Thursday (17th March) – the media in France has concentrated on one thing: the occupation of the Sorbonne and the violent confrontations between bands of young hotheads (who come from nobody knows where), and the CRS (riot police).

Until very recently, there has been not a sign on the TV of the mass meetings, the debates, or even the demonstrations: instead there have been a lot of interviews with students opposed to the movement, confrontations between students, and the attacks on the CRS.

Outside France, the blackout of the students’ movement has been almost total – with the exception of a few pieces on the violence.

All this is in marked contrast to the huge blanket coverage of the riots in the French suburbs last autumn, which were so vastly blown out of proportion that we received declarations of support for the “revolution” taking place in France, from comrades in the ex-USSR!

We know very well that the media – and above all the TV media – are to all intents and purposes controlled by the state, and even where they are not, their “self-control” is impressive: there’s even an old English rhyme that goes like this, and is valid for the media everywhere – “No-one can corrupt or twist, thank God, the British journalist. Given what the man will do unbribed, there is no reason to”.

So what the students need to ask is: what interest does the state have in displaying such images – almost to the exclusion of all else? The answer is obviously, that it contributes to the discrediting of the movement within the mass of the working class, who are certainly not ready today to undertake a violent confrontation with the state. Not only does the violence tend to discredit the movement with the rest of the class, but it also puts into question the sovereignty of the AG since it takes place completely outside the latter’s control. In fact this last question – the question of control – is one of the most critical ones: the violence of the working class has nothing to do with the blind violence of the young hotheads at the Sorbonne or – it must be said – of many anarchist groups, above all because it is exercised and controlled collectively, by the class as a group. The student movement has used physical force (for example to barricade the university buildings and block entry to them): the difference between this and the confrontations at the Sorbonne is that the former actions are decided collectively and voted by the AG, and the “blockers” have a mandate for their action from their comrades. The latter, precisely because they are uncontrolled by the movement, are of course the perfect terrain for the action of the lumpen and the agent provocateur, and given the way in which this violence has been used by the media there is every reason to suppose that the provocateur has been present and stirring it up.

Faced with this situation, the students’ reaction has in general been exemplary. When it became clear that the government was setting up the Sorbonne in effect as a “trap” for the demonstrations, and as a means of permanent provocation, the reaction at the AG in Paris III Censier was essentially this: “The Sorbonne is a symbol, it’s true. Well, if they want it, let them keep their symbol – the CRS are there, so much the better, let them stay there. And let us invite our comrades of the Sorbonne to come to Censier for their AG”. The same invitation was extended by the AG at Jussieu.

In addition – and despite some belated manoeuvring by the Trotskyists who tried to overturn the vote – the Censier AG passed a motion “in support of the injured students, against any damage done to the building, and in sympathy for the injured CRS”. The important point about this motion is that it was absolutely not a support for the repression by the police, but recognised:

• That the children of the low-paid CRS are themselves concerned by the attacks of the government (as some students tried to explain to the riot police during non-violent confrontations.
• And that the students intended to distance themselves from the violent “actions” which do the movement no service.

It is important also to note the difference between the way in which the media have reported the 18th March demonstration in France and abroad:

• In France, the media have focused on the – trivial – violence at the end of the demonstrations, but less so than on previous occasions; they have given more space to the enormous size and calm of the demonstrations (and the imaginative nature of some of the slogans).
• Abroad (for example on Euronews, or on yahoo.com where an Associated Press report is titled “French Police Subdue Riots Over Jobs Law”, which is an enormous lie, pure and simple), we have seen virtually nothing but the images of violence and burning cars.

From this, we can draw one clear conclusion. The French media who have tried to discredit the movement in the eyes of the working class, have now understood that they risk discrediting only themselves in the eyes of the population which knows what is really happening, and especially in the eyes of workers who are demonstrating themselves, or whose children are demonstrating, by lying too openly.

ICC, 19th March 2006

The text that follows introduced the ICC public meeting of 11th March in Paris, at which students and militants involved in the recent events debated their experience and the best means for spreading the movement.

As you will have heard from the media, yesterday afternoon several hundred students from the universities in the Paris region went to the Sorbonne, occupied for several days by about 50 students from this college in the heart of Paris. At the college of Censier, the general assembly of students decided to send a massive delegation to bring food to their comrades shut in the Sorbonne by a ring of cops.

Severl hundred students forced their way into the Sorbone, getting in through the windows. But the movement of solidarity with their comrades taken hostage in the trap of occupying the Sorbonne was very heterogeneous. Some students, notably those from censier, tried to discuss with the police riot squads. Some raise the slogan “CRS, join us”,[1] [73] while others shouted “Put Sarkozy on the RMI”.[2] [74] The cops didn’t charge, even if the most excitable ones engaged in some pushing and shoving and some discreet truncheon blows. Despite these skirmishes, to our knowledge there were no arrests at this point. The “forces of order” had obviously received the order not to charge, which enabled the students to get into the Sobonne. Several hundred students had thus fallen into a trap.

The situation shifted last night when there were violent confrontations between the students and the police. At 4:00 am, the CRS succeeded in evacuating the Sorbonne, using truncheons and tear gas. Several dozen students were arrested.

The children of the working class had thus gone through the same tragedy as Monsieur Seguin’s goat.[3] [75] They held out till morning and then the wolf ate them.

Faced with this repression, with the arrests and the policing of the universities, now filled with informers and special branch, the ICC denounces loud and clear the attacks launched by the “democratic” state against the children of the working class. The ICC declares its solidarity with the children of the working class, attacked by the CPE,[4] [76] beaten and arrested by the police.

Today “order reigns” at the Sorbonne. The children of the working class have lost a battle, but the proletariat has not lost the class war.

The best solidarity that the working class can give to the younger generation faced with the attacks of capitalism is for all sectors to engage now in the struggle against the CPE, against all the attacks of the bourgeoisie and against repression. The working class must demand the liberation of its children who have been carted off by the police.

To do that, we have to everywhere hold mass meetings, areas for debate and discussion. We must demonstrate massively in the streets.

But before mobilising, we must reflect, discuss together, the perspective and methods of the struggle. Because the end does not justify all means. The clearest, most conscious elements of the working class, the most conscious elements of student youth must play the role of a vanguard so that the response to the CPE does not become an adventure with no perspective. What happened at the Sorbonne last night was only an episode in a much wider movement, a movement which will, sooner or later, spread like wildfire across national frontiers.

We will now go rapidly over the events of the last few weeks.

Despite the black-out of the bourgeois media, especially the TV, despite the dispersal of the holiday period, since the beginning of February, the university[5] [77] and to a lesser extent the high school students have been mobilising in most of the universities in the big towns to protest against the infamous CPE, which has just been adopted at the National Assembly.[6] [78]

As soon as we heard about what was going on in the colleges and notably at Paris 3-Censier, we mobilised our forces right away to find out what was happening, to understand the significance of this movement, and to play out part in it.

Today, we can state clearly that this movement of student youth has nothing to do with an inter-classist agitation. And this is true even if, in the universities, the children of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie are largely hostile to the strike and have all kinds of illusions about the future that capitalism offers them. The struggle of the students against the CPE, whatever its outcome, is not a flash in the pan, a revolt with no future. The ICC salutes this movement which is fully part of the combat of the working class.

Why?

First, because the revolt of the students is a legitimate response to a direct, massive and frontal economic attack on the whole working class. With the CPE, the new generations are faced with even more job insecurity and poverty when they finish their studies.

Next, because the students immediately mobilised on class terrain, as they showed masterfully at the 7th March demonstration. They have been able to leave aside their specific demands (such as the reform of the LMD[7] [79]) to put forward demands which the whole working class can take up.

Finally, for the first time since May 68, we have seen students launching slogans appealing for the unity and solidarity of the whole working class: “Workers, unemployed, high school students, university students, the same combat!”

We have seen them going further than the students of May 68: unlike the May 68 generation which was strongly marked by the spirit of contestation and what was called at the time the “generation gap”, the students have put forward the necessity not only for the unity of all sectors of the working class, but also of unity between the generations, between those being attacked by the CPE and the pensioners and future pensioners who are being subjected to an attack on “final earnings” contracts.

If, in some respects, the new generation is a lot more mature than the one at the end of the 60s, it’s precisely because the objective conditions have also matured : the economic crisis has deepened. Today it is openly revealing the irremediable bankruptcy of the capitalist system.     

But a more significant sign of the fact that the students of today have gone further than their predecessors in May 68 is the way they have taken the struggle into their own hands, by appropriating in to an astonishing extent the methods of struggle of the workers’ movement and by making solidarity live in this struggle. And this method has been clearly revealed in the general assemblies held at Censier rather than the occupation of the Sorbonne.

We now want to look at what has happened in recent days at Paris 3-Censier.

Every day the students and wage workers[8] [80] on strike have occupied the lecture halls and held mass general assemblies.

Since we have seen with our own eyes what has been going on in these general assemblies at Censier, we can clearly affirm that they function on the model of the workers’ councils. The richness of the discussion, where everyone can speak and express their point of view, the way the tribune organises the debates, the votes, the creation of different commissions, the nomination of delegates elected and revocable by the general assemblies, this whole dynamic, this method of struggle are those which have arisen in the highest moments of the class struggle: in 1905 and 1917 in Russia, in 1918 in Germany, in Poland during the mass strike of August 1980.

For us it is clear that the lungs of the movment , the epicentre of the earthquake, is not at the Sorbonne where the students were shut up in an occupied faculty and encircled by the CRS. The epicentre is the faculty at Censier. And the bourgeoisie knows it. This is why the  media have imposed a total black-out on the general assemblies at Censier.

The students at Censier succeeded in drawing their teachers and the administrative personnel into the strike. They succeeded in building a united movement of solidarity. To the point where it was decied to hold joint general assemblies between the students and the faculty employees.

How come these young people, some of whose leaders are in their first year of studies, have begun to move so quickly, taking such a decision since the March 7th demonstration?

Quite simply, because the rejection they received from Monsieur de Villepin[9] [81] after the March 7th demo pushed the students to open their general assemblies to the wage workers and to ask them to speak. In 1968, it was precisely the shutting up of the workers in their factories, as advocated by the trade unions, which enabled the bourgeoisie to send the working class to defeat.

The majority of the workers could not go and discuss with their comrades in other enterprises or with the students. They allowed themselves to be imprisoned behind their factory gates. This is an experience that the younger generation must know about if it is to avoid the traps and manoeuvres of the saboteurs who want to send them to be crushed in small packets.

To go back to what has happened at Censier since 7th March.

On the day of the demo, a small minority of workers from other sectors, who are also revolutionary militants and parents of students in struggle, went to see what was going on in the faculties. And what we saw and heard at the general assemblies at Censier led us to see this student agitation against the CPE as  a struggle which is fully part of the combat of the working class. Once again, we declare that the future of human society is in the hands of the young generation. Once again, the old mole of history, as Marx said, has grubbed well. Once again, marxism, the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, has been verified.

Militants of the ICC intervened in the general assemblies as workers and parents of students in struggle. But what in general guided their interventions was the marxist framework of analysis, which alone offers the general perspective that can prevent the students’ struggle from being isolated.

As soon as we understood what was happening at Censier, the ICC decided to fight against the dirty work of the bourgeois media: this is why our leaflet is in the process of being translated into a number of languages (and is already on our website in English and Spanish), which means that the working class and the universities of Europe and the American continent can be informed about what’s happening in France.

In the general assemblies during the last two days, the university teachers at Censier and the administrative personnel have brought a new breath of air to the movement. They have made several interventions declaring that they are going to participate actively in the extension of the strike to other faculties. They have tried to draw in the students who are most hesitant or hostile to the struggle by reassuring them: they committed themselves to ensuring that striking students are not penalised for missing exams and that they continue to receive their student loans.

We cannot summarise the situation better than did a teacher at Paris 3: “the students of Censier have invented something new, something very powerful which is going to draw other universities behind them. And we saw this very clearly ath the March 7th demonstration”.

What actually happened on 7th March?

More than a thousand students met up at the front of the faculty of Censier to go together to the demonstration called by all the unions and the left parties. As soon as they realised that the union contingents, and notably those led by the CGT, had been put at the head of the demo, the students did a quick turn about. They took the metro to put themselves in front of the union contingents, drawing behind them their comrades from other faculties. This is how the student youth in struggle spontaneously put itself at the head of the demo behind a single banner, with unifying slogans, demanding the complete withdrawal of the CPE, whereas the leaflet distributed by the PCF[10] [82] doesn’t say a single word about withdrawing the CPE (we have the leaflet here and comrades can read it).

Thanks to this crafty trick by the Censier students, the old Stalinist dinosaur found itself tail-ending the “children of the mammoth”[11] [83] of national education. The CGT was obliged to attach its rusty wagons to the locomotive of the younger generation, a generation which Rosa Luxemburg rightly called “the fine flower of the of the proletariat”.

As in may 68, the ruling class and its forces of control within the workers’ ranks (ie the unions) were surprised, overtaken by the situation. And we have to recognise as well that the ICC itself was to some extent surprised by the vitality and creativity of the most avant-garde students.

It’s precisely because he hadn’t foreseen this happening that, after the March 7th demo, the leader of the CGT,[12] [84] Bernard Thibault, in an interview on the LCI TV channel, said to the journalists: “it’s true that in this demonstration, there was an unforeseen aspect”.

It’s also because of this “unforeseen aspect”, because they were outflanked by the situation, that the PCF muscle tried to intimidate us at the demonstration, especially at our table of publications. One of them offered us this insult: “I want to spit on your face. Aren’t you ashamed to distribute your pamphlet [“How the PCF went over to the camp of capital”] when there are no longer any Stalinists in the PCF” (sic).

We will stop there with the anecdotes. Comrades, and notably the students who are in the room, can complete, rectify, or make this presentation more precise during the discussion.

We now want to make a short point on the media black-out.

You remember that, last autumn, when the riots swept through the suburbs, the bourgeoisie set up a huge media barrage about it, not only in France, but all over the planet. In every country, the riots in France were front page news and on all the TV channels.

What is happening today in the media? Up until the March 7th demo, dead silence. Day after day, we heard about bird flu, the sordid affair of the “Barbarians” gang[13] [85] and other smokescreens aimed at amusing the gallery and above all to avoid talking about the essential, ie the mobilisation of the students against the CPE.

Why have the capitalist media kept up their silence about the students’ strike when they made so much noise about the riots in the suburbs? Quite simply because, unlike the desperate riots of the young people in the suburbs, the struggle of the students is not a flash in the pan. It bears with it a perspective for the future.

And today, if the media are lifting the black-out, it’s once again to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie. The students are presented as mere rioters. This is the message Mr Tony Blair wants to get across when the British paper the Times carried this headline the day after the demonstration of the 7th March: “RIOTS IN THE FRENCH UNIVERSITIES”.

As for the French media, they are now bringing their own little contribution to sabotaging the class struggle. And not only the right wing papers like Le Figaro or Le Parisien, but also a left wing paper like Libération, edited by the ex-68er Serge July (someone who will never suffer the scourge of unemployment). The 10th March issue of Libération was given out free at the hall of Censier because it had a ridiculous little article on the strike there entitled “An air of May 68”.

The message is, if you will excuse the expression, truly the work of prostitutes. An air of 68, we are told, means that the students have done nothing but sing revolutionary songs by inviting the Jolie Môme theatre group on 3rd March to perform in the faculty. There is not a single word about the dynamic of the general assemblies, on the unity and solidarity of the movement which brought the teachers and admininstrative personel into the strike.

And this silence was certainly not down to the fact that the journalists from “Libé” and from the TV didn’t know what was going on. They occupied the faculty with their cameras and their interviews. The French state should give a medal to its journalists and their highly artistic images.

For the ICC, it is clear that this movement of young people is frightening the ruling class. Monsieur de Villepin and his chums, on the right as well as the left, are afraid quite simply because the creativity of the students of Censier could give bad ideas to the whole of the working class.

The silence of the media, then their falsification of events, their televised interviews mean only one thing: the bourgeoisie is shit-scared. And they are all the more scared because today, the most conscious students are at the forefront of the movement. It is this vanguard that the ruling class, with its cops and special branch, want to reduce to silence.

The children of the working class who have mobilised massively against the CPE are the children of those workers who fought against Prime Minister Raffarin’s “reform” of the pensions system in 2003, only to be told with a rare insolence “The street doesn’t rule”.

The ruling class has only one answer to this protest against insecure jobs and unemployment: repression! The CPE is an illustration of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system. Today, the repression meted out to the students shows the true face of capitalist “democracy”. The social situation today is demonstrating more and more clearly that those in power can no longer rule as they did, while the exploited can no longer accept to go on living as they have.

This is why the French bourgeoisie is throwing all its forces – left and right – into the balance in order to divide the movement, and to shut the students up in the universities so that it can “power cleanse” them,[14] [86] as it did last night at the Sorbonne.

All the TV channels having been broadcasting the images of the cops at the Sorbonne with assorted commentaries like those of Claire Chazal:[15] [87] “The movement has reached a turning point: the turning point of violence”. Obviously, she’s not talking about the violence of the police, but of the children of the working class who are presented as wreckers, as “rabble”!

Why has Sarkozy, henchman of our fine democratic French police state, once again unleashed the forces of repression?

Because the students refuse the misery of capitalism, because they don’t want to find themselves unemployed at the end of their studies! Because they went to the Sorbonne to bring food and solidarity comrades, shut up without anything to eat. These students were beaten up and arrested simply because they gave the bad example of solidarity in struggle.

But if they are to stay the course of the class struggle, the most conscious battalions of the working class must remember these words of Marx in the Communist Manifesto of 1848: “the communists (…) have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement”. They must never forget that the most powerful weapon of the working class is above all its consciousness, not the blind violence of the young rioters in the suburbs.

We must oppose the violence of Sarkozy’s capitalist militia with the consciousness of the working class in struggle!

And the most conscious elements of the working class must also remember what Marx – and Rosa Luxemburg after him – said: “Unlike the revolutions of the past, the proletarian revolution is the only revolution in history which can achieve victory after a whole series of defeats”. And it is precisely because the proletarian revolution is a struggle in the long term and “draws its poetry from the future”, that revolutionaries can never give in to demoralisation and impatience.

International Communist Current, 11th March 2006

We are publishing here an article from Internacionalismo [103] (the ICC's publication in Venezuela) from October 2005 on the situation in Venezuela. The article shows well the reality of the ‘socialism’ of Chavez, who has been in power for seven years, after years of division of power between the right (Christian democracy) and left (AD, social democratic), years during which the leaders of both parties filled their own pockets so arrogantly and brazenly that they couldn’t help preparing the ground for a demagogue like Chavez, who is himself accused of being a dictator by his adversaries.

In fact the authoritarianism of Chavez is not directed against the old political parties which are corrupt to the core, and which tried to organise a farcical coup d’etat against Chavez. Rather, beyond Chavez’s empty rhetoric against “capitalists”, the entirety of his politics has but a single aim: to control the population, to subdue the working class. Chavez has created around himself a following of protégés, just as corrupt as his predecessors’, by dispensing money from oil sales when the living conditions of the population go from bad to worse. Such is the new hero of the ‘alternative-worldists’ and leftists of all persuasions.

At the beginning of December, elections were held in Venezuela. Abstention reached 80%. This level of abstention cannot be understood solely from the fact that only Chavist candidates were presented; more than anything it shows that the population, and especially the workers, have had their fill of Chavist ‘socialism’; and not only of Chavism but of the whole of the bourgeoisie and all its tricks.

The continual violent confrontation between the Chavist bourgeois factions in power and the bourgeois factions in opposition have hidden a basic reality: there is a division of labour between them faced with the need to attack the living conditions of the proletariat. In other articles in Internacionalismo we have analysed the emergence of Chavism as a necessity for the national capital given the collapse of the bourgeois parties which had been in power until the end of the 90s. In this sense the Chavez government is in perfect continuity with previous bourgeois regimes when it comes to taking measures against the proletariat to face up to the economic crisis and survive on the world market.

This division of labour takes place on two levels, which are interlinked and dependent on each other: the permanent ideological offensive to weaken the consciousness and militancy of the working class; and the unstinting attack on its conditions of existence. 

---

 A relentless attack on the consciousness of the proletariat….

To preserve its utterly decadent social system, the bourgeoisie must breathe fresh air into its ideological apparatus and so prevent the proletariat, the “gravedigger” of capitalism (as Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto), from becoming conscious of the fact that the only way to put an end to the misery and barbarism inherent in the capitalist system is the proletarian revolution.

Even before Chavez’s triumph in 1998, the Chavists and the current opposition were competing over what is the best form of democracy, the first defending ‘participatory democracy’ and the second ‘representative democracy’. Seven years went by in this tango which corresponded to the electoral rhythm of the bourgeoisie: on the one hand, Chavism trying to build a foundation for its ‘Bolivarian revolution’; on the other, his opponents trying to weaken it by calling Chavez a dictator. With the incessant electoral campaigns, the bourgeoisie has managed to create a polarisation, a net in which the working class has become trapped, cultivating divisions in the class which have resulted in a loss of class solidarity and a significant decrease in struggles against both private capitalists and the state. 

Moreover, the Chavist bourgeoisie, in order to establish a social basis for its ‘Bolivarian revolution’, has developed a whole network of organs of social control (the Bolivarian circles, commissions, militias, etc), which allows it to dilute the workers in the mass of the ‘people’. The opposition is trying to do the same thing with its ‘citizens’ assemblies’. In this way, the autonomy required by the proletariat is dissolved into the petty bourgeois strata and other oppressed sectors of the population. And among the workers themselves, Chavism has introduced its own version of co-operativism, the various forms of co-management and self-management directly promoted by the parties and organs of the state and aimed at conferring a ‘proletarian’ character on the new government. In fact these co-operatives are a means of ideologically controlling the workers and to subject them to increasingly precarious working conditions.

The biggest ideological attack on the consciousness of the proletariat has been the way that the Chavist bourgeoisie identifies its statist project with ‘socialism’. Of course, this is not the first time that the bourgeoisie has disguised its state capitalist policies with ‘marxist’ and ‘revolutionary’ verbiage: the Stalinist bourgeoisie, following the defeat of the Russian revolution, imposed the most ferocious exploitation on the Russian proletariat for nearly 60 years in the name of ‘Soviet socialism’, as did all the ruling classes of what was called the ‘socialist bloc’; and today the bourgeoisies of Cuba, China and North Korea are doing the same thing against the proletariat of their respective countries. However, this monstrous lie of identifying Stalinist state capitalism with socialism could never have had the ideological impact it had on the world working class without the participation of the bourgeoisies of the opposing American bloc: while the Russian bureaucrats subjected the proletariat to the most savage exploitation and repression in the name of the ‘socialist fatherland’, the western bourgeoisies, with the USA at their head, bombarded the proletariat of their countries with campaigns about the shortages and evils of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’, presenting democracy as the best of all possible worlds. 

It’s the same division of labour which we are now seeing in Venezuela: while the Chavist bourgeoisie exploits the Venezuelan proletariat in the name of the ‘Bolivarian revolution’, the preamble to the ‘socialism of the 21st century’, the opposition gets on with attacking the ‘Castroite communism’ of the Chavists and lauding the marvels of democracy. In sum, these two bourgeois factions form a pair in order to maintain confusion and weaken class consciousness.

This ideology of the ‘socialism of the 21st century’ is complemented by that of ‘anti-imperialism’, which uses popular hostility to the imperialist intrigues of the US bourgeoisie to line the proletariat up behind the Chavist bourgeoisie, just as numerous other bourgeoisies around the world are trying to profit from all the difficulties of the American bourgeoisie in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East by attempting to make everyone believe that the only imperialism in the world is that of the USA. This allows them all to camouflage their own imperialist appetites. The division of labour between the Chavist and oppositional bourgeois factions also comes into play in this ideology: the Chavists voice a virulent anti-Americanism, using the provision of oil as a weapon of blackmail, while the opposition is pro-American. But in the final analysis, they agree on defending and consolidating the interests of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie in its zones of influence: the Caribbean, Central America and the Andean countries (Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador). 

…..in order to subject it to even greater exploitation

This sinister division of labour has allowed the national bourgeoisie as a whole to increase the attacks on the living conditions of the proletariat without provoking a major response from the latter.

The biggest and most significant attack has been the one directed against the oil workers. Through the coordinated action of the Chavist and oppositional factions, the Chavist government has succeeded not only in reducing the number of workers, but also in passing a law that has long been wanted by the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, namely the elimination of the staff co-operative which, since the time of the multinational oil companies, had allowed workers and their families to obtain foodstuffs at reduced prices. This was done with the argument that “the situation is very hard for everyone” and that the oil workers are privileged, a “workers’ aristocracy”.

After this unprecedented attack on the oil workers, in which all the parties and unions were complicit, those in power as much as those in opposition, the Chavist government has had its hands free to inflict even stronger attacks on the living conditions of the employed workers: freezing of collective agreements, ridiculous increases in the minimum wage that are well below the current price increases in consumer goods. The threat of massive redundancies has been used to intimidate workers who try to strike for their demands. This is what has been done in response to protests by health and education workers throughout the period of the Chavist government, and likewise with workers in the legal sector and state television, that Chavez himself threatened to “crush” as he had done with the oil workers. 

The living conditions of the workers, above all in the public sector, have also been attacked by means of the commissions, co-operatives and co- and self-managed enterprises created by the government in order to exert its political and social control. With these organs, the Chavez government has succeeded in making the workforce ‘flexible’, because they are hired only temporarily by these organs, without any social wage and for the most part on wages even lower than the official minimum wage. Thus the Chavist bourgeoisie is doing the same thing as the bourgeoisies of the other governments of the right and the left in the region that are applying the typical measures of “brutal neo-liberalism”: making employment even more precarious and exploitation even more intense. This is the true face of ‘socialism of the 21st century’! These organs, however, are also instruments of blackmail against the conventionally employed workers: the government has progressively covered the public services with commissions and co-operatives, with the explicit aim of weakening and blackmailing the workers who provide these services. If they mobilise to put their demands forward, they are threatened with dismissal and replacement with workers organised in co-operatives. This is how Chavism pits workers against each other.

Behind all these attacks against workers in the public sector you can see an old necessity of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie, that of drastically reducing employment in the public sector. During the Caldera government, the left-wing minister for economic planning at that time, Teodoro Petkoff, said that employment in the public sector had to be cut by half a million. The repeated declarations by Chavez and his acolytes against the “bureaucratic counter-revolution” have just one objective: to denigrate workers in the public sector in order to justify the ever stronger attacks on their conditions and the redundancies. 

However, the bourgeoisie’s attacks on the proletariat don’t stop there. Chavism, thanks to the coordinated work of the government and the opposition, has succeeded in imposing a series of measures that, in other circumstances, would inevitably have provoked protests among workers and the general population. This concerns the brutal increase in taxes and, above all, of VAT (which adds 14% to the prices of most products and services) thanks to which the state raised more than half of the 2005 budget (more than £9000 billion); taxes on some consumer products reached 30% during 2005. Finally, the laws passed by parliament envisage the creation of further taxes, such as that foreseen for health costs of 4% for all active, unemployed  and retired workers and those in the ‘black economy’.

The attacks on wages and decreases in the social wages of workers, supplemented by new state taxes, have led to an economic and fiscal policy that has given rise a level of inflation that is the highest in the region (23% on average for 2003 and 2004), which erodes wages month after month, all of which is in the process of forcing millions of workers and their families into an alarming degree of pauperisation: according to unofficial statistics, 83% of workers (of a total workforce of 12 million) are paid the minimum wage of 405,000 bolivars (about £105) whilst the basic ‘basket’ of foodstuffs, according to the government itself , now costs 380,000 and about 600,000 bolivars according to other authorities. This is without speaking of the levels of malnutrition, epidemics etc which can only increase. The government does everything possible to doctor the figures on poverty in order to be able to be coherent with its lie about the ‘struggle against poverty’, but it is impossible to conceal the evidence. 

Furthermore, in addition to the alarming level of unemployment, the poverty and misery which weigh on the workers’ districts are causing ever more social decomposition that official propaganda tries to hide, but which is clearly visible everywhere: beggars from the towns and countryside, children living in the street, prostitution of children etc. One of the scourges which has worsened during Chavez administration is that of criminality: each week there are about 100 murders in the country, above all in the poorest districts, where a large percentage of the working class lives. The Chavist government, using its brains in media manipulation, has found a name for its project: the “nice revolution”, but what the working class experiences in its everyday life is the wretchedness of capitalism in decomposition; and that is the only reality that the bourgeoisie, whether of the right or of the left, can offer us.

The working class threatens to respond

Despite the blackmail and intimidation, the workers have no choice other than to struggle against the ceaseless deterioration of their living conditions.

The indignation in the workers’ ranks manifests itself ever more frequently: protests of the unemployed seeking work, of pensioners for fulfilment of their demands that have been conceded but not implemented (as has been the case with the pensioners of SIDOR and the CVG in the metallurgical sector). Of doctors, tube workers etc; and threats of struggle among public-sector employees in education, health, the courts etc are constantly present.

Conscious of the fact that the workers’ struggle is the real menace hanging over it, the government is preparing its forces of dissuasion: the reservists and militia of the Territorial Guard, which take orders directly from the presidency of the republic and whose task consists in intervening, in the final instance, to quell “social convulsions”. In the same way, in the hospitals and other public establishments, the state has introduced the so-called “service for social control”, in other words groups paid by the government to police the workers.

However, knowing that it is not always by repression that it can put an end to a class movement, the bourgeoisie as a whole is playing a more effective card against the workers: the renewal of trade unionism and trade unionist dissidence inside Chavism itself. This is what explains the attempts of the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), with Froilan Barrios and Alfredo Ramos at its head, to rehabilitate the CTG with a “new model of trade unionism”. Above all there is the rise to prominence of Machuca, Chavist union leader, who presents himself as a ‘workers’ leader’ not only in the industrial zone of Matanzas but on the national level. He promotes workers’ mobilisations even against Chavez, like that which took place last September. In the same way as the CTV controlled by AD (social democracy) kept at the time some ‘distance’ and carried out a certain amount of ‘opposition’ in relation to the AD governments, so today an individual like Machuca does the same thing, knowing very well how to do his work controlling social discontent since, and this is not by chance, he is congratulated both by Chavism in government and by the opposition.

To put an end to the bourgeoisie (Chavist and opposition), the proletariat must channel its indignation to reinforce its class identity, solidarity among proletarians and its consciousness of the fact that it is the only class which can and must lead the struggle of the exploited to put an end to the barbarism to which capital subjects us.

 From Internacionalismo 55

 

Our experience intervening in Argentina has led us to engage with those who are helping organize comedores populares, a version of the soup kitchen, whose missions have three objectives:

-          To hand out food to a specific number of people;

-          To provide academic and social education to those who need it;

-          To create a forum in which neighbors can discuss issues of interest to them; develop solidarity with each other; and reflect on the options available to combat the situations which capitalism puts  them in, each harder to bear than the previous ones.

We salute the attempt to build solidarity and to struggle against capitalism, which these efforts clearly suggest. However, we need to ask ourselves if these communal kitchens are really  the most appropriate medium through which these aims can be obtained.

Why the proliferation - in Argentina and other countries - of communal kitchens, Piqueteros[1] [104], economic solidarity, etc.?

In the past ten years, Argentina and other countries have seen the proliferation of grass root organizations: communal kitchens, piqueteros, networks of economic solidarity, networks of self-regulated businesses, etc. The first of these organizations were created by people whose level of poverty meant that they could not always count on a daily meal. To these we must add as co-founders those whose minuscule income allowed them to share with their destitute neighbors what little they had; people who acted out of solidarity and at the same time out of necessity.

                A recurring problem many of these workers have been facing—especially workers from small and medium-sized businesses—is that upon returning to work after a weekend’s rest, they find their workplace shut down by the owners. Such situations have forced workers to take over manufacturing plants, and other former workplaces, to try to keep their jobs and incomes.

                The piquetero movement has such an origin. From 1996 to 1997, several regions of Argentina saw the use of roadblocks by the unemployed, who were fighting to obtain a means to earn an income. These first instances of Argentine-style picketing were genuine expressions of proletarian discontent. However, as these activities could not be extended to the rest of the working class, and were thus isolated, the piqueteros became demoralized and began to just “look for the means of existence.” A minority of them tried to maintain a primitive-style organization of the piquetes, but were slowly infiltrated by agents of radical syndicates, and by the ultra-leftists (usually, Trotskyists). The result was what we now know as the piquetero movement, a movement that no longer resembles its genuinely proletarian predecessor.

                The piquetero movement is now an institution with arms that reach to the pockets of the state, as it now accepts and counts on government-distributed subsidies and food rations. Its beneficiaries are required to attend meetings and approved political activities, or risk losing their benefits. Its leaders collect a portion of the money allocated to benefit the rank and file.

                What once was a proletarian organization directly traceable to the working-class struggle, has now become part of the state. In attempting to maintain the use of the piquetes during times when their use was not required,  attempting to make them a permanent organization, the piquetes have been absorbed by the state.

                This process of co-opting was more or less replicated with the other grass-roots organizations. Communal kitchens, for example, were founded by comrades who sought to find a solution to the problem of obtaining a minimum of food. These workers were reacting to a desperate situation. Quickly, however, they were offered “aid” from political organizations, syndicates, NGOs, and churches, who taught them how to coordinate their activities with the members of other communal kitchens, how to petition the state for assistance and benefits, etc. In Argentina’s Federal Capital alone, there are over 100 of these so-called coordinated communal kitchens, and in the southern area of Greater Buenos Aires there are another 400 or so.

                Little by little it has become obvious that in exchange for a few rations, for meager breadcrumbs that barely soothe hunger pains, the control of these communal kitchens has been away from its members. These organizations were thus transformed into entities through which the bourgeois state corners the workers, gets control over them, and uses them for their political aims.

Co-option by the state

Why are these organizations co-opted by the state and transformed into entities radically different from what was envisioned by their founders?

In the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, a time during which capitalism was still a progressive system, the proletariat could still build permanent organizations that retained their class origins: syndicates, trade unions, cooperatives of production and consumption, women’s and youth associations, popular universities, homeless shelters, etc. Although these organizations were many cases lost to reformist deviations, to the routine accounting of misery, globally they still belonged to the working class.

                Back then, these organizations could exist under a political platform that did not question the entirety of the capitalist system, because had to focus on their proliferation and their socio-economic development. These were authentically proletarian schools; where workers could meet and develop their class solidarity.

                This situation was radically changed with capitalism’s entry into the historical phase of decadence. Globally, capitalism could no longer grow, except in isolated or partial instances; it found itself impotent to act when faced with a worsening of the working class’ (and the oppressed masses, in general) living conditions. At this point, mass movements based on partial struggles against single aspects of exploitation no longer made sense; they lost their dynamic, their content. Notwithstanding the sincere wishes of their founders, the permanent existence of these organizations could only be guaranteed by becoming an extension of the capitalist state.

                The clearest example are the trade unions. Throughout the twentieth century there were attempts to build all kinds of class unions; assembly, combative, anarchist, radical, base, unitary etc. ALL OF THESE HAVE FAILED AS ORGANS OF THE WORKING CLASS. If for over 80 years trade unions have sold out and deserted the working class. This is  because it is impossible, in decadent capitalism, for permanent organizations to be able to conclusively address this or that partial aspect of exploitation. And, as the state in decadent capitalism tends to be totalitarian—and to hold all groups within society under its heavy weight—it cannot tolerate mass organizing of the exploited and the oppressed. These organizations need to be destroyed, and this can be done in two ways: through repression or through co-option.

                The latter is the easiest to implement, as these mass organizations have lost all of the meaning that they had in the past, and can no longer serve the real interests of the workers. On the one hand, the state through its many agents (parliamentary commissions, various institutions, trade unions, churches, political parties, NGOs, etc.), seek to devour and quell all attempts at the independent expression of the masses. On the other hand, all attempts at permanent organisations on a bases that dose not put capitalism into question facilitates this absorption.

Causes of Hunger and Misery

What cause the malnutrition that leads to the starvation of so many children in  Buenos Aires province, in the various Argentine provinces, in many countries in South America, Africa, Asia, (and now) Europe? Is it an incompetent government? A corrupt society? The unfair distribution of wealth? Injustice? The scarcity of foodstuff? The last question is the key to the answer.  We can easily state that there is no scarcity of food. If we just limit our study to Argentina, we can see that there is an abundance of meat, wheat, Soya. We can accurately say that gardens in Tucuman are full of all kinds of vegetables and fruits, while at the same time this is an Argentine province with one the highest numbers of childhood malnutrition.

                This is the case all over the world: there is an abundance of foods; grocery store windows are full with product displays, many perishable products that are not sold are thrown into the sea…Here we find a fundamental cause of the hunger and malnutrition that affects such a great part of humanity: overproduction. The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, says that “In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production.” Capitalism is the first society in the history of humanity in which hunger and starvation can be traced not to the underproduction of foodstuffs, but to overproduction. The system is thrown into crisis not because it produces too little, but because it produces too much. Unlike hunger and misery in feudalism, the guilty party is not draught, or poor crops, or plagues of locusts. Guilt lies in the fact that “there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce,” according to the Manifesto, a fact that “brings disorder into the whole of bourgeois society.”

                The activity of searching for food in the surpluses  of the  food manufacturers or distributors, of seeking subsidies from state welfare agencies, traps a handful of comrades in an endless circle that can neither offer a solution to poverty or lessen the effects of these calamities. For, whilst the number of mouths that need to be fed proliferate , the communal kitchens cannot even come close to satiating anyone’s hunger.

                It is a question of the management of poverty. Hunger is not eradicated; people just learn to adapt to it. It also  means the communal kitchens being turned to auxiliaries of the state, of perpetuating the misery, hunger and desperation of the oppressed and exploited. Millions of human beings are abandoned to their fates by the bourgeois state. The nickels and dimes that the piqueteros distribute among their members, the soup that communal kitchens provide gives the impression that “something is being done” to end hunger; that “democratic” governments never forget the needy; that there is solidarity with the dispossessed…When in  reality, all that this is doing is perpetuating and worsening the situation; shutting it up as in a  ghetto within  shanty towns and poor neighborhoods.

Culture and good upbringing are necessary, but do not guarantee jobs

As mentioned earlier, communal kitchens have a secondary mission: to provide  cultural and  education to children and adults.
                Culture and education are a necessity for the working class if it is going to build a society free of exploitation, national borders, or nation-states; a society in which each man and woman can make personal and communal use of all that the history of humanity has taught us.
                In all countries—from the most developed, to the most underdeveloped—we can observe on the part of the state a growing abandoning of  services such as education. School buildings are allowed to decay; teaching—with the exception of that for the children of the elite— deteriorates or is directly abandoned in the poorest neighborhoods.
                The fact that the poorest and most forgotten neighborhoods in Argentina try to organize the provision of education, shows that those same people that have  been denigrated as  a “rabble” by high society—in the same way that Sarkozy referred to the rioting youth suburban France as “gangsters”—have a strong appetite for knowledge and the feelings of dignity that comes with it.
                As well intentioned as these efforts might be, their participants do not question the capitalist system, nor do they subscribe to a struggle against it. By themselves, then, these activities are co-opted and rendered impotent by the state; and in fact end up making it easier for the state to corner and control the masses.
                In addition, neither culture nor knowledge can guarantee a job. Over the years, the working class has required more and more formal education. However, even with a diploma the average worker cannot count on full employment. Capitalism has a recurring problem of out-of-control unemployment, and it often destroys many more jobs than it creates.
                What’s more, even with a job no-one is guaranteed a living wage, as real income continues to fall to levels that do not permit even a mediocre life. Let us remember the words of a worker from Garrahan Hospital: “A monthly income no longer allows you to stay alive!”
                It is not a lack of culture or education what causes the unemployment of thousands upon thousands of young workers. Instead, the cause is the permanent crises of capitalism, a phenomenon which renders the system incapable of integrating a young workforce into the productive activity of society, and excludes them from social life. The legion of human beings who have been alienated from the productive process, and thus have been condemned to a life of crime and miserable lack of security, continues to grow dramatically in many countries.

A place to meet, discuss and organise?

It could be said that at the very least, communal kitchens serve to meet with others, pose questions on social problems and discuss ways to solve them; that they could help win people to the cause of revolution and revolutionary struggle.

Comrades who participate in these organizations explain their participation using that very logic. They say, “Honestly, what we do [at the communal kitchens] makes no difference at all. It is reformism, and makes things easier for the state. But at least in this way we get people together, give them a class conscience, and teach them about solidarity.”

In Argentina today, within the various grass roots organizations (piqueteros, communal kitchens, self-regulated businesses, networks of economic solidarity, etc.) there are thousands of people who are “organized,” who supposedly “meet,” “become class conscious,” “do something,” etc. It would seem that this mass of people represent an impressive force; but in reality they are thousands and thousands of people who are paralyzed, whose are tied  hands and feet by capital and its state. This has been demonstrated time and again, the last of which happened when these organizations drowned the workers of Garrahan in a false sense of solidarity.

The one activity that dominates all others in these organizations is the disbursement of [economic] assistance, the maintenance of misery, and its use by the state to perpetuate exploitation. All of this is done against the wishes of their members. It is of no use to discuss ways of combating misery when all activities revolve around perpetuating this very problem. This is why despite meaning well, despite attempts at persuading [the masses], no real discussions of or activities directed at revolutionary struggles can be developed within this context.

If we are to organize ourselves to combat our misery, we need to zoom in on an activity that gets to the root of the problem. It is only the working class struggle that can do this. However, this struggle is still in its infancy, and it will take time to develop a revolutionary force that will allow the proletariat to rise against capitalism. In the meantime, it is necessary to contribute an activity of discussion, interventions in the struggles, the international regroupment of revolutionaries, the creation of discussion circles around communist positions. Such an enterprise might seem “abstract” and out of touch with immediate concerns in our everyday lives. But each time there is a massive struggle by the working class, the usefulness and advantage of having a handful of revolutionaries—who contribute to such a cause with analysis, proposals and orientations—becomes clear. That is how we saw the waves of strikes in Argentina between June and August, when an intervention could have helped take the struggle further, to learn political lessons, to do away with the traps that the bourgeoisie employed.

Just a few days ago in Mar de Plata, Chavez and Maradona began a farce of “anti-imperialist struggle.” At that moment, what was needed was a revolutionary voice to denounce a trick aimed a diverting them  towards an impotent activism, and will progressively drown them in confusion and demoralization.

Therefore, those comrades who are the most conscious and combative—who feel the most indignation against misery and hunger—must direct will and thinking towards the clarification of the revolutionary positions of the proletariat, towards intervention within it, towards struggle against the lies and the traps that the capitalist state uses against them

ICC 19-11-05.

The government is having difficulties with its new plans for education. There’s open rebellion from many backbench MPs, as well as opposition from leading figures such as ex-Labour leader Neil Kinnock and ex-Blair press secretary Alistair Campbell. Among the most provocative proposals is the idea that every Primary and Secondary school should become a “self governing trust backed by a business, charity, faith group, university or parent organisation”.

Another proposal reduces the role of Local Authorities from the direct provision of education to the management of a ‘service’ more tightly controlled by the central state.  There is also a dispute over schools’ control of admission criteria.

The mainstream media has presented the disagreement as one between those parts of the Labour party that want to preserve a comprehensive system against Blair and the Tories who want to bring in privatisation through the back door.

These are all red herrings. In capitalism education has the purpose “above all to equip the new generation with abilities which can be sold on the market, and in this age of state capitalism to ensure that the new generation has the abilities necessary to strengthen the national capital against its competitors on the world market” (‘Only one other world is possible: communism’, International Review 116). This all takes place in the context of a growing economic crisis which demands drastic cuts in social spending. 

 

Education is not ‘free’ – in any sense of the word. All the money for state education comes directly from taxation. Increasingly we are also seeing parts of the education system being left to fend for itself and thus directly charging students (or ‘customers’) for their services. The most glaring example of this is Higher Education – so-called ‘top up’ fees and the imposition of student loans since the mid 1990s. The result of this is that students come out of our ‘free’ educational system with massive debts which they spend many years paying off. This hasn’t solved the funding crisis. Many universities use the cash they charge overseas students to subsidise UK students.

As for ‘selection’ it has always existed – how could it be otherwise in a class divided society? A general education ‘for the masses’ has never been the main concern for the bourgeoisie, just so long as the basics are taught and there are adequate private schools and other institutions to cater for its own children[1]. In recent years there have been a growing number of different ways of ‘selecting’, such as the growth in ‘faith’ schools, which don’t actually benefit students but do give sustenance to religious ideologies.

 

The loss by Local Authorities of a ‘meaningful’ role in education is not a new form of ‘neo-liberalism’. The government is creating a new post of ‘schools commissioner’ to ensure that LA’s will exercise their powers ‘properly’, as what is happening is actually a new form of direct control from central government. As for ‘trust status’, which will effectively turn each school into a mini-enterprise, we can foresee what will happen on the basis of all the previously privatised industries: swingeing cuts, rationalisations, speed ups, individualised contracts etc. These are not caused by privatisation; rather privatisation is used to disguise the state’s need to obey the pressures of the capitalist crisis.

 

This is what lies behind the government’s proposals. Huge increases in social inequality have already been a hallmark of the Labour government, and the new proposals will exacerbate this trend. Under capitalism, no matter how much money is thrown at education, the educational system will always serve the needs of the exploiters, not the exploited.   Graham 02/02/06      

In China explosions and mine collapses follow one another in a frightening rhythm. Last August, in Guangdong province, 101 miners were trapped in the mine and drowned in millions of cubic metres of water. At the same time an explosion in Guizhou province killed 14 miners. Recently, a new explosion at a mine in Dong province in northern China cost the lives of another 134 miners. In the autumn accidents struck this sector on an almost daily basis. These accidents, one after the other, make the mines in China the most dangerous in the world with 6000 official deaths per year, but closer to 20,000 according to independent sources. This is 45 times greater than South Africa and one hundred times that of the United States. The example of the coalmines dramatically illustrates the barbaric reality that is hidden behind the famous growth rates of Chinese capitalism. In the provinces of Shianxi, Hebei, Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolian, coal resources are abundant. For ten years, the government, so as to increase production at any price, has massively privatised the mines. The result is that licences are purchased at little cost from bureaucrats who are open to bribes. In the mines, the workers enter by crawling on their bellies and without any safety or security equipment. In these conditions of ferocious exploitation, catastrophes can only increase (landslides, explosions). “In 2005, the number of deaths overtook those of 2004: 717 deaths for the first six months of the year, against 347 for the same period of the previous year (according to the Information Bulletin of the State Security Commission)” (1). Miners in China know the risks very well. But for them there’s no choice. They accept the risks or else see their families die of hunger. And for a miserable wage of a dollar a day, seven days out of seven, in inhuman conditions. The conditions of work and exploitation are no better in the public mines where everything is sacrificed for profitability. The bureaucrats, provincial and governmental officials, rotted by corruption, hide the reality by all means possible and imaginable. It’s the policy of the left and the unions in places like Britain to try to drag workers into the defence of the public services. China demonstrates that when circumstances allow, capitalism makes no difference between the public and private sector. Thus in the large mining complexes in the public sector: “Bu Guishing confirms that some local officials hasten to close down the dangerous workings as soon as there’s wind of a visit of inspectors from the provincial authorities. When the latter arrive they find the machinery still warm, but the mine is empty of its personnel, which makes the inspection impossible” (2). In China we can estimate the working class at a 100 million inhabitants, without counting the “worker-peasants”, living precarious lives with a rate of unemployment of 50%. The redundant workers call themselves the xiapang (gone down from the job). The dreadful conditions of life, where every day workers must risk their lives in order not to die of hunger, leads, despite repression, to often violent explosions of anger. “Almost every day, protests, workers’ strikes or peasant agitations happen in China. Ween Tiejun, a specialist in social questions, estimates 60,000 per year” (1).

The bourgeoisie’s contempt for proletarian lives

“Advice to the population of Harbin: in response to fears about the pollution on Song Hua river following an explosion in a chemical faction in the town of Julin, the Environment Office had declared that no trace of pollution has yet been detected” (2). Like the bourgeoisie all over the world, the Chinese bourgeoisie produces the most shameful lies. The catastrophe was only recognised on the 22nd of November, effectively nine days after it took place. The first declarations of the authorities regarding cutting water supplies were about “maintenance procedures”. Harbin is an agglomeration of 9 million people, situated downstream of the Song Hua. This important town has used the waters needed for the population for hundreds of years. Pollution by benzene, an extremely dangerous product for human life, affected the whole upstream course of the river, the sheet of pollution spreading more than 80 km. But worse still, the upstream pollution of the Song Hua caused a human disaster in all the towns and districts situated downstream, as in Harbin, but also Mulan, Tonghe and Juamusi. At the end of November another chemical explosion hit the South West of the country, without, up to now, any viable information about it coming out of China. We can thus read in Liberation of November 28: “The victims of the mine of Dong Feng, as well as the environmental damage, which is still difficult to evaluate in the general obscurity around the Jalin catastrophe, must be added to a list which is growing daily”.

The need for solidarity with the workers in China

This succession of catastrophes in China reveals to the eyes of the entire proletariat of the world the reality of the “Chinese economic miracle”. The growth rate of almost 10% hides the ferocious exploitation of the workers in this country, as well as the Chinese bourgeoisie’s total contempt for human life, which is no different from bourgeoisie in the rest of the world. China is an economic monster built on sand. It is developing by sucking the blood of the proletariat and by destroying, at an accelerating rate, resources and the environment. Faced with the misery and dangers to which it exposes its proletariat, explosions of anger, for the most part violently repressed, can only multiply in the future. “On the 26th June, 10,000 people marched in the streets of Cizhou, a province of Anhui, setting police cars and the police station alight. It began with a simple traffic incident when one of the new rich, who count in China today, knocked over a student. The incident turned into a riot when the police took the side of the driver” (1). The workers of every country, themselves exploited by their own bourgeoisies, must feel solidarity with their class brothers and sisters in China. The bourgeoisies of the most developed countries, such as Britain, are not that bothered about the fate of workers in China, but instead harp on about “human rights”. In reality they utilise to the maximum the fact that these workers work in particularly harsh conditions to justify their own plans to set up enterprises at maximum profit. This further justifies our own ruling classes forcing us to accept lower wages and conditions, or else they resort to relocations and outsourcing, trying to set one part of the proletariat against another. In truth only the working class, because it is an international class, defending the same interests everywhere, can feel in its blood the degrading conditions of life imposed on the workers in China. It is the development of the class struggle on an international scale that can offer a perspective to the workers of China.   Tony

(1)     China, the seamy side of power, by Cai Chongguo.

(2)     Courrier International ‘No good luck in the pits’.

Despite the frightening rhythm of explosions and collapses, and the resulting deaths and injuries to workers in China’s mines, it took an explosion at a mine in Sago, West Virginia, where a group of miners were trapped underground, slowly dying of carbon monoxide poisoning, for the British media to remember just how dangerous coal extraction can be.

For those who have followed the development of China’s ‘economic miracle’ this comes as no surprise. Yet an article in the Guardian (7/1/6), rather than laying the blame where it belongs, at the feet of the werewolf greed of capital, attributed the number of deaths in China to their reliance on deep-shaft mining, as opposed to open cast mining. It also pointed to the lack of modern safety equipment, comparing China’s poor safety record with that of its competitors, the world’s other major coal producers, America, Russia, South Africa and Poland.

But, as The Guardian glibly stated, and the deaths of the 12 Sago miners grimly illustrated, “there is no such thing as a safe mine”. In all mines, whether state or privately-run, the pursuit of increased productivity means a disregard for workers’ safety. In the case of Sago, just as in China, it has been suggested that not only did the mine’s owners ignore safety reports, but federal and state officials allowed the mine to continue to work despite doubts over its safety. The gap between American and Chinese mines seems to shorten further when it emerges that, because of budget cuts, rescue efforts to save the Sago miners may have been hampered by a lack of modern safety equipment.

While the media rediscovered the American working class it also tried to stress the ‘uniqueness’ of the West Virginian miners. But the American bourgeoisie showed itself just as hypocritical as the Chinese. The families of the trapped men were led to believe that all of them had survived the blast only to be told a few hours later that only one man had escaped alive. Ben Hatfield, the chief executive officer of the mine company blamed this heartless ‘mistake’ on a “lack of communication”.

When The Guardian talks about “how the world’s biggest producers juggle risk and reward”, it is clear that it’s workers who are ‘juggling’ all of the risks while the mine owners receive all the rewards. The grisly truth is that, whether you work in the capitalist heartlands or on the ‘underdeveloped’ periphery, decadent capitalism, in response to its deepening crisis, has nothing to offer workers, in all sectors, except more exploitation and quite possibly injury or even an early death.
William (02/02/06)